With its 12 Oscar nominations, its stellar cast, and its glowing reviews, The King’s Speech sounded like a movie that would leave me…well, speechless.

But when it comes to stuttering Englishmen I was, frankly, more moved by Roger Daltrey’s performance of the song “My Generation.” My main problem with The King’s Speech is that the character we’re supposed to identify with, the down-trodden-schmuck-who-can’t-catch-a-break-but-we-root-for-him–anyway-because-for-all-his-faults-he’s-got-a-heart-of-gold just happens to be…THE KING OF ENGLAND! That’s right: in order to enjoy this film I’m supposed to feel sympathy for a man who, almost by definition, is an unsympathetic character. Like a Frank Capra film about the riches-to-mega-riches life of Donald Trump, this movie simply doesn’t make any sense to me despite fine performances by Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, and Helena Bonham Carter.

I had the same problem with The Queen, which, you’ll recall, was about the trials and tribulations of a woman– oh, let’s call her THE QUEEN OF ENGLAND!—whose big life crisis was being criticized for not grieving enough after the death of Princess Diana. Well, ain’t life a bitch? I’ll bet you after those nasty British tabloids had their say about her Queen Elizabeth cried all the way home to her…ENORMOUS CASTLE. This is royalty we’re talking about, folks. The royal family’s various homes are worth well over a billion dollars– yes, even in today’s housing market. The personal net worth of Queen Elizabeth, Prince Charles, et al are in the hundreds of millions of pounds, each—by the way, each pound coin being distinctive in that IT HAS A PICTURE OF QUEEN ELIZABETH ON IT. When you’re a royal the “family jewels” is not a crude reference to anyone’s anatomy– they’re actual jewels. Call me heartless, but I just can’t feel sorry for anyone who has their own moat.

My antipathy towards the royalty genre in movies goes beyond the absurdity of being asked to identify with bejeweled billionaires seated on solid gold chairs. I frankly find it appalling, in this progressive, politically correct, anti-Establishment age, that supposedly civilized people like us continue to tolerate, and even celebrate, royalty. Slavery, as we’re reminded by the mainstream media on almost a daily basis, was a terrible, evil institution. So was Nazism. So was, and is, communism. So, I would argue, was disco. But you know what was a really, really bad institution? Royalty, the notion that God considered some men more valuable than others, that one’s class is an unchangeable accident of birth, and that the lower class should be, in effect, the slaves and property of the nobility. Does anybody not grasp the evil of this? Who could not be enraged by the fact that by law one man should bow down before another simply because the two men’s ancestries were different– and that refusing to do so could cost the commoner his life? (more…)

Yes, you heard me. “Screw Europe,” I say to you. With all of this “repairing of international relations” going on, the press (along with every “Green Day Liberal” in the Western hemisphere) seem to be getting quite giddy. Finally we’ll be more like the Europeans and maybe, just maybe, that will allow us to be on better footing with them. To all of you I ask… Why?

Why on EARTH would the United States ever want to be more like Europe? Correct me if I’m wrong, but we left, did we not? Not only did we leave that older, lesser world behind, but we left skid-marks along the way with an entire continent eating our proverbial dust. Those were good times… Not to mention the asskickery that followed suit.

The truth is we’ve been doing things far better than Europe for centuries. We’ve built a stronger military and a much more dynamic economy than any of our European counterparts… And we’ve done it in record time. We left the world’s greatest superpowers one century only to blaze past them the next. (more…)