At the first inauguration of a president, in 1789, George Washington wanted to wear a suit covered in gold leaf with a special cape, and ride to the ceremony on a white horse escorted by an honour guard on white horses. Like a coronation.
He was talked out of this, and instead wore a brown suit with gold buttons and rode to Federal Hall, in New York, on a brown horse.
The president in the new republic was not a king. Still, this inauguration, like most of the others before it, feels, to an Australian, more like a coronation than the swearing in of an elected president.
Though isn't Sun Myung Moon the current Congressionally-crowned king?
Aside: isn't there a strain of fringe Christian Fundamentalism which holds that, for America to fulfil its destiny as God's chosen nation, it must have a king? There's a facsimile of a flyer in Donna Kossy's book Kooks which is curiously suggestive of such a belief.
Posted by: acb | http://dev.null.org/ | Tue Jan 18 19:52:57 2005
Do American exponents of this regard Bush II as a rightful candidate for king, advocate adopting the Windsor monarchy, or have other ideas (or no idea) about who is to be king?
Posted by: gjw | http://the-fix.org | Tue Jan 18 23:42:59 2005
I'm not sure if they regard Bush himself as the appropriate royal figure, but they definately support giving more executive power to the president, and less to the other arms of government (congress / court).
Posted by: cbs | http:// | Thu Jan 20 19:51:39 2005
It's not as bad over here as you seem to think. Actually, it's looking much worse.
I really don't like the way things look around here these days. My state's current governor was endorsed by GWB in the last election, which made a negative impression on me if it made any at all. I'm waiting to see who the Republican party chooses as their next candidate for Governor though.
As much as I dislike my current governor, the most likely successor seems much worse. (http://www.al.com/news/mobileregister/index.ssf?/base/news/110621643154570.xml)
Want to say something? Do so here.
Note to spammers: This comment system applies the rel=nofollow attribute to the poster's URL and all links. Posting links to this page will not improve their search engine rankings.
Please keep comments on topic and to the point. Inappropriate comments may be deleted.
Note that markup is stripped from comments; URLs will be automatically converted into links.
Posted by: gjw | http://the-fix.org | Tue Jan 18 02:27:08 2005
Within that sect of fundamentalism, there is a belief that god's desired form of government is a theocracy, based on the reign of the hebrew kings (ie. King David). Hence the belief that (a) the "King James" bible is the only true translation because it was written under the patronage of a king (b) the protestant church is the true church because it has royal leaders (Liz Windsor)as opposed to elected leaders (those damn Catholics).