American friends, looking on from Canada I am happy about yesterday's widespread peaceful protests against your incipient dictator. But why "No Kings"?
Here in Canada, many of us are quite happy to have a king -- our constitutional monarch, King Charles III, who recently visited Canada to open Parliament, as a gesture very much designed to show that we are different from the USA.
As an anarchist, I value having a Head of State who has zero coercive power.
But I am guessing that when you Americans think of kings, you have poor old George III in mind, and that trouble he gave you with taxation without representation and all that rot?
I am curious!
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A "King" is much more than a head of state (with or without real power). A king is someone born of a royal bloodline. A kind is someone who is "better" than you or I because we are commoners.
Thomas Jefferson, in his first "truth" of our Declaration of Independence was speaking directly to the House of Windsor when he said:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal ...
Admittedly it took quite some time to adjust our own laws to this reality and we are still working on implementation, but the concept is fundamental to being "American".
The House of Windsor came into being in 1917, when the name was adopted as the British Royal Family's official name by a proclamation of King George V, replacing the historic name of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.
@sarabee1995 I've interpreted it like "we didn't bother to scent the waters of Boston with tea to get rid of the overreach of a king, only to find ourselves with another king"
@ArtieKat @Sarabee Wikipedia further tells me that Queen Victoria was the last of our rulers from the House of Hanover. I had to memorize all of this stuff in high school by the way but have long forgotten!
@ArtieKat Her son belonged to a different House apparently -- via his father I suppose? I am really not well-versed in the details of how our heads of state get to be such!
@ThePatientAnarchist I'm not an expert but I'm fairly sure of my facts on this. It was only the name change towards the end of WW1 because of anti-German sentiment in the UK
@sarabee1995 your interpretation is the kind of thing that we LOVE in the study of "religion and culture" -- a great example of how texts can be interpreted in different ways. Your analysis of this text, "No Kings", is insightful, well-informed, and makes perfect sense -- and it is also idiosyncratic. Everybody else on here who has addressed the question seems to agree with my original hypothesis that the message harks back to the American Revolution and resentment of George III. Whether that makes your interpretation any less or indeed more valid is a subject of heated and creative academic debate!
