Magical Realism

It's been a good week to be English. And not just for the regular reasons it's preferable to be English every other week, like free health care and all the drizzle you can eat. This week, our trans-Atlantic cousins are holding us up and demanding our filthy colonial shekels, like highwaymen of old, but in the particularly English idiom with so much politeness that you end up just sort of acquiescing to spare them any further embarrassment.

Not only is there going to be a royal wedding, but it's also finally time for the first half of the beginning of the end of Harry Potter.

I think of all the money pouring into that feisty little downtrodden third of an island, scraping by all these centuries with the right combination of pluck, blind good luck and the subjugation of peoples of varying shades of brown the world over, and it gives me some hope. Between the flood of tourists pouring in to try to experience something they would be shot trying to actually attend or reveling in the soap-opera antics of teenagers inhabiting a world cobbled together from other worlds already written about but could never actually exist, it looks like they've stumbled on to a formula whereby they are able to spin money from quite literally nothing. And that is an encouraging feat in this still-struggling economy.

As Americans, we should take note. If anything screams out the soul of American genius, it's the ability to bastardize someone else's idea and then sell the inferior product for twice the cost.

All we need to do is:

1) Start a royal family. We tried it with the Kennedys for a bit in the 1960s, but with all the sex and disease and adultery and divorce and murder and untimely death... well, OK, that's all pretty good for a royal family, honestly. But back then, I'm not so sure. As a cultural embarrassment incapable of governing itself and existing at a level of cognitive dissonance between what they are projected to be and what they actually were, they were just too far ahead of their time. Hm. Maybe this just isn't our bag.

2) Multi-film fantasy franchise to capture the hearts and minds of children and shut-ins the world over. Again, we did this already with Star Wars, but considering the quality of the last three, I'm not sure it actually counts. I'm not exactly in a big hurry for another Indiana Jones movie either. And now that I think about it, the more I catch snippets of Avatar on HBO (which is not hard considering they run it more than GoDaddy.com ads run during a Super Bowl), the more that shit just makes me angry.

OK, so maybe this isn't the answer. But the only other economic "plan" going is banning budgetary earmarks for Congressional pet projects. Really, that's all. This is your Tea Party Revolution.

Frankly, I have more faith in the Kennedys. But then all the attractive ones are dead. The only ones left are all toothy and bony, with that grievous overbite, like Habsburgs in reverse. Nobody's buying a commemorative mug if Joe Kennedy II decides to get married a third time.