Although the British might appear to be snooty, tea-drinking, crumpet-eating royalists, they do occasionally get something right.
There was the defeat of the Spanish Armada, for example. And the rise of parliamentary democracy. Plus, there was Winston Churchill. And don't forget Douglas Adams, BBC programming, and the Beatles.
But we should also acknowledge that a leg on the Round Table of Britishness has long been the granting of titles, a practice which I would like to contemplate today.
Following repeated acts of adultery by the royal family, Princess Diana's brother, Earl Spencer, decided to fix up the old family estate, which he had affectionately titled "Althorp." The repairs probably amounted to a good move on his part because they detracted attention from the unprecedented amounts of sex being enjoyed by the royals, many of whom were caught cavorting with (gasp!) commoners.
Now, houses that have proper names generally take a lot more money to revamp than houses that have only addresses. Thus, to pay for the repairs, Earl Spencer this summer made a heroic sacrifice -- he gave up the right to be addressed as "Lord of the Manors of Upper Boddington."
He also sold the lordships of Wimbledon, Newland Squillers, and Theddingworth, collecting $336,000 and expending absolutely no effort in the doing.
There is a lesson to be learned here.
The British are actually buying and selling intangible items, and they are doing it in such a way as to involve very large sums of money. What I see here is a solution that we Americans would do well to adopt, even if it was spawned in a country in which the head of state consistently appears in silly pillbox hats.
A rough estimate of the United States deficit is pretty much synonymous with Merriam-Webster's definition for "zillion," this being "a large indeterminate number." Essentially, if every American citizen sold his corneas to an ailing foreigner for $20,000 apiece and chipped in all his pocket change, we'd still come up short.
So why doesn't the United States government start selling titles? Being that they are intangible, we can make up as many as we like and still have more to sell. Titles could start at a few hundred dollars with such fripperies as "Duke of All Major Theme Parks East of the Mississippi," and progress to more expansive titles such as "Venerated Earl of Falstaff, Arizona," which, I might point out, sounds a lot less silly than "Lord of Newland Squillers." We could also offer "Pagan God of the Nebraskan Cornfield," "Keeper of Greater West Virginia," and, for any lingering "Peanuts" fans, "The Great Pumpkin."
What would be the cost of this plan to the taxpayers? Very little -- we would only have to hire one impoverished college student (preferably me) to invent and sell titles.
Just imagine: I'm sitting in my office and Ross Perot calls. "Oh," I say. "So I see. Well, just make out a check for $500,000 to the U.S. Treasury and we'll be happy to call you 'Lord of the Amber Waves of Grain, Patriot for Whom the Bell Tolls.'"
You may want to write to your Congressional representatives about this plan. In fact, I may run for office myself so that I can better promote this sort of clever legislation. If you decide to vote for me when election day arrives, just keep in mind that I'll be on the ballot as "Her Serene Excellency, Chancellor of the Lost Continent Atlantis."
