Well, today is the Big Royal Wedding. Crown Prince Felipe is marrying newscaster Letizia Ortiz. They've been preparing the ceremony for months, getting the security all planned out and that kind of thing. There will, of course, be pageantry out the wazoo and lots of royal folks from lots of weird places. Too bad it's going to rain. All the TV stations are covering it live; they've been at it all morning and presumably will be at it all afternoon.

I must say Felipe made a pretty good choice. The future Princess is, of course, bright and media-savvy, and that's going to be a big help, especially as the media becomes more and more intrusive into people's private lives. There's no ridiculousness about her being a virgin; she's been married and divorced. She comes from a respectable middle-class family and will no doubt provide a fresh influx of healthy DNA for the heavily inbred Bourbon gene pool. She's pretty and seems to have had minimal plastic surgery, though she's "TV-attractive"--looks better on camera than in real life.

I haven't really posted about this because I don't especially care. I'm a Republican both with a capital R and a lowercase one. I'm against kings and nobles and all that crap; that's one reason we fought the Revolution, for Chrissakes.

However, I'm not a anti-monarchist fanatic, and I'm a fan of the maxim "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." Spain's a parliamentary democracy under the rule of law with a governmental system that's about as good as the one they have anywhere else--I mean, if everyone on Earth lived under a system similar to Spain's, your human-rights activists and such folk would have to go out of business. The system ain't broke; it works rather well. So let's not mess around with it by deposing the powerless King; that would stir everyone up for no good reason. It would be merely symbolic.

There are some good arguments in favor of keeping the Royal Family. First, they're semi-official State ambassadors, and when they travel abroad they're on semi-diplomatic missions. Agreed, nothing important is ever decided, but having the King visit a country is likely to cause a few warm feelings among the visited. Lemme tell you, if some Spanish company wanted to put down a big investment in Kansas and wanted favorable treatment, a visit from the King would knock everybody flat and they'd be begging for the project. Second, I imagine they do something for tourism--people go to Baqueira because the King skies there, they go to Mallorca because the King sails there, they go to that mega-golf course in Andalusia, whatever its name is, because the King golfs there. He promotes Spanish vacation places by his attendance. Third, at least for some people, often the less politically aware, the King provides a symbol, a human being that they can identify with the abstract, distant State. Fourth, people older than 40 today can remember the Franco regime. After a rough start, Juan Carlos became one of the symbols of the transition to democracy. His role is normally exaggerated in the English-language press, but in many people's minds, both in Spain and abroad, he is associated with Spanish democracy. And, fifth, the Royals are cheap--they cost a few million euros a year, no more, they're not huge and expensive like the Windsors. Sixth, they're well-behaved. They keep their noses clean and never cause any embarrassing situations, unlike certain other royal families I could name. (I think the worst scandal they ever got in was when some paparazzi got photos of Juan Carlos sunbathing nude on his yacht.) I therefore conclude they're well worth the money, even though I have a natural dislike of monarchy. I'm letting pragmatics triumph over ideology.

The last Spanish troops have left Iraq.

In today's La Vangua, Xavier Batalla has read an article by Sidney Blumenthal, of all people, in the Guardian, so he has an analysis of the two schools of American foreign policy according to Sid. Now, Sid, as everybody knows, is by no means a neutral source; in fact, he's about the most extreme Clinton / Democratic Party partisan out there. Mr. Batalla does not mention this either in his article or his dandy little fact-sheet on the two opposing schools, which Sid apparently provided. According to Sid and Mr. Batalla, school Number One is the "Globalists", exemplified by a photo of a smiling Bill Clinton waving to somebody, and the other is the "Hegemonists", exemplified by a photo of a scowling Paul Wolfowitz. Above these two photos, by the way, is a still from the movie "Seven Days in May", an early-60s thriller in which the Army tries to pull a coup d'etat, whatever that has to do with anything. (Europeans keep referring to movies when trying to explain America. This is not precisely an accurate basis for analysis.)

Anyway, Bill Clinton's Globalists are described as:

Multilateral foreign policy
Multicultural national diversity
In favor of humanitarian intervention and nation-building
Stable world business scene
Economic globalization with multinational companies as base
Strength lies in multilateral cooperation
Supranational governmental institutions and polycentric diplomacy
Govern the international sphere as one among equals

as opposed to Paul Wolfowitz's Hegemonists:

Unilateralist foreign policy
Eurocentric and Christian nation
Anticipatory, preventive attacks and defense of national interests
Geopolitical competition and regional blocs
Military-industrial complex
Weakness results from multilateral cooperation
The State as lead actor on stage; unipolar leadership
Govern the international sphere not as one among equals

Oh, geez, where do I start? I'll leave off the most obvious criticisms of this wrongheaded and biased classification (I prefer the theory that divides Americans into Hamiltonians, Jeffersonians, Wilsonians, and Jacksonians) and just hits a couple of the high points.

1) Unilateralist? Yeah, we're only cooperating with like sixty countries in Afghanistan and Iraq.

2) No basis for saying "Hegemonists" are racist or religious nuts or anti-multiculturalism.

3) Let me tell you, any "Globalist" who did not look out for American interests first would not be President much longer.

4) What military-industrial complex? Weapons manufacturing is like .001% of the American economy. By comparison, Wal-Mart is like 1%.

5) Multilateral cooperation does lead to weakness if the countries you're collaborating with are weak. (Cf. Spain. One big scare and they're out the door.)

6) How could anybody possibly govern and be one among equals at the same time?

7) Is there any evidence that supranational governmental institutions work? No. Except for the EU, which is ironically Eurocentric and which many conservative Europeans want to make explicitly Christian, among them the editorial board of La Vanguardia.

8) How can you have "polycentric" diplomacy in a unipolar world? Because the facts, Jack, is that the world is unipolar and pretending it isn't would be silly. If there were any other country anywhere near as strong as the US, we would know about it.