People are quite excited over the upcoming wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. The couple seems nice enough, but I can’t figure out why some people–especially Americans–get so interested in it. Not that it’s wrong; I just don’t get it.

Unlike in England and  most of Europe, there’s no tradition of loyalty to a Monarch or an aristocracy in the U.S. The people who favored the Monarchy went to Canada after the Revolution. I sometimes wonder about the ways in which this affected our political system and culture.

Of course, it could be we’ve also found an outlet for that same impulse by obsessing over celebrities of other sorts.