Our political Quote of the Day comes via Australia’s Herald Sun on the story of a boy who lost his mother but grew into a young man who had some of her best attributes — and some of his own as well:
If Diana’s funeral was probably the worst day for the royal family since the abdication scandal in the 1930s, then William’s wedding might be its best since his grandmother’s coronation in 1953.
The motherless boy has grown into a quietly impressive young man, as Australians found when he visited flood-ravaged states a few weeks ago.
The William the world saw at Westminster Abbey in the striking red uniform of the Irish Guards on Friday combines his mother’s looks and natural touch with his father’s and grandmother’s iron sense of duty.
All without pretending to be anything other than what they are – the last heavyweight royals left standing in an increasingly egalitarian, republican and sceptical world.
But he has not done that.
He has stretched, but not broken, the rules that bind royalty. And now he is the hope of the side……
…..Wills can’t do much about names, titles or the pomp and circumstance into which he was born without disowning everything he has been brought up to do.
…William has done things his own quiet way.
Either naturally stubborn, or deeply affected by what happened to his mother, he has been his own man in ways almost unthinkable even a generation ago.
And, indeed, you could not but watch the wedding and realize how young much of the crowd was — and you didn’t need to be in your 60s, 70s or 80s to notice it.
William, in a sense, is doing for the royalty in England what Spain’s King Juan Carlos and Sophia did for the restored royalty after the 1975 death of dictator Francisco Franco: it’s not just the difference in years, it’s a whole feeling a spirit.
So he takes British royalty into a new century and — at the same time — the world won’t forget the courageous young boy so shattered by his mother’s death, the boy who had some of her same look and, we now can see, a lot of her best genes.
Meanwhile, The View has stirred up a huge controversy due to comments some in Great Britain felt were insulting to the Queen and the ceremony. It has sparked a batch of angry Tweets on Twitter.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.