The Prince and I

Happy New Year, friends and neighbors! I hope your New Year’s Eve was as good as mine. (Pro tip: eat an entire pizza by yourself, pass out for an hour, then start drinking other people’s booze. You spend about $7 and you wake up with no hangover!)

The big news for today is that I’ve been honored by my favorite monarch, Prince Leonard of Hutt River. His Royal Highness has kindly inducted me into the Illustrious Order of Merit as an officer. This means that, while I have not been knighted (though that’s definitely on my bucket list) I’m one of those people who can now put a string of letters after their name. As of 2014, I’m Andrew Heaton, OIOM.

If you’re not familiar with Hutt River and it’s impressive monarch, check out this article I wrote about it for Reason Magazine. To make a long story short, in 1970 the state of Western Australia placed a quota on wheat farmers so onerous that it would have bankrupted a local named Leonard Casley. After attempting to lobby the state parliament to rescind the disastrous edict, Leonard finally resorted to saving his and neighboring farms by declaring their region a new and sovereign country. Later on, to protect his fellow secessionists, Leonard declared himself “prince,” and has been operating as the sovereign of his startup country ever since. While Australia does not officially recognize it, they also never enforced the wheat quota, either. Leonard won, and became a monarch in the process.

In 2012 I became a dual citizen in Hutt River, and met Prince Leonard on a visit there about this time last year. Since then he’s made me his Honorary Special Envoy to New York. This means that I’m functionally his consul and diplomatic representative in the region. (As the United States does not currently recognize Hutt River as a country, it cannot have a “consul.” Hence my status as an envoy.) Now I’ve been honored by induction into the Illustrious Order of Merit.

I don’t write about my involvement with the principality too much on my website or social media, because as a humorist I do not want to give the impression that Hutt River or my involvement with it is a joke. My involvement is more aptly described as “awesome.”