The American greeting routine used to be simple. Because we officially consider all people to be equal and equally worthy of respect, the same gesture, the handshake -- simple, dignified and egalitarian -- would do for all.

But symbolic subservience to a foreign ruler is worse. When Miss Manners sees American citizens delighting in bowing or curtseying to royalty, she tries to remind herself that they are just being silly, not treasonous. When an American official does it, we can only hope it was because he was noticing that his own shoelace was undone -- and not that he recognizes the divine right of kings in general, or the authority over us of that king in particular.