Observations Continued

There are pictures of the king everywhere and I realized that this is the first monarchy that I have been to and one of the only that I can think of where the king has legitimate power. Maybe I'm just not thinking hard enough. In the car I asked the driver why there were so many pictures of the king everywhere and he made a point of saying that everyone loves the kind and that they put up the pictures by choice and that there is no law that requires it. I asked him about the uprisings in Egypt and Syria and he said that he supports both of them. However, when I asked him why he supported the uprisings he became tense and would not say. He added that there are no problems here in Jordan, that the king gives them everything that they need so why would they want anything else. When I asked about demonstrations in Jordan he was again hesitant to speak about them and added that there are some demonstrations about price increases and about the economy but never against the king directly. In Jordan it is illegal to speak out against the king and I suspected that this law was the reason for his hesitation to talk about why he supported the overthrowing of leaders in the Arab countries as admitting that he supported the overthrowing of these authority figures would imply that he would support similar endeavors here in Jordan.
Also, yesterday I was watching CNN in my hotel room and they were showing a shot of the final leaderboard from the U.S. Open. This showed the flags representing the nationalities of each golfer and I found it very interesting (and fairly disconcerting) that the American flag was blurred each of the 4 times it was displayed on TV while none of the other flags shown were blurred even though they were from other Western countries.