Perhaps you’ve noticed that media organizations from around the world have already begun broadcasting from London in advance of Friday’s royal wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton.
Unfortunately, the 24/7 reports being filed amount to little more than mundane observations about the fairytale nature of this event and about the security nightmare it poses. Or, as the current issue of the prominent German magazine Der Spiegel laments, the media are helping perpetrate “a joke, a hopelessly overhyped celebration of an absurdly undemocratic system.”
Frankly, all we need is a bona fide al-Qaeda attack in the UK or the U.S. at some point before Friday to end this unseemly media obsession and relegate coverage of this wedding to the style pages where it belongs. (But even I would hate to see anyone rain on William and Kate’s parade. Mother Nature should see to that….)
The irony of course is that nothing will do more to expose the vapid, parasitic, anachronistic and crassly commercial nature of British royalty than media efforts over the next few days to drum up interest in this wedding.
This was demonstrated in hysterical fashion last week when a British TV interviewer tried to get American comedian Jerry Seinfeld to express interest in this royal farce. For, just like the court jesters in Shakespeare’s plays (i.e., the only characters who dare speak truth to power), here’s how Seinfeld dismissed not just this royal wedding, but the entire royal family:
Well, it’s circus act; it’s an absurd act. That’s what the Royal Family is – it’s a huge game of pretend. These aren’t special people – it’s fake outfits, fake phoney hats and gowns.
(London Daily Mail, April 14, 2011)
But this show will go on. And, as the saying goes, if you can’t beat them, join them.
Accordingly, I shall join in this week of revelry by reprising – over the next three days – three of the many (anti-monarchy) commentaries I’ve written on the British royal family over the past six years.
This first one is from February 17, 2005:
A royal marriage worthy of King Henry VIII
HRH Prince Charles’ proposal to marry Mrs. Parker Bowles (his mistress-in-waiting for 30-plus years) must have King Henry VIII chortling in his grave.
After all, no other royal since that raffish king has shown such utter contempt for his religion, the institution of marriage, and the welfare (and lives) of women. Yet, on 8 April 2005, Charles is scheduled to complete this dubious trifecta and, in so doing, enhance the legacy of unconscionable royal prerogatives that make fools of his loyal subjects.
(A republic, a republic – my life for a republic!)
Charles clearly realizes what, alas, Edward VIII did not: The UK has always had a critical mass of servile monarchists for whom the royals can do no wrong. Moreover, no amount of aberrant, shameful and capricious behavior by these royals will diminish their devotion to the monarchy.
Indeed, it’s troubling – to say the least – that revelations about the royal family’s cold-hearted treatment of Princess Diana seem to have had little effect on public support for the monarchy. Mind you, these are the same loyalists who – not so long ago – welcomed Diana as the lady avenger of their faith. They worshiped everything about her and prayed for the day of Charles’ coronation as king, and she as their queen. And, upon her sudden death, they wailed and mourned as if Christ himself had been re-crucified!
But the royal family’s PR machine seems capable of manipulating public opinion through any scandal that threatens its reign. Therefore, when the exiled Princess disclosed details about her marriage (of quiet desperation) to a Prince who treated her as little more than the chosen breeder of his heir and spare, that machine spewed out its own revelations about Diana that made Charles seem the victim of a bulimic, hysterical, ungrateful and hopelessly dysfunctional brat of a wife; and, that was that!
So this British fairytale continues with Charles now lauded as a doting Daddy betrothed to a more suitable woman. The sad reality, of course, is that where the Royal pronouncement of such a marriage once warranted summary abdication, today it heralds the respectable union of the future king and his indefatigable mistress.
But royal prerogatives and enabling subjects notwithstanding, if only half of Diana’s claims about Charles are true, his head should be fitted for a guillotine rather than a crown.
(A republic, a republic – my life for a republic!)