It was hard to avoid yesterday's Royal bloody Wedding so inevitablly we have given it some attention in our household. Undeniably it was fun to join in with Twitter, which I did with relish while sitting up in bed watching the early arrivals at the wedding and feeling pleased with my Pooterish witticisms. Eg:
Prince of Orange is invited, but no Prince of Vodafone or T-Mobile. No reception for them then #royalwedding
But once I'd got up and got stuck into the day, in my case I designed an advert for my Comic Art Masterclasses to go into a comic which I then uploaded for printing, and a few other fun chores that soon filled the working day, the wedding was turned off and not another though was given to it.
This enabled me to catch up with the photos of the embarrassing costumes and the other fun stuff later in the day. These I enjoyed:
Fashion choices of the day
This morning I am delighted to find I am not alone in my ambivalence towards the Royals and their wedding. And I remain, politically and logically, a Republican (in the classical, not the American, sense). I see no place for a Monarchy in the running of a 21st century western liberal country.
However I am not at all sure that I live in a 21st century western liberal country. When our Prime Minister is an old Etonian who can blithely entertain his posh friends on the front bench by telling women MPs to "calm down dear" (no matter how funny I may have found that), when many times more people turned up to line the streets for the Royal couple than turned up for the anti-cuts protests a few weeks ago (and caused a lot less trouble), when the BBC and ITV can devote endless hours to coverage of an event in which they refer repeatedly to someone as a "commoner" as if that is in the slightest bit not-weird and by which they mean she's in some way "one of us" when in fact her family are millionaires, she's related to the Royal family and she went to bloody Marlborough. That's like redefining the word "chav" to mean someone who only went to a minor public school and doesn't have a place in the country.
So the Royals fit 21st century Britain because more people want them than don't, which is essentially democratic, which is a thing I believe in. And I can be pretty sure that, if there were a vote on May 7th for the AV voting system and for keeping the Royalty, the AV vote would get a 20% turnout and an indecisive result, while the Monarchy debate would get a 90% turnout and a 70% vote in favour.
As opiates for the masses go, they are mostly harmless. Though I do wish we knew better.
No comments:
Post a Comment