This wedding takes place in a Britain gripped by unprecedented austerity, a country facing massive cuts to all its social services. You’d think that, in the face of the real misery being meted out to ordinary people, the lavish knees-up the royals are throwing for themselves might stick in the public craw.
That, however, would be to miss the point.
In fact, the best thing the royals have going for them is their very excess, since the palaces, the costumes, the ridiculous titles and the silly ceremonies generate a libidinal energy that feeds a celebrity culture, along the lines that these people must be special precisely because they’re so insanely privileged.
To put it another way, the royal wedding appeals precisely because the pageantry is so explicitly elitist, so dramatically different from the humdrum circumstances of our everyday lives. "The great appear great because we are on our knees," the Irish socialist Jim Larkin said once. He added, "Let us rise" – but in a political conjunction where we have not risen, where, in fact, the Left remains marginal and powerless, it’s all too easy to take a kind of consolation in the lives of those who self-confidently proclaim their own greatness.
via www.abc.net.au
An excellent article
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