My post flaming the media’s wall-to-wall coverage of the royal wedding in Great Britain today has earned me the sobriquet “Mr. Grouchypants,” in some quarters, not to mention a rebuke from bloleague Mary Kate Cary for being “a little Bah Humbug-y.” Indeed, a startling number of my friends posted on Facebook this morning about being up at 6am to take in the entirety of the festivities.
One friend, who confessed to having DVR’d the event, weighed in with this defense of the national and international focus on the nuptials:
America is depressing right now. Depressing on a personal level, depressing on a global level. Depressing. A lot of people are still out of work. A lot more people are working jobs they hate because it's hard to find anything else right now. Our political discussion has been taken over by a group of raging lunatics and Donald Trump. WE have a golden couple in the White House--smart, educated, charismatic--but instead of embracing it, people who know better sit around and question his citizenship simply because he's black. It's DEPRESSING. Tsunamis, tornados, Lindsay Lohan, the Kardashians--it's all too much.
William and Kate--they love each other, they're a nice couple. William's overcome a shitty family situation and a lot of tragedy to create a nice, stable life for himself. Kate fell in love and is about to become a princess. Not to mention that the two of them will likely resurrect the British monarchy, an institution that, although largely symbolic is still one of the oldest institutions in the world. Tradition restored. It's nice to believe all of that can really still happen and real life examples of it are incredibly rare. And frankly, it's going to be a very long time before this country has any kind of feel good national event to speak of--at least until the next Olympics.
Plus, she gets to wear a kick ass dress and there are lots of hats.
Harrumph. Maybe so, but I still tend to sympathize more with my colleague who observed that we fought a whole revolutionary war to throw off the yolk of the British monarchy--why the urge to embrace them once again? (To which I reply that we also fought a bloody war to crush the confederacy and yet those people won’t go away either.)
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Reader Comments Read all comments (6)
Hunter of WI 9:01PM April 30, 2011
Ralph Allman of AZ 7:57AM April 30, 2011
Bill Hedges of MO 7:16PM April 29, 2011