Web Serfing

Salon (specifically Matt Zoller Seitz) sums it up more succinctly than I could.

Yeah, I'm talking about the "royal wedding". The wedding of Prince William (does he have a last name?) and I-don't-know-her-title Kate I-don't-know-her-last-name.

You know. Them.

Up until Wednesday, I'd successfully shoved this insanity into the background and simply assumed this whole thing had already happened and I could yawn and go on with my life.

I was corrected on Wednesday (or maybe Tuesday, I forget) and realized I had more days of banal pseudo-"news" to look forward to.

And then my morning news was pre-empted by this bullshit.

I don't mean anything against William and Kate. They seem nice enough, I guess. I don't know them, so I really don't have any strong feelings about them one way or the other. I'm with Zoller Seitz that I'm sickened by the media's blathering mindlessly on and on about this.

I mean, I get - kinda - why the British and Commonwealth nations might care about this. I don't really get why people here in the U.S. give a crap. Didn't our ancestors fight a rebellion (sorry revolution) so we didn't have to care about royalty and arbitrary labels of superiority people get from their birth and name?

There's something creepy and sinister about incessant media messages that attempt to create "noble" classes for us common folk to bow down to. In the States we're supposed to breathe reverently whenever a politician assures us of something... unless it's a politician from another party. If it's a media star/darling (Tom Cruise, Lindsey Lohan, whomever) or a CEO, we're supposed to kowtow and give nine-hundred different kinds of shit if they sneeze funny.

Hell, we don't even persecute executives for crimes in this country (*cough*financial scandal and bank meltdowns*cough*).

It's like we're trying our best to undo all those years of social evolution away from a feudal mindset.

And it's creepy.

And it kind of pisses me off.