WEDDING BELLS
We are soon to be faced by the spectacle of another royal wedding. The prospect fills me with a weary resignation. For weeks to come we are going to be forced fed daily a ghastly syrupy mix of sycophancy combined with a chronic sentimentality of the Hallmark variety. One needs a strong stomach for this sort of fare. This infantilism speaks volumes for the quality of our public life but you will need to look long and hard to find contrary voices on the public stage.
What can be said about this event that can rise above the banal statement of the obvious? A young bourgeois couple are to marry. He from what, in the rather hideous language of our ‘therapeutic’ culture, is normally described as a ‘dysfunctional’ family, a family characterised by spite, cruelty, failed marriages and ongoing feuds in which the matriarch continues to martyr herself for the cause. This family is held up to us as something to admire and to which to bow the knee! Well for my self I suppose the correct biblical quotation should be ‘let him without sin cast the first stone.’ Still you will forgive me if I am somewhat under whelmed by their example.
All of this stuff would be unimportant, mere trivia, a form of showbiz, a vehicle for selling magazines and tacky commemorative memorabilia,tea towels and pottery. If that was all I could simply turn off the TV, close the curtains and wait for it all to pass, however the reality is that this ridiculous circus continues to keep our culture in an infantile state, a retarded state that stifles cultural growth and holds back the development of a truly democratic culture.
What can be said about this event that can rise above the banal statement of the obvious? A young bourgeois couple are to marry. He from what, in the rather hideous language of our ‘therapeutic’ culture, is normally described as a ‘dysfunctional’ family, a family characterised by spite, cruelty, failed marriages and ongoing feuds in which the matriarch continues to martyr herself for the cause. This family is held up to us as something to admire and to which to bow the knee! Well for my self I suppose the correct biblical quotation should be ‘let him without sin cast the first stone.’ Still you will forgive me if I am somewhat under whelmed by their example.
All of this stuff would be unimportant, mere trivia, a form of showbiz, a vehicle for selling magazines and tacky commemorative memorabilia,tea towels and pottery. If that was all I could simply turn off the TV, close the curtains and wait for it all to pass, however the reality is that this ridiculous circus continues to keep our culture in an infantile state, a retarded state that stifles cultural growth and holds back the development of a truly democratic culture.
