Another British royal wedding is hoving ineluctably into view. I was at the last one. The memory of that candyfloss patriotism still makes me puke. Noam Chomsky likes opining about the “manufacture of consent.” Royal weddings represent an even more insidious moment: the manufacture of patriotism. The very elixir of which the country has been sucked dry is suddenly in demand. And not only by the people but by all the media and political snouts sniffing at the air of a Great National Event.
How far to pull the pin from such a political hand grenade? Too much and the daemons of nationalism may never return to their Pandora’s box. To little and people might be reminded of what the Sceptred Isle has really become: a Ballardian sexual dystopia far from the Sullivanesque nuptials of the Windsor family. And so a Wedding Planning Committee of equerries and civil servants starts sorting the good national semiotics from the bad. A flypast of Spitfires? Stirring but safely in the past: tick! Bunting? Given that vintage fetishism has proved such an effective aspic on the minds of the young: check! At William’s wedding, they even permitted some street parties. The very acme of Good Old Blighty! No drinking or singing, of course, or anything else reminiscent of the merry homeostasis of the past. No wonder that when the English are allowed to drink, they drink too much. It is because they have nothing left to drink to.
And who is—if you’ll forgive the pun—our next Duchess? Meghan Markle, a daughter of the New World described as an “actress and humanitarian.” Is that all it takes to snag a prince? What about generations of breeding-and-bearing? Even I’ve trodden the boards and given money to beggars; so why isn’t the flame-haired bastard marrying me? There have been complaints that Harry is marrying beneath himself, yet none expressed themselves more eloquently than Princess Michael, who wore a blackamoor broach to the Queen’s Christmas lunch.
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Yet one can only admire Harry for outdoing his older brother at social tobogganing. The current Duchess of Cambridge comes from a family that made its money from—wait for it—wedding bunting! If her royal wedding wasn’t a plot hatched in the smoke-filled backroom of a bunting warehouse, I’ll eat my top hat. Personally, I couldn’t give a damn who the Windsor boys marry. I remember them from school days as a slightly awkward pair—a dentist and a rural estate agent, perhaps.
What interests Bunky is: What is the purpose of the royal family? It’s clearly not to lead anyone into war, cultural or otherwise, but rather to condense the vapors of patriotism into the soft sludge of democratic despotism. Why else would they crave the approbation of the very powers that would destroy them? Prince Charles has proved a useful idiot for causes ranging from environmentalism to the cultural gray goo of the interfaith movement, like a royalist counterpart to Jeremy Corbyn.
Young Prince Harry—whose nuptials bear down on us with such terrifying determinism—has pinned his colors to the mast of Men’s Mental Health. Those of us who refuse the therapeutic shilling—choosing not to become a mewling man-child, supping at the chemical tit of the National Health Service—are soon branded “toxic.” Toxifying masculinity is an essential plank of the progressive agenda, because men as nature intended them tend to take matters in hand.
