Royal Wedding - Great but, so What?

Kate Middleton’s pretty cute, for a British chick. She’d be about an 8 I reckon. What’s-his-face has done pretty well for himself to get to nuptial point with her. Good on them. I could go for a pub lunch right now.

Beyond this thought, I fail to see why I or any other young Australians should actually care about this wedding. It would be good to see a case put forth for why our media is so enraptured by a union which for myself at least, quite frankly, probably ranks a couple of rungs below Geoffrey Edelsten’s wedding to that well proportioned 25 yr old. At least Edelsten is a taxpayer, a citizen, a philanthropist, self-made man who’s done some work and then had some work done (but that’s a different story). As for the royals, well just because your family has a Facebook page does not make them relevant.

Sure the Prince can’t be blamed for the privilege he was born into, and from most accounts he seems like a nice bloke. But surely, there is something so wrong with the way our media pines over a royal who:

a) Has not spent more than 3 months collectively in Australia, despite being a future head of state.

b) Is not influential to Australian politics or society in any way other than the surge of subscriptions to No Idea and the like.

c) Unlike his predecessors, has not had to conquer or colonise foreign lands. Or maybe he’s done that by marrying non-royal bloodlines – technicality?

So what exactly is the effort they have made to earn the gushing wide-eyed praise of us proletariat, their ever loyal subjects? At least in blighty they seem to have lifted the mood of a society ailing economically and in national confidence, and they would undoubtedly bring in some much-needed cash from tourists and exports of commemorative teacups and assorted china. However for Australia it is perplexing in the least that, as a democracy which largely operates independently of the Crown, we place any of our national value on a family living off the best welfare deal in history. Even Katie Price, another doyenne of the tabloid trade, had to pose topless, write a few children’s books and at least married an Aussie – as much as most of us were happy to see Peter Andre leave our shores. So how do we justify the immense attention this wedding is receiving in Australia?

Some might say ‘But we’re a Commonwealth, we’re such amicable brethren!’ Oh I forgot about that, what with U.K reporters taking pot shots at our cricket teams, the hopelessly irrelevant circus tent that is the Commonwealth Games, and England bidding against us for the FIFA World Cup. We voted against a republic? Oh you mean when we voted against the model for the republic, and then had a royalist PM speak for the majority in declaring we didn’t want the republic. Howard was enacting a political version of Paul Newman in ‘The Hustler’, and admittedly voters got played. Even still, karma had its way when bushy brows Johnny didn’t get the top job at the International Cricket Council (ICC), in what was essentially a colony vs. ex-colony standoff. If it’s any consolation I think he’ll probably get a wedding invite though.

This reminds me, I have a small request for our tabloid mag editors. I have a couple of close friends getting married in a couple of weeks, both of them vote, work honest jobs, have a small mortgage and I think they’re pretty photogenic. There’s relevance, geographic proximity, an event, a very romantic ‘how they met’ story and some glamour...all the pieces are there. Would you mind putting them on the cover and doing a 5-page feature?