Facebook friends being the only friends that really matter, I'm a little ferklempt to be under fire from one of my best Facebook friends, who took me to task for saying how much I loved watching the Royal Wedding, even to the point, I wrote, of weeping openly.
"Tear duct problem?" he wrote scornfully, though not without reason: Kvelling over the lifestyles of the rich and famous, especially the born rich and privileged, is not my style. Quite the opposite, in fact. That Kate Middleton is a commoner is irrelevant: How common is she, really, coming from such wealth while being so uncommonly beautiful?
Leave it to The New York Post's snark-infested columnist Andrea Peyser to trash it without mercy--and not much more merit. Bad enough the Royal Wedding was "bigger than the Super Bowl and as tacky as a legion of Elvis impersonators," she wrote. "Most of all, it was disturbingly white [my italics added]."
White? Well, it is the Royal Family of England--not Swaziland! She played the race card a second time in belittling the unwashed masses: "Brits in T-shirts and jeans gathered for days to catch a glimpse of the white folks riding to Buckingham Palace."
Apparently, she didn't see the foreign dignitaries--many in national costume--including the Ambassador of Oman, the High Commissioner of Ghana or the High Commissioner of New Zealand (garbed in a traditional Maori cloak); no mention, either, of the Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks, or the Venerable Bogoda Seelawimala--acting head monk of the London Buddhist Vihara. I probably wouldn't have recognized the President of the Zoroastrian Trust Funds of Europe, so I can't slight her for that.
Kate, Peyser said, "bore the look of a lithe human sacrifice." For those of us who can relate, Prince William fared even worse in her description of him as "the badly balding heir to the throne." She somehow found his "You look beautiful" pronouncement to his betrothed "dorky," and derided "the pomp and ridiculousness [that] spilled to the streets."
Again, she must have missed the joyous multi-colored crowds in Trafalgar Square, which reminded me of the Obama inauguration in Washington, D.C., where it was likewise people of all ages, races and walks of life coming together in celebration. No, for Peyser it was all "a worldwide showcase of dreadful hats, fad diets and an unusually sour, lemon-yellow-clad queen."
But British writer Roger Bennett, who was no less irreverent in his commentary for MSNBC, saw it differently--and with English eloquence and depth: "She's a vestige of England's empire long gone, where the sun never sets. She's the one constant and the human personification of everything that is and was once great about this country."
Back to Facebook: "[I'm] not saying 'off with their heads' but c'mon, this is the 21st Century!" my L.A.-based friend said. "OK, they can be King and Queen of Disneyland."
Storybook Land, for sure! British music journalist Mick Brown was one of many who contrasted the "fairytale of popular imagination" that William's mother's ill-fated wedding was supposed to be with what seemed to be the reality of his own.
"The fact that Prince William should have chosen to marry through genuine love and affection rather than by royal arrangement, surely presages a different future for the monarchy, less hidebound by tradition, a king with the common touch," Brown wrote in The Telegraph. Vividly describing "a ritual steeped in history" as well as "a pageantry that was at the same time magnificent and vaguely preposterous; irrational, and profoundly moving," he called the Royal Wedding "a matchless act of high theater, resonant with history, tradition and the inescapable feeling of the institution of the monarchy being reshaped before our eyes."
The benefit to "the spirit" of England, Brown stated, "in an age of increasing cynicism, when Britain’s sense of national self-hood has never been more fragile, is incalculable."
But Brown also observed "a delightful sense of informality" within "an occasion of high majesty." And who would he be sitting next to but the the teary-eyed High Commissioner of Swaziland. "It's been so wonderful," he quoted her as saying. "We all love them so much."
Simply put, "everyone loves a wedding," Brown concluded, and in this rare case I include myself.
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