panem et circenses

I'm not going to tackle the subject of the Royal Wedding face-on as it would be a) the longest blog post ever and b) a torrential outpouring of bile punctuated by occasional incoherent guttural barking and salivating, and, well, really, no-one wants that.

So I'll sneak up on the subject tangentially by observing the close parallels between uncritical royalism and adherence to religion. One of the most obvious parallels is the co-opting of an unrelated concept (patriotism and morality, respectively) and dishonestly shackling it to your chosen brand of voodoo nonsense, and then suggesting that if you want to throw away the voodoo nonsense then the other thing has to go too.

Here's how it goes for religion: "You're an atheist? Well then you have no moral code you AMORAL HEARTLESS SOULLESS DEAD-EYED BABY-EATING KILLING MACHINE!!!"

The equivalent for royalism is: "You want to get rid of the Royal family? WHY DO YOU HATE BRITAIN???"

Express the mildest reservations about God or the Queen and you tend to find yourself shackled to a giant straw man, making further rational discussion difficult.

Of course the two things come together anyway on the occasion of a royal wedding, because there's the lengthy voodoo ritual itself, involving the cuddly beardy old Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the Church of England, who embodies his church's tweedy woolly vacuous vagueness perfectly in this video, where he drops the word "God" in a couple of times, but, really, you come away not really knowing what he really believes about anything. As I've said before, the cowardly refusal to set out what you really believe (so that it can get a deserved kicking) disguised as "thoughtfulness" and "inclusiveness" or some such bullshit is probably more annoying than the table-thumping biblical fundamentalism of the more out-there American preachers. At least you know what they think.

Still, it kept the proles happy, and that's the main thing. You know where else they had uncritical flag-waving crowds all vying to outdo each other in the patriotic chanting stakes? That's right, Nuremberg.

Oops.