The Royal Baby Mania Reaches New Heights
No signs yet of abatement
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The haut bourgeois in Europe, the offspring of bankers and rich merchants in the Middle Ages have been trying to ape and integrate themselves into the old nobility for centuries, a repugnant practice eventually imitated by rich Americans, so it’s not surprising that even their crass 21st Century iterations on both sides of the Atlantic should suffer from the same arriviste impulse.
The impulse manifests itself in many ways, but since at the end of the day we are talking about the commonalities of class, the drive to highlight and cheer monarchy, the strongest representation of institutionalized privilege on earth, is a natural reflex among the corporate rich and their underlings.
As a result of this sorry state of affairs we hear—how could we not—that Ms. Kate MIddleton has finally delivered herself of her firstborn, name as yet unknown, but the American media scoundrels, so expert at neglecting and distorting truly important news, won’t leave it at that. Along with their legions of acolytes and sycophants, they continue to fill the minds of the hoi polloi with all manner of detail and vapid speculation about the significance of the new prince’s arrival.
The gushing is so ludicrous and ubiquitous that it defies proper transcription, so we will simply let you find your own examples. Here we only offer a minor instance of this avalanche of nonsense. “The world (sic) is rejoicing upon the birth of the new prince,” gushed NBC’s Natalie Morales, especially (and needlessly) flown to London to stand in front of the clinic and tell the public the obvious, while regaling the audience with minutiae. Survivors of the Princess Diana wedding and later tragic death may recall the carpet-bombing coverage accorded the events, so by now there’s plenty of “tradition” for this type of tiresome, monomaniacal treatment of a subject that could only obsess the rich, their overpaid water carriers, and the clueless.
We know that far too many Brits, except for their long-suffering republicans, are still cuckoo about such fluffery (the Brits have no match in the manufacturing of pomp and circumstance), but should the American media barons, simply by dint of ownership, pollute our still barely republican airwaves with their decadent fawning? I wonder what the signers of the American declaration of independence would say about such abject exhibition. For a nation that spends so much of the public treasure and blood on wars in the name of freedom and democracy it seems odd that its rulers retain this unhealthy fascination with autocratic symbols.
—Patrice Greanville
with Sean Lenihan
