Republican Rhapsody.

 

And so for the first time since Prince Charles pulled a Caligula and married a horse, we saddle up for another ROYAL WEDDING, where the taxpayer’s money is gleefully spent on an inbred family whose original purpose as figureheads has been buried under meaningless luxurious ceremony. Apparently an awful lot of cash is needed to make Prince Willy look like less of an absolute farting cretin, and to make Kate Middleton look less of a social climbing trophy-wife in waiting.

Unless you’ve been on the moon for the past couple of weeks, with your fingers in your ears and your eyes stapled shut, you will inevitably have heard that William Wales and Kate Middleton are engaged and will be married next year at the tax-payers’ expense. Yes, its true, the Prince has found a wife to cheat on, following in his illustrious father’s footsteps. Naturally the feeding-frenzy led by the parasites, who call themselves “journalists” and “paparazzi”, is underway with an enthusiasm rivalled only by a teenage boy’s yearning for privacy having just discovered masturbation. The media frenzy has barely got started and has yet to “climax”, the press has already shot down the Bishop of Willesden for expressing his views on the Royal wedding. It is obviously a grave crime to express indifference or opposition to the Royal Family, for it is an institution endowed by God with the right to rule us and live off our taxes, because their better than us and we’re their bitches, so sit back and watch all the fantastic ceremony kick off at your expense, bitch.

It is somewhat ironic that Christianity has been taken up as the religion of the ruling class. After all it was Christ – a radical Black Jew who came from the Middle East and looked like a goddamn hippie – who denounced the rich and the powerful, who held that the losers and deadbeats would inherit the earth, before being done to death by the state. Not an obvious hero for the British monarchy, with its family values derived from Henry VIII and pillaging the most of the world in the name of “civilisation”, which also has a history of crushing dissent to prevent the rise of a mass-democracy. The vote was not a gift from above, it was seized from below. It was gained after centuries of struggle against a clan of inbred hypocrites and syphilis-ridden playboys “entitled” to rule only by a hereditary principle.

Actually, speaking as writers, it’s probably a good thing that this wedding has been announced, because damn it, we need material for this column. Prince William, our future King lest we forget, is being hitched to another hot piece of St. Andrews ass (don’t think too much about that metaphor, I certainly didn’t) whom he first “fell for” (i.e. made Prince Will’s little Wills go SPROING!!) at a University catwalk, where Kate was wearing a dress that left very little to the imagination. An adventurous lady could possibly replicate the effect using four cobwebs and three beer bottle-tops, but it would be a near thing.

So, then, Prince William. Already balding, and always seen with an insufferable and inherently punchable smirk on his over-privileged face, he is the centrepiece to this royalist burlesque, and it’s hard to figure why he’s so popular. He’s not even that attractive. His “brother” Prince Harry could, potentially, be considered attractive if one had just served a long voyage at sea, but William just looks like a New Yorker caricature of the stereotypical British toff, all braying laughs and absence of chin. More innocent or less cynical writers than we would wonder what Kate saw in him, but then one remembers that the prospects of a fortune and endless photo shoots for Hello and OK! Magazines would turn Jo Brand into a fanny-magnet. But there’s one thought that keeps circling the mind like a vulture, which is the thought of whether or not William is good in bed. The idea of William’s cut-glass English accent expressing explicit sexual pleasure is one that will haunt my dreams forever, as is the thought of whether or not William says “crikey” at the vital moment. Though at this rate, the media coverage will catch the “vital moment” for YouTubers everywhere.

The current estimates for security alone are £20 million. That’s an astonishing amount of money to be throwing around. The money spent on the caviar and smoked salmon alone could probably neatly settle my student loan. Twenty million pounds is more money than the average working Briton will make in their lifetime, and here it is being thoughtlessly frittered away on lavish fripperies that make your average Bullingdon night out look like a monk’s lifestyle. The fact that this money is coming from the taxpayers, who have mortgages and bank loans and other plebeian concerns is the point that turns this farrago from merely an exercise in repulsive decadence into a downright insult. As we said before, the subtext of the glamour and luxury of this wedding is not to celebrate the union between two whinnying upper-class toffs, but instead to highlight the fact that some people are just born better than you. That’s right, they are better. God says so. Nobody cares if you don’t believe in God or if you don’t like how they’re living, this family of scroungers descended from a line of murderers, madmen, syphilitic lard-arses and tyrants are better than you.

The affair brings to mind nobody less than a giggling little “People’s Princess” Diane Windsor nee Spencer. When so much money was spent on the wedding of her to that gloomy bat-eared man, only for the marriage to fall limply to the ground like an overused condom, how we would have laughed, had the population not been footing the bill. The dress and ring alone cost the equivalent of £100,000 today, paid for with the wealth and land bestowed onto them by God and the public. Diana Spencer was a voluntary member of the dynasty in pursuit of a fairytale life as a Princess and Queen in waiting. The media indulged her in this puerile quest and has succeeded in creating a cult to the Princess. As for philanthropy and the two days she spent in Angola and Bosnia, when you’re a borderline airhead with millions of pounds and nothing to do except shag the riding instructor and contemplate regurgitating lunch, these things are something to do. This also helped cement the cultish following in the press. So when the Spencer girl died the press lost control of this cult and had no choice but to suspend reality. The non-event of 1997 would be mourned incessantly in the mass-media, not out of genuine adulation but to retain circulation. No deviation would be tolerated. Banning and censorship were the penalties for doing so. Today the Memorial to Diana’s memory seems very similar to her as a person. Both pointless and gushing, though unless my memory fails, Diana never drowned any squirrels. Feel free to correct us on this point if you have proof. But we digress.

I guess that the point that we are trying laboriously to get to is that this wedding is, at best, ridiculous, and at worst a spit in the eye of the taxpayer. What needs to happen is for us to reassess the position of the royals in society. The kind of unquestioning loyalty that so many people have is completely groundless. Loyalty needs to be earned, and it cannot be wasted on these non-elected, inbred sponges. So many people never seem to question the privileged position of the royals in society, despite the omnipresent implications that some people are born better than others and that you should pay for the honour of being ruled by these toffs. Not that we want to sound like Cromwellian abolitionists (we are, but we don’t want to sound like it) but the Royals are an utterly vestigial part of Britain today, a detriment to the equality of man and the last remnant of imperial rule and all the nasty baggage that goes with that. If we must have them, then let’s not waste our time harping on about the wedding, but have the incestuous pricks tone it down. Give Willy and Kate a registry office-followed-by-local-pub wedding. Move the Queen into just one of her stately homes, and give the rest to the National Trust. Give Prince Phillip an ASBO for “racial insensitivity”. Tear down the Diana Memorial and replace it with the verdant beauty of Hyde Park once again. If we are to have the Royals, don’t have them be the symbols of a lingering aristocracy. Make them normal people. It’s either that, or we can dust off the guillotines.

Written by JT White and Josh Ferguson, November 28th 2010, for the Heythrop student newspaper the Lion originally.