Kate Middleton has just emitted a baby and so, naturally, people queued up everywhere to... Well, to what? To be in with a chance of winning the afterbirth? To sniff the umbilical cord? To get a free MP3 recording of the event (99p on iTunes)? Most people probably got to the palace and said, 'Shit, what are we standing here for?' as if being tugged from out a quixotic but venomous dream.
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| Private Eye's front-page coverage. Brilliant. |
There are a few things that are genuinely saddening about this media-induced fervour. Firstly, when you look on a crowd of people waiting outside Buckingham Palace, you can almost know for certain that these people wouldn't do the same even for a friend's childbirth, such is the power of media nonsense. Do these people really care about a baby that has just been born into an archaic, deeply unfair system? If so, why? I would submit that it is almost entirely media fabrication. 'Care, care, care!' the papers scream, lest you look like some sort of social terrorist. 'Just fit in!' I think most people go along with it without questioning what the hell they're subjecting themselves to, and what their incurious (spellcheck suggested 'injurious', a word that would fit with equal ease) decisions say of their whole being. I do not think it is exaggerative to say that the media is responsible for whipping up interest where it would not have existed to an even comparable degree.
What is interesting, but deeply unsettling, is that in the past monarchs have had to maintain a huge reserve of force to legitimate their reign. Nowadays, in the world of the internet and mass media, the monarchy has become a branding exercise. Why is this worse? Well, a monarch that can best manage an army is a monarch that can best defend the country, and in this way they perhaps deserved in the past at least some of their position. Presently, however, the royal family secures its future position with what is effectively deception, as all branding is. It is propagating the idea that a population needs something more than it really does. It is incredible, simply incredible, that our current royal family has such support from the public (though I do not pretend it is quite as strong as the media might have you believe). They contribute nothing to the people by whom they are largely funded. The poor souls of this country pay for a family to live in a palace. They actually have to be paid to submit themselves to such degradation. The whole thing is farcical. Worse, they are completely unelected and nobody seems to mind.
And then you have David Cameron taking it upon himself to decide that the whole nation 'will celebrate'. How loathsome. I wouldn't particularly mind others celebrating the birth of this child (one of the correspondents on BBC News said 'Kate has given birth to a young child,' as if she might have given birth to a 43-year-old Bulgarian window cleaner), but I cannot tolerate others telling me that I must titillate myself in glee. 'Nobody's got any money, most people can't afford to have fun, the world's about as hostile as it has ever been, but an ancient mechanism for oppression and greed has just been perpetuated. Wooooooo!'
It is the ideas underpinning this unquestioning acceptance of the royals that are most damning. It says the people of this country do not mind a deeply unequal society, and the monarchy is the keystone in the idea that it's OK for some people to live comfortably by exploiting others. It says we do not mind the deification, the beatification, the media wants us to bestow on the unworthy. I would suggest that to agree that these people are better through a happy accident of birth is the ultimate in self-abasement. It is an acceptance of one's own servility, in fact a resignation to it, and furthermore a rejection of talent or endeavour. I do not need to tell you that this is toxic to society and the individual alike.
Why else do I despise this simulated interest in the royal hatchling? I alluded to it earlier, but it is this: there are already people in everyone's life, real people with whom we actually have spoken, it can be guaranteed, who deserve more attention than they receive, and it is tragic that they are not praised because they are not in the media. Don't worry about babies you will never meet, whose lives are blessed by virtue of no virtue at all. Celebrate what's real and take an interest in someone the papers haven't told you to take an interest in. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge don't care about you, won't be at your wedding, won't send you a Christmas card, and you should return the favour. Think for yourself and decide who is more deserving of your time - royalty in palaces, promoted to a mystical celebrity status, or friends.
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