Posted on 02/21/2011 9:05:41 PM PST by Brian Allen
The red carpet appears to be about to be rolled out once again for an exhibition of preening egos.
Hundreds of flashbulbs will pop as stars of the celebrity circus primp and prance.It will be yet another glittering outing for the tacky and the tawdry who comprise our celebrity culture.
No, I’m not referring to next weekend’s Oscars. I am talking about the wedding of HRH Prince William of Wales to Kate Middleton.
It is reported that one of the invitations to this ‘wedding of the year’ has plopped onto the diamante-studded doormat of David and Victoria Beckham.
The football icon and former Spice Girl are believed to be among 1,900 guests to have received an embossed invitation card from the Queen to stick on their mantelpiece.
Can this be true? It seems all too plausible. After all, as president of the Football Association Prince William met Beckham at the World Cup in South Africa and during England’s unsuccessful bid to host the 2018 tournament. And Victoria has revealed that Kate Middleton had asked to see a selection of dresses from Missus Beckham's latest fashion collection.
In an era when just about every young person apparently longs above anything else to be ‘cool’, doubtless it was Prince William and his future Princess who were awestruck at these encounters rather than the other way round.
What next, one wonders? The Duke of Edinburgh inviting Lady Gaga to his 90th birthday party? Princess Anne asking Stella McCartney to design a horse-blanket?
Of course, any suggested association between the Duke or Princess Anne and ‘celebrity culture’ is unthinkable — because both of them embody the values of another age, when the Royal Family stood for higher considerations than mere celebrity or wealth.
What was prized instead was a person’s worthiness or achievement — in other words, issues of character. In our egalitarian age, however, such values are associated with snobbery and elitism. The lowest common denominator has become instead the only acceptable game in town.
If report of the wedding invitation to Missus and Mr Beckham is correct, this would seem to confirm that the most ephemeral kind of fame is all that is needed to propel someone straight into the royal circle.
Anonymous Palace sources have insisted it will not be a ‘celebrity-filled wedding’. But why have the Beckhams been invited if not on account of their celebrity?
After all, what are they really famous for? For being stylish and fashionable — in other words, famous for being famous.
This is particularly disappointing since royal weddings are an important part of the package that the monarchy delivers.
For one of its functions is to make us all feel better about ourselves and about the country of which the sovereign stands as the embodiment.
Royal weddings play their part as important spectacles which add greatly to the gaiety of the nation. They cheer people up.
Essential to the mix, however, is the pageantry of the occasion, its pomp and splendor. Even in today’s straitened times, if an important royal wedding were done on the cheap the public would feel pretty short-changed.
If it were to be held in some dreary register office, for example, people would feel cheated. That’s why it is taken for granted that it should be conducted in a grand abbey or cathedral. And for the same reason, people expect the guest list to be similarly elevated.
The Royal Family reflects and symbolizes the nation and its aspirations. If it comes to appear cheap and tawdry, it cheapens the nation in turn. Unfortunately, an invitation to the Beckhams runs the risk of doing just that.
For they would be rubbing shoulders in Westminster Abbey with some of the most truly distinguished members of British society, along with other members of the Royal Family, Commonwealth leaders and dozens of occupants of foreign thrones.
What this brings irresistibly to mind is the ironic observation that lionized celebrities such as Posh ’n’ Becks are the new royalty.
Indeed, one has to pose the question whether anyone can now tell entertainment ‘royalty’ — whose often louche behavior is indulged and even admired — from the real thing. Prince William’s own best man, his brother Harry, certainly appears to be doing his best to blur the distinction.
Last week Harry was pictured very much the worse for wear staggering out of the latest super-trendy London nightclub, The Box.
The fondness of many young Royals for getting ‘pissed’ or worse at one nightclub after another has long been wearisomely familiar. But The Box appears to take such excesses yet another stage further.
One recent visitor reported that the club featured a master of ceremonies known as Raven O — tattooed, semi-naked and with his hair fashioned into devil horns — who took to the stage and shouted: ‘Do all the drugs you want. Do all the cocaine you can. Answer every fetish. Drugs are good.’
The acts he introduced all used nudity and violence. One man simulated inhaling drugs off the stomach of a scantily-clad female, while the next performance featured a naked man wearing a pig mask being set alight by two women.
When the main show ended at around 3.30am, selected guests were invited upstairs to the VIP area for what was described as an even ‘more titillating’ version of the show.
And what was Prince Harry’s reaction to such debauchery and degradation? He was reportedly so impressed that he was considering approaching some of these acts to perform on his brother’s stag night.
How very edifying an occasion that is likely to be, then, for the second-in-line to the throne. What so impressed his brother — the sex acts, the drugs or both?
All this is a desperately dismal commentary on the state of the Royal Family. It demonstrates that the dividing line between certain younger royals and orgiastic ‘celebrity’ culture has indeed become blurred.
Both now seem to suffer from the lethal combination of too much money and too little self-discipline or basic common sense — stranding them all equally in a state of eternal immaturity.
Of course — especially with the apparently more vulnerable Prince Harry — one cannot help but think that this is at least partly the outcome of that grossly disturbed and broken childhood, with parental infidelity, divorce and finally the death of the Princes’ mother in a car crash with her party-set boyfriend.
And what such a slippage of standards surely reminds us of is the circus that surrounded the life of Princess Diana. For she encapsulated an impossibly glamorous lifestyle which concealed the pathological hollowness and narcissism at its core.
Prince William is supposedly the last great hope for the House of Windsor. With the country exasperated by the perceived eccentricities of his father, and with the monarchy itself all but fatally destabilised by its entanglement with his mother, the hope is that with a stable marriage Prince William will ensure that the future of the institution is secured.
For that to happen, however, it has to embody an image of the nation of which it can be proud. That’s why it is very important that nothing about this forthcoming wedding — from the stag-night to the guest list — lowers the Royal Family in public esteem.
Which is why, somewhere between the Beckhams and The Box, one fears that the royal plot is being lost.
Article printed from Melanie Phillips’s Articles: http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new
URL to article: http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new/?p=800
It gets worse than that the queens sister died of alcoholism and that the ten-year-anniversary of the brothers' mother's death was recently celebrated by photo-op (of a gang-bang in a minefield) -- or by Ms Spencer's best mate, Fergy's corruptly flogging access to her ex?
That's a "royal family?"
Then so is Kim Jung Il's!
(While, meanwhile, Michael Edward Abney-Hastings, 14th Earl of Loudoun and legitimate heir to the throne of once great Britain, lives in Jerilderie, New South Wales, Australia!)
And Prince Harry was serving in Afghanistan until the press revealed his location and then he was removed from the field because he would have been considered a high profile target.
What a totally nasty piece. Sounds like she's oozing with green envy.
She sure packed a lot of nastiness into this rant.
Thanks for posting. A skillful writer and enjoyed the article. They say Lizzie Windsor is just a face on a stamp but again it’s the opposite. The woman weilds enormous power and a say in everything that goes on...
I found this whole article snide and snarky. Just sayin....
Flash bulbs?? And the 1932 Packards they rode in on???
I think it's very nice the Beckham's were invited to the reception. He's an accomplished athlete, she's making a name for herself in the tough field of fashion, they seem like a very nice couple and together they're raising a delightful family of three little boys.
I don't think this hate-filled writer would approve of ANY friends of the engaged royal couple.
Furthermore, I don't think she would find anything good in ANY of the royals even if they were saints.
And I'd bet my freeper reputation that not only does she hate herself but that she's a radical Labour Party socialist, that she thinks a benign monarchy is worse that a communist regime, that she has absolutely NO fun in her own small life....and that she hopes her secret love idol, Barak Obama, gets re-elected in 2012.
Leni
Leni
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