Pageantry-with-a-purpose reaffirming the world order

It's the popular-dude day of the week, Friday. Today he's brought what might be sunshine with him (though this has already turned to rain by the time I finished this post), and is pulling the promise of a somewhat-nice-weather weekend behind him. We cheer thee, most-popular dude, our weather demands are pathetically easy to satisfy.

When I first woke the Olympic mountains were out. Dark cloud cover extended across the sky from where I stood all the way West toward the Olympics, but stopped just short of those snowy peaks. They were awash in early morning sunlight, and the effect was beautiful. By the time I drove in the clouds had reached the mountains and a perfectly horizontal band of dark sliced off the tops of the mountains. The rest of them were still washed in golden sunlight, so it looked like a frieze, under an accent light, running across a dark wall.

But clearly none of this is important. Not when the world is abuzz about the royal wedding (or should that be Royal Wedding?). Consuming something like $50 million dollars of the worlds resources plus the costs associated with all the media broadcasting and access, the world's disenfranchised can rest easy knowing that the order of extreme privilege has not been disrupted. With pageantry that could have fed thousands, two privileged kids have been wed and, with any luck, will bless the Royal Family with an heir so that this righteous world order will be generationally and genetically preserved.

Did you watch? Were you sucked into blessing this event by virtue of the carefully choreographed use of tradition and pageantry, designed to appeal to our equally-carefully-managed conditioning? This is the same conditioning that produces a high school graduate who cannot read above a fourth grade level or reliably manipulate numbers but who will, when confronted with a flag in a public ceremony, instinctively snap to attention and slap his hand to his breast before reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. He may not be able to recite even one of the formulas for calculating slope, but he will be able to recite this pledge all his life. This kind of conditioning ceremony is how we maintain a world order.

I have seen many headlines already this morning referring to this wedding as historic. In this sense, it is. By using a wedding to reinforce, globally, the message that we all need and adore the privileged classes, we have lead the world's citizens to once again clasp their hands to their breasts and swear allegiance to the extreme stratification of power, wealth, and privilege.

Don't be fooled. The royal family (sorry, that should be Royal Family) and governments of the world don't spend $50 million just to give a couple of sweet kids a beautiful wedding. It wasn't televised and Facebooked live just to allow the common folk a chance to share in the Royal Family's personal joy.

It was, however, historic. Historic pageantry-with-a-purpose reaffirming the world order, around the globe, to a hungry, needy, war-torn, displaced, pillaged, resource-raped world. The message: "Be warm, be filled, we are still here, we will still look out for you. You may now turn back to your regularly scheduled squalid-for-our-sakes lives, quietly and orderly please. Thank you very much for tuning in."

My regularly schedule life, right about now, was a short set of tunes randomly presented by my iPod on my way to the campus. Not a Royal tune among them, though Peer Gynt certainly makes for an interesting counterpoint.

- Bob Florence Limited: Tres Palabras
- Moments of Grace: Broken Promises
- Donald Fagen: I.G.Y.
- Tim Story: The Death of Ase from "Peer Gynt Suite"


- Posted via Hermes.