Cool Britannia

Andrew McIntyre enjoyed the royal wedding:

Royal Marriage and cultural vengeance

This is the cool Britannia … at last

There was much more than just the pageantry and romance of a royal wedding in last Friday’s wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton.

Britain has effectively been beaten around the ears for a long time recently. Not only by the financial crisis, but by the politically correct, by the government’s apparent paralysis faced with Islamic extremists, by uncontrolled immigration, by a legal system gone mad where there is a profound sense that everyone except the British have rights and where even the Union Jack is considered some sort of insensitive symbol that is insulting to newer arrivals.

In this context the wedding was an emphatic blast of confidence building. All the nay sayers, the cynics of the republican commentariat seem to have been swept aside in the tidal wave of enthusiasm and unashamed approval of the event. Both Kathy Lette and her pompous husband were swept aside as irrelevant — pomp without the circumstance.

The checkmate of the ABC with its tawdry plans to be nasty was simply delicious and added to the pleasure of the occasion. Even a debate on the ABC’s Q&A with its obsession over our need for a republic produced a realistic Bob Carr reminding the audience that it just isn’t going to happen anytime soon and a very subtle and a heartfelt explanation of the importance of present constitutional arrangements by Senator Nick Minchin.

The cynics can pooh-pooh the ceremony, but history, institutions, and practice somehow was able, even in 2011, to weave its invisible web of meaning over us and the power of its symbolism was able to reach far beyond the tawdry rationalisation of indignant republicans.

Source: andrewmcintyre.org