apparently I have an opinion about opinions about the royal wedding

[kindkit]

I didn't particularly follow the royal wedding; I'm not that kind of Anglophile. But it was impossible not to hear about it. The parts of Twitter that I frequent were full of honorable British leftists saying true things: the monarchy is regressive and involves a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary people to a tiny aristocracy, the royal wedding is a distraction from more important issues, the whole purpose of the royal family is to foster a sentimental attachment to inequality, the cost of Meghan Markle's wedding dress could have housed or fed people who have nothing, etc. etc.

And yet I can't help thinking, "This is why leftists have a reputation as puritanical killjoys." It reminded me, to some extent, of fandom purity culture, in which legitimate criticisms get dulled down into the very blunt instrument of "That thing you are enjoying is Bad and Wrong." Which is an accusation that people, unsurprisingly, often react badly to.

I kept wanting the honorable leftists saying true things to shut the hell up.

Plus, I have noticed a tendency for the honorable leftists not to notice, or to gloss quickly over, the fact that a black woman marrying into the British royal family is not meaningless. Its meaning may be mostly symbolic, but symbols are important, as witness the angry British racists who hated the whole business. Anything that makes the typical Daily Mail reader fume that much can't be all bad, can it?

Comments

[lilliburlero]

I can understand some of the irritation, when for the price of the dress one could have paid for safer cladding on Grenfell Tower and still had £100,000 in spare change. (I don't think the dress came directly out of the public purse, even, but if we're talking symbols...) On the other hand, even the large sums of money involved are negligible in terms of the sort of investment needed to tackle poverty.

I only watched the homily - because so many people seemed to be commenting on it - and it was very hard not to see the negative reactions to such a well-judged, warm-hearted, intelligent and accessible piece of rhetoric as anything but racist, though. I was especially baffled by 'too long' - it was 13 minutes!

[kindkit]

I can understand the irritation too--I agree with most of the critiques from the left that I've seen. But, I dunno, there's something about extending a merciless political critique into someone else's occasion of personal joy that gets up my nose. It's like those people who come out on every beloved holiday to proclaim that it's politically bad--Christmas is Christian cultural hegemony, US Thanksgiving glosses over genocide, Valentine's Day contributes to the overvaluing of romantic love and the stigmatization of single people. It's not that those things aren't true, but is anyone actually helped by the critique or is it just virtue-signalling? As you said, even the fairly outrageous cost of the wedding would be only a drop in the bucket in an attempt to really tackle poverty. Refusing to celebrate Thanksgiving does fuck-all to help Native Americans. (I feel differently about holidays that are less personal and/or more innately offensive, like Columbus Day in the US, which is far more explicitly colonialist than Thanksgiving and which nobody has a real emotional attachment to. Kill it, and kill the orgy of nationalism that is Independence Day too.)

Even the dress . . . I certainly think there's a valid general point to be made that rich people should spread their money around to help people and not just purchase luxuries for themselves. But (a) if it was Markle's own money, I have no idea how much money she has or how she spends it; for all I know she may give tons to good causes, and (b) when it becomes not a general point but a criticism of one specific item--and one in this case for a very special occasion--where does it end? Should everybody have their weddings on the super-cheap and donate the balance to charity? Should people have receptions? Honeymoons? Am I morally allowed to buy meat and chocolate and books, which are all things I don't technically need, while there are homeless and hungry people in my city?

Sorry for the long reply, you've just made me think about a lot of things I don't really have an answer for.