Wedding flashback #3 — 2011: Peasants and princes marry for one reason

Prince William and Kate Middleton on their wedding day

     My older son got married Saturday afternoon, in a lovely waterside ceremony. Meaning that I've got better things to do than craft the high-calibre journalism you've come to expect here. But I am not without compassion, and luckily I've commented on plenty of weddings over the years. I'm sure the happy occasion will make the cut, eventually. But not today.

     The wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton is one week away. Which means I better speak my piece now, since by Monday we can expect a Category 5 media hypestorm to be howling in full fury all around us, and you won’t be able to hear a word I say.
     So far the initial outlier Royal Wedding storms fall into one of two major types.
     First, the drenching downpour of mainstream hoopla, the standard, isn’t-this-lovely, let’s-parse-every-detail documentation, the traditional approach for the past century. The TV networks are all chanting “We’re there! Giving you the lowdown on every last flower (look for myrtle in the bride’s bouquet!) and every salient and non-salient detail (did you know that two horses in the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment have been named in honor of William and Kate? You do now.)
     The second, smaller, more modern gust blows against the prevailing gale. In America, it’s a sort of “Didn’t we fight a revolution to get away from this sort of thing?” incredulity, bordering on anger. Death to kings! In Britain, there’s an even stronger current of rejection and contempt, of those insisting that just because one royal is getting married, that’s no reason to pause from despising the royals as a group and wishing they’d go away. The disgust over their lavishness and vapidity is magnified by the specter of jug-eared, red-cheeked Charles — think Bertie Wooster at 62 and a prince — and the memory of his tragic first wife, Diana, whose own storybook wedding is a cold rain on next week’s parade.
     My take is neither slack wonder nor hot contempt, though I see the appeal of both:
     Awe is appropriate. Most lives, including my own, are dull, if not dreary, our days spent taking out the garbage and clacking away at our jobs. The image, no matter how false, of a fairy tale wedding, with kings and queens and royal carriages, provides a powerful glow one can warm one’s routine-numbed heart over.
     Sure it’s a lie. But what drama isn’t? The loathsomeness of the royals is a function of our close study of their lives — they don’t seem, as a class, any more despicable than, oh, Hollywood actors or professional athletes or other providers of mass entertainment.
     But I sympathize with scoffers too. It’s too much. The media can’t seem to find a balance — next week all wars will recede, the budget brawl in Washington will mute, every news story will be drowned out by a Windsorian wave that I think would drive the most Union Jack-draped royalist mad. Is that the media’s fault? People tune in, read, they’re interested.
     Myself, not so much. I had to check which prince is getting married and which is next in line after Charles (William, for both).
     I did succeed in finding one aspect that intrigues me — the question of why they, or anybody else, get married. Why have a ceremony? I don’t mean singlehood vs. married life. I mean a wedding as a universal social custom. Why, from thatched huts to Westminster Abbey, from 10,000 years ago to next week, do humans make such a fuss when they decide to face life’s joys and woes together?
     A Short History of Marriage, by Edward Westermarck, is a surprisingly lucid piece of work, despite being written by an academic, which provides a reason for weddings that never crossed my mind, one so simple that it’s a revelation.
     “The most general social object of marriage rites is to give publicity to the union,” he writes. “Publicity . . . is everywhere the element which distinguishes a recognized marriage from an illicit connection.”
     If marriage is an institution designed to raise families, then weddings are designed to publicly commit the man, in earlier times, and now the couple, to the responsibilities soon to be literally crying at their feet.
     Hence the big wedding. Hence the feast, in order to draw the guests, who are there to witness the event and spread the word, a vital function in pre-cable TV days.
     So while the typhoon of press coverage is excessive and deadening, we can take comfort in the thought that publicity is not just traditional, but the true reason for a wedding.
     A little attention is in order — you smile at every bride and groom passing through a hotel lobby without parsing their backgrounds, why not smile at this couple too? I would not want to be either the person camped out on the sofa all week, drenched in the coverage, nor would I want to be muttering about the madness of King George III. The former might want to watch less and live more, the latter might take a day off, in the name of idealized young love. You can go back to despising the royals and eagerly awaiting their downfall bright and early next Saturday morning.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 22, 2011