Positive Cynicism – The royal wedding approacheth, and I must RSVP

Aaron R. Davis

Dear royal wedding planners:

I’m afraid that I must answer in the negative re: my attendance at the wedding of Prince William of Wales and Kate Middleton.

I do thank you for attempting to add me to the guest list, but what follows below are detailed reasons why I shall not be attending the event.

1. No one cares.

2. Seriously, no one in the free world cares that the prematurely balding scion of the oldest inbred family in Europe is marrying a girl he met at college. No one at all. We’re all too busy wondering why England is even bothering keeping these outdated relics afloat with their tax dollars — even with their status reduced to that of charming, expensive figureheads — to really care what kind of dress Kate Middleton is going to wear.

3. The tax thing bothers me. This whole pointless wedding is going to be fully tax-funded by the people of the UK. I have friends over there who can’t even find jobs, or who are about to get laid off from them, and hard-earned tax money (somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 million pounds, from what I hear) now has to be diverted to the overprivileged to pay for a wedding for a family whose only claim to importance is that they’re the descendents of William the Conqueror from a thousand years ago when there was actually need for a monarch. Sure, that sounds fair.

(By the way, do you know how much it’s estimated that the UK is going to lose because the wedding has to be a bank holiday? Five billion pounds. Five billion pounds in lost work. So that a sort of celebrity wedding that no one cares about can occur. Because the economy is doing just fine, right?)

4. This is not an event. You know why? You guessed it: because no one cares. These people are not celebrities, as much as you were desperate to turn the boy’s mother into one and then hounded her literally to death. And she at least did more for the world with her anti-landmine campaign. Why are celebrity fluff shows and serious news outlets so fascinated by this? I care as much about this nonsense as I cared about what Al Gore’s kids got on their SATs.

5. Have you seen the idiots who actually do care about the royal wedding? Especially the Americans, despite living in a country that fought to overthrow the outdated system of tyranny that the Windsors are the last vestige of? These are not the kind of people you want to be in the same group with. They look at these ugly, inbred, useless people and can’t get Disney fairy tales out of their heads. It’s kind of like a sickness.

6. I’m not in a hurry to see all the covers People is going to devote to these two in the future. Remember when Chuck and Di were constantly on the cover for, like, 20 years or something? Didn’t you get sick of those two? “Ooh, her boyfriend calls her Squidgey!” Puke, puke, puke. Also, what’s the success rate in royal weddings this century? Better than the last one? Are we going to have to endure the media’s obsession with Kate to the point where, in a few years, we’ll just be reading about her torrid affairs until we can’t stand the sight of her, either? Thanks, but I’ll be opting out of any news about that.

7. With the rise of shows like Bridalplasty and Shedding for the Wedding, is marriage even all that special anymore? I didn’t even go to my own sister’s wedding less than two months ago (although she lives in Australia, so it’s hard to just bounce over there). And my sister is someone I care about. Prince William is not.

8. We already have useless people who pervade our media and demand our attention. We call them Kardashians. But you know what’s nice about the Kardashians? They make their own money. They don’t expect to be supported by the public at large for the sake of meaningless words like “tradition.”

9. Fox News published a piece about why you should care about the royal wedding. And if Fox News cares about it, it’s probably not good for you.

10. Have you seen the people who are taking virulent stands against this wedding? They seem to think being angry about the royal wedding is equivalent to taking a stand on serious political issues, which is absurd because a) the royals have no real political power, anyway, and b) the people they actually have an issue with are the Houses of Parliament, not the Windsors. And I don’t want to have to put up with those kind of people, either. They have, I think, a legitimate beef over the tax thing, but the people lecturing me about why I shouldn’t care are just as irritating as the people lecturing me about why I should.

(And I know, you could make a case that this whole column is really me lecturing you about why you shouldn’t care, but you’re wrong: this whole column is me lecturing you about why I don’t care. I’m not really interested in what your reasons are.)

11. I tried really hard, but I totally forgot how to give a fuck.

So, if you’ll please note that I won’t be attending, I can crawl back into my cave and carry on living my life with the same affect the royals have always had on it: none at all.

So, so sincerely,

Aaron R. Davis

Aaron R. Davis lives in a cave at the bottom of the ocean with his eyes shut tight and his fingers in his ears. You can contact him at samuraifrog@yahoo.com.