Bonfire of the Absurdities...
The two ugliest people in Britain just got married today. Fortunately, to each other.

I cannot pretend to know much, nor care much, about the soap opera that revolves around Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles (by the way, does her name now become Parker-Bowles-Windsor?). I'm not at all eager to get caught up in the Diana-vs.-Camilla debate, only because I'd have taken Diana to the woodshed and made a proper woman out of her, if you get my drift. Besides, the whole thing seems rather stupid. Diana is dead, unfortunately, and whatever you might think about how sad and tragic the whole episode was, you have to remember that the woman worked her way up to potential-Queen-of-England and lived a life of royal luxury. The most tragic part of Diana's story is that she managed to get killed in France. If given the choice, I'd rather die in a filthy back alley in Khartoum of blood poisoning brought on by an infected flea bite.

Be that as it may, somehow, a Royal Wedding still holds fascination for the American public 230 years after we broke away from the Monarchy. The closest thing we have to the Royal Family here is the Kennedy Clan, and other than one tragic and one well-deserved death (you decide which was which) , we only keep watching because the Kennedy's keep finding strage ways to die. We must be interested since the wedding took up the majority of the morning airtime on all the major 24-hr cable networks.

Which leads to an interesting (to me, anyway) psychological question: despite the fact that we are a pluralistic, democratic, non-monarchial republic, populated by people who can trace their ancestry back to every shithole on the planet, why is it that we will stop dead in our tracks to watch a Royal Wedding, and dissect every moment of it as if it were the Super Bowl? Why this continued fascination with Royalty?

The closest explanation I can come up with would have me laughed out of any reputible bar within 200 miles, but here it goes. It has to do with the differences between men and women. Mind you, I'm not a doctor and I have a few screws loose, so I could be talking out of my ass for all I know. But like I've said before, this is my blog and I'll let my mental flotsam and jetsom out whenever I want to.

If you're a man, you watch a Royal Wedding because here's a future King, one of the richest and most powerful men on the planet, and he's marrying something that looks like it was dragged out of the swamp by your labrador retriever. You watched him marry Diana because yo lusted after her and envy compelled you to try to figure out how a beuatiful girl like that hooked up with such a dweeb. She would have been much better of with you, you know.You watched because you were compelled to engage in that mental monologue about how even the ugliest people on the planet can get the finest babes, if they have money and fame. Envy is a perfectly normal human emotion, after all. Now, you watch and try to figure out how one of the most powerful and richest men on the planet managed to marry his high school lunch lady.

If you're a woman, then the whole Royal Wedding reinforces your fictions and fantasies about fairy princesses and Cinderella, with a smattering of romance-novel pomp and majesty added for good measure. Women watch and fantasize that, one day, although they may not be marrying an honest-to-God-heir-to-the-throne, that their own wedding day will be just like that;
Horsemen in livery, silver trumpets, red carpets, living in a palace, millions of eyes focused on HER, and to top it off, a man who can provide her with her every whim, and have it delivered on a silver platter by servants, no less.

Men watch to drool over the bride (not this one, of course), women watch to retreat into the world their mother told them existed (and that they deserved), but which really doesn't.

I just wish my choice of TV this morning wasn't between the Royal Nuptuals and Women's Curling on ESPN.