Summer 2013’s Best News Train Wreck: Mute Monkey’s Pick

We’ve each selected our favorite media shitstorm of the summer. There were far too many qualified candidates.
-BM

I have a lot to learn about people. I accept that as a disaffected college student, there’s very little I actually understand about the world and its inhabitants, no matter how simple the latter continue to prove themselves to be. For instance, these days I find racial and religious humor to be one of those topics I don’t really touch. Not for fear of offending anyone. God no. It’s more because of the fact that an outsider telling a joke about  a group of people he doesn’t belong to obviously can never have any clue what the hell he’s talking about, limiting how funny he’s capable of being.

That being said, I’m declaring England, its inhabitants, and its silly TV shows about telephone booths fair game for mockery. There’s far too much material to ignore, and I’ll be damned if I let their asinine traditions go un-snarked at. Like the wacky rule they came up with about not ending sentences in prepositions.

One such tradition is the continued “reign,” as it were, of the British royal family. Now, I have nothing but respect for the queen and her clan (though I abhor her taste in canine companionship) and am sure that they are all more or less normal human beings leading normal lives.

They also happen to be members of the idle upper class and brits, like all white people, go fucking nuts over the idle rich, and royal or not, the Windsors qualify. They may even doubly qualify if their (and, strangely, our) public’s reaction to the fact that a few of them decided to procreate is anything to go by. I haven’t seen such a loud festival of nothing since HLN decided that the Jodi Arias trial was important/interesting/not completely irrelevant.

I am a disappointed American. Perhaps this makes me biased, but I like to think that it just lends me a different perspective, one not corrupted by the pop culture mania that’s made us all so apathetic to the actual serious issues we all face today. As such, I have developed a particular distaste for figureheads, especially when these figureheads stand atop a pyramid of little else but airtime and column inches. Very little in my mind separates the Windsors from the Kardashians other than the thirty-five IQ points members of the former family, on average, has over those of the latter. The English royalty poses for pictures, lives in luxury, and suffers the occasional sex scandal just like the Wyrd Sisters themselves. Then they go and have babies and suddenly everyone is losing their shit. Because why exactly? The young Prince George certainly didn’t do anything. His parents are probably waiting patiently for the royalties (get it?) money they’re going to receive for the upcoming movie about the intimate details of their courtship (even if it’s not being made right now, I guarantee you it will be). Yes, William served in the RAF, but don’t be naive. No one was ever going to put him in a situation that could ever even potentially get dangerous. This baby was not the first baby born after, I dunno, an infertility plague or something. He’s not the son of two warring families whose birth symbolizes peace between them. Prince George is simply the son of a family that’s famous for being rich.

I suppose I can appreciate the fact that the Windsors are there to be celebrated by the British public. It sort of seems to me like a real-life soap opera where they write a wedding or baby into the show as a ratings stunt. This is usually the point at which I suggest better things to get excited about than the goings on of the upper class, but it seems like a waste of time to try and change anyone’s mind. And I guess it would be immature to just declare “I’m right and you’re wrong.” Maybe I could lead by example and hope that my interest in what I believe to be more worthy things might lead to others following suit. But then again, positivity is for other people. I’m fine with being impotently bitter.

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