Royally Married

Royalty continues to exert a strange fascination over us. The interest shown in the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton was phenomenal with about 2 billion people worldwide watching the event live. It really does not matter what your views may be about royal families. You may consider them to be scum of the earth and leeches on the body of the nation, when it comes to their activities, most of us are highly interested. Consider the situation like this: if you have read any article or seen any program on royalty, then it means you consider them to be important enough to devote a certain portion of your life to knowing more.

Another thing that comes out in relation to royalty is class consciousness. In the case of William and Kate, we have a situation where two people met in university, liked each other, started dating and eventually got married. All perfectly ordinary in Western societies and completely unexceptional except that one of the parties happens to be royalty and the other a commoner. This was an aspect that was highlighted throughout the relationship and especially in the run up to the marriage. A commoner marrying royalty! A descendant of coal miners marrying into a descendant of people who had not seen the inside of a mine for centuries. Very few people seem to ask the question so what? Is there anything special about the genetic heritage of royalty that sets it apart from "commoners"? Ofcourse not. This reaction speaks volumes about our attitudes towards people and our assumptions regarding class.

There is a kind of snobbery in this. The feeling that I am better than someone else because I am richer, or better looking or come from a more prominent family or whatever. The feeling that my genetic stock is in some fashion superior because of my station in life. So we give those less fortunate or different from us pejorative terms like trailer trash, bimbo, redneck, camel jockey and many others. This feeling is also what impels many people to obsessively research their ancestry usually in the hope of discovering some sort of a royal link. Most of us, specially if we are middle class, suffer from it. Perhaps this is at the root of our obsession at the "common" origins of Kate Middleton.