Screw the Royal Wedding: 6 Reasons Pomp and Circumstance Are Bad for America and Britain

Since it was announced that Prince William, progeny of Diana, had become engaged to his classmate Kate Middleton, both the British and American media have been plastering every minute detail across their front pages, often with exclamation points as though audiences will die if they do not know the up-to-the-minute wedding news. Even as Japan grapples with nuclear disaster, as Western countries become more deeply involved in the Libyan war, as unions and students stage protests across the U.S. and the UK, the media fever pitch about the royal nuptials continues to swell, increasingly frenzied as the April 29 wedding date nears.

William isn’t even next in line for the throne, as Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger wryly put it. And while the excitement may echo that of the 1981 ‘fairytale’ nuptials of William’s parents –– complete with nearly identical commemorative plates –– there may just be more at work than celebrity obsession and conservative/archaic monarchy worship.

Last week, The Independent reserved its front page for a slightly more informative piece on the prince’s nuptials. Titled ‘Royal Bonfire of the Vanities,’ writers Nigel Morris and Cahal Milmo posited that by extending government powers to halt protests on the day of the wedding, Home Secretary Theresa May was actually making a power grab and a larger move to silence protest afterward as well. UK Uncut, an organization that’s fighting against huge cuts in public programs to make up for corporate tax dodgers (sound familiar? there’s a US Uncut, too), has staged protests in Parliament Square and elsewhere -- protests that have been unfairly characterized as ‘violent’ by mainstream media and May. The Independent:

Despite the appetite for a crackdown on protest, it emerged yesterday that peace campaigners camped on the pavement of Parliament Square will remain in place beyond the royal wedding. Campaigners who were evicted from the grass on the square, just yards from Westminster Abbey, have moved on to the adjoining pavement, meaning they can only be evicted by Westminster Council. The local authority was told yesterday that it cannot obtain a court hearing for the eviction until 9 May.

The former assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard, Andy Hayman, has called for "snatch squads" and "dawn raids" to be carried out by police against suspected troublemakers.

The Labour chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, Keith Vaz, who has summoned Bob Broadhurst, commander of the Met, to appear before the committee today, called for "bold and radical" measures, but added: "What we need is a big and open conversation with the police, giving them whatever they need to police... effectively."

It’s not just that England’s conservative government sees opportunity in the mass distraction...there are many other reasons to thumb your nose at the on-high brouhaha wrought by two people getting hitched. Here are five of them.

1. Monarchy is the enemy of democracy.

England’s monarchy is not the monolithic power structure it used to be -- rather than an all-ruling king or queen evoking the most archaic eras of serfdom, it functions in modern times as a constitutional monarchy, with Queen Elizabeth II serving as a symbolic head of state under the constitution and discretion of the prime minister and Parliament. There’s a long-running movement for Republicanism in the UK -- not in the GOP sense, but in the Platonic, pro-democracy sense. But with constitutional monarchy entrenched in British political culture for centuries –– and with the obvious enthusiasm for the William-Kate union –– the cards are stacked against democracy.