With “Dear Old Blighty” on the Motus Mentis radar these last days, we have for you a warmly dyspeptic assessment of the recent House of Windsor nuptials. (We thank, once again, our e-pal Bill Keezer for the link.) A sample:
Both Harry and Meghan seem personable young people but the role of a royal is not, as they and many commentators seem to believe, to ”˜change the world’. It is to carry out duties with fortitude and discretion, much as Liz and Phil have done for 70 years, and keep your own fatuous opinions to yourself. But there’s not much chance of that, I fear. We are in for a tsunami of vapid emoting from two people who, however pleasant they might be ”” and they do seem to be pleasant ”” are not necessarily the best equipped to pontificate about the many real or imagined injustices in the world and what to do about them. It’s probably just a fantasy of mine but I could swear that, during the service, Princess Anne was thinking much the same thing. Whenever the camera panned across to her she had a look on her face that suggested a corgi was attached to her lower leg and vigorously expressing itself. Except that there are no more corgis, of course.
You may have heard of a political principle called Conquest’s Second Law. It says:
Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.
As sobering as that Law may be, it seems it might not go far enough.
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What struck me about the wedding was the homily given, and how it epitomized the West’s post-Christendom. It could have been delivered by a Unitarian rather than an Episcopalian, full of vague language about “love”. Nothing necessarily bad about this in a general context, but it’s just a far cry from the specifically sacramental nature of Christian marriage, which makes not merely demands as the Primate argued but very specific demands in terms of the millennia-long dogmas of the Church.
I saw in one of the British papers where someone wondered if people should take ‘social justice’ advice from someone wearing a 20 thousand £ wedding dress?
Actually, relatively recently I learned that the Second Law was probably originated by John O’Sullivan instead, and should therefore be called O’Sullivan’s Law. (Or his First Law, as this link has it, though it lists no others.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_O%27Sullivan_(columnist)#O'Sullivan's_First_Law