BREAD AND CIRCUSES

The Windsor Family Wedding Circus is looming on the horizon and our media, as each day passes, is becoming even more puerile and infantile It's intent on bombarding us with vacuous stories about such things as Kate's wedding dress, people who collect wedding memorabilia and what the weather will be like in London on 'the big day'. And look out for the simpering interviews with John Key. You have been warned.

The global economy might be going to hell in a handcart but there's nothing like a wedding to keep us all amused is there? The western social democracies may of turned into two party dictatorships but a royal 'event' will keep us all temporarily distracted. Or so the theory goes.

While our two main free- to-air broadcasters won't spend any money on producing some real investigative current affairs about issues of concern in New Zealand, they are more than keen to splash the cash to send people to London to report on a wedding.

Doing the Windsor bootlicking in London this week include Television One's Petra Bagust (Breakfast) , Wendy Petrie (TV1 News) , Mark Sainsbury (Close Up), while TV3 have sent newsreader reader Hilary Barry and reporters Kim Chisnall and Melissa Davies.

Ms Barry says that she doesn't think 'there's a wedding I've ever been to where I haven't cried. I think marriage gets a tough rap these days.'

TV3's John Campbell will be hosting a 'Royal Wedding Special' on the day of the wedding. This is the same John Campbell who has professed his admiration for the work of noted journalist John Pilger. Clearly Campbell has not read any of Pilger's trenchant criticisms of the Windsor's or maybe he's okay with prostituting his talent these days.

But this is not, in the end, some meaningless and innocent celebrity get-together. It represents a tacit acceptance of Britain's bloodstained imperial traditions headed by a 'royal clan' that has, among other things, harboured Nazi sympathisers.

Although we like to think we have 'moved on' from mindless royal adulation, the existence of kings and queens and their offspring is offered as proof that some are meant to be rich and everyone else is supposed to be poor, some are born to rule and everyone else is born to be ruled.

Not that this is of any concern to our 'leading news journalists'. Mark Sainsbury for example, thinks that Willie is 'magical': 'There is still that little bit of magic around him and in a time when there's not much magic around, it's a precious commodity.'

Sainsbury is a rubbish journalist and he has certainly reached a new low with this drivel.

Just like us, the British working class are being subjected to a brutal programme of cuts and which are being enacted by a Conservative-Liberal Democrat Government that says it won't tolerate 'embarrassing' protests at the Windsor bash.

But Petra, Wendy and Mark won't be reporting on any of this. They won't be reporting on the dismantlement of the British welfare state by the bourgeoisie.

Instead they will be doffing their caps to the Windsor clan, praising them and talking about 'a nation coming together'.

For that, as Richard Seymour of Lenin's Tomb has pointed out, is the role of the Windsor's:

Windsor has..entrenched itself as a domestic power. It has assiduously courted a popular base, which perforce requires it to act as a silent partner in the class struggle - a source of legitimacy for the bourgeoisie, by dint of its apparent (only apparent) disentanglement from the daily grind of capital accumulation.

I'm hoping the taxpayer-funded wedding circus will be disrupted by protesters, although this will be no easy task given the huge security operation that the Government has launched. I will cheer if the whole sordid farce collapses.

I thoroughly endorse the comments of the New Statesman's Laurie Penny:

...the possibility of disrupting the stultifying public pageantry of the royal wedding must remain on the table. Do we want to be part of a culture that sits in front of the TV, whining while the big decisions are made for us and cheering on cue? Or do we want to be part of a culture that stakes a claim, stands firm and answers back to injustice?