Of course I was glued to the tube at 3 a.m. Friday to watch Britain's Prince William marry "commoner" Kate Middleton. I got so excited that I almost spilled coffee out of my brand new Will and Kate coffee mug ... but not really.
There was a $50 million royal wedding on Friday, but why should we care? And what does it all mean in the greater scheme of things? It must have been important because major TV networks sent their anchors and hundreds of flunkies to London to cover the big event. NBC offered a royal wedding "app" and BBC America provided 40 (!) straight hours of coverage. At the same time, the networks had difficulty finding foreign correspondents to cover violent uprisings in Libya, Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa.
When a royal wedding is more important than an ongoing world conflagration, our priorities are out of whack. There's something about our morbid fascination with British royalty that I simply don't understand. After all, what could be more boring than a bunch of stuffy Brits parading around in fur robes and plumed hats?
Comedian Jerry Seinfeld got it right when he called the royal wedding "a circus act" during a controversial interview on British TV.
"You know, it's a dress-up," he continued. "That's why the British people have the greatest theater in the world. They love to dress up and they love to play 'pretend.'"
Needless to say, the Brits were peeved.
It's incredible to realize that millions of Americans stayed up all night to watch the weird goings-on at Westminster Abbey. Perhaps it was because they miss our last American royal family, the deeply flawed Kennedys of Massachusetts. It's about time to give "Camelot" a decent burial.
The good news is that most Americans ignored the royal wedding extravaganza. According to a New York Times/CBS poll, less than 30 percent of us followed Wills and Kate's nuptials "very closely" or "somewhat closely." But one-third of American women under 40 and more than 40 percent of older women were fixated on Kate's wedding dress and that scrumptious matrimonial fruitcake. Meanwhile, more than half of American men, including yours truly, couldn't have cared less.
I feel sorry for poor Kate the commoner, who must live the rest of her life in a royal fish bowl with obnoxious paparazzi photographers following her around 24/7. That's inevitable, however, since she's the new Princess Di. And just to illustrate how dysfunctional her new family is, Kate's parents didn't meet the grandparents, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip, until a few days before the wedding.
No use rushing things, right?
I don't think the in-laws will be seeing that much of each other.
So what does it all mean? Jerry Seinfeld called the royal wedding "a huge game of pretend," but good old Willie Shakespeare said it best: it's "a tale ... full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
• Guy W. Farmer, of Carson City, isn't a big fan of the British royals.
