The Metropolis

Five ways you could defend the culturally embarrassing royal baby coverage to your future kids

Mike Pollitt | Wednesday 24 July, 2013 13:38

Only now, two days after the birth of the royal infant, can we begin to view the mass media coverage of the event in its true perspective – as one of the most embarrassing episodes in the history of modern Western culture.

We need to start thinking about how we can explain our collective behaviour to future generations.

For we only have to wait about 15 years until a plebeian baby born on, oh…say Monday 22nd July 2013, starts grilling their elders about what the hell just happened and why no one did anything to stop it. And that’s just our own children. Wait until the historians and cultural critics of the late 21st century get their teeth into this hysterical display.

So it’s already time to start preparing our defences for the courts of posterity. Here’s a first draft.

Defence #1: The media went rogue from the wider population

This defence paints us, the consumers, as passive victims of a rogue media class – a class which went mad under the delusion that saturation coverage was a proportionate and valuable response to the fact of a pregnant woman giving birth, an event of such banality that approximately 2,000 other UK births on the same day were completely ignored.

How does it look? This is the the “but I was only watching TV” defence. It exonerates you and me from all responsibility for this shameful affair, and rests ultimately upon a belief in our total disempowerment over the material we consume.

I don’t think it’s going to wash.

Defence #2: One birth is a miracle, a thousand are a statistic

We cannot celebrate all births. There are too many. But we can single out a single birth to celebrate for them all. The prince’s birth had to be covered in the detail – I won’t say depth – it was in order to do justice to the thousands and millions of births which it represents. The royal baby is all babies, the royal birth all births. This was our very own festival of life.

How does it look? Might be more convincing if the child singled out was a carpenter’s child born in a stable, rather than the heir to half the Western world

Defence #3: This is a country so at ease with its monarchy it’s reduced them to mere celebrities

The child is “born to rule”, but only in the modern understanding of the word: i.e. to show up now and then at factories and look interested, to live unostentatiously off vast inherited wealth, to look solemn and stay quiet at state dinners, and to not exert any public power over any issue whatsoever. There’s so much interest in this baby now precisely because its opinions and personality will have so little effect on the country over which it finally reigns. This is the little blighter’s peak, so we might as well make the most of it.

How does it look? All very well, but what’s your defence for the collective obsession with mere celebrities?

Defence #4: The birth marks the necessary completion of a tragic cycle

The archive footage of Princess Diana appearing from hospital, the baby William in her arms – footage heavy with pathos – now has its answer in the footage of Kate doing the same. With this moment, the collective societal guilt, and specifically media guilt, arising from Diana’s death has been expiated. One reason the media covered this birth so extensively is their desperation to atone for their profession’s sins. But their means of atonement is to repeat those sins. And so the tragic cycle is completed, and so it begins anew…

How does it look? It’s all a bit high flown, isn’t it?

Defence #5: Our culture really is this vapid

How does it look? Sometimes it’s best to be honest, plead guilty and trust to the mercy of the court.

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