Royal fetish
Sir: It is on the occasions of royal funerals with their attendant mock mournings and associated ceremonious mumbo-jumbo, that the socalled free press is exposed as the hoax that it really is. I cannot believe that that section of the intelligentsia which must be shocked by the sickening display of humbug dispensed to the public by the entire mass media, would not protest if they were given space to do so. The voice of sanity has to be searched for even from our licensed satirists. Oh Muggeridge! Where art thou at this hour?
The real harmfulness to the people of this Royal Family fetish is not what it costs in terms of money values (for what is a mere million or so in times when national balance sheets are read in literally astronomical terms?) but in the truly frightful distortion of real values, and the lowering of our standards of judgement. The sycophantic adulation poured out from all directions describing the great
ness . . the nobleness . . etc, etc, of our dead princes, must inevitably emasculate the plebeian powers of discrimination.
I well recall 'our smiling prince' Even the smile was not genuine, he subsequently told us. I remember he had an outstanding propensity for falling off horses. That, and a remark manufactured for him by the press, it is credibly rumoured, implying a totally ineffectual sympathy he might have felt for the poverty stricken miners of his Princedom, are about the only memorable incidents of his career. Excluding, of course, his final gesture of joining the rebels against the sexual mores examplified by the divorce laws of his day. Can we attribute one gracious act to any one member of our present Royal line? We are told in fact that their particular merit consists in their unreadiness to stick out their necks, except of course when some personal advantage is at stake.
I am very much in favour of praising famous men especially when their fame attaches to achievements in the wide field of human genius. Unfortunately our powers to discern our truly great
ones are constantly undermined by an incessant welter of propaganda on behalf of the fakes.
Bill Stone 206 Priory Road, Hastings, Sussex
Previous page
