(no subject)
The Swedish Royal Family turned down a gift from the Absolut vodka factory of one of their iconic bottled made out of some kind of semi-expensive material. They turned it down because they only accept gifts of symbolic value.
Now everyone wants to be the person who least cares about prince william and Kate Middleton. The point that is interesting to me is the intersection of kitsch and political significance that it represents. How do we reconcile the cutesy coverage of their nuptuals with our knowledge that they are the likely future heads of state of our country, and for people in the UK, a hyperpriveledged bulwark of social stratification and the beneficiaries of the taxes of poor people.
The primary means by which they're about to maintain that crazy position at the locus of an influx of personal power and financial freedom is our collective consent-cum-apathy. But at the heart of it is our inability to imagine how a famous person can't be rich. There's something kind of perverse about a famous person being poor. Not poor on paper, but poor enough to live in a crap house and have to work a crap job.