More Catherine and Less Gaga: Why Royal Weddings are Important to Western Culture

As a single male I was skeptical of the world-wide hysteria that led up to the recent royal wedding. Like Sean Hannity, I was quick to dismiss the whole thing as a little girl’s fairy tale. In a time when our nation and the world are literally dealing with meltdowns, the major news networks are all riding the royal tsunami seeming to nowhere. Had it not been for the demise of Osama bin Laden, the young newlyweds would likely still be front and center on the 24 hour news cycle.

Well, I made the mistake of tuning into a re-broadcast of the wedding simply to take a quick peak at what all the fuss was about and, I confess, to catch a glimpse of Kate in her dress. She is kinda cute after all. I might have tuned away quickly but for the fact that I happened to tune in right when Miss Kate was enroute in the limo to the Abbey. She is a naturally pretty girl and she looked beautiful to be sure. But it was her poise that pulled me in and would not let me go. Perhaps poise is not the right word, athletes have poise when they come from behind under pressure to win a game. Perhaps elegance, grace, style, humility would be better choices. How about all of the above? I kept watching. Would Cinderella keep her composure or would she crack, would she slip, stumble or slur as many of us would likely do with the eyes of the world literally focused on our every breath. I found myself feeling happy for her. The “magic” of the moment. I was hooked. Is that even possible?

Well, from her (and her dress’s) extraction out of the limo to the official kiss on the balcony, she was flawless, so much so that they threw in a crowd-pleasing bonus kiss for good measure. This girl had it. She was glowing, beautiful and warm all at the same time, yet reserved. Whatever “it” is that sets some people apart, and dare I say, makes them royal, she had it. She made young women want to be like her. She made young men want to be in Prince William’s shoes.

Equally fascinating was the crowd. It was royally crazy, every age, creed and color uniting around a single event. As it made its way toward Buckingham Palace to witness the royal kiss, I couldn’t help thinking, did they do this when the Beckhams got married? We certainly didn’t do it for Jenna Bush. But will we do it for Lady Gaga if she gets married? Now that’s a question. Some groupies and die-hards surely will, a crowd of devoted fans perhaps, but two billion people from around the world? Media tabloids aside, would every major American news outlet, all 13 or so of them, even FOX News, cover it for weeks. This was more than just history in the making. It had a deeper significance and most of the media-accessible world wanted to experience it.

I think this is what noblesse oblige may be about. It was nobility acting nobly: the way we want them to be and, more to the point, the way we need them to be. It was what the upper echelon of society used to be for us all. It used to be that the common man looked up to the aristocracy because it was supposed to be civilized, genteel, and refined. From culture to cuisine, it was the king’s court and the aristocracy that set the standard for society and set the popular trends. Of course, the industrial revolution, the rise of the middle class and the American democratic experiment put an end to most of the aristocratic influence in Western culture. But it did not put an end to the need for role models, cultural standard bearers, or our need to set some people apart from amongst us as special. Today we call them celebrities. We celebrate them because electronic images of them appear on the screens of our lives.

So, juxtaposed against the Cinderella-like Lady Catherine in today’s culture is another “lady,” pop icon Lady Gaga. Gaga, another twenty-something, came out of nowhere overnight to rock the pop culture world. Up until the royal wedding, she was also far more famous than Miss Middleton. But Gaga, like Madonna before her, appeals to an entirely different part of human nature, the visceral side, the lowest common denominators within us all, things like: self-indulgence, rebellion, and eroticism. For such things, unfortunately, we do not need much of a role model or standard bearer, nor do we need much in the way of coaching on how to participate in them. They are just there within us, part of our human condition, which can easy be appealed to, no matter whether you live in England, France or Finland. Gaga and her handlers know this and have mastered the ability to tap into it.

As far as I can tell, both Gaga and Kate appeal to younger girls as well as the little girl within the not so young, but for different reasons. Kate is the unjustly imprisoned princess, the damsel in distress, who is rescued by the dashing knight with whom she lives happily ever after. Gaga is the bad girl who has everything and everyone under her control. Males and females grow up exposed to both influences in modern western culture. But baseness does not have to be taught in order to flourish, it simply needs to be allowed. For young women, personas like Gaga, Spears, Madonna and Snooki, have dominated the wilder, baser aspects of our culture for some time. Exactly one week prior to the royal wedding, Lindsay Lohan received a standing ovation on the Tonight Show. Why? Because a woman who has everything life can offer has instead decided to live a life of excess and stealing necklaces? Is that worth celebrating? Is that what we have become? Is that what we want our daughters to learn from female celebrities?

That’s why it was so was refreshing to see billions embrace Kate, and hopefully, what she represents. A woman of class but not necessarily means, who now has a wonderful future. Class, poise, elegance, grace and humility all stem from the best of virtues. But virtue is hard for most of us. It does not come naturally, it must be taught, formed, and modeled, hopefully at a young age by parents and others in society who desire for us to do well in life.

This is exactly what we want from our upper echelon. We want them to rise to the occasion of character and privilege to which they have been blessed and we want them to live the fairy tale for us. We hope that there is still grace and virtue at the very top of our culture. So we want them to live well. We saw it in Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip, but not so much in their immediate offspring. But now we have hope for the next generation, and though the new royal couple has no official power to effect direct change in the lives of British citizens, much less the billions that were watching from outside England, they nevertheless symbolize what is good in Western culture, the values that made it great and the tradition from which they came.

The shear size of the crowd and the viewership around the world is cause for hope. It was as if people everywhere were saying, this is who we are as well. That’s what we want. We wish the young couple well, we want them to do well for their sakes and for ours. If given a choice, we’d really rather have our daughters grow-up to be more like Lady Catherine than Lady Gaga.