In December 1936, love won out for the British king Edward VIII, and he gave up the throne to marry Wallis Simpson, an American socialite.
What is socialite? According to Google Dictionary: “a person who is well known in fashionable society and is fond of social activities and entertainment.” Typically, this term is applied to a female. Think Paris Hilton, Ghislaine Maxwell and their social activities.
Regardless of Simpson’s vocation, Edward abdicated his throne as a penance for marrying a divorcee.
This was considered a no-no for the royal family back then. Nowadays, we have a divorced king/adulterer married to his divorced queen/adulteress. No pejorative is attached to the terms adulterer or adulteress. This merely signifies that they were not faithful to their wedding vows. But, oh, how times have changed.
Probably the biggest argument for keeping the inegalitarian institution of the monarchy extant is tradition. When Charles married his first wife, Diana, she had to submit to a gynecological examination to verify that she was a virgin. Man, how times have, indeed, changed.
With the modern monarchy we became privy to Charles’s secretly recorded fantasy of being Camilla’s Tampax. Camilla responded mirthfully to Charles’s bawdy words of vaginal habitation: “You are a complete idiot! (Laughs) Oh, what a wonderful idea.”
The coronation of Charles has been revealed to cost £250 million (US$316 million). How many homeless people in Britain would that have housed? It was reported in January 2023 that “at least 271,000 people are recorded as homeless in England, including 123,000 children.” Priorities?
How did these two salacious characters attain status as the heads of state in not only the United Kingdom but also Canada, Australia, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Jamaica, and ten other countries. Was it meritocratic? No. Were they elected? No. Charles won the vaginal lottery and was born to be a future king; Camilla married to become queen. So much for any pretense to being a genuine democracy in these 15 countries.
The anachronistic system of monarchy is how countries wind up with Charles and Camilla as heads of state.
Although the monopoly media are having a grand time gushing over the coronation, the famous British playwright William Shakespeare may have put it rather more succinctly and aptly as much ado about nothing.
- Image credit: Buzzfeed.
Kim Petersen is an independent writer. He can be emailed at: kimohp at gmail.com.