Compulsory mourning for a stranger sucks.

Especially when it’s performative Victorian-style royal mourning, and the past century has seen a huge cultural flip-flop so that death and mourning are as inadmissible/peripheralized in public life today as sex was in the 1890s.

It’s the cognitive dissonance. Sex used to be something spoken of elliptically or not at all, carried out furtively, not admitted to in polite society. While mourning was a huge social performance with special clothes, ritualized stages, processions, hired mourners.

/2

Today we’re relatively open about sex—at least to discussing it and portraying it openly in the media—but death isn’t something we’re routinely exposed to, happening behind closed hospice and hospital ward doors. Funerals happen … then we resume everyday life immediately.

/3

And now: this. A stranger dies, and the national discourse drags us all on a 150 year deep dive into unfamiliar territory.

And it gets weirder.

/4

I never met Prince Philip. Or his wife. My only interaction with the royal family EVER was crossing a stage briefly during a graduation ceremony attended by a minor royal (as patron of the university I attended).

He made no more impression on my life than any other celeb.

/5

And yet I’m expected to join in an orgy of vicarious synthetic grief and mourning and wrap myself in either a flag, or a black armband, or both (I’m unclear).

Whereas the normal thing to do would be: leave the bereaved family decently alone with their grief in private.

/6

To add to the cognitive dissonance is the disgusting political opportunism of the media aligned with the ruling monarchy-obsessed party. (I’m a small-r republican.) They can—and WILL—use this event to bury bad news or manufacture excuses to attack the usual targets.

/7

And the cultural dynamic of celebrity drags the unthinking and unaware along with it, much like the death of a film star, musician, famous-for-being-famous celebrity—only with vultures waiting in the wings to exploit their empathy for political ends.

/8

Looming on the horizon: the spectre of *another* royal funeral. And the tabloids watching a grieving widow—losing a spouse after that time is like suffering an amputation of the soul (source: my mother, after a similar event)—preparing to milk the event for sales.

/9

Shorter summary: the royal family is institutionally resistant to change, this means its death/mourning rituals are increasingly out of touch with contemporary cultural norms, this will be exploited by manipulative and malignant political actors.

/me: opting out.

/10 (ends)