The royal yawn: Waiting for baby Windsor

Undistracted by puppies, ousted presidents, and dead black teenagers, the international media remains rapt in anticipation of the royal baby. “This is probably the most anticipated birth since the dawn of Twitter,” gushes ABC News foreign editor Jon Williams in the New York Times. That’s high praise in the rarefied environs of the newsroom where one celebrity tweet counts for more than, say, the 5,500 likely to be declared dead in Uttarakhand. Blame it on my inner postcolonial party-pooper, but I can’t help but giggle when I hear the Archbishop of Canterbury declare: “Our country and our world needs this gift of hope at this time…In many parts of the country and our world, hope is in short supply. In Afghanistan, we are still fighting a tough war, with remarkable courage and skill. Yet even in those places, this birth will be good news.” [caption id=“attachment_956053” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Prince William and Kate Middleton. AFP.[/caption] That’s a lot of hope to pin on a child who is essentially going to be the next Suri Cruise or Aaradhya Bachchan; one more celebrity spawn to gawk at, except with greater attending pomp and pretension. He/she comes bearing the gift of fleeting distraction not hope. The world will be richer in ugly souvenirs, cutesy photo ops, and fawning commentary, but not much else. The royal baby represents the ultimate media wet dream, weaving into one perfect being all its favorite obsessions: celebrities, babies, motherhood, beauty and fashion. All made more delicious by the royal trappings of wealth and spectacle, irresistible to tourists and journalists alike. As one news article cheerily points out, this little squealer will be born a billionaire. The sheer volume of attention is all the more startling because of the unashamed absence of substance. Apart from futile and ceaseless speculation about name and gender, the media narrative is dominated by weighty concerns about breastfeeding, booties, maternal weight and most recently polo outings. This hysterical media attention underlines the irrelevance of the British monarchy which now requires soap opera stunts like weddings and babies to sustain public attention. Where once bloody wars were fought, and wives executed, to secure the royal throne, now good-looking spouses are recruited to do the same. As the Guardian’s Hadley Freedman tartly puts it, “This baby is being born into the perfect storm of baby-based bullshit, not least because its parents are seen as having rescued the royal family merely by dint of being good-looking and therefore elevating what was seen as an increasingly irrelevant institution to the lofty status of celebrity.” The modern British royal’s job description is, in essence, to be seen. Prime Minister David Cameron admitted as much when he praised the pregnant Duchess, saying, “What I’ve seen of Princess Kate at public events, at the Olympics and elsewhere is someone who’s bright, engaging, a fantastic ambassador for Britain.” Think of her as an upscale version of Sonam Kapoor hawking L’Oreal at Cannes. The royal body, argued Hilary Mantel in a controversial lecture, is “a thing which only had meaning when it was exposed, a thing that existed only to be looked at.” Mantel was excoriated for comparing Kate Middleton to “a shop-window mannequin,” but was making a far more significant observation about the present-day British monarchy:

I used to think that the interesting issue was whether we should have a monarchy or not. But now I think that question is rather like, should we have pandas or not? Our current royal family doesn’t have the difficulties in breeding that pandas do, but pandas and royal persons alike are expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment. But aren’t they interesting? Aren’t they nice to look at? Some people find them endearing; some pity them for their precarious situation; everybody stares at them, and however airy the enclosure they inhabit, it’s still a cage.

The royal baby is therefore best compared to a baby panda, whose birth at the local zoo in Washington DC inspires a similar kind of awww-laden anticipation. All that will be missing is the live video feed.