The Antisocial Socialist

There are few things, to my mind, so blatantly offensive as monarchism. I simply cannot get my head around it as a concept. It is intellectually unjustifiable to the point of being almost surreal, a blight that, every so often, stands stark against the noble, if flawed, ideals of progression, reason, and secular humanism. I ought to be reminded of it every time I pay for something, but it takes a media spectacle for the offense to truly hit home.

The wedding of the scum-sucking parasites is just a clusterfuck of everything distasteful, politically and aesthetically: wealth disparity, inherited prestige and income, imperialism, patriarchy, celebrity culture. The police, paid overtime by hardworking taxpayers, protect the bloated lordlings from the rage of young people deprived by austerity measures of the future they'd expected. Wastefulness, pure wastefulness. It's disgusting. Every time I turn on the news, I feel like I need to take a long shower afterward.

Were I a different sort of person, I would ask if there were some sort of Firefox add-on I could get to screen mentions of the spectacle like the Charlie Sheen blocker. But that would not spare me from newspapers or the CBC. And, admittedly, there's a part of me that just thrives on the outrage, as though the burning wrongness of a worldview that allows the remnants of feudalism to persist even in this supposedly enlightened age becomes a white-hot, perpetual fire crumbling any remaining vestiges of tolerance or compromise in my worldview.