Royal Wedding of Prince William of Wales & Kate Middleton

I saw some of the replay of the wedding of William of Wales and Kate Middleton.

“I see all these people happy about the royal wedding on TV Does anybody over there feel like the economy is sh*t, unemployment's rife, and here these royals are squandering hard earned tax payer money uselessly in their useless lives and in high spectacle before 2 billion people, who's a bigger sucker than the British commoner??”

I sent this message via Facebook to a British friend, a Londoner, this weekend after the spectacle of the Royal Wedding had past into the dustbin of history. I couldn’t help feeling these sentiments as I related my ideas to another British subject I was with who paid no mind to the Royal shenanigans. He felt more or less the same as I did. The shame and disgrace the royals bear on England wasn’t even worth mentioning to him.

The Royal family will never work, they merely enjoy their celebrity (or not, hard to say), their ten billion plus pound fortune (US$15 billion), yes some do a few years of military service, but really of what service is that in the useless wars we nowadays find ourselves embroiled in (do Afghanistan, Iraq, or Libya pose as direct threat to any Western countries?), and they sit on their arses and look pretty. (Yes, they do have some minor involvement in some charities, mainly just a device for saving face.)

We’ve seen and heard all this gushing about the British royal family over the weekend, but really, why do so few in the media look to the flipside—the reality, one might argue: the fact that they are a centuries old, antiquated, useless convention. A relic of a bygone era when they had political power and really meant something to the lives of their subjects. Or am I utterly and completely wrong, and by this I mean: do they secretly wield tremendous political power and influence that is unspoken in the mainstream media and massively hidden. After all the Queen does hold “State Secret," meaning she has access to all British Top Secret information.

What’s your opinion? Is the Queen a useless relic or is she the most powerful individual in the world, or somewhere in between?