Look at this week's headlines: The loony-bin regime in North Korea just announced, with beaming pride, that it has nuclear weapons. The gap between rich and poor in this country continues to widen. And now President Bush has sent Congress a budget that manages both to eviscerate social programs and also produce ballooning deficits on the scale of the Hindenburg. When a woman at a town meeting told the president she had to work three jobs to make ends meet, he beamed and told her that was just dandy. Soldiers and Iraqis are dying in Baghdad, bin Laden is still out to get us, everything you buy is made in China, and if you want tech support you have to call India. W.B. Yeats's apocalypse echoes throughout the land: "Things fall apart, the center cannot hold."
Yet somehow there is room for hourly reports on the announcement that Britain's Prince Charles will marry his onetime mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles.
Royalty is one of the more bizarre anachronisms that humankind, for some reason, has dragged into the 21st century. The concept of inherited sovereignty is not only ridiculous but, in these parlous times, deeply irrelevant.
Why does anyone pay attention to the absurd, privileged, amusingly dysfunctional family that lives in Buckingham Palace? The question answers itself: because of the "amusingly" part. It's an axiom of the writing game that people would rather read about kings and queens, and especially princesses, than about the workaday lives of ordinary folks like themselves.
And boy, have I played that predilection for all it's worth. During my time as a correspondent in London, I wrote dozens of stories about the British royals. Charles and Diana's marital woes. Tapes and transcripts of their phone conversations with illicit lovers. The divorce. Diana's reign as "queen of hearts" and empress of magazine covers around the world. Gruesome death in a Paris underpass. The funeral. "Candle in the Wind."
These stories drew great reaction from readers and were much easier and more fun to write than, say, a comprehensive takeout on racism in Britain or a careful parsing of diplomatic efforts to solve the crisis in the Balkans. In covering the royals, for one thing, there weren't many facts to gather; the stories were exercises in clever writing, not difficult reporting. I even played a game with myself by contriving to insert Diana's disparaging nickname for Camilla ("the Rottweiler") into every story that mentioned the two women, whether it was relevant or not.
When the announcement came yesterday that Charles and Camilla were going to marry, I expected to spring into action.
But I didn't -- at least not with anything like the enthusiasm I might have expected of myself. For some reason, I just couldn't.
Human nature hasn't been fundamentally altered overnight -- people still love to read about the rich and the famous and the blueblooded. And certainly my capacity for being frivolous is nowhere near exhausted. It's just that the palace announcement didn't mean much to me beyond what it was: the scheduled marriage of two sad, unattractive, wealthy, middle-aged people who deserve each other.
One reason, I think, is that with Diana's incandescence long gone and even the afterglow fading to black, the British royals are a dour and frumpy bunch. Few of us are immune to genuine star quality (even if we think we are), but the rest of the family doesn't have much of it. Young-and-glamorous trumps old-and-sensible every time.
But there's another reason my boat isn't floated by the Charles-Camilla nuptials, and it has to do with those headlines I mentioned. The president won reelection by chanting a single mantra: "9/11 Changed Everything. 9/11 Changed Everything." Journalists pointed out that in fact not everything had changed, and that many things that did change were not altered in the ways he claimed they were, and that in any event just pointing out the changes didn't mean his policy positions were right. But he did have a point. These are different times.
It's not that we don't need or want to be distracted anymore -- for proof that we do, just look at the record ratings for "American Idol" and the blanket cable TV coverage of the endless string of celebrity trials. But there are distractions and distractions: Some just don't feel right anymore. This one isn't the same to me.
North Korea's wacky leader, Kim Jong Il, has nukes, for heaven's sake, and the president has no discernible policy to get them out of his unsteady hands. U.S. troops are pinned down in Iraq. The "education president" is decimating the Education Department.
Charles and Camilla have my permission to be happy together or unhappy together, and the queen can be pleased or displeased. I just can't bring myself to care this time. And yes, I did manage to get the word "Rottweiler" into this column, but the thrill is gone.
eugenerobinson@washpost.com
