Post-modern royalty?

The pageantry surrounding the British royal wedding reminded me of Clifford Geertz's famous essay describing the “progress” through London of Queen Elizabeth I following her coronation. He empasizies the extent to which each gesture and street performance related to the queen's brief journey was pregnant with intense meaning, bestowing upon her a royal charisma which was not of her own making. How much of that rich symbolism is left four and a half centuries later? About 1.7 percent, maybe a bit less. On the other hand, post-modern superficiality and relativism have not quite won the day, yet. When I, my wife, and our daughter looked at a picture of William's two cousins in their grotesque outfits and make-up, we immediately had the same thought – don't they look exactly like Cinderella's evil sisters? Not much room for interpretation and the free play of signifiers there. Oh, and the NYT article covering the wedding ("A Traditional Royal Wedding, but for the 3 Billion Witnesses") is truly superb - a perfect balance of serious reporting and irony, astute direct observations and a wealth of background information. That could have hardly come from a blogger or citizen-journalist, I am afraid.