Gayle King Lays a Royal Egg

Screencap of CBS coverage

This is not stupendous, regulatory, profound, or otherwise Earth-shaking, but it DOES bug me, and nobody else seems to have noticed.

I watched the Royal Wedding — mostly because I was up — and while the wedding was blissfully UN-commented on by the CBS babblers, the before-and-after inane commentary was worse than I’ve ever heard at any parade (Macy’s, Rose, etc.)

Thomas Jefferson warned us about this: 

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” — Jefferson to Charles Yancey, 1816. ME 14:384

The ignorance was so stultifying that it reeked. One was incapable of getting downwind of it, but was impressed that Tina Brown (former famed editor of Vanity Fair and founder of The Daily Beast) had lost whatever cachet of cognitive ability she’d formerly exercised in the gob-smacked blithering that surrounded the politically meaningless wedding.

(Politically meaningless, but, in a sense, a final catharsis for an entire generation of Windsor infidelities, bad marriages, and Queenly condemnations and boycotts.)

No. In the midst of Gayle King’s endless destruction of any conversations with her deathless line “CAN WE TALK ABOUT THE DRESS?” the blather was blithering in a particularly bloviating manner when Gayle suddenly piped up about “the money shot.”

Seriously?

The MONEY shot referring to the royal wedding (and abetting the American fetish for “princess” stories — one that reaches back at least as far as the fact that Grace Kelly and Prince Ranier were on the cover of LOOK magazine the week I was born, the “American Princess” fetish exalted to the heavens) may be acceptable in a crude psychological analysis as to WHY American girls are SOOOOOOO fascinated with a myth that comes from cultures and political systems that we have eschewed in favor of self-governance, but “the money shot” specifically comes to us from pornography, and literally means the photographic capture and immortalization of the moment of male ejaculation — thus “proving” the sex to be “authentic” and not simulated, and, therefore, worth the money that good burghers used to pay the mobsters for back room loops.

As such King’s comment was UTTERLY inappropriate for the situation, but no one but me seems to have noticed.

As for me, well, I used to work in the pornographic movie industry (when they still made movies) and the only people I ever heard refer to “the money shot” were the money men, whose affiliations one could guess, but which I never inquired as to. We, lowly workers, referred to it as the “cum shot,” but that was in Hollywood and I’m sure that some New York or San Francisco porn denizen would take exception. Still, either was, “The Money Shot” as a characterization of the Royal Wedding is about as rhetorically out of bounds as it’s possible to get, but only I, the ex-pornographer seems offended at its grotesque misuse in the situation.

Which is why I can only refer you to the Thomas Jefferson quote above, as we deal, this weekend, with the Trumpian variant of The Plame Game™. (After all, Scooter Libby finally got his pardon, so it’s open season on all spooks.)

Vladimir must be beside himself with glee. Or, at least, it makes up for the snub that he wasn’t invited to the wedding.

“Money shot” or not.

Courage.