Because Independence Day always makes for a slow news weekend, that leaves room for looking at and thinking about other news stories that wouldn't normally make the grade at American Thinker.  The one that caught my eye was the Daily Mail's huge photo essay showing the wedding of Charlotte Freud, one of Rupert Murdoch's granddaughters, to Luke Storey, a rapper.  It was held in the exquisitely picturesque English Cotswold district, but the photos are a testament to the death of beauty in the modern era.

If you like things that are quintessentially English, the Cotswold district is the place for you:

Row houses of Cotswold stone in Broadway by Peter K. Burian.  CC BY 4.0.

Cotswolds' valley, Gloucestershire, by Kumweni.  CC BY 2.0.

Thatched roof cottage, Cotswolds, by Peter K. Burian.  CC BY 4.0.

There’s also the charming traditional English wedding, held in an old church, with the bride in virginal white, the blushing bridesmaids, the tuxedoed groomsmen, and the charmingly attired guests, including women in big hats.  Although it's played for comedy, think of this wedding from 1994's Four Weddings and a Funeral:

The contrast between that charming beauty and the pictures from the Freud-Storey wedding is striking.  The Daily Mail story, complete with photos, is here.  This video has some of those same photos:

The bride is certainly glowing with happiness (and I wish her well), while her and her groom's matching Cruella de Vil black-and-white hair is...um...cute.  Still, the tattoos crawling across her exposed skin and the sheer amount of exposed skin above the waist make her look like a stripper in a parody wedding.

The female guests showed up in ugly, mannish pantsuits or dresses that, again, show enough skin to be vulgar, not seductive.  None of the women is wearing the hats that are part of an English wedding's charm.  Many guests showed up at a daytime wedding in funereal black.

James Murdoch, the leftist Murdoch son who left Fox News behind, was the picture of cultural appropriation, in a calf-length purple Pakistani-style tunic over white trousers, an outfit completed with a black vest.  His wife wore black and no smile.

The bride's father, Matthew Freud, wore an ill-fitting eggplant-colored suit, complete with blue sneakers.  Many women wore cringe-worthy platform shoes so ugly that they made the 1970s versions look kind of elegant.  The bride's shoes were the ugliest of them all — white Mary-Janes perched on top of a four-inch-high platform.

But the worst were the bridesmaids, wearing low-cut, slate gray, slinky, spaghetti-strapped dresses that looked like cheap lingerie.  Again, that stripper vibe was strong.  The ugliest "bridesmaid" was a skinny, unshaven young man with a hairy chest, a bulging crotch (depending on the photographic angle), hairy legs, and white tennis shoes.  He was like the exclamation point on a singularly ugly affair.

This ugly wedding struck me as hard as it did because I had earlier listened to a discussion about the ugliness that is inherent in leftism.  It is a political ideology that eschews beauty, something one sees in the blocky architecture, drag queen worship, vicious attacks on Jordan Peterson for saying that some things and people are objectively beautiful, and endless efforts to convince us that morbidly obese women or people who have mutilated themselves are beautiful.

The reality is that, across all times and cultures, no matter the specifics of beauty, the Golden Mean (or Golden Ratio) has always ruled.  This is a mathematical relationship between sizes or distances that boils down to the fact that if a is greater than b and b is greater than zero, then a+b has the same relationship to a as a standing alone has to b.

The Golden Mean shows up everywhere in nature: in seashells, roses, artichokes, etc.  Architecture based upon it is pleasing to the eye, and, in all cultures that do not have forced, Marxist standards of beauty, those faces that are deemed most beautiful, whether wide or long or oval or square, show the Golden Mean in the relationship among mouth, nose, and eyes.  We are hardwired for this beauty.

I can't find which Michael Knowles podcast I was listening to, but he reminded his audience of something the late Roger Scruton said, which is that a society has to be worth saving, and that beauty is part of that worth.  As Scruton explained, beauty matters.  A society that "uglifies" itself is one that alienates people, cutting off their practical or spiritual connection to it.

And that, I guess, is why I thought it was worth drawing attention to the extraordinary ugliness of a wedding put on by people who have all the money in the world and could have opted for beauty...but didn't.