Saturday’s wedding at Windsor Chapel won’t mean much in a week. Hyperventilating fans will get their breath back, and pounce upon some new tidbit to distract them from global crises.

But if we view all mass events – the great, the small, and the artificially inflated – as emblematic of the world moment, the spectacle was enlightening.

Fading glory

The ritual presented in stark relief some of the lumbering anachronisms symptomatic of our disconnected age. Two institutions in particular were showcased in all their fading glory.

One was the old-school media, asserting its presence like a dying beast in its last gasp. The British press — which, like newsprint everywhere, is losing readership by the week — pulled out all the stops with a timeworn cocktail of sentiment and dirt-dishing, fawning over gowns and toddlers while viciously trolling the Markle family.

Then there is the monarchy itself. Irrelevant in every conceivable way, the royal family may yet prove to be the imaginal glue holding Britain together in the age of Brexit.

Pluto Return

For Americans at the advent of a national Pluto Return, the royal wedding possessed an added frisson of meaning. We watched a bi-racial divorcée from our world, the New World, treading with the poise of a trained actress over the bones of kings.

Thus was the Old World re-conquered. George III, tyrant of 1776, was among those buried beneath the chapel’s marble stones.

And while thousands thronged the streets of London, waving little Union Jacks in celebration, equally adoring crowds were convened in the West End. They are lining up for “Hamilton,” that ur-American musical that celebrates our bloody disengagement from England, one Pluto cycle ago.