Why is royal propaganda/public diplomacy so successful?

Billions of people the world over watched on the tube the union of a balding pushing-thirty anonymous-looking, rather tall blond young man in uniform who's never had a real job with an uptight, somewhat icy-looking, merchant Brit overly weight-watching upper-bourgeoisie gal (also of a certain age), a kind of updated Margaret Thatcher (who is really a Brit male's vision of a real man; please, British friends, allow me, as a colonial, some kidding).

Well, at least they -- die couple (my reference is to the British monarchy's Germanic roots, not to Lady Di)  -- both have good dentist(s). Most Americans have "an issue" with the British mouth, marked by its horrible teeth: Why can't they, the Brits, smile (show their oral stuff) properly, ask we the-ever-smiling in the USA?

(An Englishman surmises that the reason Americans smile so much is because they expect the stranger they see before them is carrying a gun. Or so says a wise American who has lived in the sea-walled island).

A "socialized" British medical system doesn't take proper care of their citizens' molars?  Obamacare: take note. We don't want anyone in the US paying for our molars through our dollars.

But I digress.

Why are these two uber-bland, and I really do mean totally uninteresting, intellectually and even emotionally uninspiring not-so-young people, straight out of a US commercial for toothpaste, who could really be found on any American mall (or campus, what's the difference?), be able to grab the attention of our globe when he's in a Michael-Jackson/Gaddafi uniform and she's in a wedding gown no card-carrying women-libber could afford (or, more to the point, even say she would want)?

Surely it's not solely because they have good dentists. No, think propaganda.

The British Empire is over. Like all arguably benevolent empires before it -- let's go back to Rome -- the British Empire ended when it overextended, i.e., tried to dominate the world without functioning at home.

When an empire is over, in my view, it becomes focused on what Joseph Nye, the admirable former Clinton administration Defense Department official who wrote a sexy novel, calls "soft power," a term which reminds me of the male organ after orgasm.

As I constantly ask myself, without a definitive answer, following events such as the royal wedding (and before) about what soft power actually is, my thought at this moment, with the USG essentially bankrupt while fighting three senseless wars, is that soft power is what fatigued empires do (mostly unintentionally), as they decline, to try to influence the world in their favor, without having the interest, energy, money for it, with "public diplomacy", their Viagra as their cheap pill to fix what they perceive as their global "communications" problems (instead of the failure of their own domestic/foreign policies).

Well, OK, Louis XIV did not take penile dysfunction "medicine," perhaps because French "culture" is more "serious"  than Lady Gaga, but he was Mr. SP par excellence.

Let me wander a bit more if you will. Maybe, regarding the made-for-Tee-Vee royal wedding, the proper, "diplomatic" word for this event is marketing. We have two bland (brand?) Brits, with good teeth, and they are "royal" (or should I say, the lady becoming royal, perfect for a television reality-show).

Looking at them, so the PR guys/gals think, will lead the world into buying "British" products, including, allow me to suggest, Cadbury chocolate, not exactly good for your teeth. Of course, by "British products," we are often referring to international conglomerates selling their wares through a "British brand." Who owns Jaguar? The Indian company Tara Motors Ltd.

Give the handlers of the British wedding (how much did it cost at a time when most of us in the rest of the non-royal world are struggling to get a real job?) credit for their prop/PR savvy.

My main point: Savvy royal handlers doubtless realize that, while revolutionaries love propaganda as an agent for change in their favor, propaganda -- making people do what you want them to do without killing them (or, in past ages, eating them), since ultimately it cannot be to your advantage if you have no interlocutor -- is often most effective as a confirmation of tradition, or, in this particular somewhat vulgar royal wedding case (cake?), the packaging (at great cost to the British people themselves) of a largely invented past to influence people in Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and North America (and the U.K. itself), who were once under the Empire's arguably benign control, to buy Cadbury chocolate, now owned by Kraft Foods.