As my Twitter and Instagram feeds have lit up with glamourous and glittering pictures of international royals and members of the Davos set in their jewels and haute couture, I can't help wonder what effect all this must be having on the people of the kingdom over which the young couple hope someday to reign. The most recent estimate I can find - from the Kingdom's own official statistics - is that more than 24% of the population live in poverty. Unemployment among some segments of the population are close to half. The country is full of Syrian refugees. Freedom House gave the country a score of 33/100 on their Freedom Index for 2022. (As opposed to 83/100 for the US, 93/100 for the UK, and 100/100 for Sweden).

It's hard to imagine that this spectacle of royal glitter doesn't play rather worse among impoverished and oppressed locals than it does among royal glitter fans in Europe and North America.

Virtually every history of the Iranian Revolution cites the resentment caused by the last Shah of Iran's extravagant Persepolis Celebration of the 2500th anniversary of the Iranian Monarchy as inflection point in turning the public against the monarchy. And that was an event presented as a national celebration, accompanied by academic conferences and the building of what is now the Azadi Tower, now Tehran's most recognizable monument.

I might be totally wrong (which happens frequently), but I can't helping thinking this glittering demonstration of the Hashemite dynasty's place among the global elite, so remote from the lives of ordinary Jordanians, might be a rerun.