Princess Diana was a godsend for pundits. AEter a summer widely bemoaned as newsless, in which Op-Editorializers were forced to treat the bite Mike Tyson took out of Evander Holyfields ear with a level of indignation last displayed when Saddam Hussein made similar inroads on Kuwait, and in which they mourned the murder of Gianui Versace as if it were the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. redux, all of a sudden its ready, set, write. Diana was the creature and, ultimately, victim of a celebrity-mad age (Jonathan Alter); Diana was the victim of her boyfinend Dodi Fayeds obsessiveurge to race away from prying eyes (William Safire); Diana was killed trying to escape a photographic sexual assault (Salman Rushdie aiid A.M. Rosenthal); Diana was a vacuous ninny (Maureen Dowd); Diana was a feminist saint who espoused radical causes (The Scotsmans Beatrix Campbell); Diana symbolized all that was magical and rarefied, adored because she was beautiful, mysterious, special (passim);Diana was an ordinary woman, whom women identified with because of shared exploitation by men (Francine du Plessix Gray). Theres something in all these perspectives, even the description of the princess as a devotee of radical causes: Her position on land mines, for example, was much more uncompromisingthan that of the ClintonAdministration. Similarly, theres some truth in each of the possible positions staked out vis-&vis the paparazzi who pursued her: Theyre creepy BUT celebrities use them back AND people want those photos, INCLUDING the high-end media that scornthem, ALTHOUGH privacy should courit for something EVEN for celebrities ind DESPITEthe First Amendment (or not). But of course, the major radical cause that Diana represented is modernity itself. She may have begun as a nineteenth-century throwback, a barely educated, docile, medically certified virgin waving from a Cinderella glass coach on her way to a fairy tale wedding that was actually a marital transaction as cynical and cold-blooded as any in Henry James. But she ended by symbolizing a new set of values: self-invention,psychotherapy,emotional expressivity,egalitarianmarriage and womens right to seek love in and out of wedlock, flamboyantconsumerism,public relations, superstardom, the Oprahfication of everything. You can see why women would love her story, which puts a triumphant and glamorous spin on so many themes of contemporary womens lives-eating disorders, depression, chilly husbands, bad marriages, divorce--Culminating in near-totalvictory over the mother of all mothers-in-law from hell, And because these are indeed real issues that in some ways transcend class, those who criticize the princess tend to sound callous, reactionary and misogynous. Imagine sneeredthe novelist Fay Weldon last year in an astonishingly venomous and almost incoherent Times Op-Ed on the royal divorce, Diana actually believed herself entitled to a faithful husband! She wanted to be happy! Stupid girl. That said, for me, the amazing thing about the Diana story is
simply that there is a Diana story. Its not just that
Britain still has a monarchy, which consumes an enormous amount of money (millions of pounds per ann&) and buttresses a still-powerful hereditary aristocracy, and that remarking on this makes one sound like a C.F!A. at the opera.Nor is it that the criticism of the royals provoked by Dianas death seems to come down to complaintsthat theyre too cold, too old-fashioned and too out of it, when whats wanted is a Clintonesque, talk-show-fiiendly monarchy of high-fashion do-gooders. Its not even just that Tony Blair is trying to save the Windsors bacon-although what does it mean to be for labor if youre also for kings and queens? What depresses me about the outpouring of emotion on the death of Diana is what it says about how little so many millions of people expect out of life. Its pathetic, really, all those grown men and women telling reporters how much it meant to them that Diana visited some relatives hospital room, or shook their, hand at the opening of a supermarket, or just meant somethingyy or made a difference of some never-exactly-specified nature. Its as if people have abandoned any hope of achieving justice, equality, self-determination, true democracy, and want nothing more than a ruling class with a human face. Because their deaths so nearly coincided,it was natural to contrast Pr&ess Diana with Mother Teresa. But in some important ways the women were not so different,Both were the flowers ofhierarchical, feudal, essentiallymasculine institutions in which they had no structural power but whose authoritarian natures they obscured and prettified. Both, despite protestations to the contrary, were in the modern mass-market image business. Neither challenged the status quo that produced the social evils they supposedly helped alleviate-in fact, by promoting the illusion that nuns with no medical training, or checks fkom wealthy donors, or selling your dresses for charity could make a difference on a significant scale, they masked those evils (or even, in the case of Mother Teresas opposition to abortion and birth control, made them worse). Why, after all, should childrens hospitals require the . fundraising services of Princess Diana instead of receiving adequate support from taxpayers? Why is it thought to be marvelous that the princess took her sons to meet and love the homeless, when the whole royal family lives off the system of inequality that produceshomelessness?We havent come very far, it seems; from the medieval view of the poor as a moral opportunity for the rich. But then, isnt it strange that the b o most famous and adored women of the moment are those archetypal medieval figures, a princess and a nun?
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Gold Seal ofApprovak As for that whiny troll, Katha Pollitt,
an unscrupulous and unreliable critic and a cultural philistine, shes a good example of the phony prep-schooVtrust-fundleftism suf3ksingthe incestuously intertwined Ivy League cliques who run the corrupt East Coast literary and magazine establishment. --Camille Paglia, in Salon
Social Media Very Likely Used To Spread Tradecraft Techniques To Impede Law Enforcement Detection Efforts of Illegal Activity in Central Florida Civil Rights Protests, As of 4 June 2020