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DOROTHY RABINOWITZ'S MEDIA LOG
Britain's Lowest Moment
Remember the media frenzy over Diana's death? I'm still sick about it.
BY TUNKU VARADARAJAN
Friday, September 1, 2000 12:01 a.m.
Yesterday was the third anniversary of the death, in a motor accident in Paris,
of Princess Diana of Wales. I am flooded with gloom.
The darkness of my mood, lest you misunderstand, comes not from a rekindled
sense of loss. Instead, it flows from my recollection of the vulgarity and
gaudy grief that swept through our lives after the death of that meretricious,
banal and empty-headed woman.
Did you know that Buckingham Palace is approaching paper conservators to see if
all those cards left outside Diana's palace by jelly-kneed mourners three years
ago can be preserved for posterity? Why? To be housed, perhaps in some maudlin,
mawkish museum, some shrine to kitsch, some documentation center for students
of mass hysteria, for archivists of tawdry public grief?
The obscene hyperventilation that followed Diana's death, the breast-beating,
the bawling, the wailing, the flailing, was Britain's lowest moment since the
beheading of King Charles I by the appalling Cromwell in January 1649.
What was so base about the behavior of most Britons was the manner in which
they allowed their sangfroid to evaporate. One would expect that sort of
behavior, perhaps, in a place of warm climate--the martyr worship, the rampant
mythology, the ululation--but not in Britain, the country of Churchill, and
Douglas Jardine (a great, frostily courageous cricket player), and the Queen
Mother, and Margaret Thatcher, to name four figures of iron poise, and leonine
will, from this century alone.
Although I was ashamed to be British at the time, my shame was tempered
somewhat by the fact that other people, in other countries--France, Australia,
India, the U.S., even Japan--were behaving in an almost equally fatuous way,
grieving for her as if she were a saint, a sage, an angel.
The blame for all this lies, in large measure, with the press--and with the
British press in particular, which, in the most astonishing volte-face one
could hope to see, altered its approach to Diana from one of open derision to
one of open-mouthed worship. Every two-bit hack became a hagiographer; every
chain-smoking, beer-swilling, quote-piping reporter became the builder of a
monument of grief, a pyramid to Diana that was no less daunting than the one of
stone at Giza.
I worked, then, for the London Times, ostensibly a serious newspaper. My
editors, like the editors of the competition, pulled out every stop to run
megawhopper supplements to Diana, the People's Princess, our Candle in the
Wind. Sonorous editorials were written--by men and women who should have known
better--and headlines of the most excruciating unctuousness were confected by
normally hard-bitten copywriters. Things like this: "Diana, She Held the Hands
and Heart of the World."
I was bureau chief in New York and remember being leaned on by my foreign
editor, back at base, to go to the British Consulate and interview the throng
of mourners who had come to sign the condolence book. This, I did--a job must,
after all, be done to an editor's satisfaction--and gathered a bushel of inane
quotes from sniffling teenagers and yentas. Never have I hated my job more, or
had more contempt for the journalist's milieu. I was only obeying orders; but
we've heard that line before, and have learned to treat it with scorn.
My editors had become praise-singers. I had a bit part in this process of
Diana's deification, but a part all the same. The memory makes me feel ill.
Copyright � 2000 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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A<>E<>R
Integrity has no need of rules. -Albert Camus (1913-1960)
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The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The libertarian therefore considers one of his prime educational
tasks is to spread the demystification and desanctification of the
State among its hapless subjects. His task is to demonstrate
repeatedly and in depth that not only the emperor but even the
"democratic" State has no clothes; that all governments subsist
by exploitive rule over the public; and that such rule is the reverse
of objective necessity. He strives to show that the existence of
taxation and the State necessarily sets up a class division between
the exploiting rulers and the exploited ruled. He seeks to show that
the task of the court intellectuals who have always supported the State
has ever been to weave mystification in order to induce the public to
accept State rule and that these intellectuals obtain, in return, a
share in the power and pelf extracted by the rulers from their deluded
subjects.
[[For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Murray N. Rothbard,
Fox & Wilkes, 1973, 1978, p. 25]]
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