Katha Pollitt in The Nation (courtesy of Jim Devine):
> "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 of life.
> It's pathetic, really, all those grown men and women telling reporters about
> how much it meant to them that Diana visited some relative's hospital room,
> or shook their hand at the opening of a supermarket, or just 'meant
> something' or 'made a difference' of some never-exactly-specified nature.
> It's as if people had abandoned any hope of achieving justice, equality,
> self-determination, true democracy, and want nothing more than a ruling
> class with a human face."
I don't know whether Ms Pollitt descends from the former British CP leader
of the same name, but I see something like a party line intruding here.
Actually I doubt that Ms Pollitt can be British, since she demonstrates,
along with so many others commenting in the past month, a total blindness
to the possibility that Diana just might have represented something else,
something more, in the context of her own society than we customarily saw
in her from these shores, and that even Brits of a radical stance might
have shared that perception.
That the Spencers were a burr under the saddle of their own class can be
further assumed from Diana's brother, who had evidently had it with
Britain, preferring the openness of the new South Africa despite all the
fearsome questions still hanging over that society.
As for the implicit notion that Diana was a more or less willing decoy
in the service of the ruling class, a prism through which the thwarted
dreams of millions were cynically refracted into mollifying rainbows,
I invite Ms Pollitt and anyone of like attitude to research Diana's
meaning a year from now, when the UK press is long occupied elsewhere.
valis
"Where an idea is wanting,
a word can always be found to take its place."
-- Goethe
