NO
"DI" PUNS, BUT NO TEARS EITHER
Here it is,
the burning question of the weekend--who had
Diana in their office dead pool? With her
long odds, they must be ready to rake in a
fortune.
C'mon, stop
frowning. You can't expect to lecture me on
death etiquette while the sharks thrash about
the chum in the water, right? Princess Diana
is like Elvis-slumped-on-the-toilet
revisited--way too big a press bonanza for
dignity to intrude.
I, of course,
choose to take the Yank slant on the media
frenzy surrounding the untimely death of
Britain's Princess of Wales. That is to say,
I'm kicking myself for not bidding on one of
her dresses when they were put up for auction
in New York a couple of months ago. If I had
one of those beaded Versace evening gowns in
my hot little speculative hands right now,
I'd be on Easy Street--just like those
dead-pool lottery winners.
That's really
what Diana's death all comes down to--money.
Money to be made for the paparazzi who
shutterbugged her limo chauffeur into driving
into concrete tunnel stanchions, money to be
made for the tabloids that printed the
pictures of Diana and her kin in their
unguarded moments, money to be made by the
designers who used Diana as the world's most
recognizable mannequin. Money to be made by a
fading Empire and its irrelevant figurehead
rulers who saw an opportunity to reverse
public disparagement by latching on to a
comely, glamorous young daughter of an earl,
the kind of princess that was sure to drive
up the tourist numbers at Buckingham Palace.
Money to be made by the princess
herself--over $20 million--in a divorce
settlement after she wanted out of the gilded
chains she had locked herself into.
Money, money,
money.
Money for good
things, too--pediatric cancer cures, AIDS
research, and lobbying money for
anti-land-mine legislation. But philanthropy
is not a certain ticket to sainthood;
thousands of anonymous people do more every
day of the week to make life better for the
sick and the suffering than Diana ever did.
Turning the cameras pointed in her direction
upon the unpleasant sights of the world was a
contribution of some substance on Diana's
part, but it was a relatively small
contribution.
Everything
about this accident smacks of things out of
kilter. Why endanger life and limb to elude
moped-riding yahoos on dark, twisting
streets? Don't Mercedes limos have tinted,
paparazzi-proof windows, anyway? Isn't
Diana's brother, the Ninth Earl Spencer,
being a tad hypocritical by talking about the
press hounding his sister to her death and
having "blood on their hands" when
she freely walked into the world's
most-watched fishbowl? And isn't it a bit
smug of him to make such stern pronouncements
from his home in Cape Town, the ass end of
the planet? And lastly, the children. One
must have a heart of stone to deny that there
are real victims in this accident, Diana's
sons Prince William and Prince Henry. But
they were unwitting victims long before their
mum bought it. Future king Willie's life is a
living hell, his every move and his
still-awkward teenage handsomeness subject to
the omnipresent scrutiny of the Brit press's
eagle eyes. Worse, poor young Harry has been
written off since the day of his birth as the
"spare" of "an heir and a
spare", a cruelty for which no British
scribe offers apology.
Lastly, the
presence of Diana herself and her Dangerous
Liaisons doppelganger Sarah Ferguson
(aka "Fergie") in the public eye
illustrated the ultimate oddity of British
life--the Americanization of the realm's most
cherished icon, the monarchy. Britons pride
themselves on remaining a breed apart from
their crown's former American colonial
subjects by virtue of the sceptered isle's
ancient and mossy traditions. While no one
has yet made Yeoman Warder of the Tower
costumes into fashionable throw rugs or
chipped off pieces of Stonehenge to be sold
as roadside souvenirs, Britain *has* allowed
its most central distinction--the royal
family--to be vulgarized in the worst
Hollywood manner of Hedda Hopper gossip
columns and the casting couch days of
Tinseltown's Golden Age.
By comparison,
the royal houses of the Scandinavian
countries are matched sets of Cleaver
families, tidy and unprepossessing
civil-servant drones that eschew tiaras and
public confessions. The Dutch royals have
known scandal, but in keeping with the
industriousness and dullness of their nation,
confined it to fiscal impropriety. The king
of Spain is a national hero who fought off
resurgent Franco fascists and stands as a
paradoxical avatar of democracy. But he
represents an idea that lost currency in
1789, the idea that monarchs should actually
have an impact on people's lives.
Here in the
States, we view royalty as just another
subset of fodder for Entertainment
Tonight. It was in this light that I
experienced mild irritation as the princess's
death intruded on the coverage of the NFL's
opening weekend--listening to Verne Lundquist
or Dick Enberg struggle for something
meaningful to say about British royalty is
too much for any American sports fan to
endure. Of course, were I old enough I would
have bitched about JFK assassination coverage
keeping me from seeing the legendary Ditka
run against the Steelers the thirty or forty
times a true football couch potato needs to
see a good replay.
I confess
that, even as the Mother Country experiences
the dire pain of their pretty, tempest-tossed
tabloid plaything being lost to them forever,
I'm more interested in the spasm of
self-examination the media has entered into
since the car crash. I love it when sonorous
talking heads and glitzy young female society
reporters alike launch themselves into What
It All Means and Who Is To Blame? mode. The
score so far? Twenty-three reporters
(including CNN, who does this sort of thing
in tag-team fashion) "indirectly"
blame the media, a whopping forty-seven
invoke the word "paparazzi" in
their blame segment--as if the specter of
oily Italians with zoom lenses is completely
unrelated to anything that occurs over on
this side of the Atlantic--and nine dared go
so far as to point the telefinger at the
viewer, or whichever viewers happen to gather
their news at the supermarket checkout line.
Of course, as soon as the alcohol content in
the chauffeur's bloodstream was revealed,
media commentators began a furious backpedal.
I make no judgments here; I simply feast on
the nonsensical cacophony of dirge,
reminiscence, and chatter.
From my perch
in the universe, it looks like celebrity
really sucks (I might feel different if I
aspired to dine at places more sumptuous than
fast-food joints). One thing I do
envy in the Beautiful People--the manner in
which they can tie the media in knots when
one of them dies a particularly spectacular
death. This press bonanza, in the long run,
will not make the tabloids reexamine their
photo policies one iota. The long-term impact
of the death of the princess will be in TV
ratings and circulation figures; which clever
mouthpieces of the Fifth Estate best
negotiated this sudden seismic shift in the
world of celebrityhood? Riff on, O blow-dried
knuckleheads, riff on.
E-Mail Captain Spaulding. Choice reader mail
will be published in Pandemonium
Online.
Previous Mountaintop
Experiences with Captain
Spaulding:
Hooray
For Me #1-- One
Margarita Too Many?
Hooray
For Me #2-- Spitting at
the Generations
Hooray
For Me #3-- The
One-Eyed Spokesmodel
Hooray
For Me #4--
Semisardonic Over Semisonic
Hooray
For Me #5-- Bury My
Brain at Wounded Knee
Hooray
For Me #6-- Tempest in a B-Cup
