A Week Of Sheer Fakery

WITHIN HOURS OF THE DEATH OF PRINCESS Diana, two unfailing fountains of banalities and bromides had been heard from. President Clinton, whose gift for self-absorption has a kind of grandeur, interrupted his vacation to deliver a bulletin on his inner life, making a statement in which he talked about his feelings and his wife's feelings and, oh yes, the Princess. Several Sunday afternoon football announcers took advantage of a pause in the play to note that Diana had been ""a hero.'' These leading indicators of cultural froth clearly indicated the beginning of a bull market in bathos.

The media were already revved up in Marathon Grief mode. Television networks were trying, as it were, to bite their lower lips, emulating the president's preferred manner for advertising his very solemnest sincerity. Early in this century a wit defined a newspaper as a device incapable of distinguishing between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization. At the century's end we have mass media with wondrous capacities for subtracting from understanding by adding to the public's inclination for self-deception and autointoxication.

By turning everyone everywhere into bystanders at events, and by eliciting and amplifying their ""feelings,'' the media turn the world into an echo chamber and establish for the promptable masses the appropriate ""reaction'' to events. Mass hysteria is a riveting spectacle, whether it occurs at a Nuremberg rally or a rock concert. It is nonetheless hysteria when muted in the form of mass lugubriousness, but at least a funeral-as-rally is, unlike a Nuremberg rally, revolting without being a prelude to anything evil--or anything at all. Because the media are part of this story, they are missing the news, which is:

Evidently many scores of millions of people lead lives of such anesthetizing boredom, emotional aridity and felt insignificance that they relish any opportunity for vicarious involvement in large events. And Princess Diana's death has been a large event precisely and only because the public, in a spontaneous act of mass parasitism, has fastened onto the event for the catharsis of emotional exhibitionism.

Even by the standards of today's confessional culture, people certainly have been remarkably ""sharing'' with their ""feelings'' about Diana. They have been sharing them with strangers, and their feelings have been about the death of a stranger who, they say, although she never made laws or poetry or shoes or butter, nevertheless ""made a difference'' and mattered to them more than they knew until she died. The media have been more than merely dutiful in reporting on the ""grief'' from which millions have been ""suffering.'' Listening to language used this way is like watching an infant play with a Steuben vase.

During the 1979 malfunction at Three Mile Island nuclear plant, a hyperventilating journalist on TV referred to the event--no deaths; no public-health impact--as a ""catastrophe.'' Viewers were left to wonder what words remained to describe, say, war. The premature death of any young mother is, of course, sad. But when it is the celebrity of the deceased that triggers behavior that gets identified as ""grief'' and ""suffering,'' what words remain to describe what occurs in, say, a pediatric oncology ward?