A Week Of Sheer Fakery

It is unclear how individuals, let alone clumps of millions, grieve and suffer for a celebrity stranger whose death illustrates the Law of Inverse Ratio Rhetoric. The law is: hyperbole about a deceased person expands to fill the vacuum of the person's substantive significance. Diana evidently was what she appeared to be, eager to use for social betterment the celebrity that came from her marriage. But that virtue does not begin to explain why people stood in line all night for the opportunity to jot their thoughts about Diana in a book at St. James's Palace, or why people left flowers at the British Embassy on Washington's Massachusetts Avenue.

Such people were clutching at the flying coattails of history. And so for the world, or at least the wired world of the North Atlantic community, last week was deeply pleasurable, even exhilarating.

All the world's a stage--well, a television studio--and those who join a mass grieving become bit players, briefly able to exclaim, ""History has happened to me, personally!'' The North Atlantic community consists of societies in which scarcities of food, shelter and clothing have been banished. But material abundance may make certain other scarcities more chafing, particularly the scarcities of power and, if not celebrity, at least recognition. This may partially explain another current form of mass irrationality, the epidemic of aggressive driving. One theory, unprovable but plausible, is that this epidemic is a welling-up of brutish assertiveness on the part of people who lead lives of quiet exasperation in the anonymity of bureaucracies.

The fact that supposedly mature societies can be so fixated on royalty suggests just how lightly childishness sleeps, when it sleeps, in such societies. It is perhaps unjust, but poetic justice, that the ramshackle House of Windsor is being faulted for exhibiting insufficient passion in the current grieving sweepstakes. Critics wonder if the royal family is emotionally crippled and out of touch. Do you suppose?

Members of that family are isolated from birth on, cosseted in unearned luxury, bereft of even a family memory of productive labor, and forbidden to utter in public virtually any serious thought. And people wonder why, when the wind rises, the Windsors want to go to earth in Scotland.

If there is any comfort for sensible people to take from the amazing amount of sheer fakery last week, it is that the British public seems to have cast a semiconscious vote against the royal family's seedy style of fantasy and for another--""the people's princess,'' which fortunately is an oxymoron that must ultimately be subversive of the infantile idea of royalty. As for the American public, its healthiest reaction now would be chagrin akin to a hangover. That would be condign punishment for becoming inebriated with a spectacle both empty and degrading.

© 1997