DEAD DIANA DAY #10, PART TWO:
“THE EMAILS”

by Arthur King

After the Dead Diana Day #10 blog, there were email exchanges. Of course there were.

Sadly, these exchanges make me realise that my target audience is (i) intelligent, therefore (ii) small, and (iii) civilised, which means it does not like to conduct discussions on an open forum on the Internet, since the forum is always mobbed with idiots who have lost their village and won’t stop shouting.

Arthur King readers – all three of them – prefer the luxury of one-on-one inquiry. The following comments are therefore reproduced anonymously, and with permission.

As I post this, the British government, and more importantly the British tabloid press, are reviewing CCTV stills of Diana Spencer on the night that she died. They are doing this in a bid to answer a vital question: Just how did a blind drunk man speeding in a dark narrow tunnel manage to crash his car?

The following email exchanges do not answer that vexing question. Instead, they discuss hysteria and celebrities, whether Diana had a soul, and how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. Okay, they don’t discuss angels and pinheads. To read the original blog, go here.

On 9/4/07 Crouching Hedgehog wrote:
okay, identifying with Diana: absurd. the people's princess: even more absurd. a great humanitarian: of course not. and i'm no big fan, either. but i do think she could've spent her life ONLY shopping and shooting birds, and instead she loaned her glamorous face to several good causes--particularly AIDS--at a particularly important time. was this the very least she could have done if she had any kind of social conscience? probably, but that doesn't discount it. so yes, for the most part, i agree with you, but I don't think she was a completely useless twat either.

On 9/4/07 Arthur King wrote:
Don't think I said she was "a completely useless twat" did I?

My main thrust is now, and always has been that she was an anachronism, and she did the charity work because she had to, not because of her social conscience (philanthropy was something the royals took on to make themselves more palatable to the public, and she cut her charities back after the divorce).

On 9/4/07 Crouching Hedgehog wrote:
no, you didn't actually say she was "a completely useless twat," but it seemed your implication--or did I get that wrong? what i'm getting at is that when you start with jokes about her sleeping around and the myth of the innocent english rose, it seems to me you take seriously the notion of debunking the illusions surrounding her, which i think most intelligent people didn't take seriously in the first place--but perhaps I'm wrong about that? no one I know ever identified with diana or thought her a saint or thought her anything more than a fashion plate who led a life of privilege and occasionally used that privilege to do a small measure of good. "people's princess" was a phrase I found highly ludicrous. but perhaps the hysteria about diana has to do more with people--like your accountant--who need some sort of fairytale to cling to. after all, the PR machine can dish it out, but people have to be willing to bite for it to work, no? i always find the hysteria surrounding the deaths of celebrities--whether talented or not--fascinating: not just Diana, but James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, the thousands of mourners in the streets of Paris for Dalida and Edith Piaf. i'm fascinated by the intense emotion people pin on perfect strangers, and what it tells us about human aspirations, fantasies, etc.

as for whether she did the charity work because she had to, that's conjecture. just because it was advantageous to her PR image to do it doesn't mean she didn't believe in it. I agree with most of what you say, but I'm willing to grant her a soul. big of me, ain't it?

On 9/4/07 Arthur King wrote:
Yes, the hysteria has more to do with our lives, with our own pain, with the way that people transplant their lives onto the lives of celebrities. I don't, and you don't, but a lot of people do, and at her death it was as though we were living in a one-party state, as though Brezhnev or Mao had died and we all had to assume the correct posture. Those who didn't were often physically assaulted in Britain.

Absurd, but a lot of supposedly intelligent people got caught up in it, and a lot of intelligent people didn't speak out because they felt afraid to. I have received a slew of emails from people telling me they are relieved that someone said this: equally there are those who view me as a pariah, so yes, I take seriously the idea of debunking the myths surrounding her.

This I have to say has a lot to do with growing up with a hereditary monarchy, a dreadful, debilitating anachronism, much like professing that there is a god, he has a beard, and sandals, he made us and he loves us, but he will send us to hell if we masturbate.

I think she had a soul, could care less who she slept with, and used the joke to illustrate the hypocrisy of people. Like all of us she had competing sides. She was against landmines, but worked to raise the profile of this issue in order to raise her own profile.

On 9/4/07, Crouching Hedgehog wrote:
I see what you mean now.

I didn't get this notion of speaking out on the subject of Diana as important, I think because I didn't grow up in England with the kind of awful one-party state feeling you're talking about, in which case I understand it better.

On 9/4/07 Arthur King wrote:
To be honest, the whole thing took me by surprise too: I’d been out of the country too long, so my reaction was “So what?”

But to ask whether her death was important made people furious: you would have thought I had proposed her head be put on a spike on Traitor's Gate, there to turn green in the wind and rain. It was oddly the same in the US.

A few days after her death, I flew to the US for the first time, and got threatened by my brother (for saying among other things that her death was a Eurotrash tragedy). My brother spent several days glued to the TV, openly grieving for what I don't know.

People everywhere offered me their condolences, which was all very sweet but I think they were rather shocked at my indifference. "Oh, she wasn't a relative," I said to one, much to her horror.

On 9/4/07, Crouching Hedgehog wrote:
I love your answer about how she wasn't a relative!

I was in LA and heard it on the news. I immediately thought how sad, merely because she was pretty and young, and I'd grown used to her face, was a teenager when she got married in that fairytale dress. My next thought was, this is annoying, because now everything will be all about Diana's death and this is tiresome. Honestly. Just the tediousness of the media frenzy.

On 9/5/07 Arthur King wrote:
Comment from a friend, based on an essay on Diana by Joan Smith:

OK, in the spirit of honest enquiry I've re-read Joan Smith's excellent essay on Diana. She's not sympathetic at all really. She certainly sees Diana as a case of society rewarding traditionally 'feminine' behaviour, and that her main point is that cultures create myths about women to control them, but that doesn't let Diana off the hook. Some quotes that might amuse you (and which fit remarkably well with yr piece):
On her last US gala appearance: "audiences had responded with that sickly combination of awe, admiration and pity"
"..that her increasing resemblance to one of the most baleful female characters in Victorian fiction has gone unnoticed" ie Miss Havisham
On the BBC Bashir interview:
"the Princess looked and sounded drained, like a crime victim who had been persuaded by police to meet the press and talk about her ordeal"
"her carefully cultivated public persona suggests her awareness that the words "tragic" and "queen" have an ancient affinity which she is happy to exploit"
On her appeal:
"Anyone who has even been jilted or endured an unhappy love affair, which is to say the entire population over 14 with the exception of a handful of cynics and celibates, understood and empathized with her"
she has been able to "re-create herself as the archetypal wronged woman"
Smith's scary prediction for women playing this "role":
"they all wind up young, beautiful and dead".
Diana is a genuinely depressed, disturbed woman (stemming from a troubled childhood) who is "self-deluding in her assessment of her own situation, and that has been astonishingly successful in persuading vast numbers of people to collude in that deception".
Finally:
"Lonely children frequently console themselves with fantasies" and the "price we would pay for imposing our fantasies [about women] on her slender form was to absorb hers in return, no matter how distorted a version of events they would turn out to represent"
Essentially, Diana represents how "we" reward traditional female behaviour and this is itself an indication of the "backlash' against the progress women have made over the last 50 years in fighting against culturally bound ideas of femininity.

On 9/5/07, Crouching Hedgehog wrote:
I think this passage in particular points to something:

“Anyone who has even been jilted or endured an unhappy love affair, which is to say the entire population over 14 with the exception of a handful of cynics and celibates, understood and empathized with her”

I think THAT'S precisely where you get accountants saying they identified with her: everyone has experienced an unhappy love affair, but most people feel miserable and pathetic about it. Here was someone whose unhappy love affair was splashed all over all known media (both with and without her help) and yet she's still a princess, still glamorous, still wearing bloody expensive frocks: the accountant gets to identify with her pain, but avoid the shame and humiliation. It's like picking and choosing at the opera--only going for the arias, not the boring or convoluted plot points. Never mind that life is made of very often boring and convoluted plot points. Or something like that.

On 9/5/07 Arthur King wrote:
Yes, they want the bloody aria, but sung by Bonnie Tyler, not Maria Callas.

That one particular sentence also struck me: that was the level of the sentiment, and it was all to do with the failure and pain of individual lives. It was a monstrous eruption of agony aunt columns, right there on the street, like a vast collective California therapy session, but it was in Britain and because it was in Britain no one was talking about what it really meant. It was all coded.

Decoded, everyone blamed the queen, because she’s our mum.

Is this too esoteric?

DEAD DIANA DAY # 10
by Arthur King

What’s the difference between Diana Spencer and a field full of landmines?
Nothing: they’re both incredibly easy to lay, but terribly expensive to get rid of.
---August 30, 1997

So many Diana jokes were going the rounds back in 1997 that I only bothered to note that one in my journals. It was all rather boring: you’d run into an acquaintance and they’d rattle off a stream of Diana jokes over drinks.

They all followed much the same formula: she was the town bike, she was bulimic, she was a gold-digger from the Eurotrash jetset. Since I didn’t care much about what was going on in England – which is why I was living in Asia – and had never been a fan of hereditary monarchy, many of the jokes went over my head, and I often had to ask for explanations.

Twenty-four hours after I recorded that joke, Diana was dead.

I’m glad I recorded it, because it provides the perfect contrast to the hysterical outpouring of saccharine sentiment that greeted her death.

When I say saccharine, I mean the likes of the 20-year-old English male accountant who stood outside the gates of Buckingham Palace and told the world, via the BBC, that he “identified with her.” Identified with her? With what? With her wealth, power, and influence? Her Versace frocks? Her life of luxury lived off the public purse?

For American saccharine, look no further than John Travolta: he offered to get on the first available plane and go over to help the poor little kids. Now John had famously danced with Diana at some celebrity bash or another, so presumably that gave him some sort of rights. Still, how the arrival of a Scientologist from Hollywood would help two princes whose mother had just died in a drunken car crash in Paris eludes me to this day.

But Travolta and England’s accountant spoke on behalf of an enormous number of people who had bought into the fairy tale myth of Diana Spencer.

The Myth of The People’s Princess
What people “identified with” was not Diana Spencer, but the Disneyfication of Diana, a carefully woven myth which ironically was begun by the Windsors, but elaborated by Diana’s PR people after her divorce. It runs like this.

Act One: Honest ordinary working girl, charmed by (slightly toad-like) prince, who marries her extravagantly, giving the nation’s poor a lift during a time of extreme unemployment, poverty and social unrest.
Act Two: Complication: wide-eyed innocent hard-working commoner girl with fawn-like limbs has married Brute Beast – People’s Princess is trapped in dungeon-like marriage by evil clan of ogres.
Act Three: Innocent doe-eyed fawn-limbed ordinary working girl escapes marriage to Brute Beast and rebuilds sex life, only to die tragically young (but still beautiful), murdered in the back of a car in the arms of her true (Muslim) love. In Paris.
Requiem: Iconic pop star sings at her funeral. A nation weeps. On television. End.

The truth about “The People’s Princess”
Let’s get clear on a couple of things. I did not “identify with” Diana. Sure, she was raising some profile for the serious issue of landmines, but hers was charity designed to raise her own profile, which is no charity at all. She did not die on her hands and knees sweeping mines from a swathe of Vietnamese rainforest; she did one photoshoot, in Angola.

She was not a “people’s princess.” She grew up in a mansion and her playmates were royalty. She had one ‘O’ level, despite an expensive education: she was a member of a social set whose women prided themselves on marrying well rather than achieving an education. Her family was well-placed socially, and she was more than willing to marry the prince of the realm and ultimately become queen, the matriarch of a family whose wealth is founded on colonial thuggery. In fact, for her social set, no honour could be higher than association by marriage with the ultimate in vicious luxury. She was an anachronism, and a shockingly bad example to set to young women. If I had a daughter, I would tell her not to imitate Diana Spencer under any circumstances: if my son brings home a woman like Diana Spencer, I can only warn him of the misery that surely lies ahead.

Any honest analysis of Diana Spencer finds her as she truly was. She was not naïve, nor was she a victim. To say that she was a victim is to trust entirely to the fairy tale of the innocent, doe-eyed, fawn-limbed, working-girl-turned-princess. That fairy tale is the product of a very effective PR campaign: Diana came from privilege, and had some good advisers in her own camp, which is how she came to be immortalised as the victim. In reality she was born into wealth, married into title, divorced to gain quite a few million pounds, a substantial annual income, access to a couple of castles, and to spend her life developing a celebrity profile with her trademark charity. She was not a victim.

Viewed in a clear light, her death reveals everything you need to know. She died in the back of a speeding car in the company of a member of the al Fayed family, a family whose members had freely admitted to buying the favour of British parliamentarians, in the same Paris Ritz where she dined the night she died.

She was not murdered because she was going to marry a Muslim. For one thing, there is no evidence to suggest that Dodi was more than a fling, but more importantly, if the royal family was going to murder someone don’t you think they’d be a little more efficient? Historically, haven’t royals led the field in the efficient use of violence? I mean, what is the likelihood that you will actually cause someone to crash by taking their bloody photograph? Surely there are other less chancy methods? A little poison perhaps? How about a late-night Caribbean drunk drowning? A blown-out tyre would have been far more efficient and more likely to cause the requisite damage, (assuming of course you could somehow get the car to travel at the required speed as you blew the tyre out).

The truth about fairy stories
No, the idea that she was murdered is a fantasy, and on the subject of fantasy and fairy tales, there are a few people out there who could do with reading something that pre-dates Walt Disney. The problem with Disney fairy tales is that they cut out all the necessary violence, and the violence is there to reveal the truth about life. That is what fairy tales do: they instruct us about life.

In their original form, fairy tales warned children and reminded adults about how vicious the forest is; and in this life, even your own parents can abandon you to wolves and ogres. If you don’t believe me, then read the original versions of Sleeping Beauty, where the prince wanders by, finds Beauty asleep, rapes her, then leaves her sleeping and beautiful, but pregnant.

Or how about Cinderella? In one of the originals of Cinderella, Cinder’s sister is so desperate to capture the prince that she cuts off her toes to try and make her foot fit the glass slipper. Do you really need me to explain that metaphor?

To recap Diana Spencer then. Born into privilege, married into title, divorced to gain castles, quite a few million pounds, a decent annual sum, and to spend her life as a celebrity with a trademark charity. Died in a car-wreck with a lover in Paris.

Ultimately, what does her death reveal? Ill-educated despite wealth and opportunity, star-struck and manipulated, but manipulating and famous, she was the best that so many could aspire to. She was everyone’s fifteen minutes of fame, and many a young English accountant’s masturbatory fantasy.

Not such a bad life when you get down to it. What people can’t get over is that she might have cut her own toes off to make the slipper fit.

© Arthur King 2007