From Patagonia to Peoria, from Beijing to Bronkhorstpruit, there was not a dry eye in the global village when Diana, Princess of Wales, was laid to rest last Saturday. Yet how at variance were these outpourings of sentiment with this hard-boiled, market- driven planet at the end of the millennium.
Though directed primarily against the paparazzi, the applause of thousands outside Westminster Abbey could also be seen as a protest against all that we have become, as outrage at being deprived of a priceless, saintly human being by those who were not only inferior, but who were also engaged in the grubby pursuit of a fast buck.
Yet the photographers were doing no more than what was expected of them. They were playing according to the spirit of free enterprise and the prevailing morality of every man for himself.
Unfettered markets are deemed both the essence of human liberty, and the most expedient route to prosperity.
Ideologues trumpet their victory over socialism, ecstatic that the state as a rational means of regulating and governing human interactions has been discredited, displaced by the wise, invisible hand of the market.
But a society that prizes risk also reaps insecurity.
Now we are free to make money and plunder without guilt, because we are told it is the natural order of things. Unsurprisingly, the gap between the wealthiest few percent and the rest is larger now than ever before in human history.
Reaching this phase has been hideously destructive, of communities, cultures, values. Most young citizens of Monrovia have no job, no future, no stake in anything. They are consigned to the margins before their lives have begun. Yet they are expected to rejoice because they have access to The X-files, Budweiser beer and the Internet.
True, there are vast parts of the world, principally in Asia, where populations are reaching levels of affluence their parents never dreamed of. But even in the wealthy United States, turbo-charged capitalism is creating ghettos of misery amid the affluence of the majority. In the Third World, in the danger zone, there are competing converse images: pockets of great wealth ringed by high walls to keep out the teeming humanity that is now being figuratively left to the wolves.
In Russia, Pakistan, Liberia, Somalia, Colombia, the nation state hardly exists anymore. The formal economy has shrunk, driving more and more people into the black economy: drugs, guns, gold, diamonds, criminality. Warlords and mafiosi are drawn to and control these trades, creating more violence and instability. The frustrations of the poor explode in jihad or episodes of looting.
The free market, of course, is an expedient. People only pretend it is God. American manufacturers seek out cheap non- union labour in the sweatshops of East Asia, but when migrants, many of them poor Africans, attempt to assert the same right to go in search of better jobs, they are barred by immigration laws.
This is the world circa 1997, skewed in favour of the rich, yet choosing to make a public spectacle out of the death of Princess Diana and Mother Teresa because they sympathised with the poor.
Yet are the poor not the same people who have been treated like pests, beggars at the banquet, occasionally thrown crumbs from the table of the rich?
Does the prospect of someone being canonised for caring for the poor indicate that there is still a fight left?
Are there are still some domains beyond the reach of the market, rights which cannot be alienated or sold? Still some hope that markets will be balanced with other social goals? Some understanding that the value of Princess Diana cannot be measured in the same currency with which one purchases a Big Mac?
Or is compassion something one feels only for saints, not for the Rwandese baby in a refugee camp or the mentally retarded person sleeping under cardboard on the Thames? Did the global millions switch off their television screens and go to bed last Saturday night, having witnessed only the sad ending to a fairy tale, an escapist diversion from the real world where everything is still for sale?
An SABC watershed
Everyone loves to sling abuse at the SABC and it often deserves the brickbats it gets but the national broadcaster deserves praise this week for deciding to film the BBC documentary on Katiza Cebukhulu and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.
In so doing it laid down a marker, showing a determination not just to assert its independence but to treat South African viewers as adults, capable of arriving at their own conclusions about an extremely serious issue involving a leading politician.
The criticism from Minister of Justice Dullah Omar that the programme was one- sided must be rejected. Pains were taken to allow Madikizela-Mandela to put her side of the story and to stress that the allegations in the documentary were untested by cross-examination in an open court.
The charge of trial by media has been made since the beginning of the Winnie saga almost a decade ago. We would argue that is not the media that has failed in its duty, but the politicians and departments of state involved who have actively obstructed or emphatically failed to deliver the truth in the murders of Stompie Seipei, Abu Baker Asvat and others.
Left to the police and the Department of Justice, there would have not even have been the slightest glimmer of hope that this sordid saga might one day end in justice.