Robert Kirby: Loose Cannon
Question 3: a) What event was this British woman talking about in 1997 when she said: “A kind of floral fascism was at work … in a country ruled by grief police?”
b) Around the same time a BBC camera chose to zoom in on a greeting card reading “God created a blonde angel and called her …” Who was the blonde angel?
c) Which drip-nosed English high-class serial divorcee described the above blonde angel as being named after a mythical huntress but hounded to death by a whorish media?
Possible questions in some future European history exam? Gloomily I suspect so. Sentimentality has an extraordinarily long shelf-life. And the grosser it is, the longer it keeps.
It’s coming up six months AD and we are still being engulfed by the Princess Di slush bombers. That well-known weapon of mass intellectual destruction, The International Express, last week exceeded its most enraptured vulgarian benchmark with “Death Has Enshrined Her and Left a Harrowing Landmark In Our Hearts”.
How long will it take for this very disagreeable orange to be sucked dry? I fear even longer than it’s taken for the first rash of showbiz hucksters to make their pile. You only have to look at Elton John to see what a television spectacular funeral can do for a career in decline. A knighthood was all Tony Blair could add without seeming too obvious. Yes, yes, we all know how much Elton’s donated to charity, but somehow you know that’s not all that’s in it for him. Publicity of that order can’t be bought, even if knighthoods can.
When it comes to gaudy Diana memorabilia, take your pick. How’s this from a Heritage Collection brochure offering “a treasured connoisseur’s piece, an investment in rarity, an heirloom which will be handed down to future generations”? For only R199,90 this unique relic is a Princess Di commemorative plate – limited edition of 10 000. The same brochure might tempt you to get your hands on a Princess Di choker necklace, “almost identical to the original worn by the princess on numerous gala occasions, including a gala function hosted by Ronald Reagan, where she danced with John Travolta! Only R269.”
If nothing else, Di’s death has shown us grief should always be allowed to assume its own forms. In Italy they are now selling nativity scenes, each with a little injection-moulded Princess Di added to the tableau. To keep things sacred, there’s a Mother Theresa as well, standing between Di and a bakelite camel. Gender equality missed a rare gloat here. They could have included Madeleine Albright and claimed Three Wise Women of the West.
And tears spill yet fresh in Egypt where an Alexandrian travel agency, owned by the Fayed brothers, has a window display depicting Di and Dodi on the wedding day that was never to be. Their faces have been glued on to full-length photographs of some successful bride and groom.
The picture bears the caption “Who Killed Diana?” The prevailing answer in Egypt is recorded in no less than three instant books by Egyptian authors who argue that the car crash was actually a professional “hit” requisitioned by a British monarchy determined at all costs to end the nightmare prospect of a Muslim shopkeeper’s son helping to raise their scions.
Snigger if you will, but not too smugly when you compare that with the anguish supermarket being run by the devastated Spencer Dynasty – as they now have taken to calling themselves. These gentlefolk are building the Diana Memorial Museum on the family estate at Althorp – 9,50 a ticket, first 10 000 sold out in a few hours. The museum will have cute “theme rooms” and the payoff is a chance to stare across a hundred yards of water at the island where the newest member of the nativity lies a- mouldering in her grave.
Recently Auberon Waugh wrote of the gross sentimentality which inspires things like the Di fest, notably the Australian “sorry books”, which apologise to the Aborigines for all the wrongs they’ve suffered, and Tony Blair deciding to apologise for the Irish potato famine. Apparently Waugh hasn’t yet heard of our own “so sorry for apartheid” registers, or any other Nadine Gordimer works for that matter.
Waugh held that “sentimentality is an unattractive self-indulgence among individuals. I often feel with sentimental people that their sentimentality is the exact measure of their inability to experience genuine feeling.”
How right he is.