I'm sorry to add to the outpouring of grief following the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, but I found myself mourning that weekend too, if perhaps for different reasons.
I was sad not only about the death of an appealing young person, but about the fact that, as somebody who writes about media and culture, I had just entered and left Valhalla and was unlikely to see anything like it again. This was a decade's worth of media eventfulness compressed into a few days.
A month ago, I would not have believed anybody who told me I would witness, in one 24-hour period, Queen Elizabeth learning how to share her feelings Oprah-style on live TV; the funeral of Princess Diana in Westminster Abbey featuring Elton John at the piano; and the death of Mother Teresa, provided perhaps by a divine hand on the eve of Di's sendoff to give us a slap in the face and make us think about what we were doing down here.
This cultural convergence was extraordinary, a pyrotechnic collision of technology, imagery, pageantry, media, canonization, gender, and history.
Awed by all this, I know I am not worthy. I can hardly absorb it, let alone make sense of it. What can anybody add to the electronic avalanche of commentary, posturing, analysis, hand-wringing, outrage, and debate that poured forth all weekend long on cable, the Net, radio, and commercial TV?
Nothing, at least not about the funeral itself.
What struck me was that at 1 p.m. the day before, when Queen Elizabeth went live from her palace balcony to reveal that she, too, felt grief, as both a queen and a grandmother, American notions of culture, celebrity, and imagery had finally conquered the entire world.
There is nothing more powerful than the technoculture we have created, and with which we are relentlessly overwhelming the hapless world.
We used to worship the hero; now we honor the celebrity, an entity that historian Daniel Boorstin once defined as "someone who is well-known for his well-knownness," as opposed to the hero, who was "distinguished by his achievement ... the hero was a big man; the celebrity is a big name." Or in our time, more likely a name enhanced by charisma or beauty.
And Boorstin wrote this three decades ago, before technological innovations like cable, satellites, and the Internet gave us the means to honor and transmit images of celebrities in so many ways so quickly.
So now even the queen has to put her emotions on public display, as every American politician and public figure learned to do ages ago. If President Clinton had been in town, he would have shown her a thing or two about sharing pain.
In the land of Oprah, there is not only the freedom but the obligation to share feelings that, if not made explicit, don't count. And so the queen faced a new kind of revolution. A few centuries ago, she might have called out the guard and slugged it out in the streets. But revolutions in the modern world are fought as much on TV as on battlefields, as America has been learning for decades.
Engulfed by a tidal wave of veneration for the fallen princess, Her Majesty, cast in the role of the wicked stepmother, was forced, not to abdicate or be sent to the tower for beheading, but to call in her speechwriters, put on some makeup, and, using her mourning populace as a telegenic backdrop, read from the prompter.
And still it wasn't enough that the bewildered queen, finally battered enough to do everything her PR advisors were telling her to do, lowered her flag to half-mast and pressed the flesh outside the palace.
She's too new at this. Her media-savvy subjects complained there weren't enough feelings, and they weren't expressed intensely enough.
Yet the queen's appearance, her first personal live broadcast, represented a surrender as significant as the long-awaited retreat of the empire from Hong Kong a few months ago. This was as vivid an acknowledgement of the American Century as any head of state could make.
American-spawned technology had taken the image of Diana and beamed it all over the world so attractively, manipulatively, intensely that we witnessed not a mere death, but a secular and cultural canonization. It was vastly bigger than the actual canonization likely to be accorded Mother Teresa, for whom comparative obscurity will be added to her many other sacrifices for the poor.
The Diana phenomenon, according to The Economist in its 6 September issue, "is a reminder of the extent to which the cult of celebrity is a creation of this century, and dependent on the technologies of communication that act as its distribution channel: the camera, the wire service, the screen, and now the Internet...."
Diana's tragedy, The Economist claimed, was that she incurred more of the costs of fame than most celebrities, but enjoyed fewer of the benefits. In any case, the cult of celebrity has become much more powerful than that of royalty. American public figures know this all too well.
But stay tuned: There are to be some emotional and revelatory royal interviews in the weeks ahead. The family will not only share our pain, they will share lots of their own.
One day after the queen's address, Elton John was singing a hurriedly rewritten "Candle in the Wind" in Westminster Abbey (the CD, whose proceeds will benefit Diana's favorite charities, will be out 16 September) as the chastened queen dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief.
We had no way to know whether she had finally come to terms with her feelings or was reacting to the sight of an acknowledged bisexual famous for Marie Antoinette costuming and gargantuan sunglasses singing down at her from the pulpits of Westminster Abbey.
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
