Ten Years Ago Tonight
Ten years ago tonight, I was walking out my front door on my way to work a midnight shift when one of my relatives —decidedly not on his way to work— pops out of his side of the duplex we were living in and asked me if I’d heard that Princess Diana was dead.
“No,” I grumbled, half-awake. “I wonder what she’ll wear to the funeral.”
My point is not that I didn’t cry some —and I did, later on, being a lifelong Anglophile— but that Diana Spencer was and is an annoyance to me. She isn’t tragic or heroic or anything else to me but overrated. Her global celebrity was entirely a function of the media age into which she emerged. Maybe she ushered it in, like some sort of sick aftershock of the British Pop Invasion from the mid-1960s. But I dislike all of these recollections in the media because they are frivilous emotionalism.
Admit it: “Candle in the Wind” didn’t always suck and make your stomach curdle.
