Ireland Online reports that Germaine Greer referred to Princess Diana as a “devious moron.” I think Greer gives Diana too much credit – In my view, she was a banal moron, maybe even just a plain old moron moron.
I still don’t know why we are treated to regular bouts of public worship of this non-entity. There were, and are, so many women, people, more interesting, more accomplished, more intelligent, more beautiful than she was. A handful of the world’s models – Iman, Elle MacPherson, Tyra Banks, Beyonce Knowles, etc., while each having their own weaknesses (like any human being) easily top Diana in every category.
I have no particular thoughts on Diana, except that I often admired her beauty in pictures. I do, however, think that if someone is a moron, that would negate their ability to be devious. They wouldn’t have the brainpower for it.
I don’t think it’s so much Diana herself as it is the story that fascinates people.
Part I - the fairy tale. Girl of aristocratic but decidedly non-royal heritage marries the Prince of Wales and becomes a princess, and the future Queen of the realm.
Part II - the fairy tale gone sour. Prince plays around with Horse Face all along, they split, she dies in a car crash.
IIRC the Spencer family was so broke they didn’t have a pot to piss in and were close to selling their family pile.
Then came the marriage to the plant whisperer and all that changed.
The thing is, the no O-levelled one had access to education at the best fee paying schools, and yet she still succeeded in failing to gain any qualifications. This is actually quite an achievement.
So basicaly she had no intellect and lots of personal likes, such as WHAM! and others of the upbeat form of chart music.
You will find no argument from me about her, she was simply a brood mare whose main purpose was to find the most eligable bachelor she could, marry him, present him with a male heir or two, and then dissappear into the family crochet network.
In that, her role was little differant to other royal brood mares, except that most of those had a personality and were capable of entertaning and holding interesting conversations with high officials.
The day is fast approaching when there will be no room in our Biography section for anything but the quarterly updates on Diana. The woman’s been dead for 10 years … how much more can their possibly be to say about her?
And the tragedy in the story is that she either bought into the “fairy tale” or was too stupid to see her role.
(Though she would have never disappeared. Queens do not disappear. They show up at public events and hospitals and Ascot with smiles and waves and, if necessary, make small talk to the woman they know their husband is boinking - perhaps inside saying “yeah, bitch, but I’m the one wearing the tiara.” Diana really should have read some English History.)
Diana came from a family so blue-blooded that they make the Windsors look like the parvenu upstarts that they really are. She must have been really dumb to not have realised that she was being used as a brood mare, or perhaps that was what the Spencers expected of her. It would hardly have been the first time.
Perhaps because even the slightest reference to her in any capacity is sufficient to cause even people who hate her to read the comments and then go off and make their own comments in public places?
Not that I don’t think the Pit is the perfect place for the thread, but how do you know the OP’s family fortune doesn’t rest upon the success of the land mine industry?
As a person, I have no feelings one way or the other about Princess Diana. As a symbol, she was a decadant remnant of an archaic system that thinks the worth of a person can best be determined by which set of genitalia they were pulled out of at the time of their birth. I have never understood the American fascination with royalty.
Great Britain has never had a Princess Diana. They probably will in the future, though. As for why people are still so fascinated by Lady Diana, I couldn’t tell you. But “devious moron” does sound stupid, even for Germaine Greer.
Yeah, it doesn’t bother me a bit when the British or the Swedes or Norwegians or whoever still does the whole royalty bit get all moist and quivery over some king or queen or whatever. I just feel like Americans ought to know better. Didn’t we kick King George III’s ass back in 1783 or whenever to put a stop to that crap? It annoys me no end to have to see the royal family of anywhere in the US media.
I used to really like Germaine Greer, but now she’s just as much an obsolete relic as the House of Windsor. In this decade her contribution to the sum total of human achievement has been a book of soft-core boy porn and shooting off her mouth that Steve Irwin deserved to get stabbed. Not exactly the wise counsel us the benighted masses ought cup our hands to our ears to hear. Kind of like Gore Vidal “I’ve gotten old and cranky but I can’t get used to being ignored.”
I think it was either the day before or the day after Diana’s funeral, when I had a temp assignment as the only guy in an office of 30-something women. These gals were actually crying, as if they had lost the only friend they would ever have. At first I thought they were joking, and I’m still not sure whether each of them was putting on a show for the others. I was glad to get out of that place.
