Princess Diana died 20 years ago this summer

I posted this here because I don’t think it’s quite Pit-worthy, at least not yet, anyway.

The memorial programs are already beginning.

:rolleyes:

She married into the British royal family, bore two children with the heir to the throne, and died way, way too soon.

I could understand a memorial program on the anniversary, but it’s already starting up. :smack:

By what criteria? If she’d died a little sooner, we’d have never heard of her. There would be no national memorial.

Why pretend it’s a bad thing when bad people die?

Don’t get me wrong, had I been able, I would have felt morally compelled to prevent it, but since I was not, I consider it a net benefit to humanity.

I don’t go the whole Diana worship- but in what way was she a bad person? She did her job, highlighted some good causes, and was by all accounts an excellent Mum to her sons. It’s at least somewhat sucky she died.

I never said she was a bad person. I just don’t get that they’re ALREADY doing 20th-anniversary memorial programs, and it looks like it will ramp up considerably in the months to come.

I think that was addressed to Mikeisskeptical.

My own personal trivia: I was coincidentally involved a car accident the same day Princess Diana was killed. Fortunately in my case nobody was killed or seriously injured.

True story.

A group of friends had a party planned for that night with a Princess Di theme when news broke of her death. Without a hitch the party theme was updated to the Princess Died.

Totally correct.

I must say, I’m morbidly curious to find out what would happen if they have a great mega-memorial event planned and then somebody else really important kicks off the week before. Like, say, HM …

I guess it’s just because I’m old, but one part of me wants to say:" Holy crap, that was 20 years ago!!!" - - - while another part of me wants to say:" 20 years ago, geez, that’s just a heartbeat!"

In media time, I guess, its long ago, but if you compare it to a 20-year class reunion when you are trying to make excuses to skip a 50 year class reunion …

Time has different meanings to different people at different stages…

I am an American. I didn’t understand the love for Diana. I also don’t understand hatred of her. Both seem a bit misplaced.

Admittedly, that’s a subjective value judgement. You could probably defend the position that she was too vapid a being to be truly worthy of the label “bad” and that her death was at most neutral news. There are even those who maintain the preposterous fiction that she was “the people’s princess” (as if such a thing is possible).

I saw her as a narcissistic, insincere, self-promoting, non-entity who cynically sought to climb the ranks of an unelected, reactionary ruling elite. Who deliberately positioned herself as the recipient of a vomit-inducing brew of sycophantic, sentimental, nationalistic, fawning, manufactured emotion from a public she undoubtedly considered beneath her. A marketing tool for the lying, bile-spewing tabloid press and a distraction from the serious, coordinated and ongoing effort to disenfranchise whole swathes of the population and to make virtually everything, in virtually every way, worse for virtually everyone.

Perhaps my view of her is unfairly contaminated by the contempt in which I hold those attempting to posthumously deify her. I find the not so subtle impulse to become slaves, to blindly accept unjustified authority and to be thankful to be relieved of the responsibility of independent thought or action, entirely loathsome. I would say that they deserve to get their wish, were it not for the fact that they implicitly desire it for the rest of us too. That we all, in the interest of simplifying their reality, abandon the core of our humanity and be subsumed into a kind of pitiful, livestock existence.

Diana was and is a conduit for, in my estimation, the very worst inclinations in human nature, but that’s just my opinion. One persons deplorable waste of oxygen is another persons “Queen of hearts.”

If you want to contest or qualify my portrayal of her, I won’t object. I’ve wasted enough time today thinking about her. She’s still rotting in the ground after all.

And I could understand a thread on the anniversary… but NOW?

You seem unduly invested in giving it all a significance it doesn’t really hold for most people.

I’m a republican and yet I find your bile here pretty much unjustified. As a child who’s formative years were the late 70’s and 80’s I was stewed in the depths of both. My clear impression is of an upward trajectory of better health, greater prosperity and greater inclusion for all, I don’t remember the royal wedding and subsequent married life being a huge drag on the public. Many people just like a good royal wedding and a bit of glittery fluff, 'twas ever thus.

Having said that, I was also put off by the fawning and expectation of vocal grief at the point of her death but then public hysteria is nothing new. Just be thankful that this was pre-social media.

I think she was fairly vapid but I’m hard pushed to ascribe venal motives to someone pushed into that situation aged 19. One thing that seems beyond doubt is that she was good mother, I think she genuinely cared for people and her two sons seem to have turned out to be decent human beings.

She may have been overexposed, but she was married to a future King, and she seemed nice to me. I liked her.

As opposed to the Kardashians, who are horrendously overexposed and who I completely dismiss as insubstantial.

I think some of the negativity isn’t really directed toward Diana but to the feeling of ‘enough already’ to the funerary worship of her after her death.

One thing bugs me though. Why the knighthood for Elton John?
All he did was sing a slightly modified version of a song that was really about someone else. At least he or someone else could’ve come up with a nice new song and dedicate it to Diana.
Why rip off Marilyn Monroe’s memory?

Well… Maybe. I do have a tendency to overstate things sometimes, particularly when the opposite viewpoint is orthodoxy. My instinct is to take a strongly counterbalancing position and I have been known to overshoot somewhat. I also find it fun to be a little vitriolic now and then, but I appreciate that in text form, it can seem like I’m much angrier than I actually am.

All I meant to say is that I don’t really care that she’s dead and there’s no reason for anyone who didn’t know her personally to care either. If you want to weep for dead people, pick worthier dead people. There’s no shortage of them, and she certainly wouldn’t have wept for you.

Since you brought it up, she gets no bonus points in my view, for successfully delivering her own children into a life of luxury, whilst unemployed, with only her servants, private boarding schools and huge piles of money to help. Failing at that would have been almost impressive.

How did you ascertain what significance it holds for most people?

Do many people have a viewpoint exactly identical in every respect to the one I expressed? Probably not.

Do many people agree with the broad gist of what I said? Almost certainly.

Are those people a global majority? Who cares?

Vitriol aside, I think the meat and potatoes of my post was that people should strongly reject herd-mentality. Do you see any irony in your responding that I’m in a minority?

A completely personal aside: the news of her death interrupted a cozy weekend with the woman I would shortly marry; the 20th anniversary of it will likely come just as that marriage ends. I’m sure there’s something cosmic to be read into that, but I have no idea what.

Are you John Cleese? :smiley:

i went to paris in april 1998, 18 mos after the accident and there was still a shrine at the opening to the tunnel where it happened. it was still a big deal, and this was france, a country notorious for its disdain for all things english. so starting the memorials and tributes for the twentieth anniv a few months early in anglophile countries such as canada and usa is no that surprising to me.

mc

Elton John was knighted for his services to British pop music and for raising money for AIDS charities. It had nothing to do with his memorial song for Diana. In any case, he and Diana were good friends, and he rewrote the song to honor her.

I was never caught up in the Diana fandom, but I see zero evidence that she set out to catch a rich or royal husband, or that she ever behaved in a mercenary way. I suggest that people who believe that about her watch some of her early interviews around the engagement and wedding. Maybe she was a terrific actress and it was all just a big con, but all I saw was a shy woman caught up in something bigger and more complex than she could handle.