The original song was being played “everywhere” in the week after she died. People felt it was the closest expression of how they felt at the time irrc Elton was encouraged to do the rewrite. I got really sick of hearing it!
One incident I remember that seemed to encapsulate the falsity of the mawkish way a lot of people were behaving. There was a memorial book in a local supermarket. i saw a woman sat at the table with a deep in thought face as she tried to write something to express hersorrow. Now remember that there was much talk about how wonderful Diana was to her children, how she introduced a new warmth into the way royal children were brought up? This lady not so much. Her little girl tried to get her attention and was snarled at for interrupting her mother’s recreational grief. I kind of wanted to say “What would Princess Di say?”
Just in the interest of fighting ignorance and all that, it was Bernie Taupin, not Elton John, who rewrote the lyrics. Elton has essentially never written lyrics and always works with co-writers. But you are completely correct about his knighthood, and even if it was “just” for playing the song live at the funeral I would feel it completely justified, as having that kind of composure in front of 2.5 billion people when your friend has just died is certainly to be commended.
Personally, I always was of the opinion that if she had been bucktoothed and shapeless with frizzy hair, no one would have cared whether she lived or died.
I’m amazed at how quickly time has passed. I remember I was on a boat in the middle of a lake with my extended family when we heard the tail end of the news report on the radio. We were all shocked, of course, as most people are when people die young. I remember watching her funeral.
I don’t think that she was all that bright or remarkable a woman apart from the fact that she was married to a royal. But her lack of polish and stiff upper lip made her a more sympathetic figure to a lot of people. And being lovely and photogenic didn’t hurt.
Today is 72 years since VE Day. Nobody cares.
This summer, just about now, is ten years since the bank scandal started (depending how you count).
It is also fifteen years since East Timor became independent.
Time flies.
As pointed out before she died and a few times afterwards, you can see that she was going to be one ugly, hatchet-faced older woman. Don’t look at the carefully posed portraits or the “curated”* casual photos - look at the ones where she’s caught unposed in 3/4 profile or so. She was not going to age well, even with BritRoyal-level help all the way.
Which makes no difference at all except to those who are still swooning over her lost beauty. It would be fading by now anyway.
Using my eyes and ears. There is little or no evidence, at this distance of time, of her simply mattering that much to the vast majority of people to justify your apocalyptic view of her significance.
My point was not whether your view might or might not be a minority one, but rather that it’s so overheated as to say far more about you than you appear to think it says about a relative footnote in the passing show.
I’m overly fond of hyperbole at times and have even been known to conflate arguing more strongly with arguing more persuasively. That said, I think you’re underestimating the resentment a lot of people feel about being told what to think by the least thoughtful among us in the name of patriotism.
I stand by the idea that there is a slave-mentality evident in many people, that the whole Diana phenomenon both fueled it and fed off it and that is one of the worst things about us as a species. I can’t truthfully deny your suggestion that my assessment was not based on a dispassionate appraisal of the situation, nor do I make any apologies for having a personal, human, emotional reaction to the whole thing. I lived through it. It was super creepy. Virtually every media outlet was effectively shut down overnight and replaced with wall-to-wall, nauseating propaganda and it went on for far too long. Countervailing voices, or even those judged insufficiently reverent, were almost entirely removed from public discourse. (I was still at school at the time and remember being reported to the Headmaster for saying “I don’t care” when another student asked me about it. I was threatened with suspension.)
Maybe it’s not a big deal so long after the event, but I don’t feel like anything’s changed. I think the same stupid thing will happen when the old woman with the shiny hat dies and for the same idiotic reasons. So I do have strong feelings about it, and it’s because I really don’t want anything like that to happen again. I want people to have a little more dignity and respond with outrage to being told that some other ape is a queen, or a lord or a princess among apes just because that’s the way it is and there’s nothing you can do about it. That whole attitude just makes me want to shake people and tell them that they don’t have to accept that sort of bollocks anymore, on account of it’s not the thirteenth century.
Nor do I think it’s just an irrelevant distraction like the Kardashians. There is in my experience a near perfect correlation between those people who are quickest to doff their hats to a toff, or who get misty eyed when “God Save the Queen” strikes up and people who consider the Daily Mail “news” and think there are too many brown people in the country. I contend that this overlap is not a coincidence. They are all manifestations of the same underlying attitudinal set. They’re happy to be near to the bottom of the ladder, as long as there’s someone lower still to crap on. They don’t mind the steady patter of effluent hitting them from above, as long as it hits those below the hardest.
So I don’t think it’s just a footnote in the passing show, it’s one particularly stark example in a seriously unpleasant, ongoing situation.
I’m sorry she died the way she did. She may not have been the sharpest knife in the drawer, but she seemed nice, to the public at least. The poor girl was in love with being in love when she married Charles, and I think she and her memory were badly treated.
Fergie might have been a 9/11 victim if the planes had struck an hour later. She was scheduled to attend a board meeting at a company that lost quite a few employees.
Perhaps, but that’s water off a duck’s back to me. The stupid, and the herd mentality, are always with us.
So was I, and I don’t disagree with you. I’m sorry if the herd mentality nearly had such adverse consequences for you: I was lucky enough to be in an environment where most people shared my bemusement.
See above: the human race will never be perfect, but these sorts of things do tend to pass.
I’d been at work for maybe an hour when my coworker rushed in screaming that Diana had been in an accident and was DOA. I did the mouth-hanging-open-whaaaaaat? thing while she repeated it a couple of times. Our manager turned on the all-news radio station and put it on the loudspeaker so we could hear the report.
First thing I thought of – and I’m sure most people also thought – was, “OMG, those poor boys…”
Compared to other royals, there was something relatable about Diana which had a lot to do with her popularity. Think of her what you will but nobody can deny that she raised her sons to be thoughtful, decent men.
