Word: diana
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...critic Elaine Showalter exposes the enormous harm done by the recovered-memory syndrome as it was applied to everything from multiple personalities to intrafamilial sex-abuse cases, in which abuses "remembered" never occurred. Showalter also notes that hysterias tend to produce scapegoats, which was borne out by the Princess Diana paparazzi hunt. As gratifying as it may have been for people to find a target of blame, most journalists recognize that the difference between the paparazzi and legitimate news photographers is roughly...
...been swept up in a popular moment that it ought to have dissected or belittled, and so then it did, in an effort to cleanse itself of having dealt with the sort of news that makes reporters squirm--the news of feeling. Yet this is what the response to Diana's death was, and it might have been wiser to take it at face value...
With no glaring cause to display mass emotions, anything that happened could qualify. Behold the responses to the death of Mother Teresa, the birth of the McCaughey seven, the au pair trial and, most amazingly, Diana. The public reaction to the septuplets might have been the same in any era; there is always something enchanting and heartwarming about human beings' doing something odd, like producing a litter. Likewise, the loss of so demonstrably selfless a person as Mother Teresa might effect a mass response in any year...
...said at the time that women especially identified with Diana, and that that accounted for the volume of the mourning. Every woman mistreated by a man--that is, every woman--could relate to moments in Diana's life that should have led to bliss and instead wound up in sorrow, humiliation and estrangement. Never mind that hers was a particular story wholly out of reach of common comprehension; it was easily translated to bad marriages and cold in-laws everywhere...
...explained the mass sadness, why were all the men weeping? And why were Americans weeping--we who could not care less about Britain's monarchy except in quaint memories of the literature of Kings and Queens? It may be simply that people make gods of selected celebrities and that Diana had to die to achieve godhead. Then, like Elvis, she became accessible after death; the public could leave flowers and personal messages at the gate of the Spencers' country estate, her Graceland...