Word: dianas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...years on, there is still something dreamlike about the week that followed the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Was central London really carpeted with flowers? Did every U.S. TV network throw out its schedule to cover, at length, the funeral of an English divorcé of uncertain prospects? Did the most levelheaded folk you know choke up about 10 times that week, snuffling into their tissues, "I can't imagine why it's gotten to me so much...
...they probably did. To be sure, quite soon after Diana's death, a school of thought argued that the raw hugs-and-tears emotionalism of her funeral was an embarrassing aberration, a fake sentiment tricked up by the mass media, keen for a good end-of-summer story. But that's not a line that convinces. The memories are too real for that, the significance of them too apparent...
...Diana's funeral week, what had been considered the virtues--the Roman virtues, an earlier generation would have called them--of restraint, stoicism and quiet, private mourning were tossed overboard. For Diana, you were allowed public gestures and declamations usually reserved for the final act of an Italian opera. That this happened in Britain of all places--home of the stiff upper lip and the sort of strangulated emotional life that has provided Hugh Grant with endless paychecks--only added to the oddity of the events. Those in other nations who thought they knew the British wondered what sort...
...modern, undeferential Britain that celebrated Diana as a rebel against authority, scandalizing those who still clung to Victorian ideas of order. Tony Blair, a new Prime Minister in September 1997, instantly understood what was going on and, by eulogizing Diana as the "people's princess," skillfully aligned himself with the politics of emotion. It was that sort of time--one when politicians proved their authenticity not just by being in touch with their (and your) feelings, but also by telling you until you were sick of it just how in touch with their bloody feelings they were. Less than...
...thought modern Britain showed the best of itself in the week after Diana died: a feeling and a compassion and an openness to emotional expression that it had for too long kept bottled up. But perhaps--as stock markets stumble and wars drag on--these are sterner times than the mid-1990s, ones when the virtues of reason, reserve and order become apparent. You can't fuel a society on flowers alone...