Word: dianas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...society whose professed virtues were once those of duty, honor and discretion become a place of in-it-for-myself, let-it-all-hang-out emoting? Step forward those two women whose influence, combined - though one suspects they loathed each other - shaped a nation: Margaret Thatcher and Princess Diana...
...Diana's contribution was just as subversive of the old Britain. In her later life - through the hugs, the tears, the riveting BBC interview of 1995 - and even more in her death, the Princess of Wales turned traditional British values on their head. It was all right to cry! It was bad to suffer in silence, repress your emotions, say, "Steady on, old girl," and generally act in a tight spot like Trevor Howard on the train platform at the end of Brief Encounter. In today's remake, Howard would be bawling like a baby; or - as we now know...
...here's the uncomfortable truth. Britain needed both Thatcher and Diana. Its old institutions were indeed rotten; its disdain for trade, for market values, was indeed debilitating, and condemned generations of Britons to stunted life chances. Britain's traditional masculine values of the stiff upper lip and "mustn't grumble" did indeed breed emotional cripples, unable to appreciate the heights - or handle the depths - of human experience...
...would have done no more in captivity than suck on a pipe while dressed in a peacoat; would have just muttered, "Hello sir, glad to be back," when released, was not in most ways a better place than the insanely meritocratic, undeferential, deinstitutionalized Britain that Thatcher and Princess Diana unleashed. Every so often, however, Britons should be allowed to look back at that older nation - and mourn its passing...
...Hamburger said that opponents to the amendment feared a history “interest group.” One of the opponents, Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society Diana L. Eck, said, “It gradually would become the history category... Culture and Belief is broader than that...