Word: dianas
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None of the year's mass responses could hold a candle in scope and complexity to the astonishing grief inspired by Princess Diana's car-accident death, of course. (There were even spin-off mass responses of rage toward the paparazzi, who trailed her car into the Paris tunnel, and of generosity toward the charities the princess sponsored.) But other major displays of widespread feeling occurred in the sorrow at the death of Mother Teresa, the anger at both verdicts in the Boston "au pair trial" of Louise Woodward, and the celebration at the birth of the McCaughey septuplets...
...that these events did not merit genuine interest and concern or that there were no valid reasons for the emotional expressions that followed them. But these responses seemed so much more dramatic than usual, and so determinedly public. What was not openly displayed was deemed not to exist. When Diana died, the traditionally stiff-upper-lipped royal family was exhorted by placards to SHOW US YOU CARE...
...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...