Word: fame
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This was the crisis of "We are the World" fame, a strange mix of starving children and weepy rock stars. "We are the World" is what we expect of a famine. We know how to deal with it, how to be sad, how to give our nickels and dimes...
...moment examine the nature of Diana's fame. One might call it a collateral celebrity, because it relied on no discernible contribution (except to the gaiety, and now the grief, of nations). Lady Diana Spencer attracted the love of the introverted heir to the English throne. And that was all. Brightness of eye, whiteness of tooth, a colluding smile, a certain transparency, a vividness, an exposed vulnerability: it was enough for him, and it was enough for us. Madonna sings. Grace Kelly acted. Diana simply breathed. She was a social-page figure who became a cover girl. One can soberly...
Diana could touch and feel; perhaps she believed she could heal. Watching her on television, jolting with tears as she listened to a speech praising and defending her work, one saw signs of an almost delusional inner drama. If power corrupts the self, then absolute fame must surely distort it. Her enthusiasms were crankish, hypochondriac, self-obsessive: aromatherapy, colonic irrigation, the fool's gold of astrology. Diana, I repeat, was "soft" news. She caused sensations by wearing a party dress or by gaining a kilo of weight. She made headlines with every wave of her hand, every twitch...
...iconography of the crash, alongside James Dean, Jayne Mansfield and Princess Grace. These other victims, however, died unpursued. They weren't fleeing the pointed end of their own celebrity: men on motorcycles with computerized cameras and satellite-linked mobile phones. The paparazzi are the high-tech dogs of fame. But it must be admitted that we sent them into that tunnel, to nourish our own mysterious needs...
...years of her life, no cameras followed her when she bent down in the wretched streets of Calcutta to take dying people in her arms or when she touched the open wounds of the poor, the despondent, the discarded and alone. When the Nobel Committee blasted her with fame, she had already written most of the tale of her life, which was without much plot, was propelled by a main character who never changed direction, yet had a great theme. The end of Mother Teresa's story is not the end of her order's work, which is one reason...