_______________ST. DIANA BY LLEWELLYN H. ROCKWELL JR. (09/23/97)
	Holy handful-of-insights buried in an avalanche-of-idiocies! (Move over, Camille Paglia.) I've seen any number of attempts from the "ism"-addicted class to torture the life and death of Diana into their various Big Pictures, but I've gotta say "St. Diana" takes the cake for sheer, goofy ambition. And while rightly denouncing the clueless (and transparently envious) windbaggery of the National Review/WSJ crowd, Rockwell goes merrily on to pay them the highest compliment, that of emulation -- not of the bitchery, but the blindness. The extraordinary worldwide love for Diana, you see, was rooted in things far more profound than mere love or mere Diana. These include: the supremacy of the Christian religion; the righteousness of "natural elites"; and the utter bankruptcy of egalitarianism, secularism, leftism, feminism and "political correctness." (What, no Panama Canal treaties?) Thus when people around the world got the news of Diana's death, their sorrow came not from honest feeling toward an actual human being, but from things like "love of the natural elite," and "attachment to traditional standards of beauty and faith." Now, perhaps Mr. Rockwell and his fellow abstractionizers really do feel their own deepest emotions over a "standard"; maybe they really do weep more over a "value" than a loved one. Clearly they cannot even conceive of the word "love" stripped of ideological or religious frameworks; such a concept must feel more foreign and more intolerable than even, say, leftism or historical egalitarianism. And what indeed of Rockwell's strange "natural elite" melange itself, deliberately blurring all distinction between apples of accidental birth-privilege and oranges of personal attainment? But enough of muddle-headedness; it simply abounds. Let's move on to flat-out offensiveness. Consider the breathtakingly unself-conscious arrogance of the following: "Conservatives object that Diana lived a life of sin. That's obvious enough from the unseemly circumstances of her death." Well, forgive me, but I'm a moron. Could someone clarify what precise "unseemly circumstances" prove said "obvious" life of sin? (Dining at the Ritz? Falling in love with another human being? Not wearing a seat belt? Trusting a professional driver not to slam her into a concrete pillar at 120 kph? Being a single mom?) More repugnant yet are such blithe assertions as "the whole point" of Diana's affair with "the immigrant Dodi Fayed" (a descriptive that speaks volumes in its polite viciousness) was to irk the royal family. Such attempts to reduce the contents of a human life and heart to mere doll-like machination, again, reveal far more of Rockwell's own cynicism and shallowness than any he would seek to pin on his subject. I suspect the reason pundits are so out of their depth on "the Diana phenomenon" is that it boils down, in truth, to only two things, both of which will be forever inexplicable: love, and Diana. Fairy-tale princesses, stylish women, aristocrats -- all have come and gone by the hundreds and thousands, and will continue to do so, and not one will claim the love of billions of people, let alone inspire one of the most amazing events of a century. The Llewellyn Rockwells can chalk up "the Diana phenomenon" to fairy tales, myths and -isms all they like (and boy, do they like). But any of several billion ordinary schmucks all over the planet could clue him in on its real reason: It was her. And as for her life and death validating "natural elites," let's ask ourselves whom Diana -- both the titled entity and the person -- most finally resembled: royals like Rainier of Monaco and Elizabeth II of England, or that liberal egalitarian punk Beethoven, regularly given to thundering pronouncements such as "My nobility is here and here!" pointing in turn to his head and his heart. -- Susan Sharp

R E C E N T L Y+| An ugly shade of green by David Bacon

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