A Week Of Sheer Fakery

WITHIN HOURS OF THE DEATH OF PRINCESS Diana, two unfailing fountains of banalities and bromides had been heard from. President Clinton, whose gift for self-absorption has a kind of grandeur, interrupted his vacation to deliver a bulletin on his inner life, making a statement in which he talked about his feelings and his wife's feelings and, oh yes, the Princess. Several Sunday afternoon football announcers took advantage of a pause in the play to note that Diana had been ""a hero.'' These leading indicators of cultural froth clearly indicated the beginning of a bull market in bathos.

The media were already revved up in Marathon Grief mode. Television networks were trying, as it were, to bite their lower lips, emulating the president's preferred manner for advertising his very solemnest sincerity. Early in this century a wit defined a newspaper as a device incapable of distinguishing between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization. At the century's end we have mass media with wondrous capacities for subtracting from understanding by adding to the public's inclination for self-deception and autointoxication.

By turning everyone everywhere into bystanders at events, and by eliciting and amplifying their ""feelings,'' the media turn the world into an echo chamber and establish for the promptable masses the appropriate ""reaction'' to events. Mass hysteria is a riveting spectacle, whether it occurs at a Nuremberg rally or a rock concert. It is nonetheless hysteria when muted in the form of mass lugubriousness, but at least a funeral-as-rally is, unlike a Nuremberg rally, revolting without being a prelude to anything evil--or anything at all. Because the media are part of this story, they are missing the news, which is:

Evidently many scores of millions of people lead lives of such anesthetizing boredom, emotional aridity and felt insignificance that they relish any opportunity for vicarious involvement in large events. And Princess Diana's death has been a large event precisely and only because the public, in a spontaneous act of mass parasitism, has fastened onto the event for the catharsis of emotional exhibitionism.

Even by the standards of today's confessional culture, people certainly have been remarkably ""sharing'' with their ""feelings'' about Diana. They have been sharing them with strangers, and their feelings have been about the death of a stranger who, they say, although she never made laws or poetry or shoes or butter, nevertheless ""made a difference'' and mattered to them more than they knew until she died. The media have been more than merely dutiful in reporting on the ""grief'' from which millions have been ""suffering.'' Listening to language used this way is like watching an infant play with a Steuben vase.

During the 1979 malfunction at Three Mile Island nuclear plant, a hyperventilating journalist on TV referred to the event--no deaths; no public-health impact--as a ""catastrophe.'' Viewers were left to wonder what words remained to describe, say, war. The premature death of any young mother is, of course, sad. But when it is the celebrity of the deceased that triggers behavior that gets identified as ""grief'' and ""suffering,'' what words remain to describe what occurs in, say, a pediatric oncology ward?

It is unclear how individuals, let alone clumps of millions, grieve and suffer for a celebrity stranger whose death illustrates the Law of Inverse Ratio Rhetoric. The law is: hyperbole about a deceased person expands to fill the vacuum of the person's substantive significance. Diana evidently was what she appeared to be, eager to use for social betterment the celebrity that came from her marriage. But that virtue does not begin to explain why people stood in line all night for the opportunity to jot their thoughts about Diana in a book at St. James's Palace, or why people left flowers at the British Embassy on Washington's Massachusetts Avenue.

Such people were clutching at the flying coattails of history. And so for the world, or at least the wired world of the North Atlantic community, last week was deeply pleasurable, even exhilarating.

All the world's a stage--well, a television studio--and those who join a mass grieving become bit players, briefly able to exclaim, ""History has happened to me, personally!'' The North Atlantic community consists of societies in which scarcities of food, shelter and clothing have been banished. But material abundance may make certain other scarcities more chafing, particularly the scarcities of power and, if not celebrity, at least recognition. This may partially explain another current form of mass irrationality, the epidemic of aggressive driving. One theory, unprovable but plausible, is that this epidemic is a welling-up of brutish assertiveness on the part of people who lead lives of quiet exasperation in the anonymity of bureaucracies.

The fact that supposedly mature societies can be so fixated on royalty suggests just how lightly childishness sleeps, when it sleeps, in such societies. It is perhaps unjust, but poetic justice, that the ramshackle House of Windsor is being faulted for exhibiting insufficient passion in the current grieving sweepstakes. Critics wonder if the royal family is emotionally crippled and out of touch. Do you suppose?

Members of that family are isolated from birth on, cosseted in unearned luxury, bereft of even a family memory of productive labor, and forbidden to utter in public virtually any serious thought. And people wonder why, when the wind rises, the Windsors want to go to earth in Scotland.

If there is any comfort for sensible people to take from the amazing amount of sheer fakery last week, it is that the British public seems to have cast a semiconscious vote against the royal family's seedy style of fantasy and for another--""the people's princess,'' which fortunately is an oxymoron that must ultimately be subversive of the infantile idea of royalty. As for the American public, its healthiest reaction now would be chagrin akin to a hangover. That would be condign punishment for becoming inebriated with a spectacle both empty and degrading.