Dead Glitterati

There are two people – perhaps more, but two come immediately to mind – who in my lifetime have been deified without sense or reason.

Diana, Princess of Wales by virtue of having married royalty, is one. John Fitzgerald Kennedy is the other. They share much. Both were promiscuous and excused for it. Both accomplished little or nothing in their lifetimes. Both gained their greatest fame in dying, and though tragic, neither were their deaths heroic. The manner of each death supports a substantial cottage industry.

There are television specials, endless investigations and commissions, coffee table books, interviews with vacuous offspring, concerts, chapel services, and Candles in the Wind. (Even that maudlin song was written for Marilyn Monroe, not Diana.) None of this nonsense would mean anything nor make any difference if it didn’t have the effect of pushing aside real accomplishment in favor of the faux. Diana the philanthropist. Her giving and support of charities – six in total – pales in comparison to the hundreds in which the British royal family is involved. Ah, but she made it personal. That is, made it public and self aggrandizing. For the Princess we’re supposed to accept that as a great virtue. Sadly most, even in Britain, will remember Diana over Winston Churchill, Nelson, and Wellington.

Kennedy didn’t start school desegregation, Dwight D. Eisenhower did. His administration didn’t pass landmark civil rights law or legislate the Great Society, his successor, Lyndon Johnson, did. JFK and his brother did, however, order the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem, the President of South Vietnam, putting this county irrevocably on the path to disaster in Southeast Asia.

You won’t find any explanation of these post mortem coronations here. I’ve written about my heroes. They were loved and are missed, but are not worshiped.

Today there was a memorial service for Diana in the Guards Chapel, St. James park. The important and self important were there. For some – family and friends – we shouldn't and don't begrudge real grief. For many others they are there only to see and be seen; as false as the conspiracy theories and tell-all biographies.

Better if those in attendance would remember another event that occurred exactly where they sat and were seen tonight. At 11:00 in the morning on 18 June 1944, the first weekend of rocket attacks on London, a German V-1 struck the Guards Chapel. 121 soldiers and civilians were killed, buried so deeply under rubble of the building that it took two days to dig them out. Such events give us the perspective required to understand the world around us. Our dead glitterati contribute to no useful understanding at all.