Important humanitarian work gives reason for Diana's tribute

The death of Princess Diana in a horrific car crash in Paris came as a very upsetting shock to me, as I am sure it did to many of you. No one who watched that glittering marriage on TV all those years ago-how young and innocent Diana looked then-could ever have imagined that it would come to this: dying in Paris in a car with a new playboy boyfriend, away from her family, attempting to escape from the press. Our first thoughts, of course, go immediately to her sons, now completely in the hands of the Queen and Prince Charles (the man who declared that he had never loved Diana). Hopefully, something of her will survive in them.

Premature reports that the crash was caused by paparazzi on motorcycles chasing the Mercedes in which she and her boyfriend, Dodi, were trying to escape, as well as reports that the paparazzi had clustered around the wreck taking shots of the bodies instead of helping anybody, prompted a media-fest on the extremely invasive techniques of today's tabloid photographers and their general lack of any semblance of humanity. (Somebody even compared them to lawyers). But this media-fest on 'how terrible the media is' was a wonderful example of that favorite philosophical put-down-a contradiction in terms. Listening to them devote entire programs to the question of whether or not the media are overly interested in celebrities, and watching them debate the ethics of sleazy tabloid journalism as they gleefully show edited sequences of the juiciest of those peeping-tom shots, prompted me to emit a weary "Media commentator, know thyself."

The worst, and most hilarious, moment of all came when they rolled in John Travolta as an expert on Princess Diana. Travolta had once danced with Princess Diana for ten minutes, in the White House, at Reagan's invitation. On that rather slim basis, he came on to the show to say how sad he felt for the family, and to tell Prince Charles that he was "there for him, 24 hours a day." I can just imagine how grateful Prince Charles will be when he hears this, and how quickly he will rush to the phone to call his bosom buddy.

In fact, it was Clinton, of all people, who struck the right note when he said that we shouldn't be talking about the paparazzi at all but should be thinking about Diana and her important work for humanitarian causes, such as her campaign for a complete ban on landmines. The fact that messages of condolence poured in from just about every country in the world-a sour note was struck by the state television of Islamic Iran, who announced that "One of the elements of moral disgrace in the British court has been killed in a car accident in France"-demonstrates that Diana was loved by an extremely wide and varied group of people. The leaders of African and Asian countries, for example, were among the first to make public pronouncements about how wonderfully warm she was as a person.

In Britain the queues to sign the ever-increasing number of books of condolences (now at forty-three), and the enormous, brilliant mountain of flowers at Kensington Palace, told us what we in Ireland always knew anyhow: that people loved Diana far more than the rest of that rotting pile of aristocracy. Many of us still remember Diana as the first royal-when she was a royal-to shake hands with someone who was suffering from AIDS. Note that I said shake hands, not gloves. Buckingham Palace was extremely nervous about her doing this and wanted her to wear gloves; but she was having none of it. In a manner similar to my own country's President Mary Robinson, she represented the feminization of power. Diana was always the one who, in the midst of a room full of men in stuffed shirts, would shake hands with women (for they would be women) serving the tea. The fact that the Queen was forced by public pressure to come out of her retreat in Balmoral and provide some evidence as to her having any feelings at all about Diana's death is a sign of how much the public sided with Diana against that crowd of stone faces. It is, I think, something unprecedented in the history of the royal family.

Diana could not receive a royal funeral, insofar as she was not a Royal. She did not receive a state funeral either (thank God-a bunch of politicians on a photo opportunity). She received a "people's funeral," in virtue of her being what Tony Blair quite rightly called a "people's princess," something which the rest of them will never be. My sister was among the million-plus mourners along the route. I wish I could have been be there too.

James Mahon is a third-year graduate student in philosophy.