It’s hard to know where to begin with Newsweek‘s spectacularly tasteless “Diana at 50” cover, which has the People’s Princess artificially aged and somewhat messily photoshopped next to a picture of Kate Middleton. Is it genius? Is it satire? Is it just a right old horlicks?
“If she were here now,” is the wistful coverline plugging a feature by Tina Brown. If she were now, what would she think? Presumably, she wouldn’t be thinking: “What the fuck have they done, mucking around with an old picture of me like that?” because they wouldn’t have to. If she were here now, I like to think Diana would be hiding away in a bunker somewhere from the cavalcade of manky old tat being written about “DIANA AT 50”, thinking: “Oh please, make it stop, make it stop. Why can’t they pick on someone else for once?”
Actually, that’s not fair. My hope is that if Diana were still alive, she wouldn’t be as hounded nowadays as she was when she was alive. Even for those of us who don’t like royalty, privilege and all it stands for, I think there was something human and kindly about her, the way in which she decontaminated subjects like AIDS or used her enormous fame to bring public notice to issues such as landmines; there was something decent and dignified about the Pestered Princess. Something much more dignified and decent than the kind of people still feasting on her legacy all these years later.
Well, you be the judge. The article is here, and there’s even a page on what Diana’s Facebook would be like (friends with Jo Rowling and Rafa Nadal! Messages on her wall from Sarah Ferguson and Deepak Chopra!) if she hadn’t been killed in 1997.
Oh, what would she have made of Twitter and Facebook? What would she have made of blogging, one wonders? Well, we shall never know. She’s dead. Why speculate? She’s dead. No amount of dancing on her grave will bring her back to life or let us know the things we never found out, those tiny corners of a very public life that somehow remained private. Now it’s 50… next it will be 60… and so on, and so on, until the very last essence is wrung dry.
Just as with Vanity Fair‘s rather unpleasant ‘Imagine if John Lennon were still alive’ supposed tribute article of last year, this kind of thing is a bit grubby, a bit undignified, a bit demeaning for the author as much as for the poor victim. The photo appears to be of Kate Middleton at the wedding of Sam Waley-Cohen, with the Diana-alike crudely splodged next to her. Subtle, it ain’t. But then I suppose that’s the whole point: create a bit of a stir, get more attention for what you’re doing. It’s all part of the show.
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