Victory Soap v. 2.0

Good grief. I'm sitting here listening to the oldies station, and an announcement comes on: the Lifetime channel is going to feature a movie called "The Murder of Princess Diana." No, it's not a parody, either. I'll bet you the Lifetime demographic will eat it up too.

I never could get the fascination with the whole Diana thing. For some reason my Anglophilia didn't extend to the British monarchy, which just bored me. If you ask me the British royals haven't been interesting since 1066. I'm a true atavist -- I can identify with dour Anglo-Saxons in their drafty mead halls, and even, just a bit, the theological obsessions of the High Middle Ages, but the velvet-robed political maneuvering and matrimonial inbreeding that came after that just leaves me cold. However, most of my fellow Americans, at least the distaff side, disagreed with me, and in the early 80s everywhere you looked (that wasn't at me) women were sporting that shiny golden Diana helmet hairdo. True story: I went to a party in, I think, 1985, being held at the home of one of my coworkers. I entered her house to be stopped dead in my tracks by the sight of an entire wall devoted to Diana: 8x10 photos, books, commemorative figurines of the marriage... "I'm kind of obsessed by her" the coworker said frankly.

But I don't get it. I never did. Diana wasn't even the sort of British woman who interested me -- she was blond and bland, and gave off that air of "preppy" which at the time was anathema to budding alterna-goth me. I found her boring, and just as I couldn't figure out what was so fascinating about the blond, healthy, ordinary tribunal of popular kids who stood at the top of my high school's social hierarchy, I couldn't figure out what made this vanilla creature so worthy of obsession. If you ask me her manner of death was the only really interesting thing that she "gave," if you will, to the world -- and it was just a common traffic accident after all. Perhaps that is why so many of her "fans" really wish there had been something more to her death, and therefore make up ridiculous conspiracy theories about it -- even they sense that there wasn't anything all that fascinating after all about their hobbyhorse.

Anyway, I'm here at home due to one of those stomach bugs (I've lost three pounds in the last two days), and still hitching a ride on someone's unencrypted wireless. I can't wait to get my own connection, though -- this one keeps dropping.

Update: after thinking about it I should rather say that I don't so much identify with the Anglo-Saxons of eld as I am stirred by them, or rather the thought of them, while the well-worm pomposity of latter day British Royal ceremonies rather bores me. Still, Beefeaters and Buckingham Palace and all of it beat the crassness and flatness of most of our modern, "hang loose" way of life. Diana and her Peoples' Princess shtick contributed much towards the grinding down of Western civilization into a gray paste of multiculturalism, which was even more of a turnoff to me than her upper-crust blandness; if she'd just been an arrogant bitch who never let the commoners forget their place she would have been much more interesting. Instead we have to go to actresses and models for imitation high-class tantrums, and as such people tend to be low-class they can't get it quite right.