I'm from the US, and therefore rather distant from the implications and effects of a monarchy, but I was startled and saddened when I first heard the news about Diana. I don't participate much in popular culture; I usually have my nose in a book rather than watch TV, so a lot of my reactions to the event and the subsequent panoply and theatrics feel more like an anthropologist examining a foreign culture.

It seems that all through history, the powers-that-be have appeased "the masses" by offering them bread and circuses involving the public execution or torture of animals or people, from the gladiators of the Roman Empire, through the delights of bear-baitings, public hangings and auto-da-fés. These days our public immolations tend to involve on-the-air humiliation and exposure, either with the consent of the victims on the TV and radio confessional/call-in shows, or by the violent abuses of the tabloids, papparazzi and TV shows featuring attack journalism. Today I heard a radio ad for a new television show featuring "A REAL judge with REAL Court cases, with REAL people!" Here in the US, we are even turning our pathetic excuse for a justice system into a form of public entertainment, although we haven't taken the final step back to the display of public executions - yet. The lines between "celebrity", entertainment, gossip and the more vicious trends I'm describing are becoming very blurred.

It is sad that so many people feel their own lives are so meaningless that they create a market for living vicariously through the lives of "Celebrities". These "public" figures are created by a combination of the avarice of the media which feature them and the people who want them to embody all their fantasies about wealth, lust, power and all the other underlying symbols of a traditional fairy tale.

As long as people with very little money and no power are kept amused by the illusions of things they can never grasp, they won't pose a danger to the people who have them; except for the few of the upper echelon who are ritually sacrificed to appease the hungers of the hoi-polloi. The fact that this phenomenon is nothing new is more depressing than comforting to me. The frenzied publicity surrounding Diana's life and death seems to illustrate just how bankrupt our sense of "entertainment" really is. Sorry to be so depressing, but I can't really can't feel any inspirational lift from an internationally shared experience which seemed carefully crafted to appeal to a need for communal wallowing in a mixture of guilt and delight in the rich theatrics of a royal funeral.