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Gail Holst-Warhaft, The Cue for Passion: Grief and Its Political Uses. Harvard University Press, 2000.
What Walt Whitman called "the tolling tolling bells' perpetual clang" was heard world-wide in September 1997, as the funeral cortege of Diana, Princess of Wales, passed solemnly through the flower-banked streets of London. A few weeks later, describing what he scornfully called "the kitsch of the Diana shrines," Adam Gopnik exclaimed in a New Yorker essay entitled "Crazy Piety" that "for two weeks good gray London took on the look of Lourdes or Fatima, with vast heaps of floral bouquets and honey-colored Teddy bears and handscrawled messages that seemed less like funeral tributes than like the contents of some vast pinata, filled with party favors, that someone had broken above" the city. And indeed, as most of the millions who watched will also recall, the princess's funeral ceremony itself was marked by a similarly odd concatenation of the traditional and the trivial, craziness and piety, sentimentality and solemnity: Anglican ritual and Elton John, the grave words of the King James bible and the souped-up warble of the American bible belt echoed through Westminster Abbey like radio frequencies colliding in the stratosphere. If Diana herself was half a jetsetting single mom and half a populist madonna, her death-taken as a representative symbolic as well as literal experience of lossilluminated the ambiguities of modern procedures for grieving.
"Brightness falls from the air/Queens have died young and fair," lamented Thomas Nashe in the 1590s, and "Goodbye England's rose.... This torch we'll always carry / For our nation's golden child," crooned Elton John, recycling not Nashe's poem but his own slightly earlier tribute to another queen who died young and fair-Marilyn Monroe-as he produced what was to become one of the hits of the decade. Well, harumphed Gopnik, in the excesses of the princess's funeral, which was "in many ways a triumph of the popular, intuitive version of the Old Religion [i.e., Roman Catholicism] it was possible to discern a glimmer of religious feeling, of a very traditional kind."1 His grudging concession-followed by an ill-tempered comment that poor Mother Teresa was the "Groucho Marx of grief ([since] Groucho, as nobody any longer remembers, died three days after Elvis)"-reiterates the central question posed by...