Where were you when news Lady Diana died?

I was in a bar with my friend P. The kind of bar with a bar TV... an old pre-remote black and white with big dial knobs and tinfoil rabbit ears, that sits ON the bar, in the corner, near the bartender, who--it is never said but a moron could intuit--has the only vote on the choice of channel. You don't even ask. This isn't a democracy. What are you stupid? You don't get free peanuts and you don't touch the f'ing teevee, now drink up. That kind of bar.

When the news broke into the (very enjoyable, thanks to my third gimlet) episode of Matlock we had been watching, they would only say she'd been in a car accident and had been taken to the hospital. Then, Kennedy-style, they spent hours repeating "there is no new word on her condition" while the hospital and the family came up with a proper press-friendly way to announce what we all knew to be true: she had died in the accident. During the wait the news outlets ran out of new and interesting ways to repeat the details of a simple car wreck over and over, grew tired of the footage of the accident scene and interviews with local first-responders, and moved on to filling the void with conjecture--on our bartender's channel of choice, trying to somehow connect or place the blame for the lilly-white princesses, well, death, on her swarthy middle-eastern lovah. There was a good two more drinks worth of that before I went home. Had the gimlets not dulled my sharp nose for utter (yet historical) horse shit, I may have been able to truly enjoy bearing witness to the birth of our current 24 hour news programming: hours and hours filled with factless, contentless, unreliable, totally baseless opinions made by people whose only credentials are that they are moderately attractive and can talk without a discernible accent.

When I got up the next, um, afternoon, all regularly scheduled programming was still being interrupted for the coverage of Diana's (by then official) death. While I slept the blame had been shifted from someone out to get her boyfriend Dodi Fahed (who also DIED, not that anyone seemed to care), to the paparazzi, to a grand jealous plot devised by her ex-husband, heir to the throne Prince Charles. The police had yet to complete their investigation of the scene and no conclusions had been made by the chief investigators, but the dim-witted wags from ABC to CNN had it allllll sewn up. That done, the talking heads shifted their focus onto the next pressing issue: whether her bitchy ex-mother in law, the Queen of England, was going to bury her like a princess or like some commoner who shamed the crown by dying in a car accident next to a Muslim. They suggested the Queen would have preferred the latter, but the people, through their outpour of emotion and grief, demanded the former...says a palace insider. Days of this. Days and days on and on. A very real tragedy, a terrible loss to so many, two little boys in particular. But days and days and days filled with mental leaps based on less than a fist-full of facts.

Anyway, that's my memory of Diana's death. A woman who did so much real good during her short life, and blamelessly created Rupert Murdoch by dying.

And the gimlets.

Posted by Antigeist at July 8, 2005 01:41 PM