Dolores O'Riordan, Nembo getting increasingly demented, fascinating to watch

[Sidney]

@Sidney

On August 31st, 1997, Diana died, and pathetic, mawkish, self centred, vain, public grief became a lifestyle choice for vast swathes of people in the British Isles.

Tony Blair was the perfect, vacuous Prime Minister to express that touchy feely, vacuous, empty feeling of grief. Bono was on hand to sing Candle In The Wind that night. Within a few days the whole thing had become a full blown phenomenon of mawk, in association with Sky News, 24 hours, every hour. The people were tearful, angry and outraged about something, about what, they didn’t know, but the one thing they knew was that they had to express it publicly, because it felt right. In Britain people said the spirit of that week was like the war, as people came together, strangers spontaneously embracing in the street. Strangers didn’t spontaneously embrace in the street during the war. They got the fook on with things. Diana’s death, on the other hand, was a public grief competition, a bandwagon embodying the values of self, self-pity and vanity which came to dominate the next two decades. Every bland tweet and publicly aceptable “show of solidarity” on Facebook with victims of worthy tragedies that don’t involve you in any way is linked back to that moment.

It’s happening again.

Competitive grief and competitive outrage at, oh, something, but what it is people are outraged at, they’re not sure.

Carry on.