Where have we gone, and what have we done?
The news on the wire today is the suicide of Jacintha
Saldana, the nurse who disclosed information about Duchess Kate to a pair of
Australian disc jockeys posing as Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip.
On August 31, 1991, Princess Diane was killed in an auto
accident in which her car was speeding to elude the paparazzo photographers
following in high speed pursuit.
This is the price of celebrity, we all rejoin, sadly shaking
our collective heads. It’s what happens
when you are famous…or infamous.
Let us not delude ourselves.
We, the public sea of voyeurs, create celebrity by ghoulishly following
every nook and cranny of people’s private lives, like so many naughty children
peering over a garden wall—to spy on Princess Diane then, and now the Duchess of
Cambridge. Sunning themselves in bathing
suits—on holiday—to escape the ever present exposure which they and those like
them must endure.
Allow me to take a straw poll: is there anyone out there who would NOT like
to hear that phone conversation with Jacintha and the fake Queen and Consort?
Is there anyone who did not view those bathing suit photos
of Diane and Kate? I myself must regretfully
answer no. I am guilty. All of us are guilty, save the Dahli Lama and
persons like him who have elevated themselves above the mire of humanity’s
daily perusal of celebrities.
If we did not crave the latest crude exposure of other
people’s personal lives, perhaps that distraught nurse with a husband and two
children might be alive. Indeed, perhaps
Princess Diane might still be alive.
To bring a curse on myself by quoting the Scottish play out
of context, “What hath we wrought?”
My only consolation in all this, as cynical as it may sound,
is to imagine what those two Australian jerks are going to have to endure when
the floodlight of celebrity is turned on them…
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