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The Princess of Shalott

by Iftekhar Sayeed
***The mirror crack'd from side to side;
'The curse is come upon me,' cried The Lady of Shalott.
— Tennyson***
CERTAIN tribes believe that the man who takes your picture takes your soul. Yet that very man — or his tribesmen, at any rate — created Princess Diana. The antinomy of creation and destruction is only one among several in the lamented life and death of the Princess.
The greatest of these is the contradiction of a member of the royal family achieving such distinction and winning so much affection in a democracy. A people's princess' must surely be a contradiction In terms. This year, constitutional monarchy in England Is a little over 300 years old. Democracy itself is only a hundred years old — dating from the Third Reform Act of 1884-85 and the Redistribution Act of 1885. which together tripled the electorate, preparing the way for universal male suffrage. Readers of Trollope will recall with what deference the higher orders' were regarded by the Englishman. Surely, over these hundred years deference has yielded to feelings of equality? The top hundred jobs in England go to the Oxbridge set. And the national lottery has been criticised for taking money from the poor to spend on the rich man's leisure-objects: a tabloid gave two opera tickets to a working-class couple. who quit the cacophony after half-an-hour.
Across the Atlantic, surely, it is otherwise. There Is social mobility within the middlerange — but the bottom-fifth and top-fifth of America just squat there. Capital is concentrated in the hands of a minority. While indeed the income of the poor has risen, as a proportion of the national pie. it has fallen. And no lobby defended them against welfare reform, while middle-class entitlements have remained intact.
The plain fact of the matter is that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 substituted the visible face of authority — the king — for invisible faces. The Cabinet is not the tyranny of the day; it was the West Indies lobby which dethroned the first prime minister. Robert Walpole, in the 18th century. Today, even the toothless European Parliament
has already attracted to Itself a swarm of lobbying firms within stones' throw. The gun lobby in America has convinced a whole nation that gun-ownership eauals freedom; the insurance looby fooled the free citizens into rejecting healthcare reform; the homosexual lobby got Mr Clinton to introduce them to the armed forces... and so on. To summarise: Parliament today is governed as much by special-interest groups today, as after the Glorious Revolution.
Deference is essential to human nature. Few individuals bother to think — they crave to be told what to do, whether by monarchs or lobbies they crave domination and direction. But In the West, this doctrine Is not readily admitted; in the 'despotic Orient’, it is axiomatic. Small wonder then that very few people in the East had heard about the Princess: China's India's and the Muslim world's billions are ignorant about her.
Princess Diana showed up other contradictions in her world: she had not achieved' her status in a supposed meritocracy. She was bom beautiful, and born a lady. Why should such a person be so love? Precisely because she could not be admired, as a tennis-star can for putting in so many hours, she had to be adored. Because somewhere, deep down, people know It's an unjust world: you're bom lucky or unlucky.
The feminist West. too. she disowned: she broke free of Prince Charles, true, but not to launch her own career! And if women are physically battered, she was psychologically bruised — what progress feminism?
But the last, and fatal, contradiction involved the media. This bulwark of democracy ferreted her out like a cat kills a mouse: and all for the people. She. too. had used the media to serve her own ends. Who liveth by the media, perisheth by the
media.
And what is the media but the masses? A Princess must either be above them, or one of them — she cannot be of the people, for the people, by the people. They can be portrayed by the media — from Antigone to Hamlet, artists have elevated our minuscule emotions and conflicts to the cosmic level by exhibiting the sufferer as royalty — but they cannot be the re-ality portrayed. Bertrand Russel thought that we have quite the Oedipus stage: our
emotions have become democratic. he believed, and welcomed it. Nietzsche before him, agreed, and deplored it. They were both wrong.
What has smitten the section of the world that has seen her over and over again, are her beauty, her terminated youth, her royalty, and above all, her effortlessness. Her struggles were off-screen; on-screen, she was the serene Raphaellte portrait. An anachronism, again; but with a difference: portraits hung in the halls of the great: but here was a portrait of the great delivered with the morning paper. Not even the Tate gallery could beat that!
Queen Elizabeth has had to give in to public demands after her death. It is ironic to reflect that the only institution free from contradiction in the western world, is the royalty. They were meant to be public property; they have become so; they were supposed to be accountable to the people — now, they are, even In their most private moment. Is it not entirely consistent with the development of western civilisation that the monarchy should be the only non-lobby in society? Vulnerable people, like you and I, flesh and blood, once the subject to tragedies, now their object.
The values of Asia are, seen in this light, wholesome, without hypocrisy. Deng Xiao Ping was, frankly, monarchical; Suharto holds undisputed kingly sway over 13.000 islands. uniting them in his own person; Lee Kuan Yew lords it over an island still from the wings — he will, till he leaves. Now lobbyists here; no murderous photographers; no parliament to spealc of. The fundamental human needs — to command and to obey — candidly satisfied. Only when we try to imitate the West do we fall into contradiction and achieve a mongrel culture.
The Lady of Shallot should never have looked out of the window.
"But Lancelot mused a little space:
He said. She has a lovely face: God in His mercy lend her grace. The Lady of Shalott."