There's a bizarre pleasure in talking about history first hand. If you had a chance to experience a historical event or an event that will be historical in time, it's almost impossible not to comment on where you were when it happened, how you reacted, and so on. You immediately become part of a yet-unwritten oral history.
Every generation has at least one historical event that they carry proudly and treat as a treasured topic of conversation. For some Turks, it's the coup of 1980. For others, it's the Aug.
17 earthquake. For every one person who talks about the day the Twin Towers collapsed, another will tell where they were when JFK was shot. One of the most important dates of recent history is Aug.
31, 1997. When Princess Diana and her boyfriend Dodi were killed in a car accident in Paris, it soon became the most important event of its time, and British royalty was soon under close scrutiny. Diana's death and its aftermath soon turned into a global phenomenon and became a special case for pop culture aficionados.
The non-reaction of the royalty to Diana's death, the press coming down hard on the queen (probably as a projection mechanism to ease their guilt), thousands of flowers redefining celebrity mourning and the postmodern funeral with Sir Elton John showed us all that it's a new era and that Diana's death had touched a place in all of us, even the most cynical. The respect that wasn't granted to Diana when she was alive was given after she died. Hundreds of articles, tens of books either wrote euologies to her or tried to find a guilty party for a life half lived in the face of the whole world.
For the sake of this half-lived life and two orphans, Diana soon turned into a taboo subject in pop culture. As soon as the dust settled after the collapse of the Twin Towers, which killed thousands of people, documentaries, docu-dramas and feature films started to take their place one after another on the opportunist shelves of pop culture. It can be understood why the ultimate fairy tale princess is untouchable, but what about the world's most famous mother-in-law?
Isn't it time that somebody lifted the veil from Queen Elizabeth? Apparently it is.
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