Diana's uncrowning glory

Perhaps I have a bias here. I am a product of a postcolonial island nation in the Caribbean. I've never lived under colonial rule and know little of its formal indignities. I continue to witness, however, the ghastly spectacle of a people who continue to see Her Majesty and all her progeny and their progeny as somehow representing a model of humanity that is innately better in some ineffable way. What is really sad is the failure to fully grasp the contradiction in the ideas of equality and human dignity that they hold dear and the values of monarchial lineage. There is a conflict between the principles people rely on to make sense of their lives as creatures of inherent dignity and the ways in which their veneration or silence about an institution that is deeply at odds with such principles renders them cognitively immobile. Thomas Paine said, "The idea of hereditary legislators is as inconsistent as that of hereditary juries; and as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wise man; as absurd as an hereditary Poet Laureate."

The truth is that those who fail to abide by this fail to see how rotten to the core the idea of monarchy is today. Its corruption lies in the fact that it assumes a fundamental difference between the humanity we commoners possess and the humanity of a blue blood. The sorry thing about this, like the Catch 22 of original sin, is that most of us are accorded this share of a blighted inferior humanity before we have even a chance to achieve our humanity, let alone voluntarily corrupt it. No, we just have to be born. That's all. And so do they.

Diana's death, though, on the positive side of things, leaves much hope for what it may accomplish by default. It keeps open the possibility that the handsome and discreet Prince William may just seek to avenge his mother's death by refusing the crown at his own chosen moment. Witnessing firsthand at a young and impressionable age how the cult of celebrity and personality ruined and deprived him of his youthful and beautiful mother, William may rightfully decide to chuck it all with the same defiant spirit with which Diana chucked an unsatisfying marriage and the genteel, proper-lady lifestyle it required. "You demanded behavior fitting of the future king of England," one wants to hear him say. "Well, it was all for naught. I don't want it. Now carry the cross of guilt and shame for making her die in vain."

There is another reason Diana's death may bring about a natural dissolution of the monarchy. Her death leaves Prince William free of the overprotective and overly intrusive influence of a concerned mother bent on selecting a bride and an occupation outside of palace life for her son. The willful Jacqueline Onassis hypermanaged John Jr.'s life in every sphere from sabotaging his desire to become an actor while at Brown University to casting that other lens tease, Madonna, into the lost paradise of former Kennedy women. Diana's death, though, leaves open a plethora of wonderfully decadent possibilities for William.

With Charles happy at last thanks to years of lost Mum love being atoned for in the unpretentious warmth of Camilla Parker-Bowles, William will have what no other royal has ever had: complete sovereignty. If reports of his temperament and inclinations are to be believed, then we might yet see that boy chasing the stilettos of sleazy pop stars. Diana the hunted may have given birth to one who may yet reverse the fate to which she was sacrificed: a chosen vessel designed to genetically preserve fossilized relics of the past. Technology assures us the indefinite preservation of beautiful artifacts and monuments of the past. The royals, living fossilized effigies of the past, assure us their continued existence by their cultivated and guarded protocols, rules for membership and sacred traditions.

We pray that William, son of Diana the hunted, will become the hunter. We pray that in hunting for his own indubitable autonomy and identity that he will dissolve himself into the amorphous mass of commoners, diluting the distinction between them and that for which his mother was killed: an insatiable, maniacal urge in the hungry commoners to touch, see and ponder the deified human wonders of the past.

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