The whole global village is on a bender, besotted with Princess Diana-mania.
It's only natural to reach for meaning when someone dies a sudden, violent death. But what we've been seeing is a binge of overreaching, a crawl-in-the-bottle lost weekend that lasts a whole week.
And I feel like the guy who gets to the party late and stands around wearing a fake smile - too sober to have fun watching people make fools of themselves, but there's nowhere else to go. It's the only party in town.
So, I've been mingling, noting the various stages of inebriation.
The first phase was euphoria. What a story - wow! Among the excited chatter I heard the princess compared to Martin Luther King Jr., Elvis, Grace Kelly, Michael Jordan, JFK, Marilyn Monroe and Winston Churchill. Down at the end of the bar, journalists drunk on TV attention were working their way around to Ghandi, Santa Claus and Jesus Christ.
I plugged ''Diana'' into a news wire word search and came up with more than 300 stories, including headlines such as:
Diana a princess because she was common, down-to-earth.
Diana lived a life of dignity each of us might emulate.
What can we teach children about truly noble lives?
Diana: A modern Greek tragedienne.
By midweek, the media hit stage two: second thoughts. Where are my car keys? Boy, look at the time, I really should get home. I might regret this in the morning. But, hey, what the heck - parties like this don't come along every day. Pour another round.
On Thursday, the story count hit a red-eyed 378 by 9 a.m., including:
What now for Charles?
The verdict on Diana too quick.
Advertisers grapple with taste concerns.
Diet chain pulls ad in which Fergie dumps on paparazzi.
By week's end, stage three: Jaded cynicism was stumbling and lurching into anger, suspicion and irrational behavior. The tone of the headlines shifted:
Little sympathy for those who invite public attention.
Calm down, folks: She was a princess, not a saint.
Spooked mourners saw Diana 'appear' in painting, then vanish.
Royal family's 'emotional constipation' angers mourners.
From there, I could see we were just one more highball away from maudlin tears and whisky memories.
Sure enough, scrolling through the opinion wire I found:
ATTENTION EDITORS: First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton has written a special column on her relationship with Princess Diana. If you are interested in running the column, please call ...
Nah. Tacky, tacky, tacky.
Like a drunken snipe hunt, the press had a feeding frenzy to condemn feeding frenzies. On every channel, there was obsessive coverage of the media's excessive coverage. Networks stalked paparazzis. Respectable newspapers and Tiffany networks were condemning the Kmart tabloids that are the bottom feeders in the media food chain.
But without uppity tabloids, we never would have met Gennifer Flowers, who introduced us to Paula Jones, who introduced us to the tabloid-trash side of our own president. Without tabloids, Dick Morris would still be on the phone sharing national secrets with the president - with a hooker on the extension.
If a tabloid pays a million dollars for a telephoto picture invading the privacy of Princess Diana, and the mainstream media uses it too, does that make the rest of us more respectable - or cheap freeloaders?
Grammarians insist ''media'' is plural. But in cases like this one, I think singular is correct. I've seen a swarm of print, TV, radio and tabloid reporters move like a single segmented insect to corner and torment a human politician who was fighting for his life. I was in it. It was a singular feeling.
The trouble is not paparazzi - it's that there is no longer much of a class distinction between the ''establishment'' media and the carnival alchemists who turn trivial litter into valuable currency.
There's a Gresham's Law of Journalism: bad news drives out good. Sensational celebrity junk drives out real news about things that actually matter.
That's why there are 378 stories a day about Diana - enough to read one every day for a year, just like O.J.
The next stage of a sensational bender is a colossal hangover: remorse. What were we thinking? Did we really do that? Not another drop of Diana. Never again.
Until the next time.
Has anyone seen my car keys?
LOCAL REACTION
Peter Bronson is editorial page editor of The Enquirer. If you have questions or comments, call 768-8301, or write to 312 Elm Street, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202.
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