A rchive Date
[ 09-10-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Mass Media ]
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[Why this willingness to weep on cue?
By HARTLEY STEWARD -- Toronto Sun
October 8, 2000
In some cultures, public displays of grief in times of death are common. Custom demands that the world be witness to the despair of those left behind. The magnificence of the lamentations, too, indicates to all - God and man - the depth of the love and respect that existed for the departed.
In other cultures, grieving has been a private affair, a matter for family and friends, a ritual into which are invited only those who actually knew the person who had died. If they shared a god, he was invited as well.
It was no place for strangers.
Since the horrific death of Princess Diana in a Paris automobile accident all that seems to have changed. Somehow, we have managed to convince ourselves that it makes sense to mourn the death of someone to whom we were not close. Indeed, someone we didn't know at all.
I remember watching in awe and total bewilderment as thousands of weepy, immature schoolgirls and emotional British housewives trekked to Buckingham Palace to leave maudlin notes and cheap flowers on the royal fences and to cry for the television cameras.
The phenomenon persisted for nearly a month and at the end, I didn't understand it any better than I had at the beginning. What was the connection between Princess Diana and all those people? Why did they feel a need to participate in something that was not their business?
If they mistook the pampered princess for someone who actually cared about them and their lives, wouldn't a simple prayer and a thank you in the privacy of their rooms suffice?
Whatever. None of the participants articulated it satisfactorily for me. The blubbering adults were the worst. The young girls, it seems to me, despaired because they had lost the one person who was living their dreams. They would now have to live them themselves or do without. I guess that's a reason of sorts for the weeping and wailing, but I'd come back to haunt you if you thought it got you a pass into my wake.
The recent dreadful spate of shootings at schools in Dunblane, Scotland and Columbine in the U.S. have offered an opportunity for the same sort of thing; a chance for people to share in an emotional catharsis in which they have no right.
I have no problem with those who share a loss in these occurrences, even though they are strangers to each other, forming support groups and demonstrating together for change, better security in their schools and even compensation.
It is the ghouls who come to view the school grounds, tear their hair out at the vile condition of humanity and experience vicariously the pain of loss, who need to get a death of their own.
I found the recent outpouring of emotion across the nation at the death of Pierre Trudeau just as inexplicable. I simply don't understand it. He was a politician. He did some things right and some things wrong in his public life. He was, by all accounts, an intelligent and loving father.
But so was my dad. Had a crowd of strangers swarmed the little church in which my family and our friends gathered to wish him God's speed, to steal from us this important and private time, I would have gone in search of a gun.
I found the massive radio, TV and newspaper coverage in the days before Trudeau's funeral, and of the funeral itself, presumptuous and so over the top as to be disturbing. I don't think it would be overstating it much to say it was downright macabre.
The media justification for it, I think, was to be found in the recurring theme - on air and in headlines - that somehow Pierre Trudeau had, by his death, united the country. It is as nonsensical a rationale for the exploitation of this man's death as you could find.
But it is too simple, I think, to explain the public's willingness to weep in unison on cue as a result of massive media coverage. It is more than a search for 15 minutes of fame. It bespeaks a greater need than that.
That we could look to the death of a partisan politician, however accomplished, however grateful we are for what he has done to bring us together, suggests a deeper national malady than perhaps we are prepared to admit.
It has been a long time since we had someone who gave us a sense of ourselves; who took seriously our role as a nation and who made us understand the nature of our beautiful country. It has been a long time since we could feel that someone who cared was looking out for us as a nation.
I think we are looking for some way to connect as a country.
We won't find it in the death of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. He's gone, as his son Justin said, and he isn't coming back. We had better look to the future.
Steward appears Tuesdays and Sundays. E-mail: hartleysteward@canoemail.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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