(from A Gallery of Ethopaths)
Mark Jove as both divine and regal,
So do the unicorn and lion
Stand guard o’er Britain
Heir to the throne, the Prince of Wales,
Whose austere destiny entails
Marriage to one of equal station,
Wedded a girl whose inclination
Made her an ethopathic cripple.
After that day, the rack and whip’ll
Seem cozier, I dare avouch,
Than poor Prince Charles’s nuptial couch.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a denser
It seems the English upper classes
Abound in weird, eccentric asses
Who dabble in exotic things,
Have unrestrained erotic flings,
Indulge in chic and faddish frauds,
And posture in the House of Lords.
Diana was a case in point—
Her mind was clearly out of joint.
She followed every crackpot trend,
Saw therapists sans stint or end,
Was hooked on diets, drugs, and pills,
Paid thousands out to quacks and shills
For Yoga, Tai-Chi, Zen and junk
Enough to fill a steamer trunk.
She moved from nostrum to cliché
Obsessed with what was “hot” today.
Apologists claim she was seeking
Self-fulfillment, but that creaking
Argument does not hold water.
At twenty-five, a person oughta
Have some sense of self-awareness.
I think that we can say, in fairness,
Diana was a textbook case
Of how, within the human race,
Ethopathy is even found
In ermine robes, among the crowned.
Among the stupid bitch’s sins, her
Worst was to wreck the House of Windsor.
The kingly fabric of Great Britain
Was clawed up by this little kitten
Who left its old prestige in tatters
And—the thing that really matters—
She placed the royal seal official
On everything that’s superficial.
The marriage left Prince Charles in shambles—
A broken man whose speech now rambles
On in a haze of sheer confusion,
His battered brain one pure contusion.
All he can do is haunt the palace
And pour himself a hefty chalice
Of Scotch and soda till he’ blotto—
In fact, we ought to see this motto
Emblazoned on the Prince’s banner:
“Why did I marry dumb Diana?”
Afterword
As fate would have it, in August of that same year Princess Diana met her death in an automobile accident in Paris, accompanied by her lover Dodi al-Fayed, the scion of a wealthy foreign merchant domiciled in London. It was impossible to get any editor to publish this particular section of A Gallery of Ethopaths in the media carnival of orchestrated grief that followed this event. Diana had become, in the words of the fatuous Tony Blair, “the People’s Princess.” The fact that Diana epitomized and encapsulated everything wrong-headed and banal and spacey in modern Western culture was lost in the fulsome emotional flood-tide generated by her obsequies.
But now twelve years have passed. It seems an appropriate moment, in the backwash of public hysteria that ensued upon the recent death of Michael Jackson, to bring this section of my poem into the light of print. And after all, the great Horace advised leaving a completed poem unpublished until several years had elapsed, so that one could re-read it with the perspective that distance gives, and perhaps revise it with the hindsight of maturity.
After re-reading the piece, there isn’t a thing I feel needs changing, except the generalized psychic distemper that produces a mentality like that of Diana Spencer. I’m proud to have the poem illustrated with a drawing by the superb political cartoonist Bob Fisk.
Before my enemies start howling about how cruel and vicious this portrait of Princess Diana is, let me pre-empt them by quoting from the British commentator Melanie Phillips. Just last year, in a Spectator column that made mention of the touchy-feely freak-scene that followed Diana’s death, Phillips said that “Diana Derangement Syndrome” was “the defining disorder of contemporary British society.” And she went on to say that “the main characteristics of DDS are the replacement of reason, intelligence, stoicism, self-restraint and responsibility by credulousness, emotional incontinence, sentimentality, irresponsibility and self-obsession.”
So it isn’t just me. Even the Brits see it. God save the Queen.
