You know what I admire most about the late Lady Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales? I admire the way she refused the Nobel Prize for Medicine, even though he research was instrumental in finding a cure for the common cold, because she felt she had failed in her primary quest, which had been to find a cure for cancer.
That kind of modesty in a public figure is rare.
Some people were impressed by the way Lady Di perfected a time machine, which she then used to go back to the early 1960s and prevent the assassination of then-United States President John F. Kennedy. That didn't impress me quite as much, though -- I mean, think about: if you had perfected a time machine, what else would you imagine doing with it?
I was much more impressed when, as they were taking her to a Paris hospital after the car crash which eventually took her life, Lady Diana insisted that they take a detour to the Middle East so she could try, one last time, to convince the PLO to renounce violence once and for all and the Israeli Knesset to stop building houses in the Occupied Territories. She died before the ambulance got halfway across Europe, of course; still, her selflessness brought tears to the eyes of all the guards on the French border.
Talk about selflessness! How can you not admire the way the Princess of Wales renounced her life of designer clothes, gourmet dining and endless rounds of partying with the rich and famous in order to live with the poorest people on earth in the slums of Calcutta? The years she spent working among lepers without a thought to her personal health and safety have served as an inspiration to --
Oh, wait. I'm getting Di confused with Mother Teresa. Sorry, but I can only process one celebrity death at a time.
It's not like there isn't enough to admire about Diana. Before her wedding to Prince Charles, she jumped off the London Bridge to save a child who appeared to be drowning in the Thames. She had stripped off the wedding gown, so that was safe, but it took half a dozen of the United Kingdom's finest hairdresser (seconded from MI-6) to return her coiffe to international standards in time for the nuptial ceremony. How can you not love somebody who puts a child's life before the pomp of a Royal occasion?
And what about her dying words, "Forgive the paparazzi for they know not what they do"? How many of us would have had the foresight to see the public anger which would be directed towards the press scavengers and, with our last breath, to attempt to forestall it?
The Princess of Wales was always a classy woman. Didn't she refuse to get into a mud-slinging match with the Royal family, insisting that herfact-finding mission to China to investigate that country's alleged abuse of dissidents spoke for itself? The most she ever said about complaints by the Queen and the Queen Mother was, "We must be patient. Remember: they're under a lot of pressure from abolitionists..." Pressure from abolitionists, indeed!
Throughout, Diana maintained a keen and ever-questing intelligence. I remember the day she balanced the American budget, proving how the country could eliminate its debt by 2012 while at the same time increasing expenditures for social programs. Rather than bask in the glory of that remarkable achievement, she jetted down to Cambridge to discuss the first millionth of a second of the universe's existence with Stephen Hawking. To be sure, she hadn't quite reconciled that turbulent time with the currently known laws of the physical universe, but Hawking seemed to think that her ideas offered many promising new avenues of thought on the subject.
A lot of nonsense will be written about Lady Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales in the years to come. We should never allow this to obscure her achievements, nor weaken our admiration for them.
