Saturday 20th of April 2024
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la belle diana...

dianadiana

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If the British royal family wished to underline their status as an antiquated institution, out of touch with the present day, they could hardly do better than commission a larger-than-life-size bronze statue of Diana, Princess of Wales.

 

The bronze monument of The Great Man (and occasionally, Woman) is a throwback to Victorian times which implicitly accepted Thomas Carlyle’s idea that history should be written as the story of heroic individuals who acted as mentors, leaders and role models, driving social and cultural progress.

In her later years, Lady Diana, “the people’s princess”, became the subject of a cult-like popular adoration. Her every deed was eagerly reported by the media, while paparazzi photos boosted sales of magazines. Diana was portrayed as a secular saint who travelled to distant countries to campaign against land mines; who visited sick children in hospital, and victims of famine and war. By contrast, the rest of the royal family were reconfigured as her antagonists, resentful of her goodness and the widespread admiration she inspired.

There is, however, another way of reading Diana’s life: as a woman fully aware of her popular image who often gave the press exactly what they wanted. As she rose in popular esteem she took her revenge on the snooty royals, and on her faithless husband, Charles, with a mixture of highly visible good deeds and romantic scandals.

The truth is probably somewhere in-between. Nobody is entirely good or bad, nobody enjoys perfect control over the way they are perceived in the media. Diana was both kind and spiteful, dignified and immature, schemer and victim. In the eye of the camera everyone becomes an actor, and ultimately struggles to recover his or her true identity.

 

Today the Victorian “hero” has been supplanted by the celebrity. In place of the scruffy old poets, statesmen, matrons and scientists worshipped in the 19th century, we lavish attention on pop singers, movie stars and socialites. Where the Victorians believed people should be honoured for their achievements and character, we are more interested in how a celebrity looks, the things he or she wears, and who they’re going out with. None of this translates readily into bronze.

Our fascination with the ephemeral idea of “celebrity” (there are conventions in the United States where one can obtain autographs and merchandise from former celebrities), is an implicit admission that people are complex and changeable. The inflexible temperament captured in stone or bronze has given way to a recognition that human beings are too contradictory to be summed up in such a simplistic manner.

The result is that bronze statues now run the risk of being viewed as kitsch – that is, as items of overblown, false emotion, masquerading as high art. Sculptor Ian Rank-Broadley has sailed perilously close to the winds with an image of a rather stern-looking Diana surrounded by an anonymous, multicultural trio of small children.

This is presumably meant to signify the Princess’s great compassion, but “compassion” is an abstract quality that quickly degrades into sentimentality in the hands of most artists. Think of all that decorative poverty in Victorian art: those poor urchins subsiding in the streets; the sick mothers reaching out to their weeping offspring; the death of Little Nell!

 

Read more:

https://www.smh.com.au/culture/art-and-design/stiff-and-pompous-why-diana-bronze-statue-is-all-wrong-20210702-p586bw.html

 

 

 

The cartoon at top by Giles... 1988... is a better tribute than the awful bronze cast... Cartoon below also by Giles.

 

See also: of FLOTUSes...

 

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guard of honour...

guardguard

skewed memory...

 

The Prince of Wales has revealed some of his favourite songs, with artists Diana Ross, Edith Piaf and Barbra Streisand making the list.

He highlighted soul group The Three Degrees' pop hit Givin' Up, Givin' In as a track that used to give him "an irresistible urge to get up and dance".

Prince Charles shared his songs as part of a special show on hospital radio to thank NHS staff and volunteers.

It will air at midday and his 13-song playlist will be released on Spotify.

The hour-long programme was recorded as part of a national Thank You Day being held on Sunday to celebrate people who helped respond to the coronavirus pandemic.

It was recorded for the Hospital Broadcasting Association made up of hospital radio stations, and the prince paid tribute to all the hospital radio volunteers who had helped entertain patients and staff during the crisis.

 

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-57709443

 

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Meanwhile Harry and Willie...

 

statuestatue

remembering di.....

 

BY Phil Butler

 

Who can forget Princess Diana’s visit to Angola and Bosnia in 1997 to walk through areas of mines and to engage with the victims of the explosives? Just days after her untimely death, the United Nations Mine Ban Treaty was signed by 164 countries. Today, Lady Diana’s visit is still talked about in Angola. But her legacy, stopping the wanton killing of innocents, seems buried with her today. 

U.S. President Joe Biden wants to supply Ukraine’s lunatic in charge, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with highly controversial cluster munitions. Not contented to upend world peace, detente, economies, and killing hundreds of thousands on the battlefield in Ukraine, America’s most dimwitted and soulless leader in history aims to blow off the feet of Ukrainian and Russian kids as his legacy in Eastern Europe. How this guy is still in office and not in jail is a great mystery for many. Just how deep into hellhole policies he’s willing to go is more certain. To the bottom or “bust” is the motto of the Biden White House.

For those unfamiliar, cluster munitions in the form of bombs, missile warheads, or artillery rounds spread shrapnel designed to kill troops or take out armored vehicles such as tanks. The munitions accomplish this by scattering “bomblets” across large battlefield areas. The munitions have many dangers, but the biggest fear is that the bomblets can fail to explode on impact and pose a long-term risk to anyone who encounters them, similar to landmines. Children are often the sad victims of leftover bomblets that can kill or maim.

House Foreign Affairs Chairman, Republican Congressman Michael McCaul, has backed the president’s decision to send cluster bombs to the Zelensky regime. I wonder if McCaul and his paymasters recall a woman named Diana Spencer, the Princess of Wales, who died in an unfortunate car crash in August 1997? I don’t think many people in Washington remember anything about Lady Dianna or her work to end the suffering of millions. And given Biden’s recent trip to see King Charles, it seems all her work will be undone by the ruling elites who call the shots these days.

The work I refer to here is the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund and that organization’s Cluster Munitions Initiative, which began in 2007. Diana’s foundation, which had raised tens of millions to help the impoverished and forgotten people of the world, ceased operations in 2012, and in 2013 the trust was taken over by the Royal Foundation. Then in 2020, the memorial fund was divided between Princes William and Harry and given to their independent charities. So, it would seem that even her children are good with Biden, making the soil beneath the feet of little Ukrainian or Russian kids deadly for generations. Biden and his Russophobic bosses aren’t satisfied with bleeding out adults in a needless Ukraine war; they want the killing and dismemberment never to end.

The original campaign of her foundation began a global movement to ban cluster bombs, started national campaigns for the same end, and supported those affected by the cluster munitions. Ironically, or sadly, the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions to ban the use or stockpiling of these weapons was eventually signed by 111 world nations in 2012. Israel, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United States were the most interesting countries that did not sign. On July 7th, the Cluster Munition Coalition (CMC) said it was “appalled by the United States’ plans to transfer banned cluster munitions to Ukraine.” The U.S. Cluster Munition Coalition (USCMC) sent a letter to the White House, and various organizations aligned with CMC and formerly Princess Diana’s Foundation are doing little more than warning that they will continue to warn about the dangers of these weapons of ongoing destruction. It’s sad.

So, what can we expect in the future? Well, the unexploded bomblets from these munitions can remain dangerous for decades after the end of a conflict. How much carnage will be inflicted on a finally peaceful Russian steppe? To give you an idea, the United States cluster bombing of Laos stopped in 1973 kept on killing 100 Laotians per year as of 2009. Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen warned Ukraine of using cluster munitions on Twitter, saying:

“It would be the greatest danger for Ukrainians for many years or up to a hundred years if cluster bombs are used in Russian-occupied areas in the territory of Ukraine.”

Joe Biden, who has escaped incarceration for treason and taking bribes alongside his son Hunter, bypassing U.S. law prohibiting the transfer of cluster munitions with a failure rate greater than one percent. The White House is relying on an assurance from the Pentagon that Zelensky will be getting the new and improved munitions. Perhaps those 155 mm shells will only leave a few unexploded bomblets, and only 40 or 50 civilians will die per year on the borders of Russia! We can expect something similar to the first year after the end of the Kosovo War, when more than 100 civilians died from unexploded bombs and mines then. This result would be a little better than the 3-4 Lebanese innocents per day killed after Israel’s cluster bombing campaign of 2006.

 

https://journal-neo.org/2023/07/28/would-joe-biden-blow-your-childs-foot-off-only-if-hes-ordered-to/

 

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