Fascination With Celebrity Is Pointless

At Many Glacier Hotel, there are no televisions in the rooms.

The gift shops sell a few copies of the Great Falls Tribune, but people don’t travel to Glacier National Park for the news.

They travel there to get away from the news.

Except news of bears.

Lots of bears are visible this year. The huckleberries are ripening on the low-lying hillsides.

So, it was an accident, really, that news of Princess Diana’s death managed to waft over Going-to-the-Sun Road, navigate up Swiftcurrent Creek, and be picked up on a scratchy shortwave radio by a guest at Many Glacier Hotel early last Sunday morning.

My family heard it as we joined the last tourists rushing home from a late-summer weekend away.

Just the bare details at first: a car wreck, paparazzi who gave chase, the future of Princes William and Harry.

I love to drive and always try to cram too much vacation into too few days. So, our family was stuck in a car for much of Labor Day, trapped with ourselves, left to discuss the life and tragedy of Princess Di. The woman who has appeared on more People magazine covers than anyone else provided a learning opportunity between Libby, Mont., and the Idaho line.

She didn’t get in the way of a stop for a milkshake, though.

Which is a way of saying that I’m not buying into all the hand-wringing and finger-pointing about cosmic meaning and media excesses since the tragic end of Di’s life.

She was a celebrity of monumental proportions. She is receiving a monumental amount of publicity.

That’s the way the world works these days. The global media made her fairy tale life and beautiful smile known from London to Laos, Seattle to Santiago. In life, and in death, she was a creature of a modern age.

During our long drive home from Glacier, Di’s life provided some rich earth for digging up a first-day-of-school humanities report for my sophomore daughter: the price of celebrity, the responsibilities of the media, the future of the royal family.

Today, and I fear, for weeks to come, many voices will offer instant critiques about the media obsession with Princess Di and the public fascination with her.

The debate swings back and forth, like a fast game of pingpong, between the notion that the press is to be blamed for hounding Diana to death vs. the notion that the public is to blame because it so idolized her.

To be sure, the reasons for Diana’s fevered life and death involve the global media and global cultural appetites.

Yet I see much straining at gnats in trying to pull huge truths from events of the last week.

Princess Di’s life and death have become so magnified that it becomes difficult to define her in a way that provides purpose or meaning that relates to the common lives most of us lead.

We don’t know what it was like to be Princess Di because most of us aren’t famous.

We didn’t marry the future King of England, then divorce him.

Our lives are consumed with the details of dressing our own kids, driving ourselves to work, and worrying about the checking account.

Yes, we search for meaning in the lives of others all the time. It is one of the most distinguishing characteristics of humanity.

And yes, the media regularly guide us to the lives of the famous, like Princess Di or Mother Teresa.

But the lessons tend to be smaller, more basic, than they often seem in the glare of publicity. Very often, it is not the inspiration, but the foibles and frustrations of famous people that grab our attention.

Most of us know the more fruitful place to search for meaning leads to our own families and friends. They provide ample examples of triumph and tragedy.

Still, at the time of their deaths, Princess Di and Mother Teresa did provide some lasting inspiration.

Di shook hands with AIDS patients when the world was fearful to do so.

Mother Teresa, in a much more significant way, did work that truly was remarkable in a distant place among forgotten people that truly was remarkable.

Their good works provide powerful metaphors for good things the rest of us can emulate.

And, despite its perceived excesses, the media helped the world see these good works.

When sorting out the significance of the lives and deaths of Princess Diana and Mother Teresa two rather timeless lessons seem most important.

Princess Di showed us that fame and celebrity don’t necessarily bring happiness.

Mother Teresa reminded us that good can be done without much money and among people who are forgotten.

Let us not be fixated on the celebrity of a modern-day princess and modern-day saint.

The most memorable eulogies will honor their humanity and their very human deeds.

, DataTimes MEMO: Chris Peck is the editor of The Spokesman-Review. His column appears each Sunday on Perspective.