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The jaws of life had barely opened and Diana's mangled body been pulled from the twisted wreckage of the Mercedes Benz than the solemn process of her kitschification on the Internet began in earnest. According to thousands of eulogies placed on the numerous bulletin boards set up specifically to mourn her death, she was not only the Queen of Hearts but the "Princess of Peas" who "parrished" while trying to help us "visualize whirled peas," the life-long endeavor of "a Mary Poppins" or "a true modern day Cinderella Princess" who "left this unkind world for a place incomparable and definitely a lot better," the "abode of God Most Hi." "She was an angle," one mourner sobbed, while another stated that "she was my idle" and still another that her death was "the one and only greatest tragedy that ever happened in this century." The Internet produced a vast oil painting on velvet composed of mortuary doggerel in which would-be laureates scrambled up the steep slopes of Parnassus, regaling us with immortal lines about "her soft blue bambi eyes" that "will always be Bright like the stares." Disconsolate fans churned out entire libraries of poems about Diana's triumphal entrance into heaven accompanied by an honor guard of seraphim as well as by Mother Theresa, who died expressly to escort the princess past the pearly gates:
Caged and silenced as if in shame,
Yet no one could douse her inner flame.
She was stalked as if an animal, then displayed as if a freak.
Yet she held herself with outward grace, all the while inside so meek.
Now set free our little dove, no longer shy, now bold,
To soar through the open heavens and walk on streets of gold.
No longer pursued by curious crowds, no poverty, no disease, no hate.
And at the entrance God has posted a sign
"NO CAMERAS BEYOND THIS GATE."
Diana's death brought out in droves cemetery habitues who gave free rein to our society's repressed poetic impulses, dark sisters who wandered in and out of the tombstones relishing the saccharine epitaphs and the mixed metaphors: "Diana was a rose whose sun has set"; "you left your footprints stamped on all of our hearts"; and "the Brightest Jewel in the British...