THE GREAT DI TURNAROUND

Hard as it is to believe, there remains among all the Diana madness one remarkable, overlooked story. Remember how the Diana week started? With an outpouring of popular anger against the paparazzi and the press (for pursuing Diana). And remember how the week ended? With an outpouring of popular anger against the Queen and the royal family (for not sufficiently mourning Diana).

The fascinating story is what happened in between to turn popular anger so swiftly from one target to another. It is the story of one of the greatest acts of misdirection since Houdini--pulled off, amazingly enough, by the very tabloids that were originally so under siege.

Under siege, that is, in the days immediately after Diana's death. By Thursday, however, the tabloids had changed the subject. WHERE IS OUR QUEEN? demanded the Sun. YOUR PEOPLE ARE SUFFERING. SPEAK TO US, MA'AM, pleaded the Mirror.

Us? Hours after Diana's death, a sobbing woman outside Kensington Palace shouted, "You're horrible!" at TV cameramen. A man-on-the-street interview by some hapless reporter yielded, "You people still at it? Why don't you just p___ off?" At the beginning, it was us vs. you: us, the decent public; you, the murderous scum known as the press.

By midweek, in a move whose cynical brilliance merits a special Pulitzer for ass-saving improvisation, those very same tabloids were screaming SHOW US YOU CARE. Us: the grieving press and public. You: those cold and callous Windsors.

And it worked. The easy explanation is that when it turned out the limo driver was drunk, the public's anger at the press declined. Yes, but the anger could then just have dissipated. The tabloids were not about to let that happen. Sensing a turn in public mood, they fed and amplified it mercilessly--and with such success that by the end of the week, on the eve of Diana's funeral, the mob roared and the Queen caved.

She took to the airwaves--what else?--to assure her flock that she too had joined the national wallow, albeit in her own private Windsor way. She begged their indulgence as she too tried--here she reached for the supreme code word of touchy-feely self-pity--to "cope." This performance was not exactly Henry II having himself ostentatiously flogged for causing the death of Thomas Becket. But it was, in its own bloodless way, mortifying--as the Queen's frenzied subjects meant it to be.

It is depressing to see an entire public so easily led by the nose. But it could have been worse. The marshaling of mass anger is an ancient art and, in even more cynical and calculating hands, a deadly one. In our lifetime it has been used to make the mob bay not for the tears of the Windsors but for the blood of the Hutu or the Jew.

We should be grateful, I suppose, that today's herd is stampeded toward the bathetic rather than the barbaric. But the ease with which that can be done is deeply troubling. For some, it brings into question the very basis of democratic governance. Democracy, after all, assumes a people capable of independence of mind, of some intellectual and emotional resistance. One doubts the very existence of that capacity after witnessing a media-fed mass hysteria.