The Death of Diana

“Sometimes in my live shows I ask the audience if they belong to any groups: a football team, a religious group, a union, a book club, a housing committee, rowing club – I am surprised by how few people have a Tribe. 

Whilst the impact of globalisation on national identity cannot yet be fully understood, I can certainly appreciate the reductive appeal of statist myth. I become ultra English during a World Cup, the last one in particular was like a jolly revival of the ‘death of Diana’ in its ability to pull a nation together in collective hysteria. 

But soon enough the bunting comes down, the screens in public squares go black and we are atomized once more. The space between us no longer filled with chants, ditties and ‘in jokes’, eyes back on the pavement, attention drawn within. 

I’m not suggesting the deep alienation that Late Capitalism engenders can be rinsed away by joining a bowling club, but it’s a •START•.

And having a Teacher within the group to which you belong provides intimacy and purpose. In the guru traditions of India the love between teacher and student surpasses all other forms, for here it is explicit that what is being transferred in this relationship is nothing short of God’s love and how an individual can embody the divine.

We live in lonely and polarized times, where many of us feel lost and fractured. It is evident in our politics but political events reflect deeper and more personal truths. I’ve been trying for a while now to explain what I feel is happening in the societies that I’m familiar with, by which I mean Europe, Australia, the United States – not that I’m claiming to be a sociologist, I don’t have a clue how to approach whatever the hell may be happening in Pakistan or China, but here, here in our post-secular edge lands where the old ideas are dying and the new ones not yet born, I feel a consistent and recognizable yearning for meaning beyond the dayglow ashes of burnt-out consumerism, lurching dumb zombie nationalism, starchy, corrupt religion and the CGI circus of modern mainstream media. 

I’ve been watching for a long time and I knew before Trump, Brexit, radicalism and the ‘new right’ that something serious was up. 

• YOU KNOW IT TOO •

Sometimes we despair and sometimes we distract because it seems like too much for one person to tackle and we’ve forgotten how to collude. 

Yet alone, I am nothing”

Excerpt From

Mentors

Russell Brand

COMIC URBAN LEGEND: Writer/Artist John Byrne has been involved in an inordinate amount of eerie coincidences.

STATUS: True

I almost considered putting a "False" for this one, if only because, upon looking into this bit, I found stuff like:

Byrne is sometimes believed to possess the power to predict events in our world, when he does his comics, and of course these events are predominantly tragedies.

And THAT, of course, is totally bogus, as well, come on. Heck, I would go further to say that I doubt the veracity of "is sometimes believed," as I don't think there's anyone who ACTUALLY believes that.

But anyhow, yes, John Byrne has been involved in an inordinate amount of eerie comic book coincidences.

Fairly early on in his career at Marvel, Byrne drew an issue of Marvel Team-Up with writer Chris Claremont that involved a blackout in New York City.

Soon after the issue was released in 1977 (and months after Byrne had drawn it), New York City had one of its largest blackouts ever.

The next year, when Byrne was on Uncanny X-Men with Claremont, the pair had Japan be struck by an earthquake (courtesy of Mose Magnum).

 

In 1978, Japan was struck with a number of earthquakes.

(Speaking of Claremont, towards the very end of his run with Byrne on Uncanny X-Men, the pair depicted the dystopian world of 2013 in "Days of Future Past." One of the characters from that story made it to the present, and in a later issue of Uncanny X-Men (#189), the character included a (in retrospect) chilling "flashback" to the destruction of the World Trade Center.

 

)

Soon before Byrne's first issue of his Superman reboot, Man of Steel, which involves Superman having to save a damaged space-plane, the Challenger space shuttle was destroyed...

 

Finally, and perhaps most notably, in late August 1997, Wonder Woman #126 came out, reflecting the short-lived death of Wonder Woman, Princess Diana of Themyscira.

 

That Saturday, the REAL Princess Diana was killed in a car accident.

Some weird stuff, no?

Byrne, himself, wrote in to Scientific American magazine after Michael Shermer had written a skeptical look at a different writer's claims to have predicted the tragedy of September 11, 2001, and stated most of these facts, concluding:

My ability as a prognosticator...would seem assured-provided, of course, we reference only the above, and skip over the hundreds of other comic books I have produced which featured all manner of catastrophes, large and small, which did not come to pass.

Well said, Mr. Byrne.