THE YEAR EMOTIONS RULED

By Roger Rosenblatt

It ought to have been evident that something very strange was going on when a middle-aged man interviewed on the morning of Princess Diana's funeral told a TV reporter that he had not wept at his own father's death, but he was weeping today. Say what? But this is the way the whole year of 1997 has gone. Every few weeks in the past 12 months, something happened to invite an emotional public reaction of mass grief, panic or elation, often wildly disproportional to the significance of the event. Most of these eruptions had little staying power, but for the moments of their blazing they were huge, sometimes frightening.

The year was a field of sudden bonfires, and a people who had thought of themselves as remote and isolated from one another at first coalesced around the news and then became the news. Emotions were bulletins. It was a year, in fact, in which however moving or compelling were external events, the public's responses to them were more powerful still. We wept in vast numbers, we cheered, we gasped, and we could not take our eyes off ourselves.

None of the year's mass responses could hold a candle in scope and complexity to the astonishing grief inspired by Princess Diana's car-accident death, of course. (There were even spin-off mass responses of rage toward the paparazzi, who trailed her car into the Paris tunnel, and of generosity toward the charities the princess sponsored.) But other major displays of widespread feeling occurred in the sorrow at the death of Mother Teresa, the anger at both verdicts in the Boston "au pair trial" of Louise Woodward, and the celebration at the birth of the McCaughey septuplets in Des Moines, Iowa. And there were several more limited upheavals, no less intense.

Not that these events did not merit genuine interest and concern or that there were no valid reasons for the emotional expressions that followed them. But these responses seemed so much more dramatic than usual, and so determinedly public. What was not openly displayed was deemed not to exist. When Diana died, the traditionally stiff-upper-lipped royal family was exhorted by placards to SHOW US YOU CARE.

What was it about this particular year that had so many people running in hysterical packs? Were these mass demonstrations brought on by apocalyptic, fin-de-siecle anxieties about the approaching millennium? By a general frustration with emotional detachments that have characterized recent years? Or by suppressed feelings about other, hidden things that erupted geyser-like in reaction to the news?

Even relatively small and local events evoked or involved heightened group responses. A heave of national paranoia resurfaced on the 50th anniversary of the Roswell, N.M., flying-saucer incident. So certain were an astounding number of Americans that a saucer did indeed crash in the desert near Roswell in 1947 that the Army Air Force command in Fort Worth, Texas, issued an explanation at the time that the vehicle in question had been a weather balloon. This past June, to keep the public calm, the Army published reassuring photos in the papers.

In another part of the alien-conscious nation, at Rancho Santa Fe, near San Diego, Calif., 39 disciples of the Heaven's Gate cult mixed phenobarbital, applesauce and vodka, slipped plastic bags over their heads and persuaded themselves that they were headed for a better life among the stars. Their suicide--the most lethal of the year's mass emotional activities--came in response to the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet, an astronomical surprise that incited other public anxieties about the coming millennium.

The Promise Keepers, all men, another cult of sorts, came together in stadiums all over the country to make mass statements of contrition for past sins and to beg forgiveness for wife abuse, child abandonment, infidelity and, apparently equal to the rest, insensitivity. In one whopping convention in Washington on Oct. 4, hundreds of thousands of them pledged their devotion to Jesus, family and one another. Their exhibition of mass apology seemed a down-home version of a wider impulse that has affected whole nations of late. France reiterated its apology for its treacherous and murderous treatment of French Jews under Vichy. The U.S., led by the President, apologized for slavery. Mass guilt, which used to be thought of as a convenient way out of individual responsibility, was in.

The suicide of Andrew Cunanan, the boyish serial killer who shot designer Gianni Versace to death on a Florida street; the conviction and sentencing to death of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber; the conviction of the World Trade Center terrorist bombers; and the bringing to trial of alleged Unabomber Ted Kaczynski--all of whom, when they were on the loose, caused minipanics--reduced the nation's sleepless nights.

Still, it was a good year to clone sheep, but pictures of the identical woolly faces of Scotland's Dolly whipped up a public panic of their own. President Clinton leaped to the task of devising cloning regulations, and Congress held hearings. Public imaginations abetted public nerves as one envisioned an NBA populated by Michael Jordans, a music world consisting of multiple John Teshes, and sheep of the ideological variety. Meanwhile, at the other end of the barnyard, the discovery of mad-cow disease (a more colorful, thus emotionally agitating term than bovine spongiform encephalopathy) had real men ordering sushi.

"Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable, [but] as a member of a crowd he at once becomes a blockhead." Schiller said that. Why does it happen? The "apocalypse now" theory has to do with the odd historical fact that people get exceptionally nervous as they near the end of any era. There were witch-hunts in the 1690s, episodes of hysteria in the 1890s. In our own time, one has only to reach back a couple of years to recall large-scale group fears induced by mention of the ozone layer, or by pandemics like toxic-shock syndrome, the Gulf War syndrome and the Ebola virus.

In Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media, critic Elaine Showalter exposes the enormous harm done by the recovered-memory syndrome as it was applied to everything from multiple personalities to intrafamilial sex-abuse cases, in which abuses "remembered" never occurred. Showalter also notes that hysterias tend to produce scapegoats, which was borne out by the Princess Diana paparazzi hunt. As gratifying as it may have been for people to find a target of blame, most journalists recognize that the difference between the paparazzi and legitimate news photographers is roughly 50 ft.

The frustration-with-detachment theory may sound more plausible than the apocalyptic, but is only slightly more down to earth. From the mid-1970s on, there has been an increasing disengagement of people from government, politics, community and, in some ways, from themselves; moreover, this disengagement has been actively sought. Not all that long ago, alienation from self and others was so universally thought to be the bugaboo of modern life that it was becoming boring to mention it. To be emotionally numb to experience, to live depersonalized, was to be unhappy. Not lately. With the notable exception of religious fundamentalism, the past 25 years have seen an aggressive pursuit of depersonalization, a shutting off of the emotions at once so purposeful and complete that many people, the young especially, speak of envying machines--a far cry from those earlier generations that feared nothing as much as becoming machines.

Women may have felt especially disengaged from emotions as they became more equal partners with men at home and at work, telling themselves that emotion-free male characteristics were more appropriate to their new status. At the same time, men were being urged to show their feelings more--with unsatisfactory results.

To some extent, the unrelenting sensationalism of the news, and of life as it has been portrayed on the daytime talk shows, added to the resistance to emotional responses. This was because, first, few things shock anybody anymore, and second, because people feel assured that all the freakishness of life will be normalized and neutralized on television. The too frequent child murders of the year, such as the killings in New Jersey (one by another child), the killings and shootings of and by schoolchildren in Mississippi and Kentucky, and the stories of newborns left in toilets or in Dumpsters ought to have aroused great public feelings of pity or rage. But they were defused at the outset by the fact that one knew they would be analyzed into the ground on TV. Everyone in America is on television. A child is killed, and moments later a distraught relative appears on camera perfectly composed because he or she has had plenty of practice with a camcorder.

Who would stir himself into a state of lasting disgust at the Marv Albert backbiting assault and underwear case, when one felt certain that Marv would (as he did) show up on Larry King, Letterman and Today to seek redemption by exposure? There was an exchange on the Today interview with Katie Couric that could be read as the clarifying moment of the entire century, let alone the past year, when Couric asked Marv why anyone should believe his version of the sordid events when he had already admitted lying to his former wife and fiance. Albert said, in effect, that while that was so, he would never lie on television.

For at least two decades, to be cool was to be "cool." And then, suddenly, it was not. As with all extreme cultural tendencies, something had to snap, and what began to show up in the mid-1990s was an insistent desire to feel passion again and show us you care. In 1995 psychologist Daniel Goleman published Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. The best seller was embraced in educational circles because EQ (emotional quotient) offered a way to counter IQ as a standard of intelligence. But it was also a signal that the public at large might be ready, indeed eager, to return to the flagrant emotionalism of the 1960s, though fired by new and different causes.

What causes were available? There was no Vietnam War to protest, no sexual revolution or drug culture to adopt (live free and die), no generation gap worth exploiting. The Gap had become a clothing store, the counterculture reduced to a few average hysterics who thought it exciting to proclaim God dead and the family expendable. As for opposing technology, it seemed out of the question. A decision had already been made to join our machines rather than beat 'em.

With no glaring cause to display mass emotions, anything that happened could qualify. Behold the responses to the death of Mother Teresa, the birth of the McCaughey seven, the au pair trial and, most amazingly, Diana. The public reaction to the septuplets might have been the same in any era; there is always something enchanting and heartwarming about human beings' doing something odd, like producing a litter. Likewise, the loss of so demonstrably selfless a person as Mother Teresa might effect a mass response in any year.

One cannot be so sure that is true of the au pair trial, however, and of its dual outrages--one over too harsh a decision, one over too lenient a one. At issue was justice, or rather injustice, and these days there is nothing like injustice to bring people to their knees or to their feet. People read of so many unjust rewards and unjust punishments--canned ceos walking off with tens of millions while "downsized" employees merely walk off--that they may be on an unconscious search for signs of cosmic fairness.

Along comes this painful and murky Boston murder trial, then, in which the truth of whatever happened on Feb. 4 was known only to the 19-year-old au pair and to eight-month-old Matthew Eappen, who was in her charge, and who is dead. The public thinks it sees injustice in the second-degree murder verdict the jury handed down. But then it thinks it sees injustice in the reversal by Judge Hiller Zobel, when he reduced the verdict to manslaughter and ordered no more jail time for Woodward. Adding to the frustration was the memory of O.J. and the question, never settled, of whether this year's civil-court decision to take away his money compensated society or heaven for what most people believe was an act of bloody murder.

Reality bites. Where was the cosmic fairness in this year's murder of Bill Cosby's son Ennis, a beloved young teacher? Did the June settlement by the states with the cigarette companies hit the bastards hard enough? What was happening in the never ending investigation of the crash of TWA Flight 800? Where is the justice for the killer(s) of JonBenet Ramsey, whose case seems to stew forever? Where is the justice for Pol Pot, the most odious mass murderer since Hitler and Stalin, who was brought into public view on videotape in a Khmer Rouge show trial. There he sat, still as death, watery eyes, age spots, every inch an ordinary old man, except in his vile soul. Where was the international tribunal to bring this subhuman low before the world? Or was it thought sufficient that he appeared on television?

And then came the death of Princess Di, the response to which was at once overwhelming and bewildering. Here was the loss of someone who was not a hero, a saint or a leader. Reduced to basics, hers was the life of a high-born girl, royally seduced and abandoned, who pleased the observing world by her beauty, gracefulness, kindness and weakness, and by an impressive amount of pluck. Yet when she died, it was as if the heart of everyone dropped in its cage.

In the weeks since her funeral there has been a visible collective effort to pull ourselves together. Among journalists, as soon as the first wave of admiring pieces had flattened out, a predictable second wave of hold-on-theres followed. The press had overreacted, said the press. The press had led and misled the public. There were so many more important stories to cover, said the press (as if that had not been the case during Iran-contra and the savings-and-loan frauds, when no princess had died). Behind all that was the embarrassing feeling that journalism had been swept up in a popular moment that it ought to have dissected or belittled, and so then it did, in an effort to cleanse itself of having dealt with the sort of news that makes reporters squirm--the news of feeling. Yet this is what the response to Diana's death was, and it might have been wiser to take it at face value.

It was said at the time that women especially identified with Diana, and that that accounted for the volume of the mourning. Every woman mistreated by a man--that is, every woman--could relate to moments in Diana's life that should have led to bliss and instead wound up in sorrow, humiliation and estrangement. Never mind that hers was a particular story wholly out of reach of common comprehension; it was easily translated to bad marriages and cold in-laws everywhere.

But if female identification explained the mass sadness, why were all the men weeping? And why were Americans weeping--we who could not care less about Britain's monarchy except in quaint memories of the literature of Kings and Queens? It may be simply that people make gods of selected celebrities and that Diana had to die to achieve godhead. Then, like Elvis, she became accessible after death; the public could leave flowers and personal messages at the gate of the Spencers' country estate, her Graceland.

In any case, there seemed to be a strong current of national melancholy seeking to express itself. The economy was way up, the deficit skinny, unemployment and interest rates down; so it would be hard to argue that melancholy was linked to money. But the fin de siecle came at the same time as the "fin" of other things. An odd loss attended winning the cold war, that of a scary enemy (the effort to inflate Saddam Hussein to that stature was seen as nonsense). There was the apparent end of ideology as the two main political parties settled on common and largely commonsensical ground. With all such monumental successes, people may have looked around for failures and things to fix. Toward the end of the year, the President hit on the topic of racism, but there seemed to be little desire to tackle an issue by "dialogue" that might better be solved with jobs and education.

What was missing, in short, was a battleground, a field of overt tension in which mass emotions might rise to an occasion. Instead, there was the presence of absence, which eats at the mind quietly and which can, when touched by one last straw, incite a riot. It may be that the death of Diana came simply as one loss and absence too many. Whatever else Diana was in the world, she effected a lovely presence, and who could not weep for the loss of that? Gone, Diana seemed to emblemize the word; she was everything gone. One grief stood for all. As in any epiphany, many people probably did not even know why they were weeping.

Among 1997's other heartfelt losses was Jimmy Stewart. The year ended in a wistful memory of the man who brought us the irresistible thought that love is forever, honesty wins, and it's a wonderful life.