Barack Obama, David Cameron strike a pose with Helle Thorning Schmidt during the Nelson Mandela memorial service.
David Cameron, Barack Obama and the Danish prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, may have been caught out being less than graceful at Nelson Mandela's memorial service by taking selfies,
but at least they got one bit of etiquette right. They didn't arrive at
the service after the deceased. At the funeral of a friend of
mine, I
turned round to watch the coffin being brought into the church only to
spot my therapist scuttling in behind it. My psychological wellbeing has
been greatly improved ever since.
You could argue that world
leaders have a duty to be statesmanlike at memorials and that
hatchet-faced solemnity is the order of the day. You might even wonder
how much any of them really cared that Mandela had died. Most of them
would probably only have met him a couple of times at most and in the
ordinary run of events you don't go to memorials of people you've only
met twice.
But world leaders have to do what world leaders have to
do. And if it means jetting halfway across the world, both to represent
your country and to show you are important enough to be invited, then
needs must.
Getting censorious about Obama, Cameron and
Thorning-Schmidt having a laugh is to miss the point. If they had
laughed the whole way through the service, then it would have been a
misjudgment. But they didn't. They were serious when required, which is
the way it should be. A memorial is a sad time, but it's also a time to
remember the fun bits of the dead person's life. Irreverence is not the
same as disrespect. I'm not sure that Mandela would have taken a selfie
at Obama's memorial if the positions had been reversed, but I'm fairly
sure he would have seen the funny side of Obama posing at his.
A
memorial should celebrate and reflect the life of the deceased. Remember
Margaret Thatcher's funeral earlier this year? Everyone at St Paul's
Cathedral behaved with the utmost solemnity. But was there ever a more
joyless, soulless service? Thatcher left this world into a public
emotional void. Compared with that, Obama's selfie could almost be
construed as an act of love.
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