See How We Are by Sara Catania

My husband and I were married on August 31, 1997. There's nothing particularly remarkable about the date, except that it was also the day Princess Diana died. The Internet was not nearly as ubiquitous then, and I've never bothered much with TV news. So I learned of her death when I picked up the LA Times from our front lawn and read the banner headline: "Princess Diana, Friend Killed in Paris Car Crash."

Diana was lovely and charming and mildly interesting for her mere existence as a "princess." And perhaps a little sad, in a storybook kind of way, for her cursed marriage to the pitcher-eared Charles.

But I was not prepared for the onslaught of coverage her death received and the pervasive state of mourning that ensued. The day after our wedding my husband and I departed for a month-long honeymoon in Indonesia. A few days later, as I set out for a morning stroll through the commercial district in the mountain village of Ubud on the island of Bali, Diana's becrowned image was everywhere, taped to shop windows, hoisted on makeshift flags and enshrined alongside incense and intricately woven palm leaves. When we returned home to LA, the tributes continued apace.

Last week, when Benazir Bhutto was assassinated, I learned of her death through a news bulletin emailed to my husband and retrieved from his laptop. Like Diana, Bhutto came from a life of princess-like privilege. Unlike Diana, Bhutto had a chance to change the shape of life in a volatile region of the world where violence and instability are a daily reality, a reality with powerful implications far beyond Pakistani borders. Her death left me, in the midst of the holiday season, with a sense of sorrow and foreboding. Yet when I picked up my LA Times the next morning, I was disappointed.

Though the story was reported "above the fold" there was no banner headline, no actual announcement of her death. No "Benazir Bhutto Killed at Political Rally." No space to simply mourn before the analysis and political jockeying began. Propelled by the 24-hour news cycle, by those undiscriminating wire feeds once the province of editors and now in the hands of anyone with internet access, Butto's story had dribbled out, like the air seeping out of a punctured ballon. And so the first story on Bhutto's death that ran in the print edition of the LA Times was headlined in "second day" style: "Bhutto's death throws Pakistan into uncertainty."

The coverage since has been tepid at best. My first inclination was to blame the nature of the coverage -- especially in comparison with that of Diana -- on changes in the medium. It's hard to resonate, to make a real splash, when the news is everywhere, all the time. We lose our perspective, our ability to judge what is important. Bhutto should not be sanctified, a la Diana. But the stages of mourning and reflection have been compressed into oblivion.

Beyond junk news engorgement is our reflexive societal abhorrence of complexity. Out media, our culture, our political leaders don't seem to know quite what to make of Benazir Bhutto's life, let alone her death. Was she a political opportunist, an egoist cutting dubious deals with Pervez Musharraf for financial and political gain? Was she the clearest path to political stability and social reform in a region desperate for change? We haven't a clue.

As Elizabeth Bumiller observes in today's New York Times, in a quote that can be extrapolated to our culture as a whole, "Benazir Bhutto always understood Washington more than Washington understood her." The writer Mohammed Hanif captures the ambivalence about Bhutto-- and the gravity of the loss of someone with her enormous political and emotional capital -- in his essay in the Times today: "For Pakistan's military-mullah establishment, she always remained a bad girl. Not just any ordinary privileged heir to a political dynasty, but a girl half the nation swooned over; a sharp political operator, a speaker who even in her stilted Urdu could have a million people dance to the wave of her hand. And she was not a revolutionary by a long shot -- but she could bring people to her rallies, and more important, polling stations by promising them jobs and reasonable electricity bills."

Bhutto's value, her role in our collective fate when alive, and now, in the vacuum created by her death, cannot be reduced to a fairytale. Rather than turning away we should acknowledge that complexity, delve into it, turn her death into a wake-up call that we must seek the nuanced understanding that could help us chart a future course in a region we grasp poorly at best.