The most-watched funeral in history may be seen as marking the death of stiff-upper-lip England itself. We have turned away from stoicism toward a mass middle-class culture that honors sentimentality in the name of spontaneity, and gestures and images in place of constancy and memory. PNS editor Richard Rodriguez, author of "Days of Obligation: An Argument with my Mexican Father" (Viking-Penguin), is a contributing editor of Harper's and the Los Angeles Sunday Times.

At the funeral of Princess Diana last week in London, it was clear that England, stoic England, has died. What we watched was a funeral the likes of which the world has not witnessed since Madonna, in the role of Eva Peron, lay in state in Dolby Sound.

Odd that we can speak of saucy Argentina and stiff-upper-lip England in the same sentence. For centuries, England's distinction in the world, its fame, has been its emotional reticence--an upper- and lower-class stoicism that insured a rigid class system on its own soil, and permitted a cruel but efficient colonial bureaucracy in hot climes.

At its best, English reserve showed itself in the steely calm that withstood Nazi bombings during World War II. It is possible to argue, I think, that the great literature of England--the wit, the conversation, the satire of the nation--derived from its public restraint.

At its worst, emotionally reticent England led to Victorian prudishness and drove many of its own citizens to emotionally warmer skies. (Think of D.H. Lawrence searching through Italy, Mexico, finally Taos, New Mexico.)

Princess Diana is the icon of a new, heart-on-its-silk-sleeve England. She is queen of the new middle-class England. Diana--the hysterical wife in the palace, the impetuous lover of playboys and riding instructors, the hugging mother, the stylish visitor to the hospice--belongs very much to the new world of mass middle-class taste.

Fifty years ago, the most famous female icon in the world was Eva Peron, a bottle-blond, who rose from being an illegitimate daughter to becoming mother of her people. Rejected by upper-class Buenos Aires, Eva Peron literally threw money at the poor. And then she died of cancer, while still a young woman.

Who knows how much cynicism or sincerity there was behind the largesse of Eva or, for that matter, Diana? Despite all of the photographs that survive of both women, we know very little about them. What is certain is that both women showed up the upper-class with their common touch. And both women merged style with virtue. (We want our saints blond.)

Diana was dressed by Gianni Versace; Eva was dressed by Christian Dior. Both women became so famous the world knew them as first names. But it is not clear whether Diana or Eva ever read a book. And from neither woman will history remember a remarkable sentence.

Anthony Sampson, the British writer, bemoaned last week the "Latinization" of British culture. As someone who, by blood and by culture, is related to Latin America, I say, too bad.

Latin Americans, especially the very rich and educated, for generations, admired Paris for achieving just the right balance between the rational (North) and the emotional (South). Today, many Latin Americans look to Miami as the new Paris, prized for being, at once, efficiently gringo (U.S. mail comes on time) and carelessly Latin.

What one wants in the world is a balance of hot and cold, spontaneity and reserve, Mexico City and Toronto. What we are ending up with is merely some lazy and cheap, if also democratic, U.S. pop culture. We end up with Oprah Winfrey's intimacies and Bill Clinton's teary sentimentality and John Kennedy Jr.'s hairy chest.

After Diana's funeral, after the bathos of Elton John's hymn to Marilyn-Diana, after the mounds of flowers in Hyde Park had turned into a stench, who was there to mourn the passing of gray England? I mean the England of the Queen Mother, standing amidst the rubble of Buckingham Palace, after a Nazi bombing, unruffled.

What the middle-class in England wants now are royals more "spontaneous"--no mean trick, since the point of royalty, beyond their value for the tourist industry, is to communicate implacability and continuity. Indeed, it's possible to argue that Prince Charles, as a royal, is a complete failure, for being too spontaneous in his dealings with Camilla.

At our best, we of the world's middle class are not stoic. We want a world that is open to ambition and change, and therefore we resent unearned privilege and rank. We do not stand on ceremony that reeks of the past. At our best and worst, we tend toward the individualistic--trust spontaneity and distrust highly communal expression. Though, as the funeral of Diana and the vast grieving made clear, the human need to deal with our individual sorrows through the death of the famous, this very need is the reason societies create kings and queens, in the first place.

I am not a royalist. Nor am I content with the pop culture that we of the middle class now use to replace civic constancy and memory. We end up being satisfied by gestures, images (supplied by People Magazine), fashions not ideas, gestures, halos created by flash bulbs.

No one understands the world we are becoming better than Madonna, a second-rate singer and a third-rate actress, a woman who is in the habit of changing her look with the seasons.

Doubtless, somewhere in Hollywood, she is brooding. She must yearn to play the role of Diana. After all, they were almost the same age. And if Madonna could play the teenaged Argentine cabaret singer, why not a thirty-year old discontent royal? Who knows, with a little schooling, she might even get the accent right.