Breaking news: Margaret Thatcher has died

[Valmy]

You may be right grumbler, but it doesn't seem to be a view that has wide currency. I mean, I don't think Tyr's views make him an outlier for his or his parents' demographic.

Eh and thinking Obama is hitler is not an outlier for alot of demographics I see around here.  Whether that view is justified is something different than alot of people feeling a certain way.

[derspiess]

Okay I had to go read up a little on the '84 strike & I'm left with the question-- what realistic alternative did Thatcher have to the course she chose?

[Jacob]

Eh and thinking Obama is hitler is not an outlier for alot of demographics I see around here.  Whether that view is justified is something different than alot of people feeling a certain way.

I'm not sure what your point is?

[Jacob]

Tyr's also enraged by the north Americans use of the word candy, so he may not be the best gauge.

That's not particular outlandish compared to the idiosyncracies of various languishites

[Valmy]

Eh and thinking Obama is hitler is not an outlier for alot of demographics I see around here.  Whether that view is justified is something different than alot of people feeling a certain way.

I'm not sure what your point is?

My point is I do not get what your point is.  So what alot of people have a certain view?

[Josquius]

I didnt see the movie so I can't comment on the differences but what struck me in the stage production was there was one stage set which had a giant blow up head and hands of Thatcher which her portrayed her not unlike the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz.  I have read that some on social media had advocated the purchase of the song from the Wizard of Oz "Ding Dong the Witch is Dead" to make it the best seller on the day of her death so I feel a bit reinforced in my initial view.
t.

Sounds strange.
The film didn't have any gigantic inflatable Thatchers no. It was able to show the bad stuff in a much more realistic manner however, IIRC there were scenes of police brutality, news reports from the time, etc...

You may be right grumbler, but it doesn't seem to be a view that has wide currency. I mean, I don't think Tyr's views make him an outlier for his or his parents' demographic.

Tyr's also enraged by the north Americans use of the word candy, so he may not be the best gauge.

I am?

[Jacob]

My point is I do not get what your point is.  So what alot of people have a certain view?

Given how ready you are to mock Tyr for his misunderstandings of American culture and politics, I find it somewhat absurd how ready you are to tell him that you have a better understanding of events that played out in his community; especially when the things he says aren't particularly outside of the mainstream in the UK.

I mean it's not like Sheilbh or Gups are saying that Northerners, the poor, and the industrial working class did well during Thatcher's government either.

To generalize, it seems to me that the argument of many of the North American Thatcher fans on languish goes something like this:

1) Thatcher's actions were justified and necessary given the realities she faced.

2) Because her actions were justified and necessary, the negative impacts are irrelevant and can be dismissed; because, you know, they were unavoidable.

3) ... or taking it one step further, there weren't really any significant negative impact at all. This results in some puzzlement at people who claim there were.

So to address each of them from my POV:

I think 1) is a perfectly defensible position, and it's not one I'm interested in contesting. I mean, I'm sure there are all sorts of disagreements that can be had about specific details and individual decisions that could have altered the tenor of her tenure, and about economic choices that could have made things turn out more or less bad, but I don't have enough command of the details to do so myself. I'd be interested in following an exchange between people who do; I don't know if anyone at languish is up for that task, however.

As for 2), I think it's an opinion you can only reasonably hold if you're completely removed from the events and consequences in question; furthermore, it's unreasonable to expect people whose lives were in fact affected by them to blithely dismiss them as you do.

And 3) is just plain silly.

Basically, I think Thatcher more or less did what she had to, but that it hurt a lot of people and that sucks.

Seems like plenty of people are hoping to turn it into me arguing that she shouldn't have done what she did, but I'm not. So then it becomes about whether it sucked that people got hurt, and I think it does; I'm not quite clear to what degree people disagree with that. Finally, it seems that there's a strain of argument that goes that people did not get hurt which I find, frankly, preposterous.

As for people claiming Obama is Hitler, I don't really care and don't think it's relevant to any of these discussions.

[Razgovory]

Good dodge, 8.0.

[Jacob]

Good dodge, 8.0.

Lousy troll, 1.5.

[Razgovory]

Wasn't a troll, as I wasn't expecting a response from you.  Bad call.  You made a Ad populum fallacy and Valmy called you on it.

[Jacob]

Wasn't a troll, as I wasn't expecting a response from you. 

[Valmy]

Given how ready you are to mock Tyr for his misunderstandings of American culture and politics, I find it somewhat absurd how ready you are to tell him that you have a better understanding of events that played out in his community; especially when the things he says aren't particularly outside of the mainstream in the UK.

Bullshit I am not ready to do any such thing.  If I felt I had a good understanding of that I would not be in this thread reading what people's views were.  It is precisely that I do not get it that I enjoy discussing Thatcher and that era in Britain.

As for people claiming Obama is Hitler, I don't really care and don't think it's relevant to any of these discussions.

You seemed to be shooting down Grumbler based on nothing else than the fact that it does not match with certain mainstream views.  I only used the Obama thing to show that mainstream views do not always mean accuracy and meaningfulness.  I am not saying mainstream views may not be very valid indeed, but they do not necessarily so.  So the appeal to the crowd I found odd. 

[Jacob]

Bullshit I am not ready to do any such thing.  If I felt I had a good understanding of that I would not be in this thread reading what people's views were.  It is precisely that I do not get it that I enjoy discussing Thatcher and that era in Britain.

My apologies then, I misunderstood. I thought you were saying Tyr's views were unjustified since they were as reasonable as people who thought Obama was Hitler.

You seemed to be shooting down Grumbler based on nothing else than the fact that it does not match with certain mainstream views.  I only used the Obama thing to show that mainstream views do not always mean accuracy and meaningfulness.  I am not saying mainstream views may not be very valid indeed, but they do not necessarily so.  So the appeal to the crowd I found odd.

It was not an appeal to the crowd, it was an appeal to the people who've directly experienced the effects of the policies in question, something which I thought relevant when discussing the effects of the policies in question.

Since you ignored the bulk of my post, let me ask you a question instead: what's your opinion of Thatcher, and of the people who loathe her? You said earlier you weren't surprised by the outpouring of spite; what do you think the sources are?

[Josquius]

Commentary:

One Sunday recently while staying in London, I took a stroll in the gardens of Temple, the insular clod of quads and offices between the Strand and the Embankment. It's kind of a luxury rent-controlled ghetto for lawyers and barristers, and there is a beautiful tailors, a fine chapel, established by the Knights Templar (from which the compound takes its name), a twee cottage designed by Sir Christopher Wren and a rose garden; which I never promised you.

My mate John and I were wandering there together, he expertly proselytising on the architecture and the history of the place, me pretending to be Rumpole of the Bailey (quietly in my mind), when we spied in the distant garden a hunched and frail figure, in a raincoat, scarf about her head, watering the roses under the breezy supervision of a masticating copper. "What's going on there, mate?" John asked a nearby chippy loading his white van. "Maggie Thatcher," he said. "Comes here every week to water them flowers." The three of us watched as the gentle horticultural ritual was feebly enacted, then regarded the Iron Lady being helped into the back of a car and trundling off. In this moment she inspired only curiosity, a pale phantom, dumbly filling her day. None present eyed her meanly or spoke with vitriol and it wasn't until an hour later that I dreamt up an Ealing comedy-style caper in which two inept crooks kidnap Thatcher from the garden but are unable to cope with the demands of dealing with her, and finally give her back. This reverie only occurred when the car was out of view. In her diminished presence I stared like an amateur astronomer unable to describe my awe at this distant phenomenon.

When I was a kid, Thatcher was the headmistress of our country. Her voice, a bellicose yawn, somehow both boring and boring – I could ignore the content but the intent drilled its way in. She became leader of the Conservatives the year I was born and prime minister when I was four. She remained in power till I was 15. I am, it's safe to say, one of Thatcher's children. How then do I feel on the day of this matriarchal mourning?

I grew up in Essex with a single mum and a go-getter Dagenham dad. I don't know if they ever voted for her, I don't know if they liked her. My dad, I suspect, did. He had enough Del Boy about him to admire her coiffured virility – but in a way Thatcher was so omnipotent; so omnipresent, so omni-everything that all opinion was redundant.

As I scan the statements of my memory bank for early deposits (it'd be a kid's memory bank account at a neurological NatWest where you're encouraged to become a greedy little capitalist with an escalating family of porcelain pigs), I see her in her hairy helmet, condescending on Nationwide, eviscerating eunuch MPs and baffled BBC fuddy duddies with her General Zodd stare and coldly condemning the IRA. And the miners. And the single mums. The dockers. The poll-tax rioters. The Brixton rioters, the Argentinians, teachers; everyone actually.
Margaret Thatcher visits Falkland Islands Margaret Thatcher visiting British troops on the Falkland Islands in 1983: the war was a turning point in her premiership. Photograph: taken from picture library

Thinking about it now, when I was a child she was just a strict woman telling everyone off and selling everything off. I didn't know what to think of this fearsome woman.

Perhaps my early apathy and indifference are a result of what Thatcher deliberately engendered, the idea that "there is no such thing as society", that we are alone on our journey through life, solitary atoms of consciousness. Or perhaps it was just because I was a little kid and more interested in them Weetabix skinheads, Roland Rat and Knight Rider. Either way, I'm an adult now and none of those things are on telly any more so there's no excuse for apathy.

When John Lennon was told of Elvis Presley's death, he famously responded: "Elvis died when he joined the army," meaning of course, that his combat clothing and clipped hair signalled the demise of the thrusting, Dionysian revolution of which he was the immaculate emblem.

When I awoke today on LA time my phone was full of impertinent digital eulogies. It'd be disingenuous to omit that there were a fair number of ding-dong-style celebratory messages amidst the pensive reflections on the end of an era. Interestingly, one mate of mine, a proper leftie, in his heyday all Red Wedge and right-on punch-ups, was melancholy. "I thought I'd be overjoyed, but really it's just ... another one bites the dust ..." This demonstrates, I suppose, that if you opposed Thatcher's ideas it was likely because of their lack of compassion, which is really just a word for love. If love is something you cherish, it is hard to glean much joy from death, even in one's enemies.

Perhaps, though, Thatcher "the monster" didn't die yesterday from a stroke, perhaps that Thatcher died as she sobbed self-pitying tears as she was driven, defeated, from Downing Street, ousted by her own party. By then, 1990, I was 15, adolescent and instinctively anti-establishment enough to regard her disdainfully. I'd unthinkingly imbibed enough doctrine to know that, troubled as I was, there was little point looking elsewhere for support. I was on my own. We are all on our own. Norman Tebbit, one of Thatcher's acolytes and fellow "Munsters evacuee", said when the National Union of Mineworkers eventually succumbed to the military onslaught and starvation over which she presided: "We didn't just break the strike, we broke the spell." The spell he was referring to is the unseen bond that connects us all and prevents us from being subjugated by tyranny. The spell of community.

Those strikes were confusing to me as a child. All of the Tory edicts that bludgeoned our nation, as my generation squirmed through ghoulish puberty, were confusing. When all the public amenities were flogged, the adverts made it seem to my childish eyes fun and positive, jaunty slogans and affable British stereotypes jostling about in villages, selling people companies that they'd already paid for through tax. I just now watched the British Gas one again. It's like a whimsical live-action episode of Postman Pat where his cat is craftily carved up and sold back to him.
The Orgreave miners The Orgreave miners' strike in 1984. Photograph: Alamy

"The News" was the pompous conduit through which we suckled at the barren baroness through newscaster wet-nurses, naturally; not direct from the steel teat. Jan Leeming, Sue Lawley, Moira Stuart – delivering doctrine with sterile sexiness, like a butterscotch-scented beige vapour. To use a less bizarre analogy: if Thatcher was the headmistress, they were junior teachers, authoritative but warm enough that you could call them "mum" by accident. You could never call Margaret Mother by mistake. For a national matriarch she is oddly unmaternal. I always felt a bit sorry for her biological children Mark and Carol, wondering from whom they would get their cuddles. "Thatcher as mother" seemed, to my tiddly mind, anathema. How could anyone who was so resolutely Margaret Thatcher be anything else? In the Meryl Streep film, The Iron Lady, it's the scenes of domesticity that appear most absurd. Knocking up a flan for Denis or helping Carol with her algebra or Mark with his gun-running, are jarring distractions from the main narrative; woman as warrior queen.

It always struck me as peculiar, too, when the Spice Girls briefly championed Thatcher as an early example of girl power. I don't see that. She is an anomaly; a product of the freak-onomy of her time. Barack Obama, interestingly, said in his statement that she had "broken the glass ceiling for other women". Only in the sense that all the women beneath her were blinded by falling shards. She is an icon of individualism, not of feminism.

I have few recollections of Thatcher after the slowly chauffeured, weepy Downing Street cortege. I'd become a delinquent, living on heroin and benefit fraud.

There were sporadic resurrections. She would appear in public to drape a hankie over a model BA plane tailfin because she disliked the unpatriotic logo with which they'd replaced the union flag (maybe don't privatise BA then), or to shuffle about some country pile arm in arm with a doddery Pinochet and tell us all what a fine fellow he was. It always irks when rightwing folk demonstrate in a familial or exclusive setting the values that they deny in a broader social context. They're happy to share big windfall bonuses with their cronies, they'll stick up for deposed dictator chums when they're down on their luck, they'll find opportunities in business for people they care about. I hope I'm not being reductive but it seems Thatcher's time in power was solely spent diminishing the resources of those who had least for the advancement of those who had most. I know from my own indulgence in selfish behaviour that it's much easier to get what you want if you remove from consideration the effect your actions will have on others.

Is that what made her so formidable, her ability to ignore the suffering of others? Given the nature of her legacy "survival of the fittest" – a phrase that Darwin himself only used twice in On the Origin of Species, compared to hundreds of references to altruism, love and cooperation, it isn't surprising that there are parties tonight in Liverpool, Glasgow and Brixton – from where are they to have learned compassion and forgiveness?

The blunt, pathetic reality today is that a little old lady has died, who in the winter of her life had to water roses alone under police supervision. If you behave like there's no such thing as society, in the end there isn't. Her death must be sad for the handful of people she was nice to and the rich people who got richer under her stewardship. It isn't sad for anyone else. There are pangs of nostalgia, yes, because for me she's all tied up with Hi-De-Hi and Speak and Spell and Blockbusters and "follow the bear". What is more troubling is my inability to ascertain where my own selfishness ends and her neo-liberal inculcation begins. All of us that grew up under Thatcher were taught that it is good to be selfish, that other people's pain is not your problem, that pain is in fact a weakness and suffering is deserved and shameful. Perhaps there is resentment because the clemency and respect that are being mawkishly displayed now by some and haughtily demanded of the rest of us at the impending, solemn ceremonial funeral, are values that her government and policies sought to annihilate.

I can't articulate with the skill of either of "the Marks" – Steel or Thomas – why Thatcher and Thatcherism were so bad for Britain but I do recall that even to a child her demeanour and every discernible action seemed to be to the detriment of our national spirit and identity. Her refusal to stand against apartheid, her civil war against the unions, her aggression towards our neighbours in Ireland and a taxation system that was devised in the dark ages, the bombing of a retreating ship – it's just not British.

I do not yet know what effect Margaret Thatcher has had on me as an individual or on the character of our country as we continue to evolve. As a child she unnerved me but we are not children now and we are free to choose our own ethical codes and leaders that reflect them.

http://m.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/apr/09/russell-brand-margaret-thatcher

[Razgovory]

Why must the British be such a mean spirited bunch?