The Iron Lady’s Mad Shadow

[marmar]

from In These Times:



The Iron Lady’s Mad Shadow
Margaret Thatcher’s gut instincts influenced the next generation of politicians, from Blair to Bush.

BY Jane Miller


Meryl Streep impersonates Margaret Thatcher wonderfully in The Iron Lady. (For so doing she received her 17th Oscar nomination.) A good deal of the film has Thatcher in her dressing-gown, mildly demented and remembering or misremembering her middle years, when, from 1979 to 1990, she was prime minister of Britain, the only woman to hold that job, which she occupied for longer than anyone else in the 20th century. She was much liked and much disliked, and she still is. While the film settles for comedy rather than excoriation, the discomfort one feels watching Thatcher going mad is mitigated by the suggested possibility that she was never entirely sane. Her “I will not go mad” echoes King Lear – and calls into question her right to imagine herself in such grandly tragic company.

Alexandra Roach plays the young Thatcher, who adores her father, despises her mother and marries a kindly duffer she comes to rely on. By the time she is leading the Tory Party, she and Meryl Streep are one. Laughed at by her almost solidly male and snobbish party colleagues as the shrill daughter of a provincial grocer, she becomes their leader, providing them with exactly the homilies her father offered her; and the scenes in which these gray-suited men do her bidding like boys hoping to please Nanny, and not altogether averse to her smacks, are among the film’s funniest.

The “Thatcher Years,” as they are sometimes called, are not by and large remembered warmly, nor were they funny. Ian Gilmour, a patrician Tory whom Thatcher sacked from her first government in 1981, wrote of the “devastation” caused by her fervent adoption of Friedmanite monetarist policies. His book Dancing With Dogma records some achievements, but reminds us that child poverty doubled during those years, that the tax burden was shifted from the rich to the poor (where it has remained), and that “British society became coarser and more selfish. Attitudes were encouraged which would even have undermined the well-being of a much more prosperous society.” If that is the verdict of a high Tory, imagine the feelings she inspired in many of the rest of us.

Thatcher pronounced herself from the beginning a “conviction” politician who had absolutely no time for consensus, and this was Gilmour’s principal objection to her. Agreement, he wrote, “effectively meant a one-woman consensus, a state of affairs which rendered debate superfluous.” Tony Blair, the Labour prime minister from 1997 to 2007, never hid his admiration for her. From her he learned the language that denies debate: “I passionately believe that…,” “I only know what I believe,” and “It is the right thing to do” have come to be offered as a rationale or clinching argument. The 33 years since her rise to power have seen a damaging diminution of parliamentary and cabinet debate in Britain. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/12694/the_iron_ladys_mad_shadow

[fasttense]

1. What is it with crazy ladies and destroying the economies of the countries they choose to live in.

Ayn Rand the psychopath tried to start a cult by writing really boring, poorly plotted stories. If Paul is any example, that totally crazy woman did start a cult, at least in one family. Then there is the egotist neo-liberal, or "free" trader as we call them in the US, Thatcher who is probably responsible for more deaths by poverty than any politician before her.

Both of them have made the world a whole lot worse because of their opinions and actions.

[leveymg]

2. Reagan and Bill Clinton also had that "conviction" thing down pat, and it worked for them, too.

Will power goes a long way in politics. It trumps consensus almost every time. If only Obama had more of it and a real core of liberal beliefs to draw strength from - but, alas, he doesn't, or can't communicate it.

[xchrom]

3. Du rec. Nt