Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea 23 (The Winter of Discontent)
“Jack always said it was difficult for us Americans to understand what it was really like here in the darkest parts of the eighties. We had a doddery old President who talked about the end of the world a little too often and was being run by the wrong people. But they had a Prime Minister who was genuinely mad. You know there were even feminists and women’s studies theorists who denied she was even really a woman anymore, she was so far out of her tree? She wanted concentration camps for AIDS victims, wanted to eradicate homosexuality even as an abstract concept, made poor people choose between eating and keeping their vote, ran the most shameless vote-grabbing artificial war scam in fifty years… England was a scary place. No wonder it produced a scary culture.” – Warren Ellis, Planetary #7
In general I attempt to maintain some vague illusion of critical balance on this blog. Even in political matters, where my overt progressivism is unmistakably a thing, I try very hard to acknowledge the points where leftist politics have failed and to find concrete lessons, both rhetorical and substantive, for their failures. But here we reach a new sort of problem of balance – one we’ve been circling about since the Three Day Week entry back in the late Pertwee era. (In this regard it’s fitting that we come to this right off of a story where the biggest flaw is that it’s not the glam rock era anymore.) And that problem is, in a nutshell, Margaret Thatcher.
First of all, however much I’ve been willing to shoot my own side of the debate when it’s being stupid, I’ve never been one to give much quarter to the right. The idea of starting with Thatcher is hardly inspiring. The fact of the matter is, I fiercely disagree with virtually everything Thatcher stood for and everything Thatcher did. There’s little margin around that to formulate some sort of balance. There’s no way to hold the ideals and values I hold and thus that this blog holds and like Margaret Thatcher. There’s not even really a way to hold them and avoid hating Margaret Thatcher.
But there is something about Thatcher that goes beyond mere political reason. I commented in the Dad’s Army entry, to some controversy and consternation, that Thatcher was “basically the raw embodiment of all evil.” The line was intended at least partially as one of those moments of excessively deadpan humor that I favor – an instance of willfully overplaying my hand and taking the most extremist position available so that all future statements on the subject are pleasantly moderate.
But there’s almost no such thing as overstatement on the subject of Margaret Thatcher, as the Ellis quote I started us off with demonstrates. None of it is strictly speaking untrue (although technically the concentration camps for AIDS victims were Lord Christopher Monckton, of whom Herman Cain is a poor American remake), and it doesn’t even scratch the surface of the horrors of Thatcherism.…
