Does this paint the Thatcher admin. in a positive or negative light?
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shareOverall, I'd say negative.
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Well put. In fact it doesn't just put the Thatcher administration in a bad light--it puts much of the governance of the Western powers, post-Thatcher, in a bad light, as the state you describe has become common to many of them...the US most definitely included.
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Thanks for the excellent post. What you describe is like on a smaller scale what was happening in the States, 80s-90s, allowing that we're a lot bigger. Among the many differences: we got the faux liberal hipster Bill Clinton, much beloved by Boomers at the time, while you got the square John Major.
shareGood response--I was thinking pretty much along the same lines, that the similarities between the US and British situations in those decades were much greater than the differences--the differences consisting mainly in terms of superficial style, as you point out, but the underlying agendas were pretty much alike.
Our Francis Urquhart would probably be something along the lines of Bill Clinton turned up to Volume 11, lol.
Both of them are FU's, Amy : Bill, and now Hillary. I saw Trump knock it out of the ballpark last night,--rhetorically, I mean--and he was at the top of his game. Better still, he had a Latino contingent, or what looked like a Latino contingent; a guy who was either an Orthodox Jew or who was dressed as one. Maybe they gave out costumes to people before the went on the convention floor. Trump's selling of himself as a common man, and better still, a friend of the Common Man, while ludicrous, was none the less a stunning performance. I don't like Hillary, but she's what we're stuck with, and I can't see her or the Democrats putting on so good a show. Twenty years ago,--do you remember?--Bill showed up at the convention like a rock star. The camera followed him through the hallways, tunnels, whatever it was that got him to the podium. It was all show biz, but then so is Trump. That's the way it is these days. There's no way Hillary and her handlers can match that, or even go half-way. I'm worried. The whole country feels like a house of cards right now. OT, but had to share.
shareThat's an excellent analogy about Bill Clinton as rock star--one I've said has haunted the Republicans for years--the inability to launch a rock star candidate of their own, and the disaster they've made of their party by so doing. McCain tried that tactic with Sarah Palin--and I think they really believed she'd take off as a genuine Right rock star--which she might have done; she had all the qualifications, but sabotaged it by having no one to reign in her public displays of her own ignorance and ineptitude (in fact, I firmly believe her backers actually welcomed those displays as being a major part of her appeal, up until it was too late). Up against Obama--who wasn't a rock star by basic temperament, but could certainly be packaged as one--the Republicans floundered repeatedly. Then along comes Trump.
The problem is, Trump is too much of a rock star for them to handle. He can't be contained, he's become enormously successful at presenting himself as a populist, no matter how faux a one he actually is, and worst of all, he's the walking, talking embodiment of the most hateful of Republican social philosophies over the last thirty years--every time he opens his mouth he lets their cat out of the bag, and he can't be stopped. What should have been the perfect candidate for them has become their worst nightmare, and the best part of it is that they can't disavow him totally. He's all they've got, their only real chance to defeat Hillary, even the lackluster Hillary of today. Ten years ago she could have been sold as another Democratic rock star, but she's accrued too much of the aura of being a tool of the corporations and Wall Street for too long--the shine is off of her, and only a series of real mis-steps by Trump (which he's certainly capable of) is apt to propel her into the White House. She should have been able to sell the idea of 'change' easily, but she's had that brand whisked out from under her both by Trump and by her own poor showings.
The whole country feels like a house of cards right now. OT, but had to share.
I'm glad you did, and not even all that OT. Look at the line-up of mediocrities Urquhart was up against--venal, immoral, stupid, and not one of them even particularly fit to govern. Even Hal, the only semi-decent one of the lot is, at the end of the day, too weak and inept to handle affairs, and thus easily felled by a Machiavellian like F.U....sort of echoes what we have on display in our country, in the here and now, and the show has almost too much relevance. If you want to take Mattie Storin as an allegorical figure of a press willing to play whore to these types, you have an almost letter-perfect commentary to the state of our system now.
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Truly, this is the state of the presidential election, isn't it. Amy? The thing is, neither party can come up with a truly distinguished candidate. The era of the statesman types has passed, or has passed in electoral politics. We're really paying the price for the social changes wrought by the 60s,--this, not a liberal observation on my part, but I've got to call it like it is--as it's like between the various "revolutions" (sexual, gender, drugs, rock and roll, et al) we've lost our dignity as a nation. We produce neither ladies nor gentlemen.
The mass media have picked up on this in recent years, and the result on prime time television are those "you too can be a celebrity" shows featuring singers who can't sing, dancers who can't dance. Then there are those trailer park daytime talk and so-called comedy shows featuring the likes of Kelly and Ellen. With those two it's like TV for unempowered women, and there must be a lot of them. The dumbing down, in language, humor, behavior, for me anyway, almost literally painful to watch in just the coming attractions they show on late night television.
Okay, a rant on a hot Saturday. I just don't see much hope on either side of the political spectrum. It's like everyone has been bought off. I do think the American people know it, but it's like we've been drugged into a kind of media passivity that precludes (forbids?) action, independent thinking and individualism. The heat's really getting to me today, eh?
You're not the only one, tel. I look around the landscape today and know despair. It doesn't help that the passing in recent years of a number of literary figures who served as some sort of counteractive to this madness--Gore Vidal, Chris Hitchens, Alexander Cockburn, and even, in his own cracked and unique way, Hunter Thompson--have left that landscape seemingly barren of any sort of corrective point of view. The lighthouses are going out one by one all along the shore, and Pope's 'universal darkness' looks to be ever closer at hand. In the wake of this, perhaps it's not to be wondered at that Trump can now gain the ascendant--what and who is there to stop, or even pungently question him anymore?
I can't bear to look at those shows. The tiny smidgen of actual talent they've produced doesn't begin to justify the flood tide of mediocrity they've ushered in, and the 'housewife' shows simply leave me in despair at what the mental composition of millions of American women must be today. At work, i see the young people endlessly on the internet and social media discussing the likes of the Kardashians with the sort of intensity that used to be saved for personal relations. Their lives are being co-opted by trash 'celebrities' and they appear to have no inkling of this. They've become as pod people for the invasion of mindless, unreflective, no-content celebrity culture, and it looks as if they have no other culture left available to them; certainly none they care to avail themselves of. Modern schooling seems bent on driving them away from the world of thought, ideas and critical thinking, and in my worst moments I can't help suspecting there's a reason for this.
I think that may be one reason, among some other and sadly, more obvious ones, that Obama has taken the heat he has. Granted that he's made a fair share of missteps in his tenure, I think one of his greatest sins in the eyes of Joe Public is his attempt to behave in the office in something resembling a statesmanlike manner. Interestingly enough, this coming from a child of those revolutionary times. That demeanor has done him no favors in the estimation of a public, a large section of whom wants the brainless sputterings of a billionaire buffoon to be the true voice of America in the post 9/11 world.
We seem to be on the same page here, Amy. The passing of the literary figure you named and others like them,--even William F. Buckley--has left a void. That reading the news and even magazines have become an on-line activity only contributes to the sense of a "throwaway culture" (remember when some families would hold only old issues of everything from National Geographic to The New Yorker for literally decades?).
One of the things that causes me so much despair is that so much of those (at the time) "liberating social change" that occurred in or on account of the 60s got cheapened fast and now looks negative. I don't know your age but I can remember being a teen and going to see French and other European movies with friends (how we got in is another matter...) that dealt with sexuality in a way then impossible in American movies, and what a cultural revelation they were! Along with the works of such literary figures as D.H. Lawrence they seemed to be ushering in an Age Of Sophistication that lay right around the corner. Movies, from Georgy Girl to Elvira Madigan, were showing the way.
This might come across as pretentious and too goody goody to say this but it's like Europe and Europeans were "showing us the way" out of our puritanical views, our restrictive lifestyles, our bourgeois (remember when that word was in wide circulation) values. A good deal of the then rather high end (as to education, income, etc.) Counterculture really did look abroad, and in many ways look back as well, to find solutions to the seeming dehumanization and regimentation of the modern world. It was beyond mere Marxism, as such, though many went that way. More like a questioning of Everything, and no, not just the whinings of a generation of pampered little Holden Caulfields,--I never went for that, though some, of course, did--but a desire to think about and experience life in other ways.
What we got instead was an opening of the floodgates of a different sort, and a cheapening of the culture, of human relations, rather than an uplifting, as so many of us wished for. I don't have time to pursue this topic further,--to much to do--but I thank you for responding. More later,--I hope.
Thanks for that post. I don't want to sound like a mutual admiration society, but you read my mind--especially with regard to the way Europe and Britain were opening our minds to arts, culture, the wider realms of thought. And I recall sneaking in to see some of those films too, being blessed with a college campus in the city that included a great arthouse theater (The Biograph, long gone alas) where I saw a good number of those productions--including Marat/Sade, that brilliant dissection of revolution (so there's an Ian Richardson connection, keeping this from being totally OT, lol). You make excellent observations with regard to the counterculture of the nation at that time. It really seemed as if the US were in for decades of expansion and experimentation on all fronts; that is, until the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam depressions set in and ushered Carter, Iraq and then the response of Ronald Reagan's 'morning in America' onto the stage.
I'd only add that in addition to the cheapening and mass-marketing of the counterculture, and the degrading effects of same, I do believe that the ensuing Republican domination had it front and center on their agenda to make certain that this sort of revolution in thought and culture was never allowed to happen again. The very notion of a public in response and revolt to government policies, no matter how deranged, had to be stopped, and the best way to do so was to propagandize despair and apathy to the masses at large. And god knows, that worked only too well. Perhaps another parallel to the state F.U. sought to create, where a dystopian generalized angst kept the people at bay and the quasi-fascists of the ruling class firmly in the driver's seat.
And it's become a throwaway culture, indeed. To see the print media dwindled down to publications the size of religious pamphlets is saddening enough: to see public libraries jettisoning large quantities of their bound media to make more room for computer stations is appalling: to know that the permanancy of print is being increasingly co-opted by the ephemera of the internet (so like Winston Smith's 'memory hole', where the news can easily be changed to fit every passing whim--is it Eurasia or Eastasia today?) sometimes leaves me in fits of depression that make me almost glad I won't have to deal with the 'minds of tomorrow' that will be populating the latter part of the 21st century and beyond.
Amy: Thanks so much for posting . What can I say but yes and yes...squared.
There's a problem with conversations like the one we're sort of having here, which is that they can induce even more despair from repetition, even as it's repeating the truth. The depression can get contagious,--as violence seems to be getting this spring and summer--and to continue along these lines is like feeding the beast.
As to Marat/Sade, maybe not a great play but a very good one,--and boy was it relevant back in the day!--and yes, I remember Ian Richardson in it, too; and Patrick Magee. Don't let's forget Glenda Jackson's striking Charlotte Corday. How many teenagers today get exposed to plays like that? Sorry, but Rent and Angels In America aren't in the same league.
There's a kind of creeping tendentiousness in most artistically ambitious plays and films today. One knows their agenda from their titles; and besides, the spin, for the most part, kills the experience before it's happened. I'm beginning to understand how George Orwell felt in his middle years,--and I'm older than he was when he died--as I feel like a leftie at war with the Left.