Hello NBs in the UK,
Re Thatcher, please consider signingthis official petition, which has a real
sense of logic and justice about it.
http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/18914
Bob
>________________________________
> From: dave miller <[email protected]>
>To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity
><[email protected]>
>Sent: Friday, 6 January 2012, 10:47
>Subject: [NetBehaviour] The Iron Lady: The Margaret Thatcher Movie We Don't
>Need
>
>http://www.thenation.com/blog/165450/iron-lady-margaret-thatcher-movie-we-dont-need
>
>The Iron Lady just opened in London where, let's hope, it
>generates some serious critique. The critical silence in the
>US has been astounding only made worse by the praise, not
>just for the film but for its subject, former British Prime
>Minister Margaret Thatcher, played in the movie by Meryl
>Streep.
>
>Newsweek's holiday double issue slapped Streep as Thatcher
>on its cover, hailing "The New Thatcher Era." The feature
>story in summary reads: "Margaret Thatcher was the infamous
>Iron Lady the Brits love to hate. This month's bio starring
>Meryl Streep proves she was right all along."
>
>Streep's already winning awards and accolades and Oscars are
>probably on the way. People are saying the film's no
>whitewash because it shows the former Prime Minister in her
>dotage, fighting dementia - three decades after she came to
>power. Director Phyllida Lloyd has described the treatment
>as operatic. Streep's called it revealing. The two
>collaborated before on the musical Mamma Mia! The truth
>is, in Lloyd's hands Thatcher's iron isn't just rusty, it's
>melted down and depoliticized, made feminist enough to root
>for and ultimately sad enough for some to sniffle at. The
>Iron Lady is Thatcher -- The ABBA Version. It's the last
>thing we need, ever, and especially at this point.
>
>Think of Thatcher and I think of hungry people. Irish hunger
>strikers, first of all, ten of whom starved to death for
>status as political prisoners on her watch. Thatcher
>insisted anti-government rebels in Afghanistan were
>"resistance fighters," not terrorists, but it was a
>different story for the Irish. Indeed, in Thatcher's time,
>there was to be no story, no effort to understand the
>reasons for the conflict in Northern Ireland; certainly
>there was to be no discussion or consideration in public of
>why anyone might pick up a gun, or place a bomb, or starve
>themselves to death.
>
>Long before the USA PATRIOT Act and the 9-11 demonization of
>asking "why," Britons were starved of information about the
>so-called "troubles." Under an ever-expanding Prevention of
>Terrorism Act, British journalists were forced to report to
>police any contact with any "known or suspected terrorist."
>Irish parties to the conflict were banned from speaking on
>radio and TV yet Thatcher's government could tell the public
>any lie it liked. When British secret service snipers shot
>and killed three unarmed IRA members (two men and a woman,
>Mairead Farrell,) on the island of Gibraltar in 1988,
>Thatcher's government released an official story about
>crossfire and a gun fight, and a bomb planted near an old
>people's home. Video footage of an impressive little
>military robot supposedly defusing an incendiary device
>played on the evening news. It wasn't true. Lloyd's film
>shows the IRA's bombings and bloodshed but not the denial
>and the deadly government tactics which likely delayed peace
>talks for a decade.
>
>Think of Thatcher and I think of the hungry people who
>started showing up in villages in Yorkshire and Scotland and
>Wales where work was scarce because Thatcher's experts
>decided nuclear power was a better energy source than
>unionized coalfields. Miners went on strike - for a year.
>Their wives and children collected soup-kitchen money from
>their churches and their neighbors and when they ran out,
>they went down to London where they tried to tell their
>story of helmeted horsemen charging the ranks of union
>strikers and police bashing men's heads in. But Londoners
>didn't believe them. They'd heard the miners were greedy and
>dangerous and a threat to their jobs. After all, "trade
>union power is the true cause of unemployment," said
>Thatcher. The 1984 strike by the National Union of
>Mineworkers (NUM) gets a couple of seconds on screen in
>Lloyd's film, but there's no explanation, no follow-up and
>no consideration: does anyone wish now that they'd listened
>to the miners then?
>
>"There is no such thing as society. Only individuals."
>Thatcher also said. With more spending by successive
>Thatcher governments on police (so-called "law and order")
>and less on just about everything else, "no society" became
>true soon enough. The Iron Lady shows Prime Minister
>Thatcher over-ruling her "wet" male colleagues over waging
>war with Argentina. A few hundred far-off Falkland Islanders
>were worth fighting for, she famously decided. A take-
>control feminist? The film ignores the families in Toxteth
>(inner city Liverpool) and Brixton (a largely black
>neighborhood in London) whom Thatcher found it quite
>acceptable to sacrifice. Cabinet papers released by the
>National Archives just now under a 30-year rule reveal
>Thatcher's closest advisers told her that the "concentration
>of hopelessness" on Merseyside was "very largely self-
>inflicted" and not worth government repair.
>
>Thatcher didn't - actually - evacuate Liverpool in the
>aftermath of the 1981 inner-city riots. She led something
>more insidious. With her professionally crafted "grocer's
>daughter" image, Thatcher gave class-conscious Britons
>permission to dismiss real human difficulties with a blow-
>dried bourgeois smirk: Unemployed? Get on yer bike! Said her
>administration. Got a problem? You're the problem! In
>Maggie's world, deprivation is your own damn fault.
>
>Nor did Thatcher give people permission only to look away.
>Under Thatcher and egged-on by her, those who could leave
>troubled towns and troubled people did, and so did
>government. We'd "mind the gap" (between the train and the
>platform) on the London Underground, but we came not to mind
>the gap between the rich and the rest, the north and the
>south; the possibilities people had if they needed things to
>be public and the possibilities they had if they could pay
>for the private stuff - the private health care, the private
>school, the private house. Today, in a new time of budget
>wars, The Iron Lady's depiction of draconian cuts as
>feminist guts is chilling. What Thatcher called "harsh
>medicine" meant one thing for the poor and another for the
>very powerful then, and it still does. In both instances,
>there is hell to pay in social fabric.
>
>I don't remember if Lloyd's Lady quotes the real lady's most
>famous phrase: "There is No Alternative." Certainly TINA
>deserves star billing. Thatcher's quip about globalized
>capitalism has defined our epoch. People can debate the
>successes and failures of "the Thatcher era" all they like.
>One thing's for certain, we don't need a new one because the
>old one's still here. The consequences of the politicies
>Thatcher pioneered and made respectable - deregulation,
>privatization and globalization - can be measured in public
>costs and private profits on both sides of the Atlantic.
>More damning, even, is the enduring cultural habit of denial
>(looking away;) and the political practice of silence;
>shutting the problem people up.
>
>Grow the gap between government and the governed and you get
>what we have: a burnt-out world driven by the super-super-
>rich where some are stealing others blind and billions are
>alienated or angry, sure that government has nothing to
>offer but a bash on the head.
>
>Lloyd's soft-pop version deals with none of this.
>Ironically, the "deeds matter" Thatcher herself would
>probably be the first to dislike this shrunken, personal-
>over-political fantasy of her inner life. Lucky for us, we
>don't need to worry about her. We need to worry about us. We
>are not demented. There are alternatives. There always have
>been. What we need (among other things) are more movies
>about the women - and maybe a few of the men -- bringing
>those to life.
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>
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