Mark Steyn On Mrs. Thatcher’s Losing Victory
April 15, 2013 2 Comments
English: The house where Margaret Thatcher was born (Grantham) Français : Maison natale de Margaret Thatcher (Grantham) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
So the British left managed to make Ding Dong the Witch is Dead number 1 on Amazon UK. Isn’t that special. Well at least what Mark Steyn calls the Moochkins are good at marching in lockstep. Lord knows that they’re useless for any productive use. Useless mouths, a just government would have left them to starve decades ago.
But I suppose that’s too much to ask for from a compassionate, multicultural government, you know, like the British, or for that matter the American. You all know how much of a fan of the Brits I am, but I’m beginning to wonder why, it seems like they have a death wish anymore, and you know, it’s hard watching your best friend attempt to commit suicide, especially when it feels like you may be following shortly.
Still, if our societies were to Follow the Yellow Brick Road on down to Oz, I wonder who we would find behind the curtain. See I’ve known this story all my life, and quite well too. On my first real job the man training me pointed out a lake cottage that had belonged to L. Frank Baum, and that doesn’t even count watching the movie every year. The thing is, the man behind the curtain isn’t any sort of wizard, he’s just another guy trying to make an obscene living by manipulating people.
Seems to work every time. We and the Brits have been lucky, right about the time our societies have been ready to go down, people like Baroness Thatcher, and President Reagan have shown up to keep us above water for another generation or so. Only thing is, I don’t see one, even on the horizon, on either side of the Atlantic, and it’s time for another one, maybe it’s already too late.
In any case Mark Steyn writing in National Review Online has a good bit to say as well, in his inimitable style
A few hours after Margaret Thatcher’s death on Monday, the snarling deadbeats of the British underclass were gleefully rampaging through the streets of Brixton in South London, scaling the marquee of the local fleapit and hanging a banner announcing, “THE BITCH IS DEAD.” Amazingly, they managed to spell all four words correctly. By Friday, “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead,” from The Wizard of Oz, was the No. 1 download at Amazon U.K.
Mrs. Thatcher would have enjoyed all this. Her former speechwriter John O’Sullivan recalls how, some years after leaving office, she arrived to address a small group at an English seaside resort to be greeted by enraged lefties chanting “Thatcher Thatcher Thatcher! Fascist fascist fascist!” She turned to her aide and cooed, “Oh, doesn’t it make you feel nostalgic?” She was said to be delighted to hear that a concession stand at last year’s Trades Union Congress was doing a brisk business in “Thatcher Death Party Packs,” almost a quarter-century after her departure from office.
Of course, it would have been asking too much of Britain’s torpid Left to rouse themselves to do anything more than sing a few songs and smash a few windows. In The Wizard of Oz, the witch is struck down at the height of her powers by Dorothy’s shack descending from Kansas to relieve the Munchkins of their torments. By comparison, Britain’s Moochkins were unable to bring the house down: Mrs. Thatcher died in her bed at the Ritz at a grand old age. Useless as they are, British socialists were at one point capable of writing their own anti-Thatcher singalongs rather than lazily appropriating Judy Garland blockbusters from MGM’s back catalogue. I recall in the late Eighties being at the National Theatre in London and watching the crowd go wild over Adrian Mitchell’s showstopper, “F**k-Off Friday,” a song about union workers getting their redundancy notices at the end of the week, culminating with the lines:“I can’t wait for
That great day when
F**k-Off Friday
Comes to Number Ten.”You should have heard the cheers.
Just such lovely people, the left, aren’t they. And then there is this:
Thatcherite denationalization was the first thing Eastern Europe did after throwing off its Communist shackles — although the fact that recovering Soviet client states found such a natural twelve-step program at Westminster testifies to how far gone Britain was. She was the most consequential woman on the world stage since Catherine the Great, and Britain’s most important peacetime prime minister. In 1979, Britain was not at war, but as much as in 1940 faced an existential threat.
Mrs. Thatcher saved her country — and then went on to save a shriveling “free world,” and what was left of its credibility. The Falklands were an itsy bitsy colonial afterthought on the fringe of the map, costly to win and hold, easy to shrug off — as so much had already been shrugged off. After Vietnam, the Shah, Cuban troops in Africa, Communist annexation of real estate from Cambodia to Afghanistan to Grenada, nobody in Moscow or anywhere else expected a Western nation to go to war and wage it to win. Jimmy Carter, a ditherer who belatedly dispatched the helicopters to Iran only to have them crash in the desert and sit by as cocky mullahs poked the corpses of U.S. servicemen on TV, embodied the “leader of the free world” as a smiling eunuch. Why in 1983 should the toothless arthritic British lion prove any more formidable?
And so. But the lion did just fine, and it’s still trying to do it’s part to support the increasingly rheumatic eagle. But. let’s let Mark end this, cause there’s no way I can do as well.
During the Falklands War, the prime minister quoted Shakespeare, from the closing words of King John:
“And we shall shock them: naught shall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true.”For eleven tumultuous years, Margaret Thatcher did shock them. But the deep corrosion of a nation is hard to reverse: England to itself rests anything but true.
Mrs. Thatcher’s Losing Victory – Mark Steyn – National Review Online.
Related articles
- In the End, Did Thatcher Win Or Lose? (powerlineblog.com)
- MARK STEYN: “A generation on, the Thatcher era seems more and more like a magnificent but temporary… (pjmedia.com)
- BBC Won’t Ban “Wizard of Oz” Tune Used To Refer To Mrs. Thatcher’s Passing (lawprofessors.typepad.com)
- Hope For 2016? (thecampofthesaints.org)
JessicaHof
NEO
