North Star Writers Group - Syndicated Commentary: Opinion, Humor and Features

August 25, 2008

As Went Reagan, So Goes Thatcher: Twilight of the Fiends

England’s Mail On Sunday newspaper, a right-wing rag serving as the print equivalent of Fox News, has begun to serialize A Swim-On Part In The Goldfish Bowl: A Memoir by Carol Thatcher, daughter of the former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, which recounts her mother’s painful struggle with stroke-induced dementia.

The revelation that Thatcher, once renowned for her command of language and “blotting-paper” memory for factual detail, now struggles to complete a spoken sentence seems a sad finale to the life of a leader who was once the most powerful woman in the world. It is an interesting turn that Thatcher’s final days seem to be mirroring those of her Trans-Atlantic friend and accomplice Ronald Reagan, with whom she energetically conspired to destroy the last remaining vestiges of integrity, equality, compassion and economic equity to be found in the governments of the West’s two leading democracies.

Dementia, whether the consequence of strokes or Alzheimer’s disease, is a dreadful fate – one which no decent human being should wish upon another, even personages as vile and brutal as Thatcher and Reagan. However barbarous their policies and practices, both remained human beings, at least in theory, and there are few afflictions that so completely may rob a person of whatever dignity they may possess as this one. Even Margaret Thatcher, the “Butcher of the Belgrano,” deserved better.

Years after her tenure in office, Thatcher extended considerable influence over the direction of her party, and by extension, her nation – even being invited for consultation at 10 Downing Street with the hapless Labour prime minister, Gordon Brown. The publication of Goldfish, however, sends one significant unspoken message to the world: The “Iron Lady’s” power and influence is at an end. As with the fading of Reagan, the world breathes a sigh of collective relief.

They don’t make demagogues like that any more. Not that there’s any shortage of power-hungry right-wing politicians on either side of the Atlantic. For viciousness, rigidity and rabid self-interest, John McCain and David Cameron fit the bill just nicely. Not coincidentally, both of these latter-day lightweights repeatedly invoke the names of their forbearers in their bids for credibility. Nonetheless, these cheap neoconservative knock-offs will forever suffer, along with their respective parties, with a gravitas deficit. McCain and the Republicans, like Cameron and the Conservatives, exist as the leftover desiccated husks of old and discredited ideologies, and neither figurehead has the beginning of a clue as to how to re-animate the day-old roadkill that passes as their ideas and policy positions.

Through personal charisma, calculation and connections, both Thatcher and Reagan attained positions wherein they were able to become the architects and prime movers behind the intellectually and ethically bereft plague of “new” conservatism. At their behest and through their influence, the right-wing toxic tsunami washed across the globe for more than a quarter century, smashing everything in its path.

From democratically-elected Latin American governments to labor unions, no force was sufficient to withstand an ideology that placed power and profit as über allies, succeeding to the point where half-witted poseurs such as George W. Bush and Tony Blair could launch a genocidal war of aggression in Iraq predicated only upon a tissue of lies, and with absolute impunity for their actions. But with this last audacious hurrah, the neoconservative house of cards collapses; there is simply nowhere for it to go – and no Reagan or Thatcher to take it there.

It is certainly possible that both McCain and Cameron may attain power. Cameron in particular seems well positioned to crawl across Labour’s moldering corpse, ruthlessly murdered by its ostensible stewards Blair and Brown, and slither into Downing Street. But what then? As either president or prime minister, McCain and Cameron will have little to do but mimic the speeches and actions of the giants upon whose shoulders they stand, the marionettes of their party and corporate sponsors, frantically trying to prevent the world from seeing who’s pulling the strings and desperately trying to convince the faithful that Rome isn’t really burning.

To be generous, McCain and Cameron are small, mediocre little men who have risen beyond their station only by virtue of the lack of credible competition. No one else – no one who matters, that is – wants to serve as the standard-bearer for a dying political movement that history will regard as the most barbarous and criminal enterprise to emerge in the latter half of the 20^th Century. Bereft of either ethics or personal pride, McCain and Cameron are more than happy to step up to the challenge. But should either achieve office, they should be presented with a bugle and the sheet music to “Taps” upon taking up their position.

As everything they profess to stand for crumbles to dust beneath their feet and the malevolent ghosts of Reagan and Thatcher fade into vague and ugly memories, they’ll need it.

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