Sometimes I love the Mother Country so much I could just shit. Following the announcement of the death of British conservative icon and former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at the age of 87, one would have expected certain things to happen based on our experiences in the US of Ronald Reagan's demise: Veneration bordering on deification, history-revisionism, and a timid opposition falling all over themselves to praise a late antagonist while making qualified criticisms. But Britain is not America, oh no indeed. While there has been plenty of praise, what has also followed are jubilant street protests celebrating the death, remarks from famous figures deriding her as an abusive sociopath and saying they feel sorry for her children having had to grow up under her, and a radio campaign to put the Wizard of Oz song "Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead" at the top of the BBC charts.
I have no dog in this fight, as I'm not British and am not especially well-versed in the policies and actions of the Thatcher government beyond the broadstrokes that they were radically conservative and cruel (by UK standards). But part of why I'm enjoying the reaction of some Britons is a sense of unslaked vengeance against Ronald Reagan, whose own massively destructive, cruel, and overbearing policy shadow still weighs down this nation with hardly any open revolt against it. Thatcher and Reagan were considered peas in a pod in political terms, despite her low opinion of St. Ronnie personally as a mindless empty suit, and seeing Thatcher's cult being savaged with completely impious (and unabashedly tasteless) fury is both satisfying and embarrassing given the American left's supine reaction to Reagan's death in 2004.
This has been going on for several days since Thatcher died, with partiers coming up with new and more creative ways to express their glee. Here's a slideshow of photos of one ad hoc street party celebrating the demise. It includes a conga-line in Glasgow, flyers that say "Gotcha! Now Get The Rest," champagne, balloons, t-shirts, and a large banner reading "THE BITCH IS DEAD." But apparently it hasn't stopped with a few spontaneous exercises, as they're now campaigning to push the Wizard of Oz song "Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead" up the UK radio charts.
It's apparently now a minor brouhaha, with the Tory party having intervened in the BBC to oppose playing the song. The guy in charge compromised by deciding that the song would only be played in a shortened form, but accepted the free speech right involved while criticizing the campaign as tasteless. Can you imagine if Americans had tried to celebrate Reagan's death by promoting an equivalently appropriate song on the radio? Our oligarch-owned media would have simply refused outright and banned the song even from normal, otherwise innocuous rotation.
I am humbled by these public reactions, and I think we are obligated to rise to this standard by having our party-planning ducks in a row for when Nazgûl partriarch Dick Cheney eventually meets his Master in a flamey, screamy place that's only a very short elevator ride down from Texas. Smaller events could be planned for the other elderly members of the Bush regime, although the second worst - Karl Rove - is relatively young and probably going to be stinking up the joint for quite a long time. :(
But we should decide now that when Cheney kicks the bucket we're going to have utterly tasteless public celebrations around the country, and do all sorts of things in numerous mediums to express our jubilation. Frankly, compared to Cheney, Thatcher was just a DMV worker with a bad attitude, so his party should be a lot bigger and a lot happier. Of course, he's one of the bastards who proves the axiom that while the good die young, genocidal Nazi war criminals live to be 110. The man is practically a cyberdemon with a warehouse full of frozen bodies for spare parts. But we can at least start thinking about the party. What song would work best? Let's hear suggestions.