I sleep walk.
I don’t actually sleep walk – I sleep run. I have these dreams where a bomb is about to go off in my flat and I have to get out now. So I get out of bed and run out of the house. These dreams come in different intensities, but at their worst I know I’m about to die, and I’m terrified of that death.*
When I was small I lived in Thatcher’s Britain, the Britain of Protect & Survive. I was terrified of bombs. When we moved to New Zealand I was five, and I listed one of my favourite things about this country that their were no bombs.
I don’t think my terror dreams come from those years in Britain. I think they’re a stress or anxiety response. But I think it’s because of Margaret Thatcher and her pals that I dream of bombs. If I lived in different times I might be running from Wolves, or communists. I’d probably be just as scared, but that’s small consolation when I can still taste the adrenalin from believing that I was about to burn to death.
As far as Thatcher’s casualties go – my experience is nothing. The miners lives weren’t ruined in their dreams, they were ruined in reality. While she never dropped a nuclear bomb, she did drop other bombs. Her economic policies led to redundancies and unemployment – those aren’t just abstract ideas – they kill people. Poverty kills, hoplessness kills – the year after the miner’s strike saw many more than the usual number of suicides. It’s not just economic policies either Section 28, passed by the Tories, made it illegal to promote the teaching in state schools “the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.”
So when someone responds to me posting the lyrics to Merry Christmas Margaret Thatcher with: “Nothing Margaret Thatcher did is worth hoping for her death” – that really depends on what, and who, you value. People have died because of Margaret Thatcher.
I don’t think individuals are the driving force for politics, if Thatcher hadn’t been there, it would have been someone else. I don’t particularly hope for her death any more, she’s old and out of power, and probably a little bit out of it anyway. But when she does die you better believe that I’m going to celebrate. I’m going to dig out my parents old anti-Margaret Thatcher t-shirt and put it on, I will play anti-Margaret Thatcher songs all day, and I will write a post on this blog, maybe about Women Against Pit Closures.
My favourite phrase in Solidarity Forever is ‘we will break their haughty power’. The power to ruin people’s lives by remote control and sit back with a cup of tea is a haughty power indeed. To suggest that people shouldn’t be angry about what is done to them, and other people, shouldn’t be angry at that haughty power, is telling them their lives don’t matter.
Howdy,
I commented saying that the lyrics make me uncomfortable. Of course, people have a right to be angry and they should be. I’ve been thinking about this, because I wasn’t exactly sad when Regan died, or Jesse Helms, or Strong Thurmond or Pope John Paul 2. So maybe the discomfort is just because Thatcher didn’t touch me from my foreign lands, but I think there’s something a bit more than that.
I think Hillary Clinton would make a terrible president. She looks good in comparison to Bush, but the lint under my sofa also looks good in comparison. And if she got power, I might come to hate her, but probably, I would stop short of wishing her the kind of malice I wished on the other folks mentioned above. The reason being the special hatred she already gets because of sexism. I cannot stand Anne Coulter (anti-feminist american pundit), but even more, I hate the way people criticize her. She’s infuriating, but the ‘leftist’ comebacks about her appearance and whatnot hurt the status of all women in a way that she can only dream of.
So the lyrics make me uncomfortable, but it’s not my war and rage against her actions is totally acceptable and admirable.
If it helps another part of the song goes “Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Hesseltine, your’e a tosser you’re a wanker, you’re just a Tory swine.”
I can sort see what you mean. I’m sure there were gendered insults of Margaret Thatcher, and I wouldn’t use them. But I think it’s over-compensating to give women who are subject to sexist attacks a free pass for the things they do which are genuinely appalling.
I used to have dreams about nuclear war when Reagan was president. Oddly, the dreams all took place after the bomb had been dropped. They were all about wandering around in an utterly blasted city and thinking “oh, #$&*@ now what?” I’ve always wondered if these dreams wouldn’t have become reality (apart from the very unlikely idea that I would somehow be alive and uninjured after the nuke went off) if Reagan hadn’t gotten Alzheimer’s. It’s a horrible disease and I hate the thought of anyone having it, but I still wonder if, in this case, it didn’t save the world.
“When I was small I lived in Thatcher’s Britain, the Britain of Protect & Survive. I was terrified of bombs. When we moved to New Zealand I was five, and I listed one of my favourite things about this country that their were no bombs.
I don’t think my terror dreams come from those years in Britain. I think they’re a stress or anxiety response. But I think it’s because of Margaret Thatcher and her pals that I dream of bombs. ”
I’m not trying to be flip, because I know that as children we make all kinds of odd associations. But what bombs are you dreaming of? I would think that the main bomb fears in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain were from the IRA or the Soviets.
Sebastian – not for me the bombs I was afraid of were always ‘ours’. The fear was relieved when I came to NZ, which banned nuclear weapons shortly after we got here. Even though there were a couple of high profile bombings shortly after I came to NZ, and obviously other people could still have bombed NZ.
So you were afraid that Thatcher was going to nuke England?
I guess as children we all have odd fears. For some reason I had convinced myself that brick walkways were dangerous because the stuff in between the bricks could crumble leaving all the bricks tumbling into the center of the earth. (I guess I was imagining it as if it were a brick bridge?)
I don’t know.
It seems to me that part of being a ruler is making decisions that hurt people, because they are good overall. Coal mining is a good example; I’d like them to stop mining coal in Appalachia because stripmining in the mountains is horrible for the local environment. (And burning coal is probably bad for the world in general.) But it would be really bad for the coal miners to stop mining coal; there are no other jobs in eastern Kentucky that pay as well as mining.
I stayed up all night watching television the night Bobby Sands died. Have loathed Margaret Thatcher ever since.
Which makes my conscience a little easier for not supporting HR Clinton this go-round. I *want* to support women in high-ranking politics, but can’t always.
Maia,
Did you also wish for the death of Arthur Scargill? He and the other union leadership who took the miners into a strike without a vote are surely equally at fault. Had they not, the striking miners would not have lost their state benefits which undoubtedly contributed to the rise in suicide rates.
Michael – You shouldn’t believe everything you read in the Daily Telegraph. The decision not to go to a ballot was taken at a union delegate conference, with representatives from all the pits. Arthur Scargill, or anyone else in NUM, didn’t pass such an ideologically drive piece of shit legislation that interfered with union’s ability to run their business – it was the Tory government.