Quote of the Day (Samantha Bee, on What We Missed With the Canceled GOP Debate)

“I think the reward for sticking with the Republican debates until the 11 o’clock hour was hearing Jeb Bush suggest Margaret Thatcher should be on our American currency.”—Samantha Bee quoted in “Party Lines,” New York Magazine, Oct. 5-18, 2016

Serendipity led me to come across the above quote just after the announcement that the previously scheduled campaign for last night was being canceled because of the withdrawal of Donald Trump and John Kasich. The conjunction of the discovery and the cancellation led my mind to roam, then think: Was it really August 6 of last year when the round of Republican primary debates began?

There were 17 candidates back then—not far off the total number of debates for the entire season—and numerous enough that they could have hired a small bus. There was so much squabbling for attention that Fox News, the network hosting that night, felt compelled to separate them into two tiers.

Nobody can say that Republican voters lacked choices. But in the end, look what they ended up with: As of this late, desperate hour, a front-runner with no attachment to principle but a decided propensity to alienate some group or person virtually any time he runs his mouth off.  I never thought, prior to this year’s lineup, that I’d hear candidates talking about rivals’ energy levels, hand size, sweat glands, water retention, female physiognomy, child molesters, etc. Altogether, hardly an edifying spectacle.

But even when candidates have had a chance to talk about something more wholesome—something that, while not illuminating an issue or their reaction to potential crises, still can sum up their values—they’ve still managed to muff it. Case in point: A topic that came up in mid-September, the U.S. currency.

Asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper which woman they’d like to see on the $10 bill, the then-GOP Presidential hopefuls offered predictable but sound choices: Rosa Parks, Clara Barton, Susan B. Anthony, Abigail Adams. (Eleanor Roosevelt, a well-known Democratic First Lady, was conspicuous by her absence, but did you really expect otherwise?) Others flipped off what they undoubtedly saw as an absurd question with an equally absurd response (wives and mothers). One candidate, Trump, offered an unexpectedly serious choice (Parks) with an expectedly creepy one (daughter Ivanka, whom, you might recall, he once said that he might have dated had circumstances been different).

Kasich’s choice, Mother Teresa, was certainly offered with an eye on Catholic voters, some of whom might object that he had embraced another faith in midlife. But aside from that (the more cynical might say, because of that), his choice was all the more brilliant, as it: 

* took the question seriously without, thankfully, mentioning a female relative that only he could relate to; 

* satisfied the one longstanding legal requirement—that the honoree on the currency has to be deceased; 

* represented out-of-the-box but not downright nutty thinking;

* rested on morally non-objectionable grounds (come on: besides the late contrarian Christopher Hitchens, who’s going to argue with a saint?); and

* reminded audiences of his own professed commitment to maintain the social safety net (he told one mega-donor furious over his decision to expand Medicaid to more than a quarter-million Ohioans, “I don’t know about you, lady, but when I get to the pearly gates, I’m going to have an answer for what I’ve done for the poor”).

In contrast, former Gov. Bush (excuse me, Jeb!) (pictured, in all his tortured glory) demonstrated so much combined shameless pandering, tone-deafness and all-around bone-headedness that it called into question the conventional wisdom that he was the smart one among the sons of George and Barbara Bush. His response? Margaret Thatcher.

Even those with today’s average attention span—the length of a tweet—would surely be reminded in debate post-mortems about the irony of citing “The Iron Lady” who felt compelled to q=warn Jeb’s father not to “go wobbly” on invading Iraq. But there are other reasons why it might not have gone over well with the rank and file who eventually doomed his campaign:

*A tough, partisan female who gave no quarter against males who stood in the way of her rise to the top: Didn’t that sound like—well, Hillary?

*Only the National Review of the early 1990s regarded Thatcher, together with Ronald Reagan, as part of “The Heroic Age of Conservatism.” You remember the National Review, right—the opinion magazine with a special “Against Trump” issue with contributions from nearly two dozen Establishment GOP figures? An issue that maybe influenced six people?

*Thatcher is a reminder of “The Special Relationship” that, at its height, featured the United States and Great Britain allying against the two worst dictatorial regimes of the 20^th century. More recently, that alliance saw countless millions of dollars being sucked into a War on Terror with little sign of success or ending—a conflict that Trump got away with criticizing while incurring no lasting damage from GOP voters.

* “Margaret Thatcher” is not exactly a name to make most Irish-American conservatives stand up and cheer. They disagree with liberal and even Irish Catholics on a whole host of issues, including birth control, abortion, same-sex marriage, and the value of Mother Church.  But they stand firmly with these others in regarding Thatcher not just as obstructing talks to end “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland, but also as the very symbol of the arrogant, indifferent leadership that perpetuated Irish misery under centuries of British colonial misrule.

The news media spent so much time covering Jeb Bush’s hapless attempt to counter Trump’s charge about his “low energy” that it gave scant attention to an answer on U.S. currency that would have made half of Irish-American GOP voters throw up their hands and made the other half simply throw up. It was a short moment in Bush's campaign, but it conveyed much about why he went nowhere fast, carrying with him the hopes of a now-clueless political dynasty.

This Day in Literary History (Fatwa Placed on Rushdie)

February 14, 1989—Salman Rushdie received the astonishing news that Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini had issued a fatwa (sentence of death) on him in a phone call from a BBC journalist, just as he was heading out to attend the funeral of friend Bruce Chatwin. The coming years in hiding, moving from one safe house to another, must surely have made the novelist wonder whether, at a not-so-distant future, people would be memorializing him, too. That is, if they dared: for Khomeini had not only laid down his edict against the author of The Satanic Verses for blaspheming "Islam, the Prophet and the Quran," but also on “all those involved in the publication who were aware of its contents."

The fatwa was more than Khomeini’s antithesis of a Valentine’s Day message: an incitement to mass hatred rather than individual love. It also represented a marker in militant Islam’s encounter with modernity. No longer would a terrorist group not officially affiliated with a formal government simply strike out against innocents, as happened in the Munich Olympics in summer 1972. Nor would a regime hewing strictly to fundamentalist Islamic tenets confine itself to hostage-taking within its own borders, as Khomeini-inspired “students” had done in Iran in seizing American diplomats during the Carter Administration.

No, now a regime had ordered every follower of Islam, anywhere on the globe, to strike out against a blasphemer—one not even an Iranian--and all those connected to the publication of his book. They would be rewarded for an act of murder--financially, if they succeeded, sexually (in the form of virgins in paradise) if they didn't. The edict became a wedge for those practicing a fringe element of a religion of peace to ward off all criticism of their policies—and an open invitation for those easily gulled by fanatics to take violent offense against easily manufactured outrages.

Khomeini may well have had another motive for issuing the murderous decree: as a distraction from his (and his nation’s) humiliation in signing a peace treaty with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, after vowing that he would never make such a deal to end a war that may have cost over a million lives. That motive might also account for why the fatwa wasn’t lifted when the murderous mullah died four months after the edict…why the regime didn’t lift it for another nine years…and  why, a year and a half ago, another Iranian ayatollah, Hassan Sanei, had re-issued the fatwa, using as a pretext the film Innocence of Muslims, which, he claimed, would not have been made if Satanic Verses hadn’t been published.

Longtime readers of this blog know my low opinion of Margaret Thatcher. (See, for instance, my post, “A Thatcher Depreciation” from nearly a year ago.) Yet, in this instance, let’s give credit where credit is due: Even though the very book that provoked the fatwa also included a far-from-subtle jab against “Mrs. Torture,” the Iron Lady made sure that Rushdie had round-the-clock protection against those intent on ending his life.

For all his brilliance as a master of literary wordplay (see, for instance, this eloquent account in Vanity Fair from his friend, the late Christopher Hitchens), not to mention his frequent prior brushes with controversy over provocative statements and incidents in his books, Rushdie was stunned that Muslims could be offended by a feverish dream sequence in his novel in which prostitutes bear the same names as Mohammad’s wives. 

Rushdie’s years of hiding, in fact, did not bring much in the way of wisdom—his libidinous, preening streak only seemed to stand out all the more every time he dared to break out of his safe houses and attempt to lead a normal social life. (Zoe Heller’s analysis of Rushdie’s recent memoir, Joseph Anton, in The New York Review of Books wryly notes that the years in hiding “had no sobering effect on Rushdie’s magisterial amour propre.”)

Yet freedom of expression—even very much including freedom to offend—needs to be defended, even when the person one mounts the barricades for is pompous. Until the incident that changed his life, Rushdie’s fiction (including the prize-winning Midnight’s Children) had been taken up with cultural displacement. Now, his own life had added a decided twist on this theme. The frequent critic of the capitalist West now found himself beholden to it for saving his life.

The same ironic reversal held for the novelist’s prior critics. Writing in a blog post for the conservative National Review—a journal unlikely to have much sympathy with Rushdie’s longtime leftist politics—Daniel Pipes refers now to “the Rushdie Rules”: i..e., constraint  on “the ability of Westerners freely to discuss Islam and topics related to it.”

(Photo of Salman Rushdie taken in Warsaw, Poland, October 2006, by Mariusz Kubik)

A Thatcher Depreciation

“Say what you will about the politics of Margaret Thatcher,” a liberal friend of mine posted on Facebook last week, upon hearing about the death of the former British Prime minister, “but she was a strong, powerful, and intelligent woman.”

To tell the truth, I disagreed vehemently with that assessment—and so would have, from a very different perspective but ultimately for the same reason, Thatcher herself. During her career, she had little use for feminism, and, having beaten male politicians at their own game repeatedly, she would have bridled at any attempt to judge her legacy by any gender-based yardstick. Besides, what did that first clause mean? If you didn’t view her through politics, her life’s work, then how on earth should she be viewed?

In short, I’m afraid she would ask, “Why couldn’t you just write, ‘Margaret Thatcher was strong, powerful, and intelligent’?”

As it happens, I have issues with the “was strong, powerful, and intelligent” part of that sentence, too. Saying a world leader is “powerful” comes with the job description; it tells nothing useful about the important question—i.e., how is power used? Though intelligence cannot be taken for granted among today’s politicians, its possession confers neither greatness nor even effectiveness, as seen in the cases of Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter. As for strength, it is not to be confused with inflexibility, anymore than love should be mixed up with obsession. Thatcher did her best to annihilate opponents, not convert them.

Something of the same measures of success used by my Facebook friend also colored the thinking of the powers that be at The New York Times. What was worse, though, was that, with far greater space and resources than my friend, it gave short shrift to a matter of grave importance for hundreds of thousands of people on both sides of the Atlantic: her policy on Northern Ireland.

From 1969 to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, more than 3,000 people lost their lives in these six provinces, with 2% of the population killed or wounded. The equivalent of that in the U.S. during that time would have been 500,000--nearly 10 times the number killed in the Vietnam War. 

Twelve years of this tragic history occurred during Thatcher’s time at Downing Street. She had the opportunity to advance the peace process significantly. Not only did she fail to do so; not only did she regret the one tiny step she did make, under extreme sufferance; but she also damaged hopes for negotiations.

In all of this, the Iron Lady not only had a predictable American ally in fellow conservative Ronald Reagan, but a more unlikely one in the liberal Gray Lady. In the 1980s, when one of the Times reporters, Jo Thomas, began to inquire into the “shoot-to-kill” practices in Ulster that were at the heart of the controversy surrounding investigator John Stalker, she was quickly frozen out by the complaining Thatcher government, then reassigned by her compliant bosses.

One might expect the passage of time to produce greater objectivity at the Times, but all readers found instead was a case of amnesia. In the two days immediately after her death, the paper devoted the equivalent of three of its very long pages, counting news and editorial space, to Thatcher. Out of this, only two paragraphs concerned Northern Ireland.

At her most benign, Thatcher saw Ulster as a backwater hardly worth learning about; at her worst, she regarded its beleaguered Roman Catholic minority as a group whose grievances she didn’t need to understand. The Times might have disagreed with her economic policy, but on this issue, hardly a whit.

The newspaper, particularly after the Jayson Blair scandal, has made a great fetish out of correcting the slightest spelling error, but it continues, all too often, to provide insufficient background and alternative points of view. It has flagellated itself on not questioning the official government version of events in the rush to war in Iraq, but its lack of curiosity about Northern Ireland extended for far longer. More often than not, the paper of record continues to publish columns of inches on this subject that makes for great garbage lining.

Believe me, though the Times continues to demonstrate historical amnesia about Northern Ireland, many Irish-Americans feel otherwise, including many progressives. The bar Rocky Sullivan’s in Red Hook, Brooklyn, held a party celebrating her death. A friend posted, out there in the social media, that Thatcher might find herself soon consigned to the ninth circle of hell.

I subscribe to neither view, but I know why so many feel so vehemently. Columnist Jimmy Breslin explained why, in a passage that also underscores why admiration for Thatcher’s “firmness” is so misplaced:

“She is a woman born to smell milk in the mouth of an unworthy, and she has the eyes of Captain Bligh. She is admired everywhere because when she takes a stand, she does not change it because if she changed, why, then it would mean she had changed. And this she would never do.”

American conservatives often liken Thatcher to Winston Churchill, but aside from their leadership of the Conservative Party, it is hard to see what the two had in common. Consider these differences:

* While Thatcher widened the gap between haves and have-nots, Churchill narrowed it. Allied with David Lloyd George, who had persuaded him to join the Liberal Party, Churchill, in the decade before World War I, helped ram through Parliament much of the social-welfare legislation (e.g. old-age pensions, national insurance against unemployment and sickness), that would not pass in the United States until FDR’s New Deal two decades later. 

 *Churchill was every bit the imperialist Thatcher was, but he was enough of a realist to at least sit down to negotiate with Michael Collins and his Irish colleagues the treaty that gave Ireland at least a measure of self-rule. Furthermore, despite all his disagreements with the Labour Party, Churchill was the only Conservative leader that the opposition would accept in forming a new British government after Neville Chamberlain lost the no-confidence vote in Parliament. It is impossible to conceive of a similar positive outcome involving Thatcher.

* Churchill became justly famous for his eloquence, inspiring his countrymen to stand alone for a year against Nazi Germany, until the formation of the Grand Alliance. His effectiveness in Parliamentary debate was heightened by a wit that, when it did not decimate foes, could mock himself. ("All men are worms, but I do believe I am a glowworm.") His words reminded his fellow citizens of the best of their political traditions, and of Western Civilization itself. In contrast, what Thatcher quotes will be recalled in the future? “The lady’s not for turning”; her response to Irish Taoiseach Garrett FitzGerald on his three Ulster peace proposals (“Out, out, out”); and her cavalier dismissal of any movement away from traditional British misrule ("Northern Ireland,” she helpfully explained, “is as British as Finchley”—her borough constituency). All of these quotes are small-minded and humorless, and, considered in terms of pure political effectiveness, utterly backfired. (Thatcher's inability even to consider any of FitzGerald's proposals backed her into such a corner that she was forced to accede to the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985.)

 

In January 1991, the National Review ran a picture of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan on its cover with the headline, "Is the Heroic Age of Conservatism Over?" I gagged then, as I do now, at this notion. The most enduring achievement of these two leaders was not something celebrated by their movement at the time: i.e., their recognition that, as Thatcher put it, "we can do business with" the Soviet Union's Mikhail Gorbachev in easing tensions between East and West. 

Otherwise, the long-term domestic results were similar, and not readily understood at the time: policies that favored the financial sector at the expense of the industrial sector that had sustained the poor for years; resulting inequality; and radically relaxed regulatory controls that led to the global recession of several years ago that both countries are still struggling to come to terms with. 

The intersection of Thatcher’s domestic Darwinism and her neo-imperialist policy can be seen in Ulster. There, while spending on security forces increased greatly under her, expenditures in social services slowed or even reversed in some cases. The result: at a point when sectarian tensions were at their greatest in Ulster, a generation of young men on both sides experienced even greater fear and uncertainty because the jobless rate in Ulster doubled from 1979 to 1986.

One unintended consequence of the Thatcher Reaction (“revolution” is a misnomer) might be the auspices under which her funeral was conducted. The Labour Party, which suffered many painful defeats at her hands, raised the embarrassing question of how the pomp-and-circumstances services at St. Paul’s Cathedral, reportedly running anywhere from $15 million to $20 million, would be paid. At one point in the past, that might not have mattered. But, with fears of a triple-dip recession rampant, the expense was now a very live issue, and especially among members of the lowest stratum of British society.

The title of this post has a double meaning. It not only refers to the critical correction I feel necessary to apply in the face of unreflective acceptance of her own value, but also the depreciation in her historical stock that I’m sure will result, bit by bit, as historians wade through oral histories, primary documents—and, eventually, documents disgorged after the expiration of Britain’s Official Secrets Act.

Intemperate speech often bestows on their possessors the reputation of candor. It was all the more necessary for Thatcher to be so characterized, as it concealed a deep strain of hypocrisy and fraudulence. 

She claimed to be merely ratifying the wishes of the Protestant majority in Ulster to stay associated with Britain, but thought nothing of honoring the even more powerful desires of the citizens of Hong Kong to remain part of Britain rather than becoming absorbed by totalitarian China. Facing the chance of war with the world’s most populous country, unable to interpose her nation’s naval force halfway around the ground, she negotiated the handoff of one of the British Empire’s prize colonies.

 

By comparison, the Falkland Islands were of little strategic or financial value to Britain. Unlike with Hong Kong, though, Thatcher beat the drums of war when the Argentine government attempted to take by force this long-disputed region. The British Prime Minister only held onto this stretch of ground because it was logistically easier to mount a military operation across the Atlantic Ocean against a tinhorn junta. In other words, she made her decision to go to war not because re-taking the islands was moral, but because she could.  

We already know of one not-so-secret act: Despite her insistence that she would not negotiate with the Irish Republican Army, a group she associated with terrorism, she did indeed authorize a backchannel of communication with them. At the same time, one adviser, Sir David Goodall, now admits that Thatcher privately urged that Catholics not satisfied with the political situation in Ulster simply move south to the Republic of Ireland--a settlement policy that many down there rightly regard as harking back to the worst days of Oliver Cromwell. Another former aide, Peter Mandelson, her Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, divulged after her death that she had told him, "I’ve got one thing to say to you, my boy … you can’t trust the Irish, they are all liars."


Some have claimed that Thatcher was merely reacting against terrorism in Northern Ireland, including the deaths of close aides and even an attempt on her life that failed. But when she spoke of the Catholic minority, the only people she could seemingly conceive of, outside of terrorists, were fools. Furthermore, some of her contemporary admirers might be a bit surprised to learn that she also branded Nelson Mandela's African National Congress as late as 1987 "a typical terrorist organization."  

Being the first female Prime Minister of her country, as well as the Prime Minister who served the longest in the post during the 20th century, hardly merits the kind of send-off Thatcher received last week at St. Paul's. She was consequential, all right, but those she succeeded in marginalizing--the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, Scotland's independence activists, and miners and their families in England--had every right not to join the mindless cheering for her from both sides of the Atlantic last week.