‘Fashionable hatred’ targets Thatcher

There’s an extraordinary painting in the National Gallery of Scotland of a Spanish wake. Painted in 1864 by John Philip, La Gloria depicts a mother grieving in the shadows as her dead little daughter is taken from her home. Friends encourage her to look into the sunny square where the neighbours are celebrating the entrance of the little girl’s soul into heaven.

I cannot imagine the death of an adult being celebrated with such faith-filled exuberance; in religious art, a good death is normally attended with awe and hope, and a bad death with fear and horror. Unfortunately, in contemporary life, the deaths of adults are sometimes celebrated with a sickening glee.

When Indira Gandhi was murdered by her bodyguards in 1984, some of her detractors handed out sweets on the streets of Toronto. When the Twin Towers fell on 9/11, television broadcasts showed people in East Jerusalem dancing and praising God and Osama bin Laden. When Osama bin Laden was assassinated in 2011, celebrations broke out across America, including on the campus of the Catholic University of Notre Dame. And, when an elderly woman with Alzheimer’s Disease died in the London Ritz Hotel earlier this month, thousands of Britons drove “Ding, Dong the Witch Is Dead” up the charts, so that the BBC would have to play it between her death and her funeral.

I felt shocked and sad when I first learned that Baroness Margaret Thatcher had passed away, and surprised that I felt shocked and sad. After all, she had been 87. However, she also had been elected the first female prime minister of the United Kingdom when I was eight, and remained in power until shortly after I went to university. Thus to me she is an inextricable part of my growing up at the end of the Cold War and also a symbol of female leadership — female leadership that does not toe the line of the left-wing feminist politburo.

Margaret Thatcher had the dubious honour of being admired or hated the same way men are admired or hated. She was not admired or despised for what she looked like, or for her love-life, but for her political decisions. She was loved or hated for her brains and her will. She also did not get where she was because of her father (like Indira Gandhi and Benazir Bhutto) or her husband (like Sonja Gandhi and Hilary Clinton). In class-obsessed Britain, it was emphasized over and over again that the first female leader of the Conservative Party was “a grocer’s daughter.”

It may be hard for Canadians to get their minds around this, but before Thatcher was elected Britain was in the grip of a class system in which everyone was expected to “know his place.” A working-class person who wanted to get ahead could be despised by his “own” as a traitor and by his “betters” as a pushing vulgarian. Grocer’s daughter Thatcher helped to change this.

Mrs. Thatcher believed in meritocracy, conscientious work, saving money, creating wealth and opportunities for everyone — not just the upper classes. When very few people in the UK owned their own homes, she sold government housing to their working-class and lower-middle-class tenants. In an era when the government owned almost everything, she put its industries up for sale, many of the shares bought by those industries’ own workers. She refused to use taxpayers’ money to prop up unprofitable industries, and she was impatient with people who made economic demands on “society.”

“There is no such thing as society,” she famously said. “There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then also to look after our neighbour.” Her critics usually ignore that last part.

As a result of Mrs. Thatcher’s policies, Britain’s economy was transformed, class loyalties shaken and the grip of union bosses on workers broken, and for this Mrs. Thatcher was loved and hated long after she was pushed from power by her own party. Her friends say she didn’t mind this, and would even have relished the street parties — heavily attended by people too young to remember her premiership — celebrating her death.

But I mind. I dislike fashionable hatred, especially among the young and among employed, educated people who have no real, personal grievance against the hated. I think celebrating death as punishment, or as a victory of the living over the dead, lowers us and makes us less human. It is anti-intellectual and anti-love. It hurts us worse than it hurts the dead, and it is a disgusting insult to those who mourn.

(Cummings McLean is a Canadian writer and author of Seraphic Singles.)