Friday, March 30, 2007

Mummy's War (29/3/07)

Friends and I harbour such a deep desire for Thatcher to pop her clogs, that if she happens to pop up on the TV screen whilst the sound is turned down, we all look at each other with an almost hysterical glee. "Is she dead? Is she dead?", we exclaim, not even trying to conceal the laughter in our voices. But no, usually she's just been down to Portsmouth to open a Tescos or something, and we have to dampen down the excitement again, keep a lid on it till another time. I should feel bad; I know that the image which comes from the screen is of an old frail lady. And then I remember growing up in the '80s. I remember the Brixton riots, the Miners' strike, the Falklands war. I remember her systematic economic disenfranchisement of single mothers and her criminalisation of the least privileged members of society. I remember the latent violence, ennui and ill-will that undersored British life, and then I don't feel so bad. Then I know that there will probably be spontaneous street parties when the happy news is announced. Down my street at any rate.

Any feeling I have must be intensified a thousand fold - it is almost idiotic to say - by those mothers who lost their sons on the Belgrano. In C4's Mummy's War, Carol Thatcher faced off with these women last night. It was repugnant to watch, as if she had summoned the ghost of her mother's wilfully blind statesmanship to ward off their pain and misery. "It was a war, we shot at you, you shot at us," she explained, as if to the subnormal. "But what about the 200 mile exclusion zone?", they asked, desperate to find something on which to hang the meaningless loss of their children. But there were no answers here; no reasoning profound enough to illuminate how a fellow mother could become the feminine face of destruction; just a retreat into the middle-class values of common-sense and fair-play. "Well, you started it," said C-Thatch. Gone were the almost manic facial expressions of the boarding-school girl whose exeat has been cancelled because her gym slip was dirty; they were replaced by the anonymous, timeless mask of self-righteous stupidity. And yet the language was the same - you started it, whoever smelt it dealt it. Funny how politicians and their ilk (in which I include Maggie's daughter) are reduced to the language of the playground to express something as huge, as horrific, as grown-up, as war. War for goodness sake - violation, rape, murder, trauma, displacement. "You started it". Well, I hope we're all very happy in Great Britain, knowing that the Malvinas are safely under our sovereignty. It certainly helped me to sleep a little easier last night.

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