Meeeting Margaret Thatcher

I have a picture of Baroness Thatcher listening to me. We met at a small cocktail party at the RAF Club in Piccadilly about ten years ago. She was very cordial and, of course, quite intense. We didn’t talk politics, but rather about the Eagle Squadron, the Yanks who flew in the RAF during the Battle of Britain. I had a good friend who was one of the Eagles and was the only American at El Alamein, a decisive battle in the desert in August 1942, “the end of the beginning” in Churchill’s famous phrase. I told her that my daughter wrote for The Guardian (oops, a Lefty newspaper). She asked what her name was, and when I answered “Alison Powell”, she said approvingly, “a most English name”. She also spoke of Ronald Reagan, saying quite sadly, “the last time I saw Ronnie he didn’t recognize me”. And now we have Meryl Streep in “The Iron Lady” as the aging Thatcher in her twilight years also in late stage dementia. Of course, in flashbacks she is still vital, attractive, Britain’s first female Prime Minister, ten years in office and every inch the leader. I lived in London during the blackouts,, the garbage piled high on every street and it was chaos. She was the leader they needed. I found myself agreeing with everything she said in the film: Don’t let the mindless mob of miners destroy society, teach the tinpot Argentine fascists not to trifle with the English Lion, keep Britain out of the disastrous Euro zone. “Grocer’s daughter”, one of her “spineless pygmys” mumbles under his breath while orchestrating her ouster. Well, I was a grocer’s son myself, spending my earliest years behind my father’s grocery store. I found myself in agreement with her, which is saying a lot from a citizen of The People’s Republic of Berkeley. History has already placed her in the pantheon of great leaders. I do, too.

Socialism::the dirtiest word in American politics

You hear Republicans like Mitt Romney decrying Obama for leading us to a European socialist future. Who does he mean? Not Finland, Germany, the Netherlands and Luxumbourg who, unlike us, still have a AAA rating. Are they picking on poor little Greece or Ireland? Nick Kristof points out that even Europe’s poorest countries produce a wealth of beguiling supermodels. So let’s pick on someone our own size, like Canada, that bilingual socialist monarchy to the north (or the south if you live in Detroit). But wait a minute, even with full national health services it’s the only industrial country that didn’t have a bank failure during the Crash. The truth is that these critics wouldn’t know Keir Hardie from Oliver Hardy. When I was a freshman at UCLA I asked my political science prof. why there was no major socialist party in the US and he answered simply, “There’s no sentiment for it”. OK, point well taken. I re-read Marx last week, the Communist Manifesto, hardly a sound bite and not a single mention of socialism. It is primarily an economic history showing how feudalism gave way to the medieval guilds then the industrial revolution and finally Adam Smith capitalism. What it really seems to point out is that the 99% and the 1% have always been with us. Capitalism creates and destroys over and over again. But here’s a positive note. Warren Buffet is on the cover of Time this week being called The Optimist. Way back in 1935 Alexei Stakhanov was also on the cover of Time. He is the Soviet miner who could produce 5 times his quotas every day. He’s the model for Boxer, the hard-working horse in Orwell’s “Animal Farm”. You see, the sage of Omaha and the lowly miner actually have something in common: they’re both optimists. Workers of the world you have nothing to lose but your credit cards.