With dissertation duty reaching its nadir I haven't had the chance to blog for a while but that's out the way now and with almost two weeks having passed since the death of 'Baroness' Thatcher, I thought I'd have a little look back at how she's been received on both the social media end of things and in the news.
First of all I want to discuss what I believe to be my own role in her death. So strangely enough the subject of my dissertation was the media's role in the defeat of the unions during the 1984 miners strikes. On the day of Thatcher's death a course mate was proof reading it for me and uttered the words, 'Right I'm going to move on to Max's third chapter, 'Thatcher's Army', this should be fun'. A few milliseconds later (I kid you not) another course mate on my other side was to utter the resounding statement, 'Thatcher's fucking dead'. It was hard to believe at first and we in fact point blank refused to but the BBC News home page never lies and slowly the realisation set in that I had doomed our ex-PM. I should write dissertations about tyrants more frequently (and yes I am describing her as a tyrant). Maybe Gadaffi could have been brought down way earlier if I'd chosen the topic of British Foreign Policy in Libya.
Anyway, in 2013 whenever an event like this happens out of the blue the twitter feeds erupt and should probably be recorded for examination in 20 years time or so. Examining twitter after the Boston marathon bombings my feed looked something like this:
First ten minutes- Basic news reports.
Next twenty minutes- Sympathy for the victims/sympathy towards runners who'd put in such maximum effort for 26 miles and had their day ended in nightmare (there were reports of some of the participants going straight to the blood banks to help the victims. To call them legends would, if anything, be a bit of an understatement).
Next half hour- Journalists get involved. Start informing us of how this is 'of course a tragedy' but tragedies such as this one are happening daily in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria etc.
Following hour- Others jump on the 'this is happening elsewhere daily and no one knows anything or gives a shit' bandwagon. My feed has now been transformed from basic news coverage to wild conspiracy theories and everything in between.
It is indeed fascinating. With Thatcher's death, Facebook and Twitter were alight with arguments over whether the death of a frail old lady should be celebrated. Personally, I don't believe it should. Margaret Thatcher did some terrible things which are still impacting us today but the times to have celebrated have passed and as much as I despise her offspring (Carol is an idiot and Mark is as crooked as the leaning tower of Pisa) it wouldn't be fair on them to see such public hate towards their recently-deceased mother. The time to celebrate and demonise may have been 1990, the year the Tory Party decided enough was enough and ousted her, or possibly it was 1997 when the Tories as a whole were ousted by that wily old fox Blair. Either way, 2013 is definitely way too late to be burning model witches and drinking Maggie's own weight in beer as a form of send-off.
A couple of objections I have however. Firstly, what on earth gives the older generation the right to tell students they can't form an opinion over Thatcher. This is something I've seen on Facebook way too much in the past week. Most of the people I know at University are intelligent and intuitive enough to have formed rounded opinions on Thatcher's reign and you don't simply need to have lived through an era to have formed an opinion on it (see the 'I hate Hitler but wasn't alive in 1930's Nazi Germany' line of argument). Secondly, I have to say that I've in general objected to what the media have been saying about the woman. Her achievements have been broadcast above her failures and yet her failures were far far greater. She let us become a divided nation while doing little to solve an economic rut and was tyrannical in her dealings with anyone who objected. While headlines such as this one from the Sun are simply amusing and not worth writing about, what's more of an issue is decent establishments like the Times writing neutral obituaries of the woman which cloud the events of the 1980's. Coming across phrases such as 'she achieved so much for women' are ever-so-slightly stomach-churning. Make no mistake, Thatcher did absolutely nowt for women's progression in society. She viewed herself as a gender-neutral human being and wiped out any advancements being made in the second-wave of feminism. It wasn't until she left office that feminism gained speed again. History will undoubtedly forget this fact and in 20 or 30 years time she'll be seen as one of the most important women for the advancement of feminism in the 20th century. This is an untruth.
So there you have it. My final thoughts are that now she's been laid to the rest we can move on and consign her to the back pages of the dustiest history books. After a three-month dissertation and two weeks of non-stop broadcasting, I for one am all Thatchered out.
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Hope you all enjoyed.
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