My interview with Vanity Fair‘s John Heilpern is up:
“What have you done for pleasure lately?” I asked.
“You mean apart from the occasional sodomy?” he replied.
We also talked blogging models:
He conducts an ongoing conversation with more than a million people a month about such topics and hobbyhorses as the intransigence of Republicans versus Obama (which he nicknames Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner); the moral shamefulness of government-sanctioned torture; pedophilia and the lost credibility of the Catholic Church; and Montaigne’s essay on why we bless someone who sneezes.
“Montaigne was an early blogger,” he pointed out, for he wrote about everything under the sun. And doubtless Pascal too—for what else are prototype blogs but spontaneous pensées? Sullivan himself was a born blogger before blogs existed. Among the brightest and best of his Oxford and Harvard generations, he was weaned on the old print media of Fleet Street when he left Oxford to join The Daily Telegraph in 1984—an unapologetic Thatcherite and novice editorial writer among the gilded newspaper palaces along the Street of Shame.
“People forget that we churned out an editorial a day at newspapers. When I went to the Telegraph, the editorial conference took place at 4:30, and there was tea afterward, and gin. They’d already demolished two bottles at lunchtime. Copy was due at seven P.M., and you had to write it on deadline, very concisely, very solid.” He began to laugh. “That’s how I learned how to blog—in the most traditional setting ever.”
Now that’s an awesome view! It certainly looks like it could be in the Alps somewhere, but I am going with the U.S. because I think we have more of a fondness for fences than Europeans, though I could be wrong about that. The mountains look more like the Rockies than the Sierra Nevada, and a couple of my students mentioned Telluride but then said no to that because the town is more self-contained than what we’re seeing. However, I did notice that on the outskirts of Telluride there is an area called Mountain Village, which is more residential and would have this view overlooking Telluride, which would be just off to the northeast. Sunset in beautiful Mountain Village, CO?
Another looks west:
I’m sure someone will be able to pinpoint the exact hotel, room, and, based on the angle, the probable height, weight, and dietary preferences of the photographer, but it looks a lot like Jackson Hole, Wyoming to me. I’ll go ahead and guess the Grand View Lodge.
Another jumps to Europe:
This looks to me very much like the Alps based on the landscape and chalet style houses; the modern square building in front makes Italy and France less likely, leaving Switzerland, Austria and Liechtenstein. I imagine some readers will spend hours figuring this out – I’ll just guess the western outskirts of Vaduz, Liechtenstein since the mountain range across the valley looks like the one you see from Vaduz.
Another:
Swiss Alps! French Alps! German Alps! Austrian Alps! I have no idea which Alps this view belongs to, but lovely it is. An hour browsing through pictures of the Alps is not an unpleasant hour at all. But I’m reduced to a wild guess: Engelberg, Switzerland. And just for fun, here’s one of the many beautiful Alpine views I came across in my searching. Okay, one more.
Another:
Verbier, Switzerland? I am sure that is not correct. I am not a geolocation wonk but enjoy VFYW for the memories and other connections evoked by the photographs. I spent my 20th birthday in Verbier, over 30 years ago. The view from my window that morning was as peaceful and full of promise as this week’s shot.
Another adds his own view:
Wow, this week’s contest brought back a strong memory of a conference I went to five years ago in the French Alps. Here’s a picture I took at the time, from the Centre Paul Langevin looking into the village of Aussois:
What a gorgeous location. Pretty similar, huh?
But not quite the same. In the contest photo, there’s no church, and the mountain looks different and more distant. So you’re not going to get the level of detail from me that usually wins these contests, as in “the photo was taken at 7:23 pm from the east-facing window of suite 327 in the Smith building, and assuming the photo was taken by someone standing with the camera at eye level, the photographer was 6 ft. 2 in. tall, with a slight limp and probably dark brown hair and moderate acne.” Heck, I may not even be in the right country. But thanks for the excuse to reminisce and go thru some old pix of mine!
Another gets the right country:
Clearly in the alps, and likely Austria, eastern Switzerland, or perhaps even Lichtenstein if I remember my rooflines right. No time for a search – have to go shovel an half-foot of snow off the driveway for the second time today – so I’m going with a town I visited on a high school ski trip and had some fine fondue chinoise: Lech, Austria.
A previous contest winner nails the exact location:
A few months ago you had a great contest, #139, which featured a German schloss that no one actually found. As time ran out, my failed search for it ended just 40 miles to the south in the vineyards of the Rheingau. When I realized this week’s view was nearby, in the Alps, I saw a chance for redemption. But with weak clues, such as the sun’s angle or the ski tips at lower right, and having never skied in Europe, my only option was to start “trekking” through the mountains. And trek I did. Hour after hour, through every snow peaked massif and ski resort the Alps have to offer. Finally, late on Sunday night, pay-dirt:
This week’s view comes from the village of Rohrmoos-Untertal, Austria, in the Schladming ski region. The photo was taken by a Dish fan who rented an apartment in a private ski-haus named for its owner, Christine Milalkovits. The house is located at 104 Untertal Strasse, altitude 2,961 feet above sea level, latitude 47.22.04.91 N, longitude 13.40.44.91 E. The view was taken from the first floor and looks nearly due north along a heading of 353.33 degrees towards the Dachstein massif.
Ironically, I thought the orange plastic tips in the lower right of the photo were skis, so I emphasized ski resorts while searching. Turns out, they’re actually the handrails for a child’s slide/swing. So it goes.
Attached is a bird’s eye view which simulates the lighting on February 28, 2013 at 5:07 PM local time (my best of four estimates for time and date):
Lastly, in recent weeks readers have been sending in some pretty nice visuals, so I created something new to try and keep up. Assuming it can be transcoded and uploaded, it’s a video which might as well be titled “The View From (an F-16 doing 400 mph above) Your Window”:
The only other reader to answer the correct village writes:
This view reminded me of Flachau, Austria, where spent some vacations as a child. So I started looking in the right general area right away. Google maps Austria doesn’t have street view, but I think I found the flat-roofed building in the aerial photograph:
My guess is that the view is from Haus Christine, Untertalstraße 104, 8971 Rohrmoos-Untertal, Austria, looking north over the village of Rohrmoss-Untertal towards the Dachstein mountains from a room in the north-west corner of the house.
Congrats to our reader on the tough win. Details from the submitter:
This picture is taken from one of the first floor bedrooms of the Apartment Christine II in Schladming-Rohrmoos, Austria. The mountains to the north are the Dachstein mountains, a spectacular range covering the Austrian regions of Upper Austria, Styria and Salzburg. There is actually a ski resort at the top (nearly 3000 meters high), accessible only via a Gondola. On our side of the valley you have the ski resorts Fageralm, Reiteralm, Hochwurzen, Planai, and Hauser Kaibling; Rohrmoos is in the valley between Hochwurzen and Planai.
We were here for a week to ski and watch the second half of the FIS World Cup Alpine Championships, held at Planai (Schladming), where the USA did remarkably well despite the early injury of Linsey Vonn. Austrians are bat-shit crazy about skiing; while they were gracious hosts to all racers, they would certainly cheer the 6th place Austrian well above the first place foreigner. We are certainly skiers but not really ski spectators, but it was easy to get caught up in the emotions when you are surrounded by thousands (upwards to 40,000 near the end ofthe week we are told) of fanatical fans.
By the way, you have posted in the past our VFYW shot in Lake Tahoe. At the time I commented that none of the Views ever have children compositions obstructing the otherwise interesting perspectives. In our case it was these same kids (9 and 5-year-old twins, all girls) who brought us to Europe (Salzburg) for a year: my wife is German and our kids were not making as much progress in their command of the German mother tongue as we had hoped, so we have taken the immersion (otherwise known as throwing your kids to the wolves) route. It was in Salzburg that we were introduced to Krampus‘, which I emailed you all about early in December [see photo to the right]. Weird shit.
As with the thousands of others I too am a Dish subscriber and wish you all continued success. I am not gay; not conservative; not Catholic (or religious); and clean shaved, which is why I enjoy the perspectives and am willing to pay them, unreserved.
John L. Allen Jr. visited Argentina to report on Pope Francis. He writes that “people who know the lay of the land here insist there’s little meaningful sense in which Bergoglio could be described as a ‘conservative’, at least as measured by the standards of the church.” Some reasons why:
• Bergoglio is one of the least ideological people you’ll ever meet, more interested in concrete situations than in grand political theories.
• The most serious opposition to Bergoglio from within the Catholic fold in Argentina consistently came from the right, not the left.
• Despite a checkered personal history with the [center-left Argentine President Cristina] Kirchner family, Bergoglio had good relations with other members of Argentina’s current government, and is open to dialogue with all political forces.
The fact that he is the first Pope to come from a country that already has marriage equality – and that he was on the liberal wing of the conservative side on that issue within the church – seems salient to me. An ideologue could never have supported civil unions as an alternative, as Bergoglio did. A pragmatist – who could see the actual damage the church was doing to itself with its harsh rhetoric against gay couples – might. But the one thing Allen picked up on that I’ve also heard among Jesuit friends is Francis’ executive skills:
He’s a man comfortable exercising authority. Lozano said that during the twice-monthly meetings Bergoglio held with his six auxiliary bishops in Buenos Aires, he would always go around the table and solicit advice, and he took it to heart. When it came time to decide, however, things weren’t put up for a vote — Bergoglio made the call, and never seemed anxious or overwrought about it.
Third, Bergoglio may be a peace-loving man of the people, but he’s no naïf about the use of power to make his vision stick. Wals, for instance, noted that the new pope’s very first episcopal appointment was the choice of 65-year-old Mario Aurelio Poli of Santa Rosa as his successor in Buenos Aires. That move came on March 28, just 15 days after Francis was elected — among other things, a sign that the wheels may grind more quickly under this pope…
In the same way, Bergoglio also didn’t shrink from holding people accountable. Villarreal, for instance, said he’s familiar with at least one instance in which a priest wasn’t toeing the line, and after giving him a chance to straighten out, Bergoglio didn’t blink about sending him packing.
Readers push back against my praise for Margaret Thatcher (and I largely respond to their dissents in the above video):
I’m sure you’ll just dismiss me as a lefty toady, but, good god man, not a peep about Thatcher’s willingness to demonize gay men? Exploiting prejudice is, if nothing else, brilliant politics. Doesn’t she get a pat on the back for that, too?
Tom Dolan points out that her record is more of a “mixed bag”:
As a member of Parliament (MP) in the 1960s, she was one of only a handful of Conservatives to vote for the decriminalization of homosexuality, a truly forward-thinking and brave gesture that she deserves a great deal of credit for. Sadly, as Prime Minister, she would squander much of that credit (ironically enough, for a politician who put such stock in thrift) by lending her support to one of the nastiest anti-gay measures of modern times: the infamous Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, which forbade schools from teaching “the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”.
I was living in London—waiting tables, seeing plays, stealing silver, pining after British boys—when Section 28 was being debated. The law prompted Ian McKellen to come out of the closet and it prompted some righteous lesbian parents to tag Thatcher billboard with “Lesbians Mums Aren’t Pretending.” Coming at the height of the AIDS epidemic, Section 28 instilled panic. It felt like this law might the first of many anti-gay laws to come. Instead Section 28 was the beginning of the end for political homophobia in the UK. Because McKellen wasn’t the only gay person to come out in protest. And you know what happens when gay people come out.
So thanks for that, Maggie.
Section 28 was and is indefensible – and I should correct my statement above that it was from 1981 – when it was 1987. But it was also part of an epic struggle between Thatcher and the far left that emerged after her first election, and caused the creation of the breakaway pre-Blairite Social Democratic Party (now the Liberal Democrats in a coalition government with the Tories). Local governments – especially in London where “Red Ken” Livingstone was ensconced – were constructing curricula of conscious radicalism. She was wrong to take the bait. But, unlike Reagan, she also launched a very comprehensive nation-wide safe sex campaign when HIV and AIDS emerged. I wrote the editorial in the Tory Telegraph at the time in favor of investment in research and public information campaigns on HIV and AIDS. She was a scientist. She was not a homophobe.
Another reader points to a speech in which Thatcher laments, “Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay.” Again, I think that was more about her war with the left than the issue as such. The context makes that clear:
In the inner cities—where youngsters must have a decent education if they are to have a better future—that opportunity is all too often snatched from them by hard left education authorities and extremist teachers. And children who need to be able to count and multiply are learning anti-racist mathematics—whatever that may be. Children who need to be able to express themselves in clear English are being taught political slogans. Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay.
But its only real defense is that this was 1987. Another reader:
Even if you agree with her economic policies, how do you justify her human rights record? Her coddling of dictators and butchers? In Chile, Indonesia, South Africa, etc, she was so clearly in the wrong and she remained steadfast and unapologetic about it.
Finally, as a Catholic of Irish heritage, how do you justify supporting her Ulster policies? Dick Cheney is a war criminal and Thatcher isn’t? John Yoo is morally reprehensible and Thatcher is an inspiring leader? Is torture of IRA members (and worse, suspected IRA members) okay? If you can do nothing else, explain to your baffled readers how you can beat the war criminal drum daily against the Bush-Cheney-neocon cadre and still respect Thatcher.
I’m not going to defend her love of Pinochet. But the torture of IRA prisoners predated her premiership. Unlike Yoo, she was a fanatical devotee of the rule of law. And, as I have already argued, she opposed pre-emptive war as a violation of international law. Another reader:
Not to burst your balloon, but the hagiography of Margaret Thatcher has really got to stop. Two really concrete examples of the backwardness and stupidity of Thatcher’s politics can underscore what I mean:
First, when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Thatcher immediately declared her opposition to the reunification of Germany, because such a unification would pose a danger to the security of Europe. Try for a moment to grasp the deep hypocrisy required to believe that. For decades the US and the UK used the Wall (justly) as a symbol of Soviet oppression. Thatcher stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Reagan when he demanded Gorbachev “tear down this wall.” And as soon as the Wall was torn down and the liberation of East Germany from dictatorship became a possibility, she lost all interest in the liberation of others.
Second, Thatcher continued the Labor government’s failed policies with regard to the violence in Northern Ireland, and then played right into the IRA’s hands by ratcheting up the police state there. Rather than sitting down with republicans and loyalists and hammering out an agreement, Thatcher seemed to actually believe that enough troops and police and arrests were the solution. How many people died because Irish Catholics felt (rightly or wrongly) that the IRA’s shootings and bombings were the only response to a British government that would not negotiate a settlement in Northern Ireland under any circumstances? I would submit that a British government amenable to sitting down with the SDLP and Sinn Fein and the unionist parties would have been able to reach the very same terms as the Good Friday Agreement a decade earlier if not for Mrs. Thatcher’s refusal to even attempt a peaceful solution.
Thatcher was a groundbreaking person, a very overrated prime minister, and a fantastic orator. And given her opposition to things like peace in Northern Ireland and the reunification of Germany, it seems fitting that she will be most remembered for speeches where she proudly proclaimed her stubbornness in the face of contrary evidence (“The lady’s not for turning!”) and her politics of being against virtually everything (“No, no, no!”).
Maybe you had to be there. I was born in the eighties, so I really wasn’t. But I happen to value things like peace, freedom, and self-determination. Thatcher was in favor of those things for good old England, but only paid lip-service in the case of the rest of the world.
I copped to the Germany derangement earlier. Another reader:
I’m not denying Thatcher’s impact and historical significance, but I’ve always thought that you over did it with your praise for her. It seems to me that she looms larger for YOU personally than historically since her rise to power coincided with your political and philosophical maturation. Understandable, but I still think she is ultimately over-rated and candy-coated by you. Of course, I’m not a Brit, so maybe I just don’t know of what I speak, but I am roughly the same age (born 1960) and have lived through the same times as you, Reagan and all.
I get how you feel she changed British politics, and there’s no question in my mind that she was a damned interesting, complex, and charismatic person, but it’s the gauzy “warm and fuzzies” you feel for her that I question. You just wrote a bunch of posts about how pop music went after her all because of her policies, and then laud how she cut the budget etc. But did it ever occur to you that her policies really did cause hardship for many, that there was a reason besides the left’s “collectivist, envy-ridden” feelings? Two wrongs don’t make a right: the hard left and trade unions needed a kick in the pants, but that didn’t mean their original intentions weren’t good.
Part of my “Gotcha!” is I now regularly read you laud Obama’s “conservative approach” to healthcare, your adjustment to understanding that social spending is often necessary for the poor and powerless, and that the 1 percent sometimes need something – government – to stop them from totally subverting the system. So, how do you square this reality with your enthusiastic memories of Thatcher? Is it just that things were SO out of whack in the UK by the 1970s that “the left” deserved to be eviscerated at all costs just to level the playing field? That the “collateral damage” caused by her be damned, it was all about the process? That the UK is/was so different from the US, that the time needed her? Or, have simply you mythologized the time and made it grander than it really was? But Reagan and Bush 43 were “strong leaders” too and you aren’t afraid to even re-evaluate “St. Reagan” after all of these years.
The answer is yes – things really were that out of whack. The entire British economy was a propped up, inflated, inefficient state-subsidized mess. There was no way out of that without a major restructuring – and it began under her Labour predecessor who acceded to spending cuts under the direction of the IMF. The unemployment of 1981 – 1987 was appalling in its human costs. But it led the way to far lower unemployment in Britain than the continent in subsequent years.
Alas, we live in a time of few princes, and nearly as few dandies. Prince Charles counts as both, and Antongiavanni makes a case study out of him more than once. He also draws lessons from the dress of American newscasters and presidents. “Brokaw is the most elegant,” he observes of the former group. “Rather’s clothes fit well, but he is so slavish in aping his hero Edward R. Murrow — even patronizing the same Savile Row tailor — that he cannot be said to have any style of his own.” President Johnson, envious of Kennedy, “sought out a London tailor whom he told to make him ‘look like a British diplomat.’” Of Carter, Antongiavanni writes only that “it is one thing to wear Hawaiian shirts in Key West or jeans and cowboy boots when splitting wood, and another to address the people from the Oval Office in a sweater.” …
Newscasters’ jobs demand deliberate dress, and our political leaders, whether elected or royal, act as media figures in essentially the same mode. David Letterman favors a versatile form of double-breasted jacket, but one that is “difficult to tailor, and thus no longer favored by the industry.” Alex Trebek also wears double-breasted jackets, yet “acquires his clothes through a promotional deal with a third-rate manufacturer.”
Other “eminent men, such as Kelsey Grammer, David Hyde Pierce, Jon Stewart and Matt Lauer, have shown that it is possible to dress fashionably without getting carried away.” Coming to Conan O’Brien’s lack of not just double-breasted jackets, but pocket squares, patterns, or even stripes, Antongiavanni remarks that “people expect those with more money, more fame, and more delightful jobs than themselves to be more stylish; and when they are not, they do not respect them, for they consider that so much opportunity to cut loose has been squandered.”
(Photo: NBC News special correspondent Tom Brokaw arrives for an event launching a ‘national initiative to support and honor Americaâs service members and their families’ April 12, 2011 in the East Room of the White House. By Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images.)
As part of a larger look at the business strategy behind paperbacks, Nichole Bernier explains the logic behind new covers:
A look at a paperback’s redesign tells you a thing or two about the publisher’s mindset: namely, whether or not the house believes the book has reached its intended audience, and whether there’s another audience yet to reach. Beyond that, it’s anyone’s Rorschach. Hardcovers with muted illustrations morph into pop art, and vice versa. Geometric-patterned book covers are redesigned with nature imagery; nature imagery in hardcover becomes photography of women and children in the paperback. Meg Wolitzer, on a panel about the positioning of women authors at the recent AWP conference, drew knowing laughter for a reference to the ubiquitous covers with girls in a field or women in water. Whether or not publishers want to scream book club, they at least want to whisper it.
About the example seen above:
When Jenna Blum’s first novel, Those Who Save Us, came out in hardcover in 2004, Houghton Mifflin put train tracks and barbed wire on the cover. Gorgeous, haunting, and appropriate for a WWII novel, but not exactly “reader-friendly,” Blum recalls being told by one bookseller. The following year, the paperback cover — a girl in a bright red coat in front of a European bakery — telegraphed the novel’s Holocaust-era content without frightening readers away.
“The paperback cover helped save the book from the remainder bins, I suspect,” Blum says. Armed with her paperback, Jenna went everywhere she was invited, which ended up tallying more than 800 book clubs. Three years later, her book hit the New York Times bestseller list.
“Often the hardcover is the friends-and-family edition, because that’s who buys it, in addition to collectors,” she says. “It’s imperative that a paperback give the novel a second lease on life if the hardcover didn’t reach all its intended audience, and unless you are Gillian Flynn, it probably won’t.”
As the saying goes, the first step toward recovery is to acknowledge the problem.
The problem in 2012 — as in 2008, as in the near-death experience of 2004, as in the popular vote loss of 2000, as in the loss of 1996, as in the loss of 1992 — was the GOP’s failure to offer an economic program relevant to the problems of middle-class Americans. The party’s present three front-runners would not only repeat that failure, but double down on that failure.
The Republican Party desperately needs renewal, its early presidential front-runners are characterized by their rejection of change.
Relatedly, Jonathan Bernstein argues that the GOP is broken. One reason why:
Winning parties have a tendency to overlearn the lessons of their campaigns; winning candidates become role models for the party in the future. And the Republican Party, which has produced many impressive and honorable politicians over the years, has been unlucky in its winners — especially Richard Nixon and Newt Gingrich, but also in many ways Ronald Reagan. The lessons they learned from those politicians and from the 1968, 1980 and 1994 victories have reinforced the worst instincts of party actors (even though the victories actually mainly had to do with economic and other fundamentals that had nothing to do with the lessons “learned”).
I remember reading an article in the Washington Monthly back in the late 1980s by one of the smugger liberal British columnists, Polly Toynbee. It captured part of the true derangement that Margaret Thatcher brought out in her political foes. It was called simply: “Is Margaret Thatcher A Woman?” It’s still online. It was a vicious attack on her having any feminist credentials. It included this magnificent lie:
She has experienced nothing but advantage from her gender.
Toynbee’s case is worth hearing out, but it’s an instant classic of the worst British trait: resentment of others’ success. No culture I know of is more brutally unkind to its public figures, hateful toward anyone with a degree of success or money, or more willing to ascribe an individual’s achievements to something other than their own ability. The Britain I grew up with was, in this specific sense, profoundly leftist in the worst sense. It was cheap and greedy and yet hostile to anyone with initiative, self-esteem, and the ability to make money.
The clip below captures the left-liberal sentiment of the time perfectly. Yes: the British left would prefer to keep everyone poorer if it meant preventing a few getting richer. And the massively powerful trade union movement worked every day to ensure that mediocrity was protected, individual achievement erased, and that all decisions were made collectively, i.e. with their veto. And so – to take the archetypal example – Britain’s coal-workers fought to make sure they could work unprofitable mines for years of literally lung-destroying existence and to pass it on to their sons for yet another generation of black lung. This “right to work” was actually paid for by anyone able to make a living in a country where socialism had effectively choked off all viable avenues for prosperity. And if you suggested that the coal industry needed to be shut down in large part or reshaped into something commercial, you were called, of course, a class warrior, a snob, a Tory fascist, etc. So hard-working Brits trying to make a middle class living were taxed dry to keep the life-spans of powerful mine-workers short.
To put it bluntly: The Britain I grew up in was insane. The government owned almost all major manufacturing, from coal to steel to automobiles. Owned. It employed almost every doctor and owned almost every hospital. Almost every university and elementary and high school was government-run. And in the 1970s, you could not help but realize as a young Brit, that you were living in a decaying museum – some horrifying mixture of Eastern European grimness surrounded by the sculptured bric-a-brac of statues and buildings and edifices that spoke of an empire on which the sun had once never set. Now, in contrast, we lived on the dark side of the moon and it was made up of damp, slowly degrading concrete.
I owe my entire political obsession to the one person in British politics who refused to accept this state of affairs. You can read elsewhere the weighing of her legacy – but she definitively ended a truly poisonous, envious, inert period in Britain’s history. She divided the country deeply – and still does. She divided her opponents even more deeply, which was how she kept winning elections. She made some serious mistakes – the poll tax, opposition to German unification, insisting that Nelson Mandela was a terrorist – but few doubt she altered her country permanently, re-establishing the core basics of a free society and a free economy that Britain had intellectually bequeathed to the world and yet somehow lost in its own class-ridden, envy-choked socialist detour to immiseration.
I was a teenage Thatcherite, an uber-politics nerd who loved her for her utter lack of apology for who she was. I sensed in her, as others did, a final rebuke to the collectivist, egalitarian oppression of the individual produced by socialism and the stultifying privileges and caste identities of the class system. And part of that identity – the part no one ever truly gave her credit for – was her gender. She came from a small grocer’s shop in a northern town and went on to educate herself in chemistry at Oxford, and then law. To put it mildly, those were not traditional decisions for a young woman with few means in the 1950s. She married a smart businessman, reared two children and forged a political career from scratch in the most male-dominated institution imaginable: the Tory party.
She relished this individualist feminism and wielded it – coining a new and very transitive verb, handbagging, to describe her evisceration of ill-prepared ministers or clueless interviewers. Perhaps in Toynbee’s defense, Thatcher was not a feminist in the left-liberal sense: she never truly reflected on her pioneering role as a female leader; she never appointed a single other woman to her cabinet over eleven years; she was contemptuous toward identity politics; and the only tears she ever deployed (unlike Hillary Clinton) were as she departed from office, ousted by an internal coup, undefeated in any election she had ever run in as party leader.
Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir preceded her; but Thatcher’s three election victories, the longest prime ministership since the 1820s, her alliance with the US in defeating the Soviet Union, and her liberation of the British economy place her above their achievements. What inspires me still is the thought of a young woman in a chemistry lab at Oxford daring to believe that she could one day be prime minister – and not just any prime minister, but the defining public figure in British post-war political history.
That took vision and self-confidence of a quite extraordinary degree. It was infectious. And it made Thatcher and Thatcherism a much more complicated thing than many analyses contain.
Thatcher’s economic liberalization came to culturally transform Britain. Women were empowered by new opportunities; immigrants, especially from South Asia, became engineers of growth; millions owned homes for the first time; the media broke free from union chains and fractured and multiplied in subversive and dynamic ways. Her very draconian posture provoked a punk radicalism in the popular culture that changed a generation. The seeds of today’s multicultural, global London – epitomized by that Olympic ceremony – were sown by Thatcher’s will-power.
And that was why she ultimately failed, as every politician always ultimately does. She wanted to return Britain to the tradition of her thrifty, traditional father; instead she turned it into a country for the likes of her son, a wayward, money-making opportunist. The ripple effect of new money, a new middle class, a new individualism meant that Blair’s re-branded Britain – cool Britannia, with its rave subculture, its fashionistas, its new cuisine, its gay explosion, its street-art, its pop music – was in fact something Blair inherited from Thatcher.
She was, in that sense, a liberator. She didn’t constantly (or even ever) argue for women’s equality; she just lived it. She didn’t just usher in greater economic freedom; she unwittingly brought with it cultural transformation – because there is nothing more culturally disruptive than individualism and capitalism. Her 1940s values never re-took: the Brits engaged in spending and borrowing binges long after she had left the scene, and what last vestiges of prudery were left in the dust.
Perhaps in future years, her legacy might be better seen as a last, sane defense of the nation-state as the least worst political unit in human civilization. Her deep suspicion of the European project was rooted in memories of the Blitz, but it was also prescient and wise. Without her, it is doubtful the British would have kept their currency and their independence. They would have German financiers going over the budget in Whitehall by now, as they are in Greece and Portugal and Cyprus. She did not therefore only resuscitate economic freedom in Britain, she kept Britain itself free as an independent nation. Neither achievement was inevitable; in fact, each was a function of a single woman’s will-power. To have achieved both makes her easily the greatest 20th century prime minister after Churchill.
He saved Britain from darkness; she finally saw the lights come back on. And like Churchill, it’s hard to imagine any other figure quite having the character, the will-power and the grit to have pulled it off.
(Photo: Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher speaks at a political conference during the early 1980s in London, England. By Tim Graham/Getty Images)
In the early 20th century, tattoos were stigmatized (even illegal in some jurisdictions) because of their association with raunchy male imagery. Middle-class women who were tattooed knew they would be considered “loose” or seedy if they showed their marks. By the ’60s and ’70s, tattooing became more directly linked to the counterculture, and remained so until the 2000s. Now tattoos are not as subversive or associated with “bad” women—instead, they have become fashion accessories of the most indelible kind.
Although “not all tattooed women were considered freaks—tattooed society women wore discreet decorative tattoos, which were trendy in the late 19th century, first in London, then in New York,” heavily inked women were considered “a violation of nature.” Something similar could be said for men, but women were decidedly less accepted because “they were more explicitly associated with nature through motherhood and female intuition and other feminine intangibles that disqualified them from having much influence in culture.” The circus and carnival freak-show ladies were also guilty of transgression because they showed bare skin in public.
Regarding the woman seen above:
Mifflin refers in her book to Olive Oatman, “a tragically bicultural American” who was orphaned after her family was killed by Southwest Indians in the 1850s, then adopted and raised by Mohave Indians who gave her a chin tattoo as a mark of tribal acceptance. After she was ransomed back to the whites at age 19, she was stranded between the two cultures and the tattoo marked her as a Mohave and functioned as a kind of ethnic barrier. “It’s somehow fitting,” Mifflin said, “In light of our colonial past and our multicultural present, that the first American tattooed woman was a white Indian. She literally embodied the two cultures on which the country was founded.”
Heidi Julavits is entranced by Christa Parravani’s memoir, her, about the death of her identical twin Cara:
Briefly their story is this. Until Cara died, she and Christa functioned as a single entity split between two bodies. As children, the twins vowed that if one perished the other would commit suicide. “The unharmed twin would take her life by whatever means she possessed: Drano, phone cord, knife, swan dive from a cliff.” (Parravani cites the following statistic: 50 percent of “identicals” die within two years of the death of their twin.) …
Cara matured into a drug abuser and the less stable of the two; Christa, by comparison, was driven and even-keeled. Then, at the age of twenty-four, Cara was raped and nearly killed while walking her dog in the woods.
What had been transpiring gradually—the twins’ healthy separation into two adult women—was violently hastened. “The moment my sister fell under her rapist’s hand, he untwinned us: the bodies were the same but Cara became lost in hers. My body became a vessel of guilt, reminded us both of the past . . . joyful giving of sex, ripe exposed youth, and the naïve belly that still tickles at touch.” The trauma precipitated a drug-addiction tailspin from which Cara never recovered. The twins’ relationship became untenable. “She hates you for reminding her of what she was,” the author writes. “You fear her for showing you what you could become.” Christa, after trying repeatedly to help Cara get clean, adopted the tough-love approach. Cara’s final angry words to her gauntlet-throwing sister were, more or less, if I die now it will be on you.
And then, as Charlotte Brontë might have it, Cara died. (As Charlotte Brontë would not have it, she died of a heroin overdose, in a bathroom.) But contrary to sisterly suicide pacts and the rules of metaphysics, both sisters, in a sense, lived on. “While she was alive I was vibrant, responsible, steady, and holding her up,” writes Parravani. “I was her opposite. In the wake of Cara’s death, I became her.”
This week’s view comes from the village of Rohrmoos-Untertal, Austria, in the Schladming ski region. The photo was taken by a Dish fan who rented an apartment in a private ski-haus named for its owner, Christine Milalkovits. The house is located at 104 Untertal Strasse, altitude 2,961 feet above sea level, latitude 47.22.04.91 N, longitude 13.40.44.91 E. The view was taken from the first floor and looks nearly due north along a heading of 353.33 degrees towards the Dachstein massif.
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