Lady Thatcher's Friends Object to Meryl Streep's Granny-Gone-Mad Biopic

Oh dear.  Close friends of Lady Thatcher are furious--furious, I tell you!--at Meryl Streep's soon-to-be-released Margaret Thatcher biopic.  It employs a granny-gone-mad theme, they say, which has Lady Thatcher hallucinating and regretting the high price she had to pay to obtain and wield power.  The high price she had to pay to wield power ruthlessly . . . .

And as I read this, I think how fascinating it is that in 2011, we're still expected--all of us--to bow reverently before the several unassailable icons of the era of neo-conservative dominance that has brought the world's economic and political cultures to the fracturing point.  We may not question the virtue of Lady Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, or John Paul II.

Because the same powerful elites that brought that holy trinity to power continue to dominate the economic and political life of Western nations in the period of decline to which their ruthlessness and rapacity have brought these nations.  And even as the economic and political life of those nations falls apart due to the greed of these elites, they do not intend to have critical questions asked about the icons of virtue to which they have appealed for validation, as they divide up the final spoils of the democratic societies they have succeeded in dismantling.