“During the 80s, there were numerous sparky cultural critiques of Margaret Thatcher from the likes of Stephen Frears, Ken Loach and Derek Jarman in film, and from other artists working in other areas, especially in the most successful British cultural form, music. But in the longer term, her effect has been disastrous. Thatcher, like the Queen, is basically vulgar, and has little cultural sophistication or understanding. But unlike the Queen, she actively hated culture, as she recognised that it was a form of dissent. In her policies, she promoted what became known as celebrity culture; this was her celebration of what she thought was an entrepreneurial worldview, which, when mixed with greed, became the narcissism of the present day.
Thatcher had no understanding of what a central place the arts have in British life. Or how good Britain is at producing books, films, theatre and music. She was also a social atomist: she didn’t understand altruism, solidarity and identification with others as a basic part of human nature. Her failure to understand this helped give rise to mass forms of saccharine sentimentality such as that which surrounded the demise of Princess Diana. Solidarity was replaced by sentimentality in British life.”
Hanif Kureishi on Margaret Thatcher via The Guardian
Forgive me for not wasting a single tear on the day of her departure.
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[image: Keith Haring, “Ignorance=Fear” (1989)]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mecfebuNpX1qz762fo1_500.jpg)
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![Václav Havel playwright and politician, dead at 75.
Havel’s life in six stages:
the early student years under the Stalinist regime; the playwright and essayist of the Sixties; the defeat of the last great attempt at ‘socialism with a human face’ in the Prague Spring of 1968; the years of dissidence and arrest which culminated in Havel’s emergence as the leading spokesman for Charter 77; the Velvet Revolution; and finally the Presidency. Along the way, we get an abundance of ‘endearing foibles’, which far from tarnishing Havel’s heroic image, seem somehow to make his achievement all the more palpable. His parents were rich ‘cultural capitalists’, owners of the famous Barrandov cinema studios (‘bourgeois origins’). He has always had unreliable habits (a fondness for eau de toilette, sleeping late, listening to rock music) and is known for his promiscuity, notwithstanding the celebrated prison letters to his working-class wife Olga. (When he was released from jail in 1977, he spent his first weeks of freedom with a mistress.) In the Eighties, he was ruthless in establishing himself as Czechoslovakia’s most important dissident – when a potential rival emerged, doubtful rumours would start to circulate about the rival’s links with the secret police. As President he uses a child’s scooter to zoom along the corridors of the huge Presidential palace.
[…]
Rarely has one individual played so many different parts. The cocky young student in the early Fifties, member of a closed circle which holds passionate political discussions and somehow survives the worst years of the Stalinist terror. The Modernist playwright and critical essayist struggling to assert himself in the mild thaw of the late Fifties and Sixties. The first encounter with History – in the Prague Spring – which is also Havel’s first big disappointment. The long ordeal of the Seventies and most of the Eighties, when he is transformed from a critical playwright into a key political figure. The miracle of the Velvet Revolution, with Havel emerging as a skilful politician negotiating the transfer of power and ending up as President. Finally, there is Havel in the Nineties, the man who presided over the disintegration of Czechoslovakia and who is now the proponent of the full integration of the Czech Republic into Western economic and military structures. Havel himself has been shocked by the swiftness of the transformation – a TV camera famously caught his look of disbelief as he sat down to his first official dinner as President.
- Slavoj Žižek (here)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lweghndGX01qz762fo1_500.jpg)
