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As torrential downpours muck up the English countryside, the British sense of the absurd and ghoulish Thatcherism thrive. BY
ANDREW ROSS | welcome to Bangladesh. It's monsoon season here, the end of June, when the rest of the Western world enjoys the bright golden rays
of summer. Flooding in Bognor Regis, pigeons dropping dead out of the sky over the English Channel,
the Glastonbury Pop Festival -- Britain's answer to Woodstock -- turned into
a giant mudbath, it's like the rains of
Ranchipur. Mum and I sit in our rented Peugeot with sandwiches in wax paper and a thermos of coffee in Tesco's parking lot, waiting for the sheets of rain to let up just a little bit so we can hobble the 10 yards to the
supermarket to buy some light bulbs, a hot water bottle and a bar of Cadbury's Fruit & Nut.
Of course I'm exaggerating. I've seen at least 10 minutes of sun in the
past eight days. And it's not as if I expected any different.
After all I'm from here. Rain -- heavy rain, light rain, medium rain, fine rain, drizzle -- was the one constant in my childhood, through deaths, marriages, bar mitzvahs, my first shave, the first time I stuck my hands up a girl's jumper, driving lessons and season after season watching an interminably bad local soccer team.
Older and wiser, I come back once a year, mostly to see my mum and go with her to have a coffee at Blossom's in George Street and fish and chips at Banker's on the western road. Weather permitting, of course. This time I also popped up to London and saw the rebuilt Globe Theatre, a prime destination for charabancs of schoolchildren, soaked to
the skin, glumly watching "A Midsummer Night's Dream." The Globe has a restaurant, but I can't tell what the food is like because the manager informed us everything was booked for the next hour even though the room was almost completely devoid of patrons. Clearly, not a follower of Tony Blair's free-market New Labor government.
Speaking of which, the honeymoon, if not over, is already showing signs of
irritation. For one thing, Tony, used to being fawned over almost as much
as Princess Di, seems not to take to criticism all that well. Snarling and sulking would be the best way of describing his response to questions about the way some of his more senior acolytes are already starting to throw their weight around. And sleaze, it seems, is not a Tory Party monopoly after all. One new Labor MP is already being given the boot for having bribed election opponents to stay out of the race. And one learns from the inestimable satirical magazine Private Eye that the New Labor man charged with ending the once-revered British welfare state as we know it earned his spurs by cruelly laying off 1,000 workers from a major publishing company and refusing to recognize the near-unanimous desire of the company's remaining journalists to unionize. Thatcherism lives!
Actually Thatcherism lives in a particularly ghoulish way. Destroyed in the recent election, the Conservative Party, at least
the pitiful rump that currently sits in the Mother of Parliaments, keeps
seeking a leader in the Iron Lady's handbaglike image. It believes it has
found one in the form of a 36-year-old balding man, William Hague, whose chief claim to fame was to have delivered a rousing speech to a Tory Party conference at the age of 16. So
depleted, unfortunately, have Conservative ranks become that young William has had to fill his "Shadow Cabinet" with assorted philanderers, like Lord Cecil Parkinson, who fathered an illegitimate child via his young secretary, and various political wide boys, far-right zealots and known incompetents from the last Tory government. There's even informed speculation that
the disgraced former Right Hon. Jonathan Aitken -- last seen urging his
17-year-old daughter to commit perjury on his behalf before his libel suit
against the Guardian newspaper and Granada Television collapsed in a tissue of Aitken's own lies -- will soon return to the Conservative front ranks. Scumbag he may be,
goes the thinking, but in the end, he's "one of us."
Still, the U.K. is not a total washout. Through the downpours, or perhaps
because of them, the British sense of the absurd remains acutely intact.
"Batman and Robin," and the attendant which-celebrity-will-show-up-last
hype event (at Battersea Power Station of all places) has been unmercifully
bashed. Even better -- and this surely makes Britain a light among
nations -- the authorities have just outlawed the use of cell phones while
driving. It's true: Being an obnoxious, self-important jerk will cause you to be pulled over by a British bobby and fined 20 pounds. Hurrah! The Dunkirk
spirit survives. Perhaps Prime Minister Blair, having blasted away at
America's disgraceful record on greenhouse gases at the United Nations,
might now turn his attention to another U.S. monstrosity recently showing
up on these shores -- the sports utility vehicle.
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