Another Maggie

The news of Margaret Thatcher's passing does not effect Americans the same as it does the British. It's easy to understand why. She was the prime minster for a foreign country that's not often in anyone's thoughts unless they're watching public television and are hooked on 'Downton Abbey.'

Her passing does seem to have revealed the sharpness of opinions about her, at least in Great Britain. Despite the fact that her last year in public office was in 1990--over 20 years ago--it's the 11 years that she did serve that have left a sizable country with some distinct opinions about her--good and bad.

And the news reports on this dichotomy. Perhaps we find it funny that 20 years later people can be so animated about their dislike for the woman that they hold parties to celebrate her passing. Or, graffiti a brick wall with lettering that looks like it would make a great album cover for a British rock band.

Personally, I have no feeling one way or the other, other than to greatly admire someone who can stay in office that long with some very heated opposition in a country that can call an election to oust you at any time.

The pictures of her with our president Reagan invoke a nostalgia for two political stalwarts who thought alike and came along at the same time. Maggie and Ron, two kids who got along in the sandbox of the world.

There is the affectionate remembrance of her and Reagan described in one story that has Reagan putting his hand over the receiver and likely holding the phone away from his ear when she was delivering a withering scold about his invading a Caribbean country with the Queen's picture on the currency without telling her. You almost think it's Lucy yelling at Charlie Brown.

For those with little memory, the country was Grenada and it was 1983, when Reagan sent marines in to free the country from the rebels. It didn't last long, and it only produced one Clint Eastwood movie. The effect for Americans was some swelling of military pride, but also some concerned realization that there were foreign medical schools, like the one in Grenada, that trained Americans to be doctors for practice in the United States. The belief that everyone came from an Ivy League school was shattered. Worry did set in then, for awhile. Credentials started to be questioned. What if my doctor got their med school degree in a foreign country?

You can just imagine Reagan, the actor who surely played males who were yelled at by wet hens, grinning that Maggie was a little excited. Almost as if a neighbor built a tree house in a tree whose branches were over the other yard. They made up.

I know only one Brit whose opinion about Maggie I could get. He was the owner of the last company I worked for, and is a British national. Unfortunately, it would only likely be e-mail contact, and I'd be robbed of the accent and the facial expressions that would come over his glasses. Whatever his opinion of her is.

So, has there been an outpouring of divided opinion about anyone in our political system who has left us? Maggie certainly came from a political cloth that was made of different fibers than those here in the States. She held an advanced degree in chemistry. Certainly we always have people who don't like someone. The public portions of Washington D.C. are crowded with protesters over many issues and the targets are very specific.

But we're a very large country, with large malls, and when the protesting crowds come home, they get very diluted with everyone else. We're not jammed into a pub giving voice to happiness over a demise.

Is there anyone I could fell the same enmity toward, even after they've died? I was searching my memory hard for this, but I was aiming too high. I was at the Federal level, when I should have been at the local level.

John V. Lindsay, a New York City mayor whose two terms in office ended in 1973, and who passed away in 2000. I was no longer living inside the political boundaries of New York City then, but I can well imagine if I were, and if I were imbibing, I'd find several bent elbows at bars in Woodside, Flushing, Bayside, Douglaston, Rego Park, Jamaica, Astoria, Jackson Heights, anywhere in fact in the lovely borough that the New York Times still calls an 'outer borough,' who would gladly drink a good riddance toast to the departed mayor who couldn't get the streets plowed in Queens in 1969 after a major snowstorm, leaving the borough isolated for days. Truly outer, then.

"Mayor Linds-ley," as the departed union leader Mike Quill would tauntingly call him before ordering the Transport Workers' Union members off the job, giving NYC its first transit strike in 1966, "we hardly miss ya."

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