Meryl Streep is a great actress, except sometimes when she plays herself, as she did two nights ago at the Golden Globes Awards banquet. There she launched into vulgarities and unbecoming humor. The one thing she apparently felt obliged to demonstrate--as she was named "best actress" for her role as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady--was that she is not at all like Lady Thatcher. Let it be said in Ms. Streep's defense that her Golden Globes award speech was not a persuasive act. She's better than that.
Elsewhere Streep has acknowledged that getting into the character of Margaret Thatcher made her much more sympathetic to Prime Minister Thatcher the human being. It's hard to imagine it being otherwise. Thatcher was refined gold in the bourse of politics, a "conviction politician," to use Mrs. T's own expression.
Right now the voting public in the U.S., the U.K. and Europe could do worse than see The Iron Lady. Yes, it probably exaggerates the dementia of Mrs. Thatcher today, just as her indignant family asserts. And it skimps on Mrs. Thatcher's role with Ronald Reagan and John Paull II in winning the Cold War. But it does abundantly show something greatly wanting in our own time, the life and career of a courageous truth-teller, a leader who successfully called on her countrymen to own up to their government's wastefulness and to show the patience required to reap in time the reward of renewed prosperity and national pride.
Many actual lines of Mrs. Thatcher are on full display. "To cure the British disease with socialism," she says, for example, "is like trying to cure leukaemia with leeches." Ouch.
Are not Western democracies today trying to cure runaway deficits with still more debt and restrains on growht? We have spent more than we produced. The left wants to make up the difference with taxes on "the rich", which inevitably means the entrepreneur--the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Recently, we have seen how Gov. Scott Walker managed to prevail with a reform program in in Wisconsin not unlike Thatcher's a generation ago in Britain. Just getting public union members to pay a share of health and other benefit costs already has reversed a huge budget deficit. Walker's reforms even prevented the layoffs of public workers. Yet the public employee unions, as in Thatcherite Britain, are enraged, largely because the bosses' power is threatened. Huge demonstrations occured in Wisconsin just as happened in England in the 80s.
Will they fail in Wisconsin as they did in the U.K. in the 80s? Will Americans as a whole get a similar message about the chance for real hope and change nationally? Well, it won't hurt if people go see The Iron Lady as they ponder these matters. Hollywood, for some reason, and perhaps unwittingly, has laid out a good part of the true, often-repeated choice of modern democracies.
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