#NowThatcherIsDead and The #Selfie

MANILA, Philippines -News of ex-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s death sent a small but still noticeable wave through our local cyberspace. For most of us here in the Philippines, it meant nothing. For a number of activists, it meant the death of an enemy, an ultraconservative, but not the death of an ideologue. For a number of netizens, it was a time to send out some polite, well-meaning 140-character press release to the “Iron Lady” whom they barely knew as one of Meryl Streep’s many masks that sit comfortably in the ranks of Julia Child (Bon Apetit!) and Miranda Priestly (That’s All.). Indeed, citizens of cyberspace celebrated #RIPMargaretThatcher in their own little ways.

It was, nonetheless, an occasion for a few laughs, with netizens confusing the trending topic, #nowthatcherisdead, as “now that Cher is dead.” Some wondered if the 66-year-old pop star still believes in “love after life” after mistaking Thatcher’s death as Cher’s. With the dementia-stricken Baroness’s death coming 23 years after her 11-year stint as British Prime Minister (the longest ever in 20th-century British Parliamentary history), she has become quite irrelevant for most of us in this modern world created by social media. Or so we think.

In all honesty, there’s more reason for the typical netizen to “mourn” the passing of the Iron Lady. She invented the “selfie.”

Beyond the first-female-to-be-Prime-Minister politics and the high-pitch voice Thatcher was known for, she created Thatcherism — a kind of philosophy that proclaims I, Me, Mine, as Sir George Harrison once put it himself. It’s a kind of philosophy that says there’s no such thing as a society, moreover, social forces are all imaginary, and the individual is the only one accountable for everything that happens in this universe. While it makes a strong assertion for the power of the individual, so much so that it places the individual at a very high pedestal — that of a god or God himself — it is also quite corrupting.

In Thatcher’s time, Great Britain was going through a recession — like a lot of Western economies are these days — and a huge block of British people were being laid off. Bourgeoise economics followed a certain logic which said that the poorer you are, the less wages you got; and the richer you are, the more likely that money found its way into your hands.

Thatcher did nothing to avert that. On the other hand, she even encouraged it, blaming the poor for being poor, for having no job, and for not having the same “discipline” as that of the rich and powerful. She refused to see, or even consider the possibility, that the poor were poor because the rich were rich (and ultimately oppressive) and that the status quo worked that way. In order to escape being poor, the rich kept their workers’ wages low and at the same time, their workhours extremely long.

The Iron Lady believed so much in the “power” of the individual, which translated to the “power” of private corporations, that she relegated a lot of the government’s functions to the private sector’s ownership and administration. In the end, hospitals and schools became businesses, not services of the state. People had to buy their education. People had to buy their lives. Naturally, it was Britain’s poor who were at the receiving end of this policy.

Thatcher gave her people a slow death by taking their rights away. She even labeled some people as “terrorists” (including Nobel Peace Prize winner Nelson Mandela) simply for opposing her ultraconservative views (sound familiar?). For these “terrorists,” like the citizens of Northern Ireland who rebelled against her, she ordered hasty assassinations.

Whether you believe in Thatcher’s methods or not, a lot of us have now embodied this vanity and unsuppressed pride. And while the #selfie is nowhere near an act of removing a person’s basic rights, it is a quiet manifestation of the individualist outlook in life. It is an outlook that says, “I don’t mind, I want to put myself out there.”

Let’s be honest, at the moment you do a selfie, you can be sure that nobody in cyberspace cares how you look today or what you’re eating or how tiring your workout is (except, perhaps, our stalkers). A #selfie, no matter how much I try to justify it, is such an anomic thing to do — it’s all in the first person singular, none of the “you’s,” “them’s” or “we’s.” While I have no big insecurity with the way I look, I can’t even begin to think of reasons why people should want to post how they look or what they’re up to every minute of every passing day.

Is it a person’s attempt at being relevant — to be a selfie in this selfie-infested world?

Perhaps, that’s how huge Thatcher’s influence is: she has made us monsters for attention and we don’t even know it. Now, we are made to think that the only way to be involved in society is to be an individual.