Word: thatcherism
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...whose scant arable land continues to disappear. Arranged neatly alongside the makeshift altar, the gifts intended for the bride's parents include a new refrigerator, a 24-in. color television set and a jet black Yamaha motorcycle. The presents are ogled, but atop the TV a photograph of Margaret Thatcher creates the greatest buzz, a reaction the bride, and perhaps the groom too, would undoubtedly have enjoyed. Were they still alive...
After exhausting their fascination with Margaret Thatcher, a few of the guests allow as how, yes, one might think that marrying dead people is bizarre. But as an occasional feature of life in these parts for longer than anyone can remember, "ghost marriages" are just another relic of ancient China, another relatively harmless superstition for a billion people struggling to jerk themselves toward the 21st century...
Even the dead bride's Thatcher fixation tells a larger tale. The young woman, it seems, idolized Thatcher, not because she shared her politics but because with a single phrase Thatcher once captured her own world view: "If you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman...
...hear anymore. Let us leave quietly." Then, apropos of nothing more than the increasingly common disdain many Chinese appear to feel for the army they saw as their great protector before it marched on Tiananmen, this small, fine-boned woman with searing brown eyes and a complexion Margaret Thatcher would compare to a rose recites some lines of Du Fu, the 8th century poet famous for decrying the gulf between ruled and ruler in China: "So it is better to abandon a daughter at birth than to see her later married to a soldier...
During her three years in office, Gro Brundtland has succeeded in creating the most feminine, not to say feminist, state anywhere in the world. After a decade in power, the more conspicuous Mrs. Thatcher has named not a single woman to her Cabinets. In Norway it is scarcely newsworthy anymore that every other member of the Cabinet is a woman, and more than a third of the parliament. Brundtland even toys with the idea of changing the country's system of hereditary monarchy to allow princesses as well as princes to inherit the throne. And in the privacy...