In today’s Impromptus, I have a brief item about Mexico: They have caught a drug kingpin. This is a huge, huge catch. Immediately, some people said, “Yeah, but it won’t make any difference.” And I thought of something Margaret Thatcher said: “Just rejoice at that news,” for at least a second or two.
Thatcher made her remark during the Falklands War. Britain had just retaken South Georgia. Here on the Corner, I wanted to link to a video, showing Thatcher on the evening in question: here. She tells the press, “Just rejoice at that news and congratulate our forces and the Marines.”
If you were a little Thatcher’d out, I wouldn’t blame you. We have had a lot of Thatcher since her passing. Nonetheless, she was great. I sometimes say of a very popular piece of music, “It’s not its fault it’s hackneyed.” Or, as Lorin Maazel (the conductor) once put it to me in an interview, “If you become jaded because of overexposure, the problem is yours, not the composer’s.”
One more “follow-up,” if I may: In my column, I mention a new campaign called the “Sparrow Initiative,” in which Chinese democrats, living in exile, stand up for the land rights of their countrymen at home. Millions of Chinese are evicted from their homes, so that the Party can accomplish whatever the Party has in mind. On these homes is the word “Dismantle.”
Which is what the Sparrow activists have been putting outside Chinese embassies: first in Washington, then in Ottawa. If there is such a thing as righteous vandalism, this is it.
In the time since I wrote my column, the Sparrow activists have struck again: in Australia. For a write-up, go here. What is it about the Anglosphere, by the way? On to the embassy in London, I say (if it hasn’t happened already). Maybe one day the one-party dictatorship in China will be dismantled.