I noticed something rather intriguing, albeit a tad worrisome, in Steyn’s rerun of his Margaret Thatcher obit from years back. To wit:

A few hours after Margaret Thatcher’s death on Monday, the snarling deadbeats of the British underclass were gleefully rampaging through the streets of Brixton in South London, scaling the marquee of the local fleapit and hanging a banner announcing “THE BITCH IS DEAD”. Amazingly, they managed to spell all four words correctly. By Friday, “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead”, from The Wizard of Oz, was the Number One download at Amazon UK.

Mrs Thatcher would have enjoyed all this. Her former speechwriter John O’Sullivan recalls how, some years after leaving office, she arrived to address a small group at an English seaside resort to be greeted by enraged lefties chanting “Thatcher Thatcher Thatcher! Fascist fascist fascist!” She turned to her aide and cooed, “Oh, doesn’t it make you feel nostalgic?” She was said to be delighted to hear that a concession stand at last year’s Trades Union Congress was doing a brisk business in “Thatcher Death Party Packs” – almost a quarter-century after her departure from office.

Of course, it would have been asking too much of Britain’s torpid left to rouse themselves to do anything more than sing a few songs and smash a few windows. In The Wizard of Oz, the witch is struck down at the height of her powers by Dorothy’s shack descending from Kansas to relieve the Munchkins of their torments. By comparison, Britain’s Moochkins were unable to bring the house down: Mrs Thatcher died in her bed at the Ritz at a grand old age.

“Sing a few songs…smash a few windows”—how very quaint! Anybody think that today’s Goosesteppin’ Leftists, either in Ole Blighty, Amerika v2.0, or pretty much anyplace else in Western Civ, would content themselves with such trifles nowadays? It is to laugh, I’m afraid. Or, provided you think long enough and hard enough about the various issues involved, to weep.

If Mrs Thatcher had had our current crop of Violent Leftards to deal with back then, she would probably have died a lot younger than she did, and it’s all but a dead cert that it wouldn’t have been in any plush bed at the Ritz Hotel, either.

Just another marker for how much the world has changed since those days.