Autumnal Ruin

The one known as The Doctor has replied to my last post. And his words, as always, got me to cogitating.

I found myself thinking about those three defining political figures of the 80s - Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev - their legacy and their fates.

In their time, they were supreme. An electronic age that pre-dated the digital, they were televisual figures. We remember them as kind of monumental MCs hosting their vast assemblies - party conferences, ideological conventions, May Day parades - bathed in the honeyed electronic tint of mid-era video tape.

And then they left the stage - all three vanished into a kind of melancholic disintergration. Reagan, as the Doctor says, became a recluse, imprisoned in the cage of his own dementia. Thatcher, so rudely defenestrated by men she'd made, lurched further into vicious meddling that helped cripple her party and then she crumbled away, eroded by drink, physical and mental frailty, the death of her beloved husband, the ruin and humiliation of the no-good son she doted upon. And Gorbachev has dissolved into insignificance, despised and finally forgotten by his own people.

What strange metaphors, what strange ends. Figures who thrived in the cheap glamour of a brash, insolent age, they end their years in dicrepit solitude. Forgotten, humiliated, unspeaking and unheard.

You look at Thatcher and Gorbachev now, the absent shadow that was Reagan - demented, kept hidden for a decade in the grounds of his Californian mansion - and you see empty shells, people whose insides have been scooped out like a cantaloupe. They're like symbolic figures from some dark, overwhelming art film - Siberberg, Tarr or Sokhurov - shuffling befuddled into the fading light.

I wonder... was this always their fate?