In his first piece on the death of Margaret Thatcher in the New York Daily News, Dalrymple refrained from repeating his previous criticisms of her administration and focused on her positive personal qualities. In this new piece at his Hilarious Pessimist blog, he explains some of his disagreements but sarcastically condemns those who “dance on her grave”:
Tell me upon whose grave you dance and I will tell you what your opinions are.
If you reply that you dance on no one’s grave, because it is unseemly to dance on graves, I have to tell you that you are not a modern man, indeed that you are seriously behind the times; for failure to celebrate the death of a person whom you detest implies a degree of self-control that is harmful to the health. As William Blake put it, ‘Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires;’ and if you control yourself, who knows what terrible consequences might follow?
Curiously I was talking the a conservative friend of mine the other day and I used the word unseemly, I can’t quite remember the context, something like ‘I don’t do such and such because I think it unseemly’ anyway he immediately responded “Unseemly! People probably don’t even know the meaning of the word these days”. – something along those lines.