Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/12/02/thousands-of-people-have-signed-up-to-throw-eggs-at-a-new-bronze-statue-of-the-iron-lady.html
…
7 Likes
Yeah. Let’s not do nice then shall we? How about something that corrodes the lacquer protecting the bronze like she corroded housing policy?
Or sink it, with all hands. Or allow it to die to prove a point. Or send up batallions of armed thugs to destroy communities? Or have your home secretary recommend that someone should do something about a particular lawyer defending people so that the security services will engage their loyalist terrorist proxies to murder him in front of his family safe in the knowledge that your successor government (replete with human rights lawyer despising Home Secretary) will mix any public inquiry into the state sanctioned murder of Pat Finucane?
Or I don’t know, celebrate the cabinets of rapists and child abusers she ran too while you’re at it? Why not Jimmy Saville as well? Thatcher wanted to give him a knighthood or some such shite.
27 Likes
I’d love the day where we stopped celebrating assholes and start celebrating people who actual improved the world a bit more…
26 Likes
I couldn’t stop! I had to meet one of the Finucane family this week the morning after the announcement so it was hard to keep quiet.
10 Likes
There was already a plan in place to position the bronze Iron Lady on a 10-foot-high plinth to prevent vandalism, which is truly a testament to the woman’s legacy.
I will give them credit for explaining the plinth honestly, although putting up a statue to honour someone they acknowledge is that deeply loathed strikes me as a slap in the face to the people of Grantham.
Here’s hoping that it ends up like the American statues of Confederate “heroes”, within years instead of decades. It looks like there’s already a lot of thought being put into creative ways to make that happen.
19 Likes
You mean the family of Pat Finucane? This guy?
Sad how the work of such individuals might be undone by this Brexit BS. We’ve nearly completely seen the dissolution of any peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and I’d hate to see greater violence in NI again… I know I’m prone to 80s nostalgia, but not like this…
13 Likes
Hear hear! If we put some decent people up on pedestals more often it certainly wouldn’t hurt anything.
9 Likes
To some degree? But also, we shouldn’t do that too much, or make them too perfect, or we’re in for nothing but disappointment when they’re revealed to be just as human as we are.
Maybe the goal should be to NOT put people on pedestals? 
Or at least not mistaking pedestals as deifications?
17 Likes
We could cover the milk snatcher in UHT. What does that do to bronze?
10 Likes
It’s a statue of Maggie. Only melting it down would improve it.
21 Likes
Tomatoes corrode bronze and are cheaper than eggs.
22 Likes
I agree with everything you said, but society at large invests a lot of power in monuments. They have strong messages and all that.
If we could change the subject of monuments to people or ideas that represent the best of humanity (even with its flaws) we’d be making a positive impact.
Personally, I don’t like statues of people. I think every public monument should be abstract art and/or street art, but I’m peculiar that way.
7 Likes
Agree 100%.
We should use monuments to celebrate ideas/ideals or memorialize events (maybe), but not to worship an individual or their “achievements”. Humans are flawed, so there will always be reason to tear them down.
8 Likes
At least introduce a rule that the feet of all statues be made of clay.
12 Likes
As I recall, Ariel Dorfman discusses something similar in How to Read Donald Duck, his entertaining and funny Marxist critique* of the imperialist and capitalist assumptions underlying the massively influential Disney cultural products. Scrooge McDuck and other characters are absolutely obsessed with having statues of themselves erected as the ultimate life achievement.
[* words you seldom hear together in the same phrase – no wonder Pinochet targetted the book for burning]
7 Likes
“The eggs weren’t supposed to be frozen? My bad!”
3 Likes
Stay safe, eggs could speard salmonella, so it’s better put a good amount of bleach on the statue.
And in this time bleach is useful to stop spreading the COVID.
Yes, it stinks, but safety first!
4 Likes
My ultimate life achievement would be for someone to make an action figure of me.
5 Likes
If no one else is will to memorialise your awesomeness that way…
6 Likes
