Photographs ©2011 Alistair Gentry
Or: How do you solve a problem like Margaret?
The previous post reminded me of the day I photographed the devil and nun dolls I used to illustrate it. When one takes off the nun’s clothes- as of course one always does with nuns- the shocking truth is revealed:
IT'S MARGARET THATCHER IN ECCLESIASTICAL DRAG.
Soylent Green is people, there is no spoon, I am your father Luke, etc. MARGARET THATCHER HAS GONE UNDERCOVER AS A NUN. The entrepreneurial proprietor of some plastic sweatshop in China seriously overestimated the demand for Margaret Thatcher puppets with wobbly heads on springs. What to do? Chinese ingenuity (and let’s be honest, tighfistedness) repurposes this redundant army of smirking, psycho-eyed Thatchers as a squadron of fervid nuns: the other traumatic, destructive female force in the childhoods of many people in the British Isles.
It’s not as if these Chinese manufacturers didn’t know who she was. Thatcher’s quite popular and well-known in China. There are wax effigies of her and Deng Xiaoping having a meeting about screwing their own citizens in a sort of weird shrine/psychogeographical Pharos of rightist malevolence at the apex of the Di Wang building in Shenzhen, which was the tallest building in Asia for about 45 seconds. This can only be a deliberate invasion of stealth Thatchers.
Conversely, the devil doll has nothing hidden inside it. It’s just hollow. QED.
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