Another of my occasional visual puns - verbum sapienti sat est, and all that.
This picture is by Chinese photographer Kuang Huimin, part of a photo-essay on images of The Great Helmsman in China today, for which he won one of the prizes in World Press Photo's recent annual awards.
[Brought to you via the excellent China news blog Ministry of Tofu, a relative newcomer on the scene, having only launched a bit over a year ago.]
Update:
The slogan I had in mind was: Mostly Armless.
(Nobody seemed to get it. See Comments below.)
13 comments:
What a fascinating article. The juxtaposition of China's excessive modern manufacturing culture (the endless statues, paintings and other such tat, all of exceptional quality made by skilled craftsmen) next to the ignorance that still prevails in the country's backwaters concerning that monster. I particularly like mao06.png- another juxtaposition of those who vehemently stick to the old traditions of endless firecrackers and those who would wish they would just shut up. Again the statues overflow such that they become detritus along with the firecracker waste. Makes you wonder what the old chap is thinking; he possibly remembers the misplaced patriotism of the past but it seems he would rather forget and move on. Such an odd country.
I think the Mao-fetishisation is probably rather patchy in its distribution (not that I've been out in the wild countryside much; I rather fear 30 or 40% of the population here are still basically living in the 1960s). It's a lot stronger in his home province of Hunan, I gather, than in many other places.
I suspect it's also rather cyclical. I was told that it was experiencing a big upsurge at the time I first visited in the early '90s. Back then, cab drivers everywhere seemed to be hanging little medallions of him on their rearview mirrors for good luck. I've seen that once or twice in lower tier cities in the past decade, but never in the big metropolises.
By the by, I hope you got the pun.
I think I'm probably going to have to explain it at some point.
“It seemed to me that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization I could live in and stay sane.” is about as good as my puny intellect could muster (I had to look up the latin!) but Ford didn't even say that line! Was I even close?
No, no. Probably the most famous line associated with him. And pretty much Book 1, page 1, I believe; it was certainly within the first few minutes of the original radio series, which is still my prime point of reference/memory.
Also, the title of the last book in the series.
Okay, I'll bite. (Er, perhaps that's another allusion to the same line?)
...Well, I don't know. And I cheated. I just hopped over to my copy of The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide..., and re-read the first chapter. Which finally brought me, after several pages, to Ford's first appearance, as a shadow being cast across Arthur lying there in the mud.
My only real clue is in your "title of the last book" comment. I could sorta-kinda squint at the photo to get the pun. But am not convinced by my own squinting.
NOW I get it. It took me a while though. 24 hours!
That is a great series of photos.
Mostly armless. Geddit??
In fact, the official assesment of Mao's legacy is pretty close to Ford's summation of Planet Earth for the Guide: Mostly harmless.
Deng Xiaoping famously came up with a 70/30 split for the harmless/harmful ratio of his doings.
Whom exactly did he manage to appease by attempting to quantify Mao's crimes against humanity by statistical means?! If your conscience is so far gone that you can signify the deaths and suffering of millions as only being slightly more than a quarter of his total output, as if he were having an employee evaluation, there must be something seriously wrong with you and your environment. Outrageous.
I realise the absurdity of my ignorance after writing that last comment - I sounded like a Daily Mail reader - but I just had to say something.
Well, I think the official Chinese assessment tends to gloss over the "responsible for the deaths of millions" element.
It's more a case of: founding the Party, propagating the Communist revolution amongst the peasantry nationwide, rallying the resistance against the Japanese, expelling the corrupt KMT, and creating a new nation run on socialist lines - pretty damned impressive.
Not having a f***ing clue how to run a country this size afterwards - well, who would?
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