Ding Dong Protest is Dead?

Protestors unite under the tolling bell. Photo: Flickr/infomatique

You might have heard in the last couple of weeks of the passing of a certain… divisive figure.

Perhaps you missed the 24-hour rolling footage of swiftly-located campaign and parliament footage? (presumably built up in a vault beneath Media Centre over millennia by unpaid media interns – a bank of these visual obituaries, one click away in case of any public figure’s demise…)

How about the plethora of inane vox-pops: “I recognise that some people think this is disrespectful, but the fact is… we don’t think it is”; the half-hourly refrain of that terrible U-Turn joke she made; or the recycled saccharine nothings oozing from the overworked pie-holes of the lacquered faces of her political offspring?

Of course you didn’t, the ceaselessly rolling hashtags on your Twitter feed and the aforementioned merry-go-round of platitudes summoned in (immediately less-appealing) 1080p, ensured that even the most passive of Harry Styles fans certainly had: “May he rest in peace. Amen”.

The cacophony of wireless-fidelity-based excrement-tossing between left & right took perhaps it most bizarre turn with the resurrection of a 6-year old campaign to get Judy Garland’s ‘Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead’ to Number 1 in the charts.

Thankfully, it only got to Number 2.

Why thankfully? In case the bingo card provided above missed the mark, my attitude towards the aftermath of the events of the 8th April is that of wearied irreverence. Frankly, I’m disappointed.

Don’t get me wrong, I find much of her “achievements” and attitudes utterly reprehensible. Like much of my generation, from June 29th onwards I’ll find myself increasingly having to face up to the zombified torrent of detritus that the legacy of her political and economic crusade against the post-war consensus continues to spew to this day.

But the fact is, if the best Thatcher’s opponents could do is hunt down and ridicule the underage and ignorant on twitter, make like Naboo and turn their backs on the funeral procession, construct an (admittedly impressive) shopping bag coiffured puppet, and get a 51-second 74-year old musical number in the charts – then they have failed.

It smacks of the Christmas No.1 campaign in 2009 for Rage Against The Machine which had a similar hue to it – “Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me”… do you hear the people sing? But the tone of such a campaign suited the nature of the instigative factor: a matter of consumer-choice like the resurrection of Wispa, and, regardless of the benefit to Simon Cowell’s wallet, the consequence was that the majority of consumers did – for one week at least – win out.

But in this case, the instigative factor is that an old lady, out of office for 22 years, died of a stroke.

“Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead” just isn’t good enough. It’s not people expressing themselves, it’s sing-song schoolyard name-calling idiocy, and all it has achieved is reinforce in our overlords their opinion upon the nature and attitudes of the ineffectual ‘plebs’ and given fuel for the fire of the “She made Britain great again” baloney brigade.

The rage is understandable. Her politics and those of her influences and influences must be held to account. There is much that has been broken and that we as a society – yes it is a thing – must fix. But this immense tide of feeling has thus far failed to be utilised to register anything more legitimate, energising, intelligent, or even vaguely impactful as a form of protest than ‘Add to Cart’ in order to gloat at another’s final shuffle off of this mortal coil.

Before entirely forgotten or lost, buried beneath this reeking compost-heap of regurgitated banalities, headlines and platitudes from all sides, the potential to initiate something more must be captured and developed. We must do better.