On crowdfunding - for one purpose or another. And reactions to statues!

Crowd funding is an odd modern phenomenon. You hear heart-warming stories of someone who needs to fund travel to somewhere far away for medical treatment and the money is gathered. Stranger are the stories of people crowdfunding to set up a small business but, hey, if people want to give someone a leg-up, so be it. Then there are sponsored walks (cf Captain Sir Tom Moore) and sponsored runs and the like. 

Now it seems that Donald Trump is trying to crowdfund his “election defence fund”, asking for contributions from his fans. But then I suppose all campaign funding depends on a kind of crowdfunding. And undoubtedly there will be Americans who will “help him out”. Some will be rich folk, but there will lots of less well off crazies sending their little contributions. As Mr Tesco would tell us, every little helps.

And in Texas an ultra-conservative is offering a million-dollar bounty for proof that Donald Trump is being cheated of victory in the presidential election. He is the lieutenant governor of the state and says the money will “incentivize, encourage and reward” citizens who can provide evidence of voter fraud. I thought at first that he was offering his own money but then I read on and discovered that the sum of at least $25,000 dollars to anyone who provides information leading to a conviction will come from his campaign funds. More crowd funding!

We have our own crazies, of course! I read about a man in Totnes in Devon. He says the pandemic is a secret plot to impose a totalitarian world government and a nefarious effort to crush freedom. He is also opposed to 5G, believing mobile phone signals either transmit the virus or reduce our defences to it, and has said he would not accept a vaccine as it would involve injecting nanoparticles into the body that would allow people to be controlled. He’s in his 70s and is a recent convert to using Facebook. He’s the kind of 70+ year old who gets us all a bad name, in my opinion, but apparently quite a lot of people in or around Totnes share his views. Really?! I wonder of he and his like ever use video calling or zoom meetings, and if so, do they not fear that the virus might come through his computer or tablet screen?

I despair! I really do!

But all is not doom and gloom. The figures that a good friend of mine publishes every day show that the coronavirus infection rate is very, very, very slowly beginning to reduce in Greater Manchester, even in Oldham, where it still stands at over 700 per 100,000 but ever so slightly fewer cases than yesterday! Maybe we’ll see our way out of it eventually. Provided the crazies are not proved right that all this technology is just spreading it around some more!

That’s enough of that nonsense! There are other things for people to get upset about. A group of campaigners worked for years and years to get a statue erected to celebrate the writer and philosopher Mary Wolstencraft, mother of Mary Shelley, by the way.  She was self educated and at the age of 25 set up a school for girls in Newington Green in London. She published “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” in 1792. Quite an achievement. And then misogyny set in and the male establishment “annihilated” her reputation. But in 2010 volunteers set about raising funds (more crowdfunding?) and having a memorial made and placed near the location of her girls’ school.

The statue was duly commissioned and was eventually erected just the other other day, to immediate outcry from some quarters because it’s not a nice sedate (and nicely clothed) representation of the lady in question, like the suffragette statues erected in recent years. No, it’s a sculpture by Maggi Hambling, a swirling mass of supposedly female forms, representing the female struggle to be heard and to be taken seriously, a big problem for Mary Wolstenscraft, topped - shock! horror! - by a quite small naked female figure. Not a representation of the lady in question at all! Opponents have declared that you don’t see famous men represented by naked male figures, which is true, but I think this sculpture is quite thought provoking. Maybe the naked female might cause some to think about the objectification of women over time and still ongoing. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!