Rampant Anomie

(Extract from debate on 'socialised' healthcare on US website)

This debate has become shrill enough to be heard across the Atlantic. It seems that many Americans fear that Mr Obama’s healthcare reforms equate to socialised medicine, on a par with the worst excesses of Stalin or Mao. The less hysterical opposition believes the state isn’t competent to meddle in such a fundamentally important service.

As a 39-year old, lifelong citizen of the UK, I’m so appalled by how our National Health System (NHS) is being misrepresented in the US media that I feel compelled to jump into this debate with a native corrective.

First, around 8% of UK GDP is spent on healthcare, principally through taxes paid to central government. By contrast, around 16% of US GDP is spent on healthcare, principally through premiums paid to profit-making intermediaries. While questions remain over the NHS’s efficiency, the plain fact is that the vast majority of the funding it receives is spent on delivering healthcare. In the eyes of Brits and other nationalities with similar systems, a preposterous and distasteful proportion of US health dollars is sucked up by corporate intermediaries for no other reason than to turn a profit.

Second, the term ‘socialised’ is bandied around with a gleeful and fear-mongering abandon reminiscent of Joe McCarthy. The fact that I benefit from a state healthcare system doesn’t mean I wear overalls, work 16-hour days in a tractor factory and attend a daily realignment where I chant the wisdoms of Chairman Brown. I believe that such fundamental public services as the armed forces, the police force, the fire service and the NHS should derive their funding and authority, and be answerable to, central or local government. It is possible and desirable to have a free market economy where essential services aren’t subject to the exploitative whims of big business. After all, does anyone complain about getting arrested by ‘socialised’ state troopers or having their wars fought by ‘socialised’ marines? It has also been claimed that state healthcare is undemocratic, but it’s hard to see how unless you’re a board member for a medical insurance provider.

Third, the NHS does creak in places – it is after all a product of the late forties when the nation was still on a war footing – but it offers every citizen of the UK a comprehensive system of care free of charge and regardless of status or earning power. There is absolutely no prospect of my being denied care because I haven’t been with a given employer for long enough or I hadn’t read the special exemption clause about water-skiing over 30mph. I may pay more tax for this privilege, but I pay far less than many Americans are obliged to hand over to profiteering middle-men who would otherwise deny them what I would consider an essential service.

Over the last three years, I’ve had three operations to stabilise a spinal fracture following a road accident, and one to remove broken knee cartilage following a skiing accident. A bill for those procedures would have easily got into six figures. I have paid nothing, nor will I ever be expected to. It is enough that as a hard-working taxpayer, I contribute to a mutually beneficial, cooperative system which would protect me even if I fell on harder times.

I certainly have my gripes. After my road accident, I was stabilised and left welded to a spinal board by my own blood for twelve hours because A&E (ER) staff were overwhelmed by drunks and hypochondriacs. There are too many managers and not enough clinicians. It is well nigh impossible to get someone to answer a phone to get an appointment changed. But when it comes to the fundamentals of clinical care, any UK citizen knows the NHS will save their life and give them the care they need with no discussion of cost. And for those who can afford it, and are prepared to pay for a little more speed and a bigger room, private healthcare is freely available.

If the political will were there, Americans could learn from other countries’ experiences and build a great, cost-effective, universal healthcare system from the floorboards up, having swept aside the profiteering middle-men. It is galling to see so many millions of people willingly perpetuating a healthcare system so preoccupied with profit that it doesn’t deserve the name, and doing so because of an unthinking fear of government and foreign ways.

I'm drawn to air shows. This is partly because I've retained a socially backward child's preoccupation with makes, models and distinctive dorsal fin modifications. It's also because the spectacle of pink, porky, menopausal men nearly bursting through the seams of flying jackets and peak caps that wouldn't quite fit diddy Tom Cruise makes me realise I'm no longer the squarest kid in the playground. Then again, I have considered acquiring big shades and an emblazoned flight-suit and loitering possessively in front of a parked fighter jet when its owner has sloped off for an ice-cream. I’ve even practised my Colgate smile. Ladies, it’s not all about size when you’ve got 30,000 lbs of static thrust and six hard points to offer, woof woof. And I can get my hands on nylons and chewing gum.

Wheeling my delusions back into the hangar, there is real spectacle to be relished. The endless wonder of hefty, jagged hunks of metal defying then taunting the laws of physics. Skill, sinew, ingenuity, metal and fossil fuel artfully drawn together into spectacles of soaring splendour. The growl of ancient, piston-engined warriors evoking the terrors and triumphs of the war that formed our world. The raucous, sky-scouring thunder of fast jets barely tolerating human control. Yet in my third decade of aerial gawking, I'm coming to the view that air shows are most of all a barometer - of technology, of our place in the world, of military muscle, of how much we're defined by our past.

When I first donned my anorak and took to the flight-line in the early 80s, during the heady and paranoid final act of the Cold War, it was claimed that the US Air Force had more aircraft in East Anglia than the Royal Air Force had anywhere. This pleased me far more than it did the women living in ditches at Greenham Common – my single-minded enthusiasm for anything loud with wings far eclipsed my grasp of current affairs. Like the rest of my pimply brethren in the local squadron of the Air Training Corps, I was mystified and amused by the squadron of feminist peaceniks who descended on us outside a Remembrance Day service in central Manchester, begging us not to place our innocent young lives in thrall to an American imperialist Armageddon (I’m paraphrasing, clearly).

The big air shows of those days didn’t disappoint, flaunting all of NATO’s expensive military might. Cold-war dinosaurs were still alive and thrashing with ear-bleeding vigour. Small-talk was pointless when Lightnings and Phantoms were overhead, but the mile or so they needed to turn around did afford some respite. The tarmac actually trembled when a Vulcan got airborne at full chat. The B52 challenged the notion that a couple of acres of rattling sheet metal held together by rivets, spit and hope shouldn’t zip through the sky at 600 knots. The SR71 had clearly escaped from some vault under the desert where vat-grown geniuses designed matt-black titanium demons that outpaced rifle bullets, skimmed space and leaked corrosive fluid when their skin temperature fell below three figures.

Then there was the new breed. The novel F16 and F18 still gave the crowd plenty of speed and noise, but this time with impossibly tight turning circles, improbable angles of attack, and fluttering fans of water vapour as the air itself was pummelled into submission by the computers that now controlled it all with some artistic direction from the pilots.

Not that the party ended when the Berlin Wall came down, at least not straight away. Instead, the artist formerly known as the USSR was pleased to show off the majestic machines – like the colossal but nimble Su-27 - that had months earlier been the subject of code-names, espionage, speculation and techno-thrillers.

I was moved to write this cryptic piece by the air show I attended at RAF Waddington a few weeks ago. I’m fighting with a churlish impulse to call the whole thing a disappointing washout – but by the standards of the 80s, that’s what it was. There was skill, grace and wonder galore – from the unfailingly superb Red Arrows, the crazed Blades aerobatic team, the frankly impossible antics of the Chinook – but something was missing.

For a start, the Vulcan didn’t fly. The world’s only airworthy Vulcan bomber, a wonderful brute of a machine, a crowd-puller and the object of much ersatz patriotic nostalgia, is sustained mainly by frantic charitable lobbying. It failed to fly because of some bureaucratic snafu, causing those above the age of 50 to stage a mass huff, pack away their tartan rugs and clog the exit lane with Volvos and Hondas.

Then it transpired that only one performer, the RAF’s spanky new Typhoon fighter, had afterburners and supersonic potential – and that didn’t appear until 5 o’clock, precisely the time the canny motorist wants to be on the open road to beat the jam. There were Tornados, Harriers, F16s, F15s et al on static display, but these monsters shouldn’t really be static at all. Why weren’t they in their element, splitting the sky open with howling fury? Can it really be the case that even the Americans can no longer afford to actively display their wares?

The Typhoon is impressive enough. Also known as the Eurofighter, it was intended to be the next generation Cold War air superiority fighter. It gets off the ground in a heartbeat and is as advanced and as manoeuvrable as you could wish, assuming you want to take on a Soviet air armada, circa 1988. Unfortunately, it was delivered about 20 years late and at staggering cost.

It’s not that the leaking, creaking Tornado fleet isn’t in need of replacement; it’s just hard to see how the over-specified Typhoon provides value for money in these complex times, particularly when the USA could provide something as good off the shelf. The RAF finds itself deploying these high-tech Cold War warriors in Lincolnshire when what our armed forces seem to need most is a way of moving around Helmand Province without being blown to smithereens by enthusiastic amateur bomb-makers.

So while the geek in me bemoans the lack of exciting kit at air shows, the changes to the schedule over the last three decades is instructive. Circa 1994, it was just about possible to see the beginnings of a Peace Dividend and a safer world in which East Anglia no longer needed to accommodate wartime levels of US personnel. If the dull fare at Waddington this year simply reflected a safer and sweeter world than we had in 1989, that would be something even a plane spotter could celebrate.

Alas, the world is no safer, just a bit more complex. Our armed forces have more responsibilities and less kit and money to fulfil them. When squaddies die on mined roads for lack of helicopters, over-worked Nimrods explode because ancient design faults went unresolved, and a Hercules can be downed by a bullet for want of Vietnam-era safety foam, it’s really no wonder that the RAF can’t lay on much of an air show and show me where my tax pounds are going – unless of course, you count the Typhoon at a unit cost of £84 million.

Why do so many supposedly bright and well educated people despise the English language so passionately? It seems the passing of formal education in our own language has produced something far worse than mere indifference. Instead, we find a cheerful determination to bludgeon words into banal corporate gibberish that should be confined to a Dilbert cartoon. Or worse, an implacable desire to purge the language of all those messy, old-fashioned, 'oldspeak' words that just get in the way of the optimalised stakeholder paradigms that iteratively disbenefited 'newspeak' should synergise to facilitate user-centric corporacy. Innit.

'Disbenefits' sums up this malaise quite nicely. An ugly and wholly unnecessary word that I'm sorry to say has crawled into respectable dictionaries everywhere. This hasn't happened because it fulfills a need to eff the formerly ineffable, the usual if somewhat old-fashioned route to lexicographical recognition. Instead, it's there because professionals, seemingly everywhere, feel compelled to use obtuse language in a chest-beating bid to show how clever and, well, professional they are. After all, if you're being paid a lot to write something clever, you should scorn words like 'deficit', 'drawback', 'obstacle' or 'disadvantage' as opposing terms to 'benefit', and instead use something far more exclusive. Then you should repeat every sentence in the next line, paragraph and chapter, having raided the thesaurus for a gloss of original thought, safe in the knowledge that content will matter less than thickness or syllable-count.

Perhaps I'm just bitter, having discovered that far from being in the premiere league of the verbose, I'd barely qualify for the Sesquipedalian Paper Boys' XI by the standards of the workplace.

Anyway, this is good:

http://www.andrewdavidson.com/gibberish/

A woman sits behind a podium, sweat glistening on her upper lip, shoulders braced against an onslaught. She blinks as camera flashes pop and reporters hurl their jingoistic vitriol at her in beautifully enunciated BBC-English. Their questions all amount to one stinging accusation that brings blood to her cheeks and tears to her eyes: she has let her country down, toyed with and destroyed the hopes of millions, failed beyond hope of redemption and besmirched the flag. She deserves to slouch off into shameful ignominy with Burgess, Philby, Yoko Ono et al. If only we still used Tower Hill as God intended!

Of whom do I speak? Margaret Thatcher? Imelda Marcos? Susan Boyle? Alas, no. I’m talking about a British tennis player, Anne Keothavong, who has the outrageous temerity to be merely a very good British player, rather than the greatest player in the world.

Can there be a clearer picture of how our news media creates, shapes and warps public expectation than the sight of some bald, fat journalists with notebooks berating a hard-working, full-time athlete into tears for daring to get into a prestigious tournament without the patriotic fervour to win it? If memory serves, even the Army Corporal who, having sworn fealty to the Crown then proceeded to sell intelligence to Iran, wasn’t compelled to face the deranged ranks of the fourth estate for an ersatz inquisition.

The group psychosis once called ‘Henmania’ is back and looking for another sap to focus on. Tim Henman was the ideal patsy; good but not quite good enough. The bleating mob could convince itself it had shared in his victories, and enjoy some righteous hand-wringing when he failed to win Wimbledon - a fate which, incidentally, he shared with the vast majority of top-flight, millionaire tennis professionals.

Now the mantle has passed to poor old Andy Murray, whose name sadly doesn’t gel so well with the word ‘mania’. It’s regrettable that he’s had his abrasive edge filed off because someone of his stature really does need to tell the press and the goofy yahoos on Henman Hill a couple of home truths. First, he and his fellows are professional athletes, not agents of imperial destiny. Second, to be competing at his level at all is an achievement (and earning opportunity) far beyond the dreams of bald, fat journalists. Finally, he is not a PR consultant and the very idea that we should think less of a tennis player for being ill at ease with the press is too ludicrous to dignify with an argument.

To take two subjects at random – Iraq and MPs’ expenses - England seems to expect a damn sight too much of some people and not nearly enough of others.

I found this nugget in the gossip column of 'Entertainment Now - The Insider's Guide To Variety, Cabaret and Misplaced Ambition'.

'Quit your hissing and booing because it's official - Cowell is a soft-boiled patsy after all, not the hard-boiled pro he pretends to be.

Having swapped the Britain's Got Talent green room for the nearest saloon bar, 49 year-old Romanian midget vocal performer, Anastasia Shchukina, told all over a treble Drambuie and a cigar nearly as long as she is.

"With his swarthy looks, glaring eyes, high waistlines and penchant for ladies of the ample persuasion, everyone thinks he's the how-you-say pimp-daddy hard-man of the forgettable musak scene," she told me in a husky slavic accent direct from central casting. "But I've performed my routine for real hard men - I was wired up to a sincerity meter at the 1984 Stasi Christmas party, and may your decadent western God help you if you mess up your lines at the Lubyanka karaoke night."

With her elfin looks and dainty stature, Anastasia barely passes for a quarter of her real age. I forgot she was a woman of the world when she burst into heart-rending sobs midway through ordering a Ploughman's Lunch with extra mustard.

"Got you!," she laughed. "That got me into the BGT final and out of some sticky spots over the last few decades."

But shouldn't the public feel cheated, I asked, recalling the moment when Anastasia, a.k.a. ten year-old Holly Steele, burst into tears part-way through her semi-final number?

"Pah," she said, showering me with cracker and pickle, "it's all just emotional pornography really. I've arranged tragic deaths for relatives and carried around a puppy with a broken paw, but that's all so cliched. You don't want to see talent on there, you just want to see damaged people's emotions get shredded so that you can say "aaawwww" now and again. Could I nail that number without blubbing? For sure. Would it have got me into the final? No. I am just providing a service."

Nor does she worry about the authorities catching up with her. "I would just show them the contract - they tell you to make 'em cry and make 'em dial by any means possible - it's all pounds, roubles and zlotys, baby."

Interview over, Anastasia was Holly again, chewing parma violets and daintily cuddling up to her on-stage mother, in reality a KGB-trained minder ten years her junior. With a pirouette and a curtsy, she was on her way to Heathrow, next stop 'Bolivia Tiene Talento'.

"My Spanish sucks," she confided with a wink. "But everyone understands tears."

Between bouts of despair brought on in no particular order by morphine patches, chronic pain, the ultimate futility of existence, the false promise of a glistening spring day and the fact that Sony Media Manager can't be persuaded that each movement of Beethoven's 9th belongs in the same folder, I was struck between the eyes by yet more confirmation of what I used to think of as irrational cynicism.

Engrossed as I was in my almost-daily bout of prescription masochism in the gym at work, I couldn't fail to notice that yoof had trumped male menopause and prevailed upon management to make the fixed-volume, fixed-channel, plasma-screen media-multiplicity show only TMF rather than BBC News 24.

I'm not entirely hostile to TMF. 'Pimp My Ride' is trash of the highest order, unashamedly materialistic, outlandish and responsible for many a set of bitchin' forks. 'Pimp My Ride UK' is pure comic bathos, not unlike listening to Billy Bragg covering 'Still DRE' in his broadest accent while wearing a miner's helmet. But I digress.

I found myself randomly roped into the kind of target audience that cynical cops and Daily Mail readers everywhere will be very familiar with - the terminally feckless, those whose subsidised 60" TVs are never switched off while their aspirations are never switched on.

The ad that triggered this shallow epiphany invited me to text mine and my partner's (i.e. baby-farva's or baby-muvva's) names to a given premium rate service which would then use some ingenious algorithm (or bored clerk in Mumbai) to suggest the offspring's name.

Perhaps I'm reading too much into this, but does it say something about our society that people will contact a remote computer recommended by a rolling torrent of digital dross to be told how to label the accidental issue of their organs?

I should have passed this burning nugget of zeitgeist to FlamingCross. It absolutely fits his sclerotic agenda. Time for a little lie-down.

While enduring an inexplicably popular film, mainly because my butt was welded to the sofa by drugs, booze and craven etiquette, I had a revelation.

This epiphany could unite both hard-bitten cops and hand-wringing libertarians in support of universal DNA-profiling, provided they could agree that a movie should be more than a random selection of karaoke numbers linked by a lazy and vacuous excuse for a plot.

Put simply, had the producers of Mama Mia watched an episode or two of The Jeremy Kyle Show, they'd have known that paternity tests are pretty easy in the 21st century, and science is a better way of proving who begat who than a lot of pointless pouting, prancing and pretending to sing to old Swedish pop songs.

Come to think of it, we could have just had a compressed and hyper-violent version set before a baying studio-audience in Norwich and starring the likes of Ray Winstone and Kathy Burke. Working title: 'Billy Jean' or 'Mother's Little Helper'.

To give Mama Mia its due, I did enjoy Pierce Brosnan's singing; now that's entertainment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZrccOX4fGs

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/03/11/brazil.rape.abortion/

Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, Archbishop of the Brazilian city of Recife, has almost inspired me to cast my cherished atheism aside and set up the Coventry branch of the Orange Order. Unfortunately, due to the economic downturn, I can’t even find enough apprentice boys to intimidate the local Hare Krishnas.

A nine-year old girl repeatedly raped and finally impregnated by her stepfather was shown grace and mercy passing all understanding. The girl’s mother, doctors and others involved in the decision to terminate the pregnancy - rather than forcing the child to risk her own life to give birth to her rapist’s offspring - are to be excommunicated.

Can anyone explain this to me? Can anyone convince me there’s reason and virtue in this act rather than a devotion to medieval dogma so unflinching, unthinking and unfeeling that it’s plain psychotic? I fear this question isn’t rhetorical enough. Anyone who’s read more than one book on a given subject or been on the receiving end of a poor decision at court knows that truth isn’t absolute and an artfully constructed argument is the best substitute we’re likely to get for it. Besides, religious thinkers have had a couple of millennia to get their ducks in a row and simple logic will always be trumped by the hallowed utterances of dead zealots, ex-Nazis and blind faith.

I would genuinely like to be enlightened on the Catholic Church’s system of moral triage. Why, for example, is life in embryo or in terminal agony so much more precious than at any other stage? Why aren’t paramilitary murderers and genocidal dictators routinely excommunicated? Come to think of it, why wasn’t the rapist step-father who conceived this debacle cast from God’s mercy? Could the reason be institutional misogyny?

To give him his due, the Archbishop did try to explain. “A graver act than rape is abortion,” he told the press, and the girl herself wasn’t excommunicated because. “the Church is benevolent when it comes to minors.” More tea, vicar?

This may seem an exercise in Catholic-bashing, and if it causes any believer who gets this far some offence, that wasn’t my point but I don’t mind at all. Plainly, Catholicism doesn’t have a monopoly on lunatic beliefs but its inability to drag itself into the second millennium makes it such an easy target.

Admittedly, secular despots are just as capable of wickedness and merely hijack a desperate human need to kowtow to anything capable of making messianic noises. Far from being arch-atheists, the likes of Stalin and Pol Pot amply illustrate the danger of religious instinct. Far from dispensing with religion, they simply replaced the established version with one of their own making which was no less dependent on fear and unthinking obedience to dogma. I digress.

Perhaps I’m missing the point and easy certainty makes for a more comfortable existence than cold reason. Perhaps I’d need years in a seminary to understand the sacred mysteries well enough to want to cast decent people into the outer darkness, to condemn their immortal souls to endless suffering, for saving the life of an abused child. I’m still genuinely curious though. Can anyone explain Archbishop Sobrinho’s actions? Anyone?

Am I the only one to have noticed the weather? I've been shivering and slithering around all week and marvelling at this fluffy white stuff falling from the sky.
Despite this, people are dragging themselves to work as normal on punctual trains and buses, or driving with commendable care on clear roads. It's business as usual for the London Underground and the Channel Tunnel, but then it doesn't snow underground. We aren't even the laughing stock of Europe because our airports grind to a halt on account of a wintry squall that would barely deter a Swede from mowing his lawn.
Incredibly, there hasn't been a whisper of this meteorological mayhem on the news. Where is the hysterical, saturation coverage we're entitled to? The endlessly funny footage of Londoners failing to understand this strange new world in white and driving - and indeed walking - like lemons? The shock-horror exclusives revealing that snow is white or can turn into ice? The predictions of another 3cm with north-easterly gusts uttered in tones once reserved for a massive Soviet ICBM launch?
Why oh why oh why is everyone being so calm about this Siberian nightmare? I think I'll email BBC Breakfast and complain about their sidelining the piffling weather and focussing on trivial things like war and the future of humankind.

When it comes to judging how far we've come down the road from the class-bound, hierarchical Britain of yore to the golden New Labour meritocracy we've been promised, forget think-tanks and colum-inches; just take a long hard look at BBC2's Masterchef, having first turned the sound down - unless you want the last thing you ever hear without tinnitus to be, "cooking does not get tougha dan dis (you slaaaag)".
I frequently find my public sector hackles rising at what that strange show's victims, nay, contestants, nay, kitchen porters of tomorrow, are made to do. I'm not talking about getting to grips with cooking food - if that's not too vulgar a term - to a very high standard; serving bleeding and bleating meat to avoid the risk of its being a tad dry; and giving their meagre morsels of salivatory delight names that would make a beat-poet scratch his noggin - anyone for mezzanine of korfballed pike in a bitumen of drizzled sarin?
Instead, I'm talking about the constant, buttock-clenching, lip-biting degredation and kowtowing forced on these saps by the presenters' swaggering, inquisitorial style. Many programmes are padded out with pointless soundbites - take Dragons' Den and its pointless narrator's need to repeat the bleeding obvious for the hard of thinking (the blogger just said that Dragons' Den's expert analyst repeats the bleeding obvious to give cherished viewers extra insight) - but this is worse.
Knowing how to cook is just not enough for these sadists. Blue-chip interview questions, usually flung at the little chefs while they're busy chastising scallops, have to be fielded, and fielded out of the park, even if their flatulence of sulky yak liver and distressed onion jus is the closest thing to organic ambrosia these gourmands have ever supped. Unless the little chefs are prepared to say they are the best and destined to win, which is, given the level of competition, at best hubris and at worst a desperate, frightened lie, they're plainly lacking the ambition they'd need to hack it in a professional kitchen. If they can't persuade mein hosts that they'd skewer and lightly braise their own immediate family for Raymond Blanc's amusement and force-feed their flesh to an expectant Westminster lunch service, they are the professional equivalent of a sputum garnish on a coulis of frisky calf a la Max Boyce.
I'll concede that there's a bit more to it than that. Force-feeding the little chefs expectation and then stewing them in an emotional pressure cooker makes the tearful disappointment most of them will face all the sweeter for the audience; but that's another debate.
In short, it is not enough for them to be good at what they do unless they can regurgitate stylised chaff when asked questions whose only real purpose is to justify the interviewers' existence and put them in their place. On Masterchef and in many workplaces, this approach legitimises a thoroughly modern model of cap-in-hand, forelock-tugging begging and pleading for your job. It is degredation for entertainment, a test of conformity as well as competence. Where, I ask you, is Amnesty in all this?
Perhaps it struck a chord because I've had a few interviews in the public sector, all of which only tested my ability and willingness to say the right thing on the day and thereby conform to the interviewer's agenda. I don't claim that this is telltale of a conformist and intellectually craven culture which values saying the right thing more than doing it; I'll leave that for Flaming Cross. I'm just suggesting that being loudly and farcically 'on message' matters far too much in our supposedly restless, democratic culture.
After all, do I care about a Tanvic mechanic's willingness to embrace automotive corporacy and facilitate an enhanced customer expectation matrix, or is it enough that my new brake pads and discs work when I leave the M1 at 90mph in the expectation that I'll enter the Little Chef (the dining experience, not a failed contestant) on my feet rather than in the hurtling shell of my unresponsive car?
I almost included The Apprentice in this piece, but realised I didn't mind its contestants being degraded.