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Now here’s a New Year’s resolution ... for you, of course, since I obviously don’t need one.
Repeat after me (and then go off and write it down):
“I [your-name-here] firmly resolve that when I hear the phrase ‘socialised medicine’ I will no longer run around in circles waving my arms in the air and screaming, before sprinting off to stick my head into the nearest ostrich. Oh and while I[your-name-here]’m at it I also resolve never to say cruel and nasty things about fruit cake ever, ever again!”
You see both fruit cake and socialised medicine are useful, tasty things full of fruity, healthy goodness; not to mention eastern promise---things that over here are grossly maligned and misrepresented and screamed and arm-waved and circle-run at, not to mention the thing with the ostrich and the cruel and nasty sayings.
And, really, it’s not in the least fair to either of them.
For example when you consider the fact that disease is socialised you can immediately see why medicine should be socialised too: and if you haven’t noticed this most obvious characteristic of disease, all you have to do is to look at the way we all go around sharing it like socialists in the most egalitarian way, why it’s almost Marxist “from each according to his ability; to each according to his sneeze” as dear old Karl wrote in das Kapital one chilly winter as he sat in his accustomed place in the hardly-heated Reading Room of the British Museum (before, unfortunately, using that particular sheet of the manuscript as a hanky.)
And it’s not just infectious disease: the state (at some level or other) builds a road for various reasons, one of the unintended consequences of which is a plethora of road accidents which of course tend to need medicine to come along and sew together whatever pieces happen to be left over from them. Now, while some few roads may be capitalistic endeavours, earning tolls and so-forth, almost all of them, even here in America, are the most socialist of enterprises, constructed for the common good and paid for using taxation.
So it should surely seem obvious by now that a socialised problem should have a socialised solution. And, when you consider that socialised medicine is so much better and so much cheaper and so much ...all those other wonderful things that end in ‘-er’ than any alternative, you realise that the only reason you don’t have it here and the sole reason why, when you merely hear it mentioned you all run around in circles waving your arms in the air and screaming, before sprinting off to stick your heads into the nearest ostrich, is because of the rich buggers who make a killing off the fact that you don’t have it---and ‘killing’ is (I’m sure) le mot juste. And it is surely not a coincidence that the sort of swine who promote anti-socialised medicine are exactly the same ones who spread all those rumours and innuendoes and down-right stodgy lies about fruit cake. Why they all probably spend their weekdays commissioning evil advertisements designed to trick you into giving your doctor an excuse to prescribe expensive and dubious drugs for diseases you didn’t know you had (and probably wouldn’t suffer from under socialised medicine); and their weekends commissioning nasty cartoons and vile jokes demeaning fruit cakes.
So forget about stupid useless resolutions about losing weight, or giving up smoking, or finally having stopped beating your wife and, or, or husband; and start the revolution now, by having a really good New Year’s resolution about socialised medicine and fruit cake.
And then stick to it, because it (at least the fruit cake bit) will surely stick to you.
Cheerio for now
from
Richard Howland-Bolton
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Notes:
Please be kind to this essay, I was sick (probably from eating too much fruit cake) during its production and it seems to have effected my higher cognitive functions, so it’s not its fault.
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