Keeping Meat Fresh
Why are Earth people so parochial?
OK, so both the quote and the first line are Doctor Who quotes, which is impressive even for me. Still, I wrote this (or something like it) several weeks ago on paper - ooh, I'm a proper luddite, me - and it's now in a dormitory, somewhere in the Italian Alps. I got to do some shoehorning, since it's not vaguely topical any more, and the second quote (from The Visitation, since you ask) is a start.
Parochiality is a human speciality; clannishness is another. In Ireland, we like to think corruption and nepotism are local specialities rather than recurring issues all over the planet. We're so easily lead by what people tell us about foreigners that people-who-call-themselves-socialists can tell us that the EU is going to reduce our minimum wage, even though Ireland and the UK are the most right-wing countries in Europe by miles. Foreigners are people we think of, instinctively, as the enemy. One person is usually rational enough to overlook the knee-jerk reaction, people in mass numbers aren't. A person is sane, a mob isn't.
Witness Britland's reaction the the American broadside against the NHS. Now, let's be fair; some of this was motivated by a genuine concern that right-wing American nutcases were using lies to achieve what can only be described as a socially evil outcome. Some of the responses were intelligent, and watching the viral spread of the #welovethenhs meme on Twitter was strangely heartwarming - or at least, as heartwarming as Twitter can be, given that the format that suits cynicism rather more than sentiment.
Still, there's a line between cynicism and just accuracy, and it probably needs to be drawn about here. Much of the Brit response was a glorious example of parochiality at its best. If you hunted in the papers for the last ten years, you'd be hard-pushed to find an article singing the praises of the NHS. It's a money-pit, it doesn't work, it's a frightening and dark netherworld stalked by MRSA and Waiting Lists. A couple of yanks put the boot in, though, and the nation closes ranks; meanwhile, Daniel Hannan goes on Glenn Beck to slag off the U.K.'s hitherto favourite whipping boy to Johnny Foreigner, and he's universally denounced as the Antichrist, except without the charisma.
'Course, Daniel Hannan is a vile, evil man and should be spat at in the street. He's also a paedophile. Oh, okay, I made the last one up*. But he's a shameful waste of skin because he's lied to millions of people about the nature of state medicine, and will - as a result - have at least few thousand premature deaths on his conscience**. His vilification by Dem Across De Water is based on his betrayal of a national institution. He'd have been equally heavily criticised if he'd called Stephen Fry a smug wankstand.
It's a good job that no-one in the States has ever seen Bodies. Jed Mecurio's 2005 hospital drama isn't exactly a glowing advert for the NHS. It is, however, as good a drama as has come out of British screens over the last ten years, which is another way of saying that it's the best hospital drama ever.
The obvious difference between Bodies and other hospital dramas is that it's, y'know, good. Programmes set in hospitals have a decent not-shit ratio - the setting is by definition about life and death, so if you write a half-competent script you're pretty much there. But most hospital dramas stick to the case-of-the-week format; this isn't surprising, as it's the obvious place for a drama to be found. Bodies, though, was an altogether different programme. The cases themselves were so fast, so constant, that the people involved ceased to matter. This wasn't a show about people, it was a show about hospitals; a drama about systems and institutions, a story where the people were crushed by the scale of the grander story.
In other words, the story is the setting. Bodies doesn't care about individuals, any more than the characters in it do. To the management in the hospital, they're consumers; to the surgeons, they're statistics; to the nurses, they're a pain in the arse. The main character, Rob Lake, views them as slabs of meat to be fixed; Roger Hurley, the sympathetic villain of the piece, sees them as proving ground for his research theories. Lake and Hurley are among the few characters who views the people as bodies; to everyone else, they're much less.
The least likeable thing about Bodies is a hint of xenophobia in its portrayal of foreign staff. And yet it's not really a programme that blames individuals, even if its central storyline is about the hospital's most incompetent doctor, and the cases involve an endless series of medical error. It's a programme that views problems as systemic, individuals as enslaved to the whims of gods. Lives are risked because the months statistics on caesarians are high; mistakes are covered up to protect the system; anyone who goes outside the unwritten rules is promptly crushed. The only other programme to really portray life this way, as a grand sweep of inhuman actions in which individuals simply don't matter, is The Wire. Bodies isn't that good, not even close, but you could mention it in the same sentence without feeling silly.
And yet this unrelenting grimness - botched procedures, lies to patients, lack of funding and inadequate resources - never once feels like a critique of the NHS. The mantra of Bodies is that everyone is treated the same. The poor, the homeless and the downright nasty get the same treatment as the rich or the good; the staff show the same professional care to everyone, regardless of background. It's certainly tough, but hey, so's life. The hospital might be hierarchical in its structure, but it's fiercely egalitarian in how the patients are treated. It isn't a social resource, it's an institution that keeps people alive. Its name says all you need to know, really. Bodies. It's how everyone is seen. In a joyless, suffocating environment, this is pretty much the one consolation that you can take.
This is what we don't have in Ireland, or at least, it's what we're striving to give away, and yet another example of parochialism is how the U.S. vs U.K. debate wasn't used as the prism through which to view our own priorities. The healthcare system to which we are evolving is one that prioritises one life over another; it's one that judges, on crass financial grounds, who deserves to live, and who doesn't. This isn't a preachy piece of hand-wringing liberalism, it's a fundamental question of how we view the services we provide. Once health insurance and private care becomes the standard for all the wine-guzzling classes, then it means we've given up on the whole idea of health for all. It means we don't even expect the public service to be any good. It means we've told the poor and the vulnerable, in a subtle but chillingly final way, that they simply don't matter.
The N.H.S. may not be the glorious service that the U.K. is pretending, now that it's come under the glare of their jumped-up colonial buddies. The key difference is that the majority of Brits still believe, unswerivingly, that it should provide the best for everyone. That it fails is a tragedy. Our tragedy is that we stopped believing long ago.
*I didn't really. He is a paedophile.
** And also because he's a paedophile.
OK, so both the quote and the first line are Doctor Who quotes, which is impressive even for me. Still, I wrote this (or something like it) several weeks ago on paper - ooh, I'm a proper luddite, me - and it's now in a dormitory, somewhere in the Italian Alps. I got to do some shoehorning, since it's not vaguely topical any more, and the second quote (from The Visitation, since you ask) is a start.
Parochiality is a human speciality; clannishness is another. In Ireland, we like to think corruption and nepotism are local specialities rather than recurring issues all over the planet. We're so easily lead by what people tell us about foreigners that people-who-call-themselves-socialists can tell us that the EU is going to reduce our minimum wage, even though Ireland and the UK are the most right-wing countries in Europe by miles. Foreigners are people we think of, instinctively, as the enemy. One person is usually rational enough to overlook the knee-jerk reaction, people in mass numbers aren't. A person is sane, a mob isn't.
Witness Britland's reaction the the American broadside against the NHS. Now, let's be fair; some of this was motivated by a genuine concern that right-wing American nutcases were using lies to achieve what can only be described as a socially evil outcome. Some of the responses were intelligent, and watching the viral spread of the #welovethenhs meme on Twitter was strangely heartwarming - or at least, as heartwarming as Twitter can be, given that the format that suits cynicism rather more than sentiment.
Still, there's a line between cynicism and just accuracy, and it probably needs to be drawn about here. Much of the Brit response was a glorious example of parochiality at its best. If you hunted in the papers for the last ten years, you'd be hard-pushed to find an article singing the praises of the NHS. It's a money-pit, it doesn't work, it's a frightening and dark netherworld stalked by MRSA and Waiting Lists. A couple of yanks put the boot in, though, and the nation closes ranks; meanwhile, Daniel Hannan goes on Glenn Beck to slag off the U.K.'s hitherto favourite whipping boy to Johnny Foreigner, and he's universally denounced as the Antichrist, except without the charisma.
'Course, Daniel Hannan is a vile, evil man and should be spat at in the street. He's also a paedophile. Oh, okay, I made the last one up*. But he's a shameful waste of skin because he's lied to millions of people about the nature of state medicine, and will - as a result - have at least few thousand premature deaths on his conscience**. His vilification by Dem Across De Water is based on his betrayal of a national institution. He'd have been equally heavily criticised if he'd called Stephen Fry a smug wankstand.
It's a good job that no-one in the States has ever seen Bodies. Jed Mecurio's 2005 hospital drama isn't exactly a glowing advert for the NHS. It is, however, as good a drama as has come out of British screens over the last ten years, which is another way of saying that it's the best hospital drama ever.
The obvious difference between Bodies and other hospital dramas is that it's, y'know, good. Programmes set in hospitals have a decent not-shit ratio - the setting is by definition about life and death, so if you write a half-competent script you're pretty much there. But most hospital dramas stick to the case-of-the-week format; this isn't surprising, as it's the obvious place for a drama to be found. Bodies, though, was an altogether different programme. The cases themselves were so fast, so constant, that the people involved ceased to matter. This wasn't a show about people, it was a show about hospitals; a drama about systems and institutions, a story where the people were crushed by the scale of the grander story.
In other words, the story is the setting. Bodies doesn't care about individuals, any more than the characters in it do. To the management in the hospital, they're consumers; to the surgeons, they're statistics; to the nurses, they're a pain in the arse. The main character, Rob Lake, views them as slabs of meat to be fixed; Roger Hurley, the sympathetic villain of the piece, sees them as proving ground for his research theories. Lake and Hurley are among the few characters who views the people as bodies; to everyone else, they're much less.
The least likeable thing about Bodies is a hint of xenophobia in its portrayal of foreign staff. And yet it's not really a programme that blames individuals, even if its central storyline is about the hospital's most incompetent doctor, and the cases involve an endless series of medical error. It's a programme that views problems as systemic, individuals as enslaved to the whims of gods. Lives are risked because the months statistics on caesarians are high; mistakes are covered up to protect the system; anyone who goes outside the unwritten rules is promptly crushed. The only other programme to really portray life this way, as a grand sweep of inhuman actions in which individuals simply don't matter, is The Wire. Bodies isn't that good, not even close, but you could mention it in the same sentence without feeling silly.
And yet this unrelenting grimness - botched procedures, lies to patients, lack of funding and inadequate resources - never once feels like a critique of the NHS. The mantra of Bodies is that everyone is treated the same. The poor, the homeless and the downright nasty get the same treatment as the rich or the good; the staff show the same professional care to everyone, regardless of background. It's certainly tough, but hey, so's life. The hospital might be hierarchical in its structure, but it's fiercely egalitarian in how the patients are treated. It isn't a social resource, it's an institution that keeps people alive. Its name says all you need to know, really. Bodies. It's how everyone is seen. In a joyless, suffocating environment, this is pretty much the one consolation that you can take.
This is what we don't have in Ireland, or at least, it's what we're striving to give away, and yet another example of parochialism is how the U.S. vs U.K. debate wasn't used as the prism through which to view our own priorities. The healthcare system to which we are evolving is one that prioritises one life over another; it's one that judges, on crass financial grounds, who deserves to live, and who doesn't. This isn't a preachy piece of hand-wringing liberalism, it's a fundamental question of how we view the services we provide. Once health insurance and private care becomes the standard for all the wine-guzzling classes, then it means we've given up on the whole idea of health for all. It means we don't even expect the public service to be any good. It means we've told the poor and the vulnerable, in a subtle but chillingly final way, that they simply don't matter.
The N.H.S. may not be the glorious service that the U.K. is pretending, now that it's come under the glare of their jumped-up colonial buddies. The key difference is that the majority of Brits still believe, unswerivingly, that it should provide the best for everyone. That it fails is a tragedy. Our tragedy is that we stopped believing long ago.
*I didn't really. He is a paedophile.
** And also because he's a paedophile.
posted by Nyder O'Leary at
17:46
2 Comments:
Good this week, possibly the best you've written. You could take the discussion on to why we close hospitals or sell off hospital land and try to dump all responsibility for everything in private hands - but it would be hard to make this particular point any better.
Except...
Do you really need to go to court and have the bumhole sued off you before you leave the name-calling out?
Get rid of the asterisks and direct your fire at Roman Polanski. Not so contraversial I guess, but with the French government interceding on his behalf (not because he's innocent - he admits the charges - but cos he's famous) that makes EVERYBODY IN FRANCE A PAEDOPHILE-OPHILE. Hoh hoh hoh (laughter en francais) yes, vous France, I'm calling you out! Paedophile-ophiles!
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