‘Honest politics and Tory politics are contradictions in terms. Lying is a necessary part of a Tory’s political equipment, for it is essential for him to conceal his political intentions from the people. This is partly the reason for his success in keeping power.’
The founder of the NHS, and a chief builder of the post WW11 Welfare State, Nye Bevan, in 1944.
All these years later, after a period in which over 75% of the time has seen Tories in government (add New Labour’s Tory-Lite era, and it’s been an era of near as dammit total right wing dominance!), his words seem more apt than ever.
If I could afford it, which of course I can’t, I’d have a thorough massage once a week. Particularly the back, and especially the lower (cervical?) area, and the neck and shoulders. Classic stress loci.
But whilst I can occasionally persuade Teresa to give me a few minutes of back massage, in the main I’m reliant on other stuff for relaxation. Self-medicating with booze works, for sure. But isn’t the healthiest way.
The results are immediately tangible.
Chester, our delightful and, of late, not so wee moggie, can be a real blessing. Today, like yesterday, I plan to spend as much time as poss’ resting in bed. And about 20 minutes ago he popped in, from one of his regular jaunts outside. The little darling came straight up to me and went straight into face rubbing. Which I adore.
Trump watching Higgins at work.
Another almost cast iron sure fire way I’ve found to relax is watching (good) snooker. For some reason it has to be players I find engaging, playing very well. Anything less, and it doesn’t work. Todays snooker menu consists of the gargantuan feast that is Trump vs. Higgins, 2019 World Championship.
Over eight hours of two of the greatest playing superbly. Although John Higgins is undoubtedly brilliant, he’s not one of the players I’m drawn to. For some reason (my artistic aesthetic side?) I like guys like Trump, O’Sullivan, Selby, etc. They play superbly, and look great doing it. Higgins looks like an accountant or a bank clerk!
Trump in killer shark mode, nailed eight frames in a row!
Trump played so phenomenally well in this match, particularly one session – which Steve Davis aptly described as ‘brutal’, and ‘controlled annihilation’! – that it really was one of the best snooker finals one could hope to watch.
And, as Stephen Hendry commented, these longer matches bring something the shorter formats just can’t deliver. Epic! And yet also soothing…
This is both a book review (my first zero stars one!) and a polemic, I guess. It also touches upon troubled familial relations.
Many years ago my mother gifted me a copy of Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life. I read the first half, and found it asinine. But, in essence, I agreed with Hay; thinking positively is healthier than thinking negatively.
But the second half of the book? That was another matter entirely. And it is in that part of her ‘work’ that Hay’s true colours are shown to be, not to put too fine a point on it, a motley flag of insanity. Insane, and very dangerous for anyone taking her advice to heart.
I have, I suppose, some unresolved issues with my mother, around both the break up of our original ‘nuclear’ family. And, subsequently, being treated less equitably than other siblings. Re the latter; when my sister lived abroad, my mum visited Spain far more frequently than travelling the few miles to us (I’ll leave it at that, for now).
Anyway, back to the main topic of this post. Her having bought me this book, whilst in part motivated by good intentions, perhaps, revealed a deeper – I might say unstated, except it wasn’t/isn’t – view of her apparent opinion of my life circumstances.
What it boils down to is what is nowadays referred to as ‘victim blaming’. In this case it’s the ancient pre-scientific idea that illness is a form of punishment for ‘sin’, wrongdoing, evil, or just a bad attitude. Call it what you will.
When I first read You Can Heal Your Life I put it down in absolute shock, horror and disgust, when I read Hay’s moronic assertion that the disease Polio is caused by ‘Paralysing jealousy. A desire to stop someone.’ She has an A-Z, or, more accurately, an A-W, of similarly ridiculous ‘explanations’, for everything from Abdominal Cramps to Warts! [1]
The impact of polio on my family’s lives is huge. Polio killed my grandmother on my father‘s side, contributing to the consequent disruption of his life (he and his brothers were brought up in foster care, as orphans). Polio also disabled my maternal grandmother, meaning she lived her adult life on crutches, and eventually in a wheelchair. My mother had issues with family, quite possibly related again, in part, to the knock-on effects of this disease, running away from home very young (so I’ve been told), and ultimately into the arms of my father.
Does she really and truly believe that these two ladies got polio as a kind of cosmic or psychic punishment for ‘Paralysing jealousy. A desire to stop someone?’ Such views are horrific; they are obscenely offensive, and totally unfounded. The actual cause of polio is, as should be universally known now, a virus, identified in 1909, transmitted for the most part via water contaminated by human faeces. [2]
Something that struck me very forcibly when I decided to research this post is the total mismatch between endorsements and critiques in relation to Hay. Everybody , from Wikipedia’s entry on her, to the Guardian’s obituary, simply parrot Hay’s own completely unsubstantiated ‘personal history’. There’s no mention at all of any sceptical views of her anti-scientific ideas and claims.
I find this deeply shocking. Does her financial success make her immune to proper evaluation? Apparently so. The only objective or balanced critiques I could find were those of individuals, pointing out what dangerous nonsense she grew rich peddling, sometimes in the context of the death of a loved one who’d followed her crackpot advice.
It’s a great shame, I feel, that so many people – millions, perhaps, if sales of her stuff is any indication – are suckered into uncritically adopting her bullshit. Even if only thanks to the positivity aspect of her ideas. It smacks of a blinkered desperation. I can understand that. Having chronic ailments myself, I recognise that deep longing for some kind of simple solution to what might otherwise appear to be intractable problems.
It has been demonstrated – the placebo effect, for example – that the mind can be very powerful in relation physical health. But to adopt Hay’s alleged position (her own life needs to be thoroughly investigated, as to the truth of her own claims/actions [3]) is to fly in the face of the findings of all modern medical science.
It has been medical science, not New-Age quackery, that has dealt with my psoriasis and related arthritis, and manages both my physical pain and mental ill health. We can thank (or curse?) developments in public hygiene, in light of this hard won knowledge, for creating the conditions that have allowed for humanity’s demographic explosion.
I thought about giving this book half, or maybe even just one star, for the first part, about the benefits of positive thinking. But the issue is that these come attached to the second part, which, in my view, is poisonously bad. Evil, in fact. The rose here is attached to an enormous stinking turd that really cannot be ignored.
It has oft been said the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It’d be damning enough if one were to know how many desperately ill people have died as a result of taking Hay’s unfounded nonsense as truth [4]. That people will have died following her advice is sadly inevitable.
But, just as bad in my view, is the pernicious and completely bogus idea that illness is the fault of and consequence of the sufferer’s thoughts and/or actions. This adds self-righteous condemnation to the arsenal of the healthy, and unnecessary guilt and self-condemnation (how ironic, given the alleged healing of loving oneself Hay professes to peddle!) to the afflicted.
My mum needs both her hips replacing. According to Hay’s worldview this is somehow my mother’s own fault, on some negative psychological level: ‘Fear of going forward in major decisions. Nothing to move forward to.’*
This would be laughably preposterous applied to a car; do my tires regularly need replacing because, A) they have a ‘Fear of going forward in major decisions. Nothing to move forward to.’ Or B) due to physical wear and tear?
If your local garage mechanic said ‘You don’t need new tires, your tires just need to truly love and value themselves. Here are some affirmations for them to repeat.’ Would you pay them, or go back there in future?
Not the cartoon I wanted. But the same idea.
In her lifetime Hay profited monumentally from peddling her dangerous brand of nonsense. Her personal claims are all totally unsubstantiated. And her broader claims fly in the face of medical science. Why – other than the toxic marriage of hopelessness to comforting BS – has she not been taken off her pedestal? It has to be the present day sanctification of success. She’s made lots of money, so she must be right.
Louise Hay (source: wiki)
* These quotes are lifted from the appalling second part of You Can Heal Your Life. It ought to have a Government health warning: New Age BS is no substitute for scientifically grounded medicine.
NOTES:
[1] Her ‘explanation’ as to the cause of warts would be hilarious, if it weren’t so frighteningly vacuous: ‘Little expressions of hate. Belief in ugliness.’ Her list reads like a dotty New Age analogue of horoscopes; arbitrary, open to wide interpretations, and based not on real knowledge of understanding underlying facts, but a vague even whimsical form of associative imagining. Warts are in fact caused by a virus. Not by the mind of a person who may have them.
[2] Tragically, under our current Tory rulers the potential return and rise of such diseases is being increased by the total disrespect shown to both the environment and the humanity it sustains, by their rampantly capitalist ideology. Brexit is part of this downward scramble towards private profit-motivated deregulation.
[3] As far as I’m aware none of Hay’s autobiographical claims, from the alleged facts of her childhood, to her ‘miraculous’ curing of her self from cancer are in any way reliably documented.
[4] I need to re-find the quote, but one of the few critical things I found about Hay included a comment from a bereaved man whose wife died whilst following Hay’s imbecilic ideas.
It’s really saddening to find ourselves in a state where Jonathan Pie and The Daily Mash are better and more reliable sources of news than any of the mainstream screen media.
I’m a staunch supporter of the BBC, as a ‘national good’, a publicly owned and run non-politically affiliated institution, there for the benefit of all in the UK, free from commercial exploitation.
Ever since its inception most Tories have disliked the BBC, and even as they continue to disassemble and co-opt it, from within, they still caricature it as a hotbed of leftist ne’erdowells. In actual fact it has been infiltrated and taken over by bean-counting place-serving yes-men/women, appointed by the Tories for so long now I’ve lost track.
It’s gotten to the point now that even so called news items are actually party political broadcasts for the Tory agenda. I heard a piece on the NHS ‘collaborating’ with private healthcare on BBC R4 the other day, and couldn’t believe how blatantly Tory it was.
Essentially it portrayed the private sector as coming to the rescue of the ailing NHS. No examination of why this has come to pass. Nor what it means for the future of the NHS, beyond the programmes’ blatantly biased message that public/private cooperation can only be good.
But coming to Pie’s latest rant; it’s a theme many on the left are slapping their faces at. When Starmer recently took Sunak to task over the economic meltdown the Tories have gotten us into, and in particular the role of Tory self-serving greed – in the latest form of Mone – in all of this, Rishi did exactly what Pie is talking about.
Rather than address the blatant theivery of the super rich, at a time when the nation was and still is supposedly ‘all in it together’, this City millionaire instead tries to steer the conversation towards blaming those sections of the ‘lower orders’ who are having the temerity to strike, in pursuit of such outrageous demands as living wages and job security.
And let’s not forget that Toryism has always campaigned for the erosion of workers’ rights. That’s why we’ve seen a thermonuclear mushrooming of ‘zero hours’ contracts. That’s what Brexit was always really about. Removing that pesky EU red tape, aka deregulation, has always been about taking away rights and powers from those lower down the food chain in order to benefit those further up it, making it easier for them to skim off the cream.
As Mick Lynch is constantly saying, to anyone who’ll listen, these rich greedy fuckers are getting wealthier by parasitically exploiting all of us. And yet, because they have vast wealth, they brazenly use it to manufacture a ‘divide and rule’ scenario, in which the middle and working classes blame each other, and especially those at the bottom of the pile – from those fleeing poverty, persecution, war, etc, to those who actually serve us day in day out (teachers, posties, rail workers, nurses) – it’s literally fucking insane!
As The Daily Mash have noted, we’re drifting dangerously close to outright fascism. A right wing one party state, run by a wealthy clique whose rapine self-interest is gradually being set in legal stone.
Two World Wars and the sacrifices of rivers of blood, mostly the blood of the cannon-fodder workers, saw the demise of the Victorian and Edwardian era of aristocracy, and – in response to those collective sacrifices – the setting up of many national and international forms of governance.
The NHS and the EU/NATO, etc, were all born out of those bouts of unprecedented blood-letting that occurred really quite recently. And we’re seeing it all carved up, flogged off and destroyed by greedy capitalists whose self-interest and short-termism are totally unsuited to a world in which we face so many human-made (and other) threats to our collective existence.
Nuclear proliferation and war, chemical and biological (never mind ordinary) weapons, pollution, climate change, mass extinctions for which we are the chief cause, all these require strong and morally directed governance. Not rapine neo-liberal capitalism.
It’s grim out there right now. And I’m not talking about the winter weather.
I have chronic conditions – psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis – that require ongoing medication. And to pay for this – in addition to the taxes we all pay* – I pay a monthly direct-debit towards a prescription pre-payment scheme.
*Or ought to, and by and large do. I my view it’s those wealthy enough to dodge such joint responsibilities that are our biggest problem.
On my last visit to the chemist, to pick up my regular prescription meds, after 5 or 6 years of never being asked for any proof, I was asked. I told them I had none, as I’d never been asked before. They told me I’d have to bring some proof next time.
I’m not sure what constitutes proof? There’s no physical document or card anymore. There used to be a card. But that’s been scrapped. Toryism shaving off another small fraction from the public purse, to give the fat cats further scope to skim off more cream. So I guess I’ll just have to print out an appropriate email, if I can find one.
The Tories have always disliked the NHS, and for decades they have been systematically butchering it. Tragically the Blair/Brown Labour govt. colluded in the expansion of rapine capitalism within the NHS, making an already dodgy situation even worse. In many ways New Labour was Tory Lite. Tragic!
There are so many layers and levels to all the ramifications of the Tory ‘only money matters’ attitude (I won’t dignify it with the term philosophy!). One of these is to make parking at NHS facilities another opportunity for parasites to drain money from NHS workers and patients.
So not only am I taxed ‘at source’, to fund all our public services, including the wonderful institution that is the NHS. But, as an ill person – something that at its rotten core (I can’t say heart, Toryism has no heart) the right equates with ‘sin’* – I have to pay two more times: once more for my prescriptions, and again, to park.
Healthcare Tory style.
* There’s a barely disguised eugenicist Spencerian thread at the base of such ideologies, itself heir to the far older superstitions of religions, and dark pre-scientific (mis)understanding, which equates illness (and even ‘ugliness’) with sin and evil; outward manifestations of inner un-Godliness. Conditions that – rather than being understood and treated with due sympathy and care – are to be denigrated and punished.
