Shostakovich, in his memoirs (whose authenticity some have disputed), describes a minister in the Soviet Union praising a great Soviet cultural event, such as (says Shostakovich) the closing of a theater. Not very long ago, the medical director of the hospital in which I used to work sent an e-mail to all its staff describing a forthcoming glorious event in the hospital’s long history, namely its closure. This, he told the staff, was a great opportunity; at last we were masters of our own fate.
Who the we were to whom he referred he did not actually say: presumably they did not include the staff who would not be re-employed when a new hospital to replace the old was supposedly built. Nor did he say in what way the we who remained would be masters of their fate in a way in which they had not been masters of it before. Certainly, the glossy propaganda-type news-sheet that the hospital, in common with all other British public hospitals, had put out and distributed to its staff before the closure, in which the Chief Executive was surrounded by workers as happy and smiling as the peasants in the Soviet press at the height of a famine, never spoke of anyone not having been the master of his fate. The medical director spoke inspirationally without inspiration, as it were. This was not truth speaking to power, but cliché speaking to fear and impotence.
The hospital had a long and
