GREAT MOMENTS IN GNOSTICISM: “The NHS is our religion: it’s the only thing that saves it from the Tories,” former Social Democratic Party candidate Polly Toynbee writes in the Grauniad:

Glorious celebrations for this week’s NHS 70th birthday mark the proudest social democratic moment of our history. The Labour party descended on Tredegar, Nye Bevan’s birthplace, to march through the streets to brass bands, and London marched too. Everything lyrically expressed in Danny Boyle’s Olympic ceremony, with its 300 glowing NHS beds filled with bouncing children, is emotionally reprised in this reminder of our better selves.

Note the artwork accompanying the story, with the appearance of stained glass, with halos, doctors as the Three Wise Men,” and light streaming down from heaven onto a hospital – Nietzsche declared God dead, but he’s been revived in the form of socialized medicine. Praise be upon the glories of the NHS!

As Tom Wolfe wrote in his epochal 1976 article, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening” “It is entirely possible that in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode wrapped in semi military gear and guerrilla talk.”