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Monday, October 20, 2003

This is from NTK, so in all probability you have already read it, but by God it bears repeating. The Barefoot Doctor gets a good shoeing from the forces of reason.

I’m not quite sure what inspires such fundamental, primal, atavistic loathing in me for the Barefoot Doctor. Part of it is no doubt the fact that he is coining it by hawking mass-produced herbal remedies to the credulous and stupid (but is this righteous anger or jealousy?). Another part is the smugness radiating from every pore of his no-homeopathic-cure-for-baldness scalp. A third is without a doubt that the New Age, however laudable its aims and however efficacious its distillate of passiflora, seems intent on war against both the comprehensibility and the beauty of the English language, choked as it is with incontinent wittering about creativity, negativity, positivity – not everything has to be an abstract noun, you muppets.

Ultimately, though, I suspect that my ambivalence lies not in the idea of homeopathy and what we like in tribute to Edward Said to call “Eastern medicine” – after all, folk remedies have often survived for centuries because they have at least some utility among the folk – but that the Observer only saw fit to get an expert on it in when one turned up with white skin and an English education. In his cultural appropriation and desire to commoditise every aspect of any cultural experience promising profundity or spirituality, in doing so crushing every aspect of the alien from it, the Barefoot Doctor is the patron saint of backpackers, and must be reviled as such.

The revelation that his range of unguents includes a “Darkness Remover” candle is, however, a thing of beauty…

His web presence is pure evil also, down to the infuriating use of flash and unnecessary music loop.

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