Lines

It must be nice to have a job working on a TV show you like, okay you may have to put up with the odd racist presenter and a punch in the face, but it's a small price to pay to be in the presence of such genius. No?

Almost a million people (and I use that term quite loosely) have signed a petition petulantly demanding that the BBC reinstate a programme about schoolboy hijinks dressed up as motoring journalism along with its lanky provocative-for-cash presenter. Tha's about four times as many who signed the petition calling for a debate in Parliament on the effects of the government's catastrophic welfare policies. Not only that but Jeremy Clarkson is a friend of the Prime Minister, so a televisual troll and vapid bigot receives the ultimate endorsement while Cameron's own government can't be bothered to even consider the effect of their  on the poorest. We don't have the right to call ourselves civilised.

Let me be clear: Clarkson is a cunt. He may have started out as a journalist, but all that remains is a husk formed from populist outrage. According to the Guardian his most recent Top Gear Magazine article consists of nothing more than tired stereotypes about foreigners and public transport (apparently the former drive taxis universally smelling of vomit while the latter are containers of disease). Outrage isn't really the appropriate response at this point; more a sense of resignation and tiredness. I'm so fucking weary of this cretin. There is no content to his bullshit and no taxi I have ever travelled in has smelt of vomit either.

Clarkson and his tedious insipid cohorts, the sycophantic Hammond and the terminally curmudgeonly-for-cash James May, stand on a line that seems to divide society quite deeply (if that petition is anything to go by). On their side of the line is a world where people can speak their minds, do as they please (drive as they please where they please, specifically). On our side of the fence is, in their view, a stuffy repressive modern world of political correctness inevitably gone too far (the only kind apparently) and where values and cultures are shockingly mashed together with no respect for...something - even though culture is born from the confluence of older existing traditions.

Clarkson is the last bastion of free speech to the repressed fans of Top Gear who delight in his brave license fee funded health and safety checked white skinned antics. He is no more a maverick than John Wayne was a real cowboy. Instead he receives a huge sum of money to comfortably say things that resonate in a vile echo chamber of public opinion warped by a right wing media. His fans are regularly told about Muslims wanting to ban Christmas and how their kids can't play conkers in schools -a very Clarskon activity - without crash helmets, about how their white skinned daughters will be robbed of their innocence by foreigners while they themselves are robbed for their livelihoods - and thus their sense of identity - by, well, other foreigners. It's deeply sad but somewhere along the line these people lost who they were. Capitalism sold them down the river: Thatcher stole the industries they worked in and gave them to outside interests full of people they were told were better and smarter for example. Now all these people have as an ideological refuge is that side of the line, the one Clarkson, Hammond - Britain's worst presenter and a tawdry clone of the man himself (only made more pathetic by his inability to be equally as innately offensive) - and Misery Guts for Money James May.

People revel in the maverick antics of the Top Gear trio as they throw cars that aren't 'cool' out of planes, or drive around America with provocative slogans just to upset the locals. But they aren't really in any danger, not even in Argentina, the BBC and the behind the scenes staff will cop the flak, just as one of them did when Clarkson got a bit tired and felt like throwing his weight around because one of them wasn't on hand to offer him a plate of Roast Bee or something. That poor sod felt the wrath of Clarkson's faithful who variously thought that he should never be allowed to work again (no doubt subsequently complaining if he signed on) and that he had a punchable face. These are the same people that audibly guffawed when, on the televisual kleenex that is the One Show, Clarkson referred his wisdom on the issue of striking public sector workers. He felt they should be shot in front of their families. 

But it's all a joke innit. If you don't find that funny then you are on the wrong side of that line. You are a stuffy do-gooder - worse: you are a repressive force doing the common man down. Of course these people should be shot. In this age of fluid opinion and fact free churnalism of course these people should be shot. Just as when some poor shmuck working for Top Gear (and thus Jeremy Clarkson) doesn't immediately rush to his master's side like an unquestioning faithful puppy. 

I want our society to move forward but it won't as long as people refuse to move past that line.