BY JOHN NASH
Being refined and civilised people of excellent taste, most readers of CSM are probably yet blissfully unaware that a tsunami of bile erupted not long ago among the inhabitants of that strange metaphysical country called Social Media, that place ceramic-toothed, tattooed moderns, Siamese twins of their telephonic apparati, use instead of intelligence.
This particular brouhaha concerned the very excellent and highly entertaining gentleman farmist, Jeremy Clarkson, who had the temerity to write a funny, satirical remark about Her Grace, Mrs Harry, Meghan Markle. Space does not permit an intersectional academic analysis of the reason for his merry jest, but very briefly Their Graces, Mr and Mrs Harry, have apparently been winding up the rest of the Windsor family so badly with their Tales of the Unrespected that the only way they could ever get home again would be in a small rubber boat across the channel and up the Thames by night (£5 grand in readies per head, one-way only, speak to Abdul in Calais, bring yer own paddle, petrol extra). Her Grace Mrs Harry is, was in any case at the time, the target of a vast river of public bile, a revolting fluid that aids eventual digestion in both biological and social matters.
Jeremy C added to the bile pile, referencing a scene from the admirably appropriate “Game of Thrones” television series, in which a XX chromosome carrying version of an unimportant member of the Erectus hominids (formerly known as “a woman”) had to perform an utterly non-objectifying unclothed walk of atonement through some town or other whilst publicly displaying primary and secondary somatic sexual characteristics (formerly known as “her bits”). Game of Thrones is a fictional fantasy television programme based even more appropriately on an American fictional fantasy novel. In the TV version, an XX Erectus hominid etc, Lena Headey, played the head of the unfortunate naked character Cersei Lannister, but her body and bits were actually played by a body double, actress Rebecca Van Cleave. They were then electronically glued together.
Dear Reader, if you are reading this in the lavatory, please now prepare yourself mentally, draw a deep breath and reach down to firmly grasp the ivory straining bars on either side of the pot while I reveal Jeremy C’s wicked prose. If you are squeamish, please read only with one eye. He wrote:
“At night, I’m unable to sleep as I lie there, grinding my teeth and dreaming of the day when she (Mrs Harry) is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant, “Shame!” and throw lumps of excrement at her.”
For good measure, he added that he hated Her Graceness Meghan, Mrs Harry, “not like I hate Nicola Sturgeon or Rose West”, but on a “cellular level”.
I know, I know – it is impossible to imagine a hatred more than that felt by sane people for the Caledonian poison dwarf Nicola Sturgeon, but JC’s whole satiric statement was not intended to be taken literally – it was a parody, a send up, a joke, a flippant and amusing remark, over the top on purpose. (He has a driving programme, but it’s not used by driving instructors and he has a farming programme, but no farmers take that seriously, either. However, both are very entertaining, an old fashioned condition that affects pre-woke people over forty).
However, since it takes a degree of mental agility and competence to even understand the concept of “joke” and even more intelligence to decode the delightful and delicious but impossible ingredients of this particular parody, plus a degree of maturity to understand both humour and literature in the wider sense, the uproar precipitated by the joke suggests something untoward about modern society.
Imagine, if you can for a moment, the TV scene of this evil satire. Here is a body-double actress playing the part of the body of a fictional naked character who is exhibiting fictional atonement for a fictional deed in a fictional TV series based on a fictional fantasy book. This scenario is actually an electronic phantom of a fictional version of a fiction of a fiction of a fiction of a fiction – a phenomenon having an even less tenuous connection with real life than Jeremy Corbyn or David Icke. What sort of emotional, ignorant illiterate would take the slightest bit seriously such an obvious satirical parody that plays on televisual suspended belief – a fictional fantasy. This sort of violent, misguided and inappropriate hysteria over utter fiction is normally experienced only by white middle-class vegans and XR extinction half-wits.
What sort indeed?
Oh, dear, please don your hysteria-proof PPE, your woke-cancelling earplugs and arm yourself with a family size bucket of pile ointment. It’s the sort called Caroline Nokes, Conservative MP for Romsey and Southampton North and Chair of the Women and Equalities Select Committee. She/he/it/neither/both/wtf wrote a letter in December to the Editor of the Sun, insisting that she (The Sun Editor) (Ninny Warning: trigger alert) should immediately disembowel Jeremy Clarkson with a rusty chisel and kick his worthless and steaming entrails all over Westminster.
I should add that this last sentence was terminologically inexact, a teeny exaggeration for comic effect and should not be taken too literally. Please do not reach for the smelling salts, and please ask little non-binary Tarquin to put down the rusty chisel and pink football boots. If you have had any issues with any of the statements in this article and want to talk to someone, don’t phone me – go and find a life.
The Sun, of course, immediately offered a grovelling apology to the whole world and interstellar space, and so it should – the Sun is well known for the conscientious way it supports women by promoting their swimwear and lingerie industries.
Jeremy Clarkson has also apologised, saying he made a “clumsy reference to a scene in Game of Thrones, which had gone down badly with a great many people” and he was “horrified to have caused so much hurt”. He also said he will be “more careful in future”. Beautifully put, JC – that was no way to refer to a TV programme. They all missed your joke, so no doubt they will all miss your oblique sacrificial goat apology. Their Graces Mr and Mrs Harry called it “a publicity stunt”. They should know.
Meanwhile, the exploding MP, Ms/Mx/Ind/Misc/Mre Nokes (who nearly had to appear in a walk of shame herself, once) is also a member of the APPG on Body Image, an august collection of important worthies concerned, among other things, with eating disorders. One would think that these days, they would be better off attending to the eating disorders of that half of the frozen UK population who can’t afford any food, but hey-ho, that’s politics I suppose. I would also have thought such a prominent APPG Member concerned about body image might be concerned by the image of a naked woman parading her bits on TV to the obvious delight of non-objectifying XY chromosome carrying versions of an unimportant member of the Erectus hominids (formerly known as “men”) watching TV at the time.
The letter was so unnecessary – to paraphrase Proverbs 17:28:
“Even a fool, when she holdeth her peace, is counted wise: and she that shutteth her lips is esteemed a woman of understanding”.
Sadly, Ms Nokes heldeth not her peace, shutteth not her lips and proveth to be both unwise and of little understanding, a state clearly designed to greatly improve her standing in the APPG. But it gets worse – horrifyingly, the silly letter was then co-signed by no less than 65 other trundle-butt, pathetic MP’s, perfectly demonstrating the gravely serious condition that this country, let alone the terminally ill Conservative Party, now finds itself in, licking the bottom of the Marxist woke barrel for sustenance.
The disappointing intellectual problem here is that humour, particularly dark humour, requires a bit of agile intelligence and emotional fortitude in order to both write and understand. Put simply, it is claimed that funny people are more intelligent than their po-faced peers. That, in turn, suggests that seriously po-faced people have less intelligence. Research also suggests that funny people are less aggressive, again indicating that those gobby processions of grim, dogmatic, small-minded prophets of wokery and “inclusiveness” are, in fact, prophets of precisely the opposite.
I so mourn the passing of Blighty, Dear Reader. I remember when, long ago, this country had a robust, everyday common sense of humour (feel free to hum the Dam Busters March as you read on). When this country was bombed in WW2 around the time of my birth, instead of sticking two fingers in our ears and running around shouting, “La-La-La-La” in a futile attempt to make the nasty Nazis go away and take up charity volunteering, Britons laughed and made up rude songs, suggesting that Herr Hitler suffered a testicular deficit in the quantity of one and his mate Heinrich was hung like a hamster. Can you imagine today’s generation responding to an air-raid? There would be an instant run on toilet paper, TenaLady pants and Valium. Not a song would be heard, not a sound – except, perhaps, confused wailing and the furious tapping of fat little fingers organising an online petition to stop the war because a bomb killed someone’s tortoise.
Now, thanks to a couple of generations of well-protected, well-fed peace producing a whole generation of undisciplined brats who are subjected to continuous gavage with electronic brain-junk instead of actually thinking with neurons, people are becoming mentally obese and filled with bile. Britain is becoming bilious and yellow, festering with too many nasty, noisy, finger-wagging, over-reactive, intolerant puritans.
They, in turn, have badly influenced Sleepy Hollow, the debating chamber in the Westminster Asylum. Far from serving rural Britain, the woke inmates there are rapidly becoming like the French Taunter from the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, shouting at us from their isolated castle. They don’t listen, they lie like a cheap watch in debates, they prefer infantile urban clickbait fiction over more challenging truth and they openly promote hate-speech. In effect, they are yelling at us lesser mortals:
“I don’t want to talk to you (rural people) anymore, you empty-headed animal food trough whopper. I fart in your general direction. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!”
In the heart of that once bastion of free speech, the self-service capital of our nation, they are now trying to tell a hypocritical newspaper editor to force a funny columnist to write only left-wing approved stuff. That is the true horror of their self-serving outrage over Jeremy Clarkson’s joke.
Enough is enough. People of rural Britain, a suitable reply to all of them was demonstrated in the Holy Grail film, too – it is time we laughed with Jeremy Clarkson, waved the flag in defiance and lobbed a rotting cow in the general direction of the lot of ‘em.
John Nash grew up in West Cornwall and was a £10 pom to Johannesburg in the early 1960’s. He started well in construction project management, mainly high-rise buildings but it wasn’t really Africa, so he went bush, prospecting and trading around the murkier bits of the bottom half of the continent. Now retired back in Cornwall among all the other evil old pirates. His interests are still sustainable resources, wildlife management and the utilitarian needs of rural Africa.