Jeremy’s tripartite apologies fell not on deaf ears but on ears eager to take his admission of guilt and broadcast it for selfish advantage.
Jeremy Clarkson has done it again, which is to say, he has inadvertently lurched into the terrible dominion of HR, humorless executives, and his daughter’s public ire — ultimately finding himself out of a job.
According to Variety, after years of joyous vehicular frivolity, Clarkson is to be booted from Amazon Prime Video (the streaming service of that megacorp with the smirking logo) as soon as the current commissions wrap up.
The reason for his ouster has much to do with Harry and Nutmeg (I won’t mention her name; she doesn’t deserve the attention) and a small bit to do with a contract that was bigger than his shows’ recent successes.
What chafes personally is that, up until today, I didn’t have to care about the unroyals. The race-baiting, perennially victimhood-craving duo, whose existence irritated one like a mosquito outside one’s tent, was England’s problem. But, now, because of that bloodsucking pair of whinging transatlantic parasites, the man whose shows are the only ones that I watch with any consistency has lost his job.
More than anything, this episode is illustrative of our modern inability to demonstrate any form of grace.
A few weeks ago, I recapped what was originally a pre-Christmas brouhaha:
A controversy (contra-vasy) has occurred that should surprise no one: Jeremy Clarkson (automotive journalist and beloved blowhard) has landed himself in some trouble by criticizing Meghan Markle (schismatic non-royal and podcast host). Writing for the Sun, Clarkson requests the public shaming of the limelight-addicted Markle, similar to what the townsfolk did to Cersei, as vividly depicted in HBO’s Game of Thrones.
Clarkson wastes little time in his column:
Meghan, though, is a different story. I hate her.
Not like I hate Nicola Sturgeon or Rose West. I hate her on a cellular level.
At night, I’m unable to sleep as I lie there, grinding my teeth and dreaming of the day when she 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.
Everyone who’s my age thinks the same way.
But what makes me despair is that younger people, especially girls, think she’s pretty cool.
They think she was a prisoner of Buckingham Palace, forced to talk about nothing but embroidery and kittens.
It always comes back to feces. No matter how far afield the subject, the manure pond of the culture wars will pollute the ground beneath our feet.
Clarkson had the temerity to treat Nutmeg with the scorn she and her lout of a husband so richly deserve. What Clarkson wrote was dumb and funny, but was received as a neatly wrapped gift of a chance at victimhood for a pair who are sustained by such negative attention from British chatterers.
Having no idea how soon I’d be proven correct, I cautioned that Clarkson’s skewering of the unroyals was a fool’s errand, no matter how enjoyable his bombast:
Unfortunately, some targets are reduced by feculent invective, while others only grow stronger. With Meghan and Harry, the more they’re targeted by the establishment English, the more powerful their grievance pitch becomes — evinced by the Independent‘s Harriet Williamson’s response. Maddie Kearns wrote a few weeks ago about an impolitic exchange between a palace lady-in-waiting and a “black domestic-abuse campaigner.” An awkward conversation became a national outrage and further proof that the palace was irredeemably racist; an accusation that Markle has weaponized in the past.
Jeremy’s tripartite apologies fell not on deaf ears but on ears eager to take his admission of guilt and broadcast it for selfish advantage, according to the Daily Mail:
In a public rejection of his apologies, the Sussexes’ cheerleader, Omid Scobie, last night tweeted a statement from a spokesperson for Harry and Meghan, accusing Clarkson of ‘spreading dangerous conspiracy theories, and misogyny‘ – claiming it was ‘not an isolated incident shared in haste, but rather a series of articles shared in hate.’
https://twitter.com/JeremyClarkson/status/1604826179999076352
His shows, the Grand Tour and Clarkson’s Farm did well, but not nearly as well as Amazon hoped when it hired Jeremy, following his ouster from the BBC for taking a swing at a production manager after having had a bit too much rosé at an on-site office.
Clarkson’s yearly contract of $10 million may have had more to do with his ouster than anything he wrote or said. Unfortunately for us all, he provided his superiors the perfect way out of an expensive obligation.
Some people aren’t worth the time it takes to write about them. As Martin Luther put it:
The excrement of the eagle can boast that it comes from the eagle’s body even though it stinks and is useless; and so you can also be of the nobility. You people are and remain people, that is, swine and senseless beasts.
Please keep writing about the swine on your farm, Jeremy, they’re far more interesting than those residing in L.A.