A wag on Facebook suggests that, with Jeremy Clarkson's suspension leaving the future of Top Gear in doubt, the programme's title could be re-used for a show that samples and rates legal highs. In a similar vein, I suggest, 'top gear' might well be the explanation for why the powers-that-be at the BBC weren't sufficiently compos mentis to get rid of Clarkson several years ago. After a series of racial incidents, and a bizarre call for striking public sector workers to be shot, it seems that in punching an underling Clarkson has gone too far.
What deserves comment is not the man's arseholery. Arsholes, like the biblical poor, are with us always, and the law of averages means that from time to time one or two of them will find their way into the broadcast media. Rather, what's interesting is the amount of support this particular arsehole has found in his adversity.
Top gear runs through this story like a thread, for a former prime mover in the acid house scene, Guido Fawkes, or Paul Staines as the man is in fact called, has started a petition calling on the BBC to reinstate Clarkson. In itself this is to be expected. There is honour even amongst aresholes, and it is almost touching to see one member of the arsehole community prepared to help out another who has got himself into a bit of a scrape. No, what demands attention is the fact that over half a million people to date have signed the thing. What on earth is that about?
It is not, one assumes, that half a million people are so devoid of any moral sensibility to think that it's OK to go around hitting staff who fail to supply you with hot dinners on demand. Instead, what the petition reflects is Clarkson's popularity. The man is well-liked by a significant proportion of the British population, much though it might pain the more pollyannaish kind of liberal to admit it. Why?
Well, since the 1960s British society has changed for the better, as well as for the worse. The past half century hasn't just been all about closing coal mines and selling council houses. There have been strides forward in opposing racism, in securing gains for women, for LGBTQ people, and in many other ways the adoption of more humane approaches to a broad spectrum of human situations. This is in no small part owing to the victories of liberation campaigns. And, guess what? Not everybody likes this.
However much I might be, and I am, signed up to the views that patriarchy is bad for men as well, that racism damages white workers by dividing them against black workers and so on, these positions are true only, as they say, in the final analysis. Prior to that, men - #yesallmen - benefit from sexism. We are more likely to get jobs, and be paid more than women. We might well find ourselves in situations where we benefit from women's unpaid domestic work, and so on. White people - yes, all of us - benefit from racism. And so on. You get the idea.
Now it's by no means inevitable that someone who benefits from oppression in the short-run seeks to defend that oppression; things like experience and politics can play a part here. Never the less, it's entirely unsurprising that a good number of people who in various ways have done rather well out of unequal relations to others resent the fact that those relations have been eroded. Hence the backlash against feminism, hence the rallying cry 'political correctness gone mad', and hence Jeremy fucking Clarkson. He is a standard bearer for reaction against the trendy view that foreigners aren't all that bad, or the bleating communist insistence that women can drive sports cars too. He provides a voice for the unspoken resentments behind many a suburban front door. He is the arsehole of all our hearts.
And the fact that he is so popular serves as a timely reminder that there is a job to be done defending the gains of the last fifty years.
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