Clarkson: Cowardice is the new bravery

[EsoognomEhT]

As the nation settled down on Wednesday night to watch England play Croatia, I sensed an air of optimism in the land. A feeling that all would be well. I mean hey, England were holding their own against Brazil when Croatia didn’t even exist as a nation state. So what chance would these swarthy-looking Yugo-ruffians have? They were minnows in a tank of sharks. They weren’t going to be beaten. They were going to be eaten.

Hmmm. I’m afraid I knew we were going to lose moments before the match began. I looked at our players mumbling their way through the national anthem and realised they didn’t really care about playing for England. Because they don’t really know what England is. And truth be told, neither do I.

When I was their age it was crystal clear. Newspapers would report: “Fog in the Channel: Europe cut off.” Peter Ustinov would arrive at JFK airport and, having studied the signs saying “US citizens” and “Aliens”, he’d ask a security guard where the British should go. We were separate, different, better.

We had hardback dark blue passports with a personal message from the Queen on the inside cover “requiring” that foreign border guards allow the bearer to do whatever he or she pleased without let or hindrance. Slap one of those down on a Frenchman’s desk and the crack of invitation grade cardboard would have the greasy little oik sitting up straight; that’s for sure.

We had saved the world from tyranny so often we’d lost count; we’d brought decency, truth and cricket to every continent and every coral pinprick. We’d sailed iron steamships into America when they were still using coracles. We were defined by our brilliance, our superiority, our technical know-how.

Today, things are rather different. Mention the war and you’ll be told by an outreach counsellor that we must empathise with the Germans, who are coming to terms with their mistakes of the past. “And you know, children, it was actually the British who invented concentration camps . . .”

Empire? When I was at school, teachers spoke with pride about how a little island in the north Atlantic turned a quarter of the world pink, but now all teachers talk about is the slave trade and how we must hang our heads in shame.

Right. So we must forgive Germany for invading Poland. But I must beat myself to death every night because my great-great-great-grandad moved some chap from a hellhole in Ghana to Barbados. In fact I can’t even say we’re British any more because then all of Scotland would rush over the border, pour porridge down my trousers and push a thistle up my bottom.

I believe people need to feel like they’re part of a gang, part of a tribe. And I also believe we need to feel pride in our gang. But all we ever hear now is that we in England have nothing to be proud about. In a world of righteousness we are the child molesters and rapists.

Our soldiers were murderers. Our empire builders were thieves. Our class system was ridiculous and our industrial revolution set in motion a chain of events that, eventually, will kill every polar bear in the Arctic.

And it gets so much worse. Because if you say you are a patriot, men with beards and sandals will come round to your house in the night and daub BNP slogans on your front door. This is the only country in the world where the national flag is deemed offensive. Small wonder the England players were disinclined to sing the national anthem with any gusto. It’s in English and that’s offensive too. Unless it’s simultaneously translated into Urdu, for the deaf.

Then there’s our national character. In the past, boys were told in school assembly that their mothers had died and were expected to get over it in a nice game of rugby. Crying only happened abroad. Not any more. We were ordered to weep like Americans when Diana died, and no local news report is complete today without some fat oik sobbing because his house has fallen over. I sometimes get the impression Kate McCann is being hounded precisely because she has a stiff upper lip.

Every day we read obituaries about men who pressed on with the attack on a German machinegun nest even though their arms and legs had been blown off. Today disabled people get a statue in Trafalgar Square just because they got pregnant. Tomorrow all the obituaries will be for those who saved others from certain death by insisting they wear high visibility jackets. Cowardice is the new bravery.

As for that wounded soldier seen recently sporting a T-shirt that said: “I went to Afghanistan and all I got was this crappy false leg,” I call that typically English. But not any more. It’s appalling. A slight on disabled people. And you shouldn’t have been in Afghanistan in the first place, you baby killer.

Do you see? We can’t be proud of our past because it’s all bad, we can’t use British humour because it’s offensive and we can’t use understatement to deal with a crisis because the army of state-sponsored counsellors say we’ve got to sob uncontrollably at every small thing.

I want to end with a question. It’s addressed to all the equal opportunity, human rights, diet carbon, back room, bleeding heart liberals who advise the government: “I am English. Why is that a good thing?”

I bet they don’t have an answer. And until they can come up with one, chances are we’ll never win at football again.

Too ****ing true, too ****ing true

[gammbino]

Clarkson's column is a must read every week; this one was particularly good. Unfortunately it's becoming much the same situation in many western nations.

This one didn't appear in the Times but I really enjoyed it:



I spent some of my summer holiday on a small Caribbean island. Created by a volcanic burp at some point in our ever-changing world's past, it was what most people would consider to be paradise.
Surrounded entirely by the sort of sea you normally find in airbrushed travel brochures, it was ringed by an uninterrupted
sliver of perfectly white, perfectly deserted beach and, further out,
a tropical reef blah blah Jacques Cousteau blah blah etc.
There were no hotels and the only other house I could see from ours belonged to Bruce Willis.
Hopefully, you have a mental picture of the scene because now we move onto the meat and potatoes. You see, the island in question was only a few miles long and a few miles wide. So how do you get about?

It's too far to walk from the one shop to the little dock where people keep their boats. But it would be ridiculous to drive. And so, while there is one pick-up truck - used to pull boats out of the water when a hurricane is coming - the residents move around in a collection of communal golf buggies.

It's all very communist. You help yourself to a cart and then, if you're the last to use it at night, you have to plug it into the mains and charge it up.
Brilliant. No noise, no fumes, no pollution, no jams, no sense that Bruce's golf cart is bigger than mine and I must respond. And of course, absolutely no chance of anyone being even slightly killed...
You'd think. But that ain't necessarily so because, you see, sticking its oar into this Liberal Democrat's idea of heaven comes something called youthful exuberance. Mix that with a T-junction and someone's going to need the flying doctor.

If the golf buggy had had an engine, the person going the other way would have heard it coming. But it didn't. So he came round the bush, and bang. Of course, you may argue that a golf buggy can only do 15mph and that no harm can come to a driver at this speed. True enough.
But when it has a head-on with another buggy, also travelling at 15mph you have a 30mph impact. Doesn't sound like much? Really? Well try running face first into a wall and then send me an email explaining how things turned out.
Did the accident bring everyone to their senses? Yes... we thought. But wait, what's this? Why, it's a teenager attempting to do a donut in his buggy. And over there, there's an 11-year-old trying to jump his over an iguana.
This is the problem, the concept that our friends in the yellow and green parties just can't seem to understand. That for some, taking risks is fun.Of course, they'll say that the people I'm talking about are yobs. They'll point to someone called Darren in a Nova, doing handbrake turns in a Tesco car park. But me?
Well I'll point to Steve Fossett.

As I write, the American adventurer is missing in the Nevada desert. There are fears that he's crashed his plane and that he's dead. It'll be a terrible shame if it is true, because Steve to me is what the baby Jesus is to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

I met him once many years ago and he didn't really fit the profile. I knew, from reading his biography, that he'd made a fortune on Wall Street and since retiring had raced at Le Mans, swum the Channel and beaten the world speed record for crossing the Pacific in a sail boat.
So I was expecting him to be a cross between Gordon Gekko, Thomas Crown and the Terminator. I was expecting him to break every bone in my fingers when we shook hands and for him to slap me on the back with such force that my spine was shattered.
This turned out to be wrong. "Can you tell me where Steve Fossett is?" I said to a man in tatty combat trousers, sweeping the floor in a big aeroplane hanger. "That's me," he said quietly.

He was a rubbish interview, stammering and not quite being able to enunciate what drove him. But when the cameras were off and we were just chatting, he was funny, extremely kind and driven by a quest for adventure so powerful that if you took out his soul, it could be used to light the world.
Since our meeting, he's gone properly berserk, setting 23 world sailing records and nine distance race records. And when he breaks a record, he doesn't do things by halves: when he crossed the Atlantic in 113 hours, he shattered the previous record by nearly two days.
Most people would have had their work cut out keeping ahead of the game in the world of sailing. But not Steve. Because during this time, he set a new record for crossing America in a non military jet. His average speed was 726mph.
And then he turned round, went back to the West coast and set a Transcontinental record for turbo props. Then he broke the record for crossing Australia. And then he broke one for flying round the world. Of seven world records for fixed-wing aircraft, Steve has three.
I have nowhere near finished.On top of this, he's broken 10 of the 21 world records for gliding. He's gone further than anyone else and he's been higher. 50, 727 feet. And then, just last year, he got back into a powered plane and flew round the world again without refuelling in 76 hours and 45 minutes. The longest flight in history.


He has competed in several triathlons, is one of only eight men to have done all of the world's 10 toughest ski races, he has done the 1,165-mile Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in Alaska and he has piloted an airship at 71.5mph. Another absolute world record.
And I haven't even got to the ballooning yet. He was the first to cross the Pacific in a balloon and, after six attempts, the first to go all the way round the world. You get the impression he's circumnavigated the globe more often than most 747 pilots. Oh, and he's climbed six of the world's seven highest mountains.
He disappeared while on a flight looking for somewhere in Nevada where he could break the land-speed record. He had the car, 47-feet long and powered by an afterburning jet engine from a Phantom F4. He just needed somewhere to drive it.
A menace? A one-man carbon snowshoe? I don't think so. I dislike using the word 'hero' because I think it should be mainly reserved for soldiers. Or at the very least, people who risk their lives to help others. But in a way, that's exactly what Steve Fossett did. He risked his life to show that there's still some hope in the Liberal Democrat's stupid vision of a perfect golf-buggy-and-cotton-wool world.
At the very least, that makes him an inspiration.

http://www.topgear.com/content/features/stories/2007/10/stories/13/3.html

[Gothjod]

Great read. Good read.

[Kitsune]

In a certain way I can sympathize with the author of the article at the beginning of this thread. Because we Germans went throught the same - only much, much worse.
One quote is interesting however:

And until they can come up with one, chances are we’ll never win at football again.
As it so happens, I have made my own deep-minded thoughts about the very same topic. And I came to the conclusion that it might be possible that winning at football is somewhat overstated. You know, according to the most diligent research done about the subject, German soldiers fought consistently better than English ones in both Worldwar I and Worldwar II. Wether it was in the mud of Flanders, on the sea in the battle of Jutland during the first great war, or in France, Greece or the deserts of Africa during the next one. But, and that may be surprising, when German and English national football teams met at some time during the first half of the century, the Germans would always lose. Usually even with scores like 10:0 or 13:2 or something like that. Then, when you consider which nations are good at football these days, you see that it are countries like Brazil or France...have you ever heard that the Brazilians have conquered something or won a battle somewhere? Neither have I...And who is football world champion? The Italians! Need one to say more? Perhaps there is no connection between soldiering and football at all - or perhaps there is but it is an inverted one.
What do you think? p-)





*Jumps into a very, very deep foxhole*

[CPL Trevoga]

In a certain way I can sympathize with the author of the article at the beginning of this thread. Because we Germans went throught the same - only much, much worse.
One quote is interesting however:

As it so happens, I have made my own deep-minded thoughts about the very same topic. And I came to the conclusion that it might be possible that winning at football is somewhat overstated. You know, according to the most diligent research done about the subject, German soldiers fought consistently better than English ones in both Worldwar I and Worldwar II. Wether it was in the mud of Flanders, on the sea in the battle of Jutland during the first great war, or in France, Greece or the deserts of Africa during the next one. But, and that may be surprising, when German and English national football teams met at some time during the first half of the century, the Germans would always lose. Usually even with scores like 10:0 or 13:2 or something like that. Then, when you consider which nations are good at football these days, you see that it are countries like Brazil or France...have you ever heard that the Brazilians have conquered something or won a battle somewhere? Neither have I...And who is football world champion? The Italians! Need one to say more? Perhaps there is no connection between soldiering and football at all - or perhaps there is but it is an inverted one.
What do you think? p-)


*Jumps into a very, very deep foxhole*

I think it's great that God is punishing those evil English for their crimes against the humanity and their endless greed. Hopefully Pakistanis and Indians will wipe them out with their ****s in a next few centuries. Enough with evil.

*Jumps into a very, very deep foxhole*

[shocker1]

Man that was brilliant, I am not British but I enjoyed reading that. I like this quote.

In fact I can’t even say we’re British any more because then all of Scotland would rush over the border, pour porridge down my trousers and push a thistle up my bottom.

[Lambert58]

Our soldiers were murderers. Our empire builders were thieves. Our class system was ridiculous and our industrial revolution set in motion a chain of events that, eventually, will kill every polar bear in the Arctic.

Welcome to being an American.

[deadtired]

Welcome to being an American.


Actually, you can blame the English for making America what it is, too.

BTW, this Clarkson guy seems like a reasonable person. Why is he not Prime Minister?

[McNasty]

Empire? When I was at school, teachers spoke with pride about how a little island in the north Atlantic turned a quarter of the world pink, but now all teachers talk about is the slave trade and how we must hang our heads in shame.

Yes, because glorifing the past usually brings splendid results.
Clarkson is amusing, and I really enjoy Top Gear, but he really is an ignorant ****.

[oldsoak]

I dont like Clarkson, but I will admit he's got a point. Its the trendy attempt to be more servile, self mutilating and apologetic than the rest thats castrating Britain. As for glorifying the past - every country does. Every country has its golden age of myth and legend. Even the most feeble banana republic has it, so why not us with our inventors and explorers ? So what if we conquered the world and enslaved millions ? Has any country had the ability to create an empire and turned it down ? We are only different in that we did it better than anyone else. Pride is a powerful motivation to strive beyond the mediocre.

[Seraph]

Hehe. This is last place I expected to find a Clarkson thread.


BTW, this Clarkson guy seems like a reasonable person. Why is he not Prime Minister?
Yep, this is a common (but fun) debate here in the UK.


Clarkson is amusing, and I really enjoy Top Gear, but he really is an ignorant ****.
This also is a common view. Clarkson does have an innate capacity for arrogance.
We know him best here for his show TopGear. But is appropriate to remember that much of the show is scripted, and not by him.

[Lazy Lob]

I don't like Clarkson either, he tends to revel in being a bit of a tit.

England has become its own worst enemy.

[oldsoak]

I don't like Clarkson either, he tends to revel in being a bit of a tit.

England has become its own worst enemy.

sad but true :-(

[B_Soldier]

Why did Ghana have to be the hellhole example?

[Daniel San]

One could say patriotism is dead.

It is sad that the love (or passion) for one's country has become the scapegoat for many great evil of time past.

Although patriotism might have been a contributing factor or simply a factor in humanity's great tragedies, rejecting it altogether is an aberration.

One could list, as a cause of the shunning of patriotism, the erosion of the Nation-State with heavy population migrations. But I think that there might be something more than simply ethnicity as a basis for patriotism.

[Kilgor]

One could say patriotism is dead.

It is sad that the love (or passion) for one's country has become the scapegoat for many great evil of time past.



White man's guilt and the left's continuous preaching of the evils of patriotism are certainly not helpful.

[Rictor]

Now listen, I share your senitments. But loving one's country, being proud of it, is not the same as believing it to be flawless. Much the same way that a Catholic insisting on believing that the Pope's every word is divine is patently absurd.

The British Empire was a ruthless institution that subjugated entire nations for the benefit of a few, rich white dudes. That's a fact. The Treaty of Versaille played a major part in starting WW2. Fact. This does not make Britain any less great or make its heritage something to be scoffed at. It's totally childish to close one's ears whenever someone points out the glaring flaws and mistakes and crimes of one's nation. Every nation is horribly flawed in some way or another. And yet the people of, say, Romania, who's greatness never amounted to 1/10th of Great Britain's, still find some way to be patriotic.

[8thidpathfinderpower]

Why should anyone be a patriot? With all the money to be made stealing from the poor, the rich controlling government, and the masses being controlled by major corporations, its easier if we just sit back and do nothing...especially when it might soil our image as a selfish, pathetic, and ignorant people, led into stupidity by those stupider than the rest.

[Mr Gently Benevolent]

Oh the enlightened Mr Clarkson the one and same fool that laughed at the publics fear of identity theft and published his own financial details just to prove how foolish we were only to have £500 stolen from his bank account and donated to charity. The man’s a 5 star knob.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/07/clarkson_bank_prank_backfires/