Work hard and get a car!

Following from my last post about what makes a motorist a moton I find that we have fertile ground in Top Gears recent 'cycle safety' film. 

I don't see any need to further rehash what has been so eloquently ridiculed elsewhere, nor do I wish to engage in more childish name-calling. The problem with Top Gear is that if you strip away the bluster, name calling is all you're left with, and no amount of reasonable points refuting claims therein carry as much weight as the wit and 'humour' with which they retort. I would suggest that Chris Boardman really ought to have realised that and simply refused to be part of this. You're a great guy Chris, but what did you expect to happen?

I could take some time looking at the kind of claims that we see on Top Gear and link them to Motonism as alluded to in my last post, but I should think its fairly obvious - by ignoring facts and cynically sticking with bullying humour in defence of a well planned, well thought out car-libertarian stance Clarkson, May and Hammond have become the poster-boys for the Moton movement. An old motorist friend of mine who spends more of his time asserting his heterosexuality than one might think necessary has told me that if he absolutely had to have sex with a man it would be Hammond. Yes, he's even thought about it - this program takes Motonism past dogma and in to fetish - and they've frequently reinforced the forbidden 'fetish' aspect through their own far too frequent, disgusting rampant homophobia. 

Clarkson manages to epitomise the most irrational part of this anti-anyone-who-isn't-a-moton rage with 'work hard and get a car' quotes such as we've seen recently (and further back - he isn't good at originality). In that one statement he manages to say that because we're cyclists we're poor, we're poor because we don't work hard. This isn't a joke - its an arrogant, sneering insult that intentionally mis-states both why we cycle, who cycles, and makes light of the reality of the real poverty that many thousands of people in the UK have to face since the financial meltdown (where private debt of better off people was nationalised, such that now the poorer are made to pay through lower wages and squeezed benefits). This isn't just a motorist not getting why we cycle - its a politically motivated, thought out reinforcement of multiple stereotypes designed to denigrate anyone who isn't part of Clarksons gang.

Back in the '70s or early '80s it might have seemed a good idea for a black comedian such as Lenny Henry to work with a racist comic. It wasn't. It really, really wasn't. By providing a platform for these folk we make their 'humour' acceptable.

Chris Boardman has done a lot for UK cycling. Being involved in this was a gaffe of Bernard Manning proportions. What the hell did you expect to happen?