Naughtie's Shaft of Wit

BBC veteran James Naughtie caused much hilarity last week by inadvertently re-naming Tory Nobody Jeremy Hunt in the finest Cockney Rhyming-Slang style. A new euphemism is born, and a very useful one too.
Naughtie blamed Reverend Spooner for his bungle. Naturally this blog deplores such facile displays of logo-tistical dexterity. But it has to be said that Naughtie did not perform a Spoonerism, but merely muffed his lines, possibly because of Freudian slippage, possibly not.
When Robert Newton uttered the famous out-take 'Arrr, Jam Lid!' on the set of Treasure Island - that was a Spoonerism. The title of this blog, for reasons I've forgotten, is a Spoonerism.
Scum scaremonger Richard Littlejohn, however, is simply a cunt. And the shafts of wit by fellow-traveller Jeremy Clarkson will never be the same again either.

Jeremy Clarkson. This Year's Hitler.

Since the uninvited assistance from 'Godwin's Law' it is now an internet taboo to refer to Hitler and the Nazis as epitomies of Evil and a world gone mad - which was the one benefit of their legacy. So someone else had to fill the rhetorical gap. Step forward Jeremy Clarkson - the arrogant, feckless, petrified adolescent who has managed to make himself a symbol of all that's wrong with a society sticking its head in the sand over its responsibilities to future generations of people. It's a lousy job, but someone has to do it, and Clarkson will do fine. He won't mind.
It's a good thing that, unlike Hitler, Clarkson is not a real person. But nevertheless, how he, and his armies of disciples, will cope with the death of the car industry is still matter of real concern. The millions of addicts to petro-porn who tune in every day to Top Gear on BBC or Dave will notice that their regular fix isn't hitting the spot as it used to. It will be cut with more and more low-octane features on diesel and hybrids and convoying technology, when what they want is a big red Fasterati Fallus Stigging through 'Hammerhead' on its way to a record time which Little Big Teeth won't be able to stick at the top of the table.
With hilarious consequences.
Top Gear has drooled over the possibilities of hydrogen power for a while. James May insists over and over that the technology is clean and harmless and fun and fast. 'All it produces is water'.
Unfortunately, he doesn't tend to talk about the carbon cost of producing the hydrogen fuel in the first place. Which leaves our credulous petrolheads imagining a future which is reassuringly the same as today, only without the guilt. When they finally begin to realise the damage done by the car to the cities it now owns, and the lives of the generations forced off the streeets and into their bedrooms in front of their fattening screens, they might realise that there is still some damage which the hydrogen cell will not cure. Carbonisation is not the only crime of the car.
And as any viable hydrogen car is still at least a decade away from mass production, it is all a bit academic. It will be too late by then for the car industry to retool itself to undo much of the environmental damage it has already caused.

In Memory Of The Gas Buggy. Here's To You, Mrs Robinson.

In what must have been 1930 at the latest, Mrs Robinson, one of James Thurber's 'aged coloured washerwomen' prophesied:

"... the oil supplies of the world are being dried up in order to prevent future wars. This will also put and end forever to pleasure driving, but that is alright because, if people kept on riding in cars, they would soon lose the use of both legs, and the life of man would pass from the earth."

Which put her several decades in front of most of the politicians, technocrats and businessmen of the last 80 years. Ignoring those words in that little New Yorker sketch is now costing the US taxpayer $34,000,000,000 - at the latest count. And has, to do full justice to Mrs Robinson, cost millions of US people their health - if the alarming obesity statistics are to be believed. And as to the future of the 'life of man on earth', her instinct is as eloquent as David Attenborough and all his gorillas. The car is a bit of an environmental and social culprit all round, in spite of its many short term benefits. And the US dependency on cars makes it one of the culprits of global warming and the global economic crash - which oversold credit on car purchases just as it did on the property market.
Obama's proposals for a green, revolutionary automotive industry, with its hi-tech holy grail of cheap, sustainable mobility, are only a possibility and are primarily a means of preventing mass unemployment rather than a long-term environmental strategy, but they are a step to satisfying the historical inevitability of Mrs Robinson's wisdom while at the same time giving Jeremy Clarkson time to finish his memoirs in peace. I can hardly wait.