the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Why do some people imagine that just because their success in one field of human endeavour has afforded them some measure of celebrity, it somehow confers upon them some kind of greater a moral authority, one that the rest of us should take heed of? 

Gary Crisp, who looks uncannily like Count Arthur Strong without his hat, is a serial offender who it comes to this kind of thing and like Strong, he is a someone who thinks he’s more intelligent than he is and thus fits himself in hot water as a result. Unlike Strong however, this was all done for laughs and unlike Strong, he wasn’t cancelled by the BBC years ago. Resulting in a interview in yesterdays Daily Telegraph in which he gave his opinions on two of the most divisive issues of the day, Gaza and trans.

Quite why anyone care’s what he thinks about anything other than football, I’m not really too sure. It’d be like asking Orson Welles how to bake a cake. But we live in an age where people do and where ‘celebrities’ own ego and sense of self-importance convinces them that they do. We also live in an age in which the media love to give an opportunity for someone like Crisp to say something controversial, because that will ultimately generate more revenue for them. It’s such a mutually beneficial arrangement that its essentially a digital ‘reach around’ 

So Crisp can say, safe in the knowledge that he’s saying the right thing – right in the sense that it won’t harm his career – “I think if you’re silent on these issues, you’re almost complicit.” The problem for him though, is that by not staying silent on these issues he is complicit in revealing himself to be a mental pigmy.

“It’s beyond depraved, what they’re going through, unimaginable. I’ve got kids. They’re grown-up now, but every day people are losing their children, their brothers and sisters. I don’t know how the world thinks this is OK.” Does he not understand what happens in a war? Does  Does he not understand that Israel is surrounded by countries who wish it never existed, or that the founding charter of Hamas espouses jihad – holy war – until Israel is no more. 

“Obviously October 7 was awful, but it’s very important to know your history and to study the massacres that happened prior to this, many of them against the Palestinian people.” There it is, the but. The ‘but’ that somehow transforms anti-Semitism into a bastardized moral equivalence. Is Crisp an authority in Middle Eastern history or is he just a student at the University of Twitter?

The attack by Hamas wasn’t just ‘awful.  Being stuck in a traffic jam is awful. An undercooked meal is awful. Biting into a chocolate only to discover its coffee flavoured that’s awful.  To suggest that the massacre of 1,141 people, the worst single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, was ‘awful’ belies the sheer scale of its barbarity and his stupidity.

He is lives in a country where his stupidity has no cost, where his luxury beliefs are protected by democratic freedoms that the people of Gaza can only dream of. One where having different views won’t make you fearful of a knock on the door at dead of night, one where being gay isn’t seen as a crime, and in a time where one can earn an obscene amount of money by talking  about an irrelevance to adults with who have yet to fully grow up.

He is a highly distilled iteration of the same combination of presumed moral authority, self-importance and entitlement that saw a a load of people most people had never heard of write a letter to The Guardian last week expressing something with some others.

Crisp also has deep feelings for these others. “They’re some of the most persecuted on the planet, trans people. You’ve got to be very careful not to have bigoted views on that. I genuinely feel really badly for trans people. Imagine going through what they have to go through in life. Is there even any issue?”

Of course he thinks that. Once again, at no point in his life will he ever be be confronted with the reality of his luxury beliefs. No man will. No man will ever find women demanding access to mens toilets, no man will themselves losing against mediocre women in sporting competitions just as no man will ever see their identity turned into little more than performative wish fulfilment by deluded women.

Its precisely because he’s so removed from the consequences of his luxury beliefs that he can afford to hold them.   

What a Count.