I think before we begin it's worth just taking a minute; taking a minute to let your eyes glide over that headline. Drink it in. Luxuriate over each word. Alan Sugar - the man who, physiologically answers the question "What would the child of a cockney bulldog and an old leather jacket look like?", him; that man. That man who hosts The Apprentice and spends a significant portion of his year smashing the hopes and dreams of largely awful people who refer to themselves as 'entrepreneurs'. That man, Alan Sugar, he believes that industrially-produced chart music's Taylor Swift, has gotten a tattoo of a swastika on her face.
Eh I don't get this . Can someone explain is she making a statement or what ? https://t.co/C0zBVIcuQs
— Lord Sugar (@Lord_Sugar) April 26, 2018
As we can see, the reason Lord Alan Sugar thinks that this has happened is due to him misconstruing an article from the satirical publication The Onion as being a real piece of news. Now, I am not going to berate Alan Sugar for not knowing that The Onion is a satirical publication. Frankly I can't imagine Alan Sugar is someone too well-versed in the world of online satire. And that is perfectly fine. I can't imagine that successfully administrating several companies with a collective net worth in the billions of pounds leaves much time for keeping up with web-based satire. He's a busy man. His days are largely taken up with pointing aggressively at his underlings and dismissing them. One can only imagine the amount of paperwork associated with executing redundancies on the kind of scale Lord Sugar has grown accustomed to.
While many on Twitter wasted no time in berating Lord Sugar for not realising that The Onion was a satirical website, his willingness to not question the source of the news is not what is so astounding here. In Alan Sugar's world, it is, to Alan Sugar, a believably plausible scenario that Taylor Swift would get a swastika tattooed onto her face. To Alan Sugar, everything that he has thusfar heard about Taylor Swift, has led him to form an image of a woman who, it would not be entirely incongruous for, to get the emblem of the vilest political regime this world has ever known tattooed onto her cheek.
Alan Sugar has perhaps heard of Taylor Swift from a nephew. Alan Sugar has perhaps been at a wedding; or out shopping; or sitting in a chauffeur driven car, and a song has started playing. "Who's that?" Alan Sugar would've asked, bemused by this previously unknown music entering into his world. "That," Alan Sugar's nephew/chauffer would've replied, "Is Taylor Swift." Alan Sugar would've sat there, allowing this new name, to wash over him. He would've listened to the music and he would've thought to himself, "Catchy as this is, based on my fleeting knowledge of her thusfar, it is not outside the realms of possibility that she may wish to one day emblazen her face with a swastika. I, Alan Sugar, do not like this. I must do something to appease the anger that I feel within at this great injustice." And then he would've fired his chauffer/nephew*.
When it was quickly made clear to Alan Sugar that he had made - what, if this were a trashy tabloid I would call - a colossal gaffe, instead of deleting his Tweet, he acknowledged that he had been hood-winked.
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Thanks to so many people informing me that Onion is a spoof site. I thought it was strange to show Taylor Swift in that way. https://t.co/rTGPA31Bch
— Lord Sugar (@Lord_Sugar) April 26, 2018
For a brief few moments however, we lived in that world. The world where Alan Sugar was going about his business believing that Taylor Swift had a swastika inked onto her face. Perhaps he was sitting there, in his luxurious cockney home where all the furniture is made of reclaimed leather and unsold DVDs of independent British films starring Danny Dyer, maybe eating some muesli, thinking. Thinking his thoughts about Taylor Swift and her race-war promoting face.
*How does one fire a nephew you may ask? Easy. Put them up for adoption after bribing the parents and promising to get them a replacement son of at least equivalent, if not superior, quality.
EDITOR'S NOTE, N.B.: In trying to find a featured image to use for this article, I searched 'Alan Sugar' in a well-known stock image library. Only two results appeared. One was a photograph of Alan Sugar with his wife attending some sort of red-carpeted event - a reasonable enough photograph to appear given the circumstances. The other was a photograph of four King Size Lion Bars sort of gaffer-taped together into a large chocolatey bundle (pictured below). The fourLion Bars are apparently of Romanian extraction, according to the accompanying description of the photograph. They are also apparently 'More Crunchy'. More crunchy than what? I do not know. Perhaps they are more crunchy than previous iterations of the bar? Perhaps they are more crunchy than Alan Sugar? I still, do not know.
