Sharon Osbourne
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It remains to be seen whether the show will return, whether Sharon Osborne will be replaced as co-host, or whether the forces of good will finally triumph
As a child, I remember the Osbourne family getting a reality show, and hearing that the shuffling, mumbling Ozzy Osbourne had once bitten the head off a dead bat in front of a crowd of Black Sabbath fans.
At the time it was hard for me to process how this shambolic man could once have been capable of such a horrific act, and the mystery of that transformation made him somehow even more terrifying.
I was much less concerned with his wife, Sharon, whose cheery screeching would have seemed at home in a HOA meeting anywhere in the world. To me she seemed like an ordinary suburban mom, unwittingly wedded to an inhuman fiend.
Today, that's no longer the case. I have grown up, Sharon has unmasked herself, and I have come to realize that Ozzy was the innocent victim all along. His dazed shuffling was no act. It wasn't concealing anything.
The recent rumors that he had taken to his deathbed were unfounded, but they reflect a deeper truth. He has long been drained of the dark energy he once held by extended proximity to a more powerful malevolent being. Sharon Osbourne is my new nightmare fuel.
She revealed her true form on a December 26th episode of the BBC game show Would I Lie to You? The format of the show involves celebrity panelists telling outrageous stories about themselves, which the other panelists have to judge to be either true or lies.
The story Sharon told about herself spoke of such outrageous and oblivious cruelty that there was no question she was telling the truth. Her summary of the events tells the story plainly enough: "I once sacked a member of my staff because he showed absolutely no sense of humor during a house fire."
Did Ozzy Osbourne on FIRE get his assistant sacked?! | Would I Lie To You - BBCwww.youtube.com
Generally the summaries on this show — when the stories are true — are revealed to be slightly hyperbolic versions of the actual events, exaggerated so their fellow panelists will mistake them for lies. But as the panelists dug into Sharon's story, the details become more and more upsetting.
She describes a mishap that unfolded with a candle gifted to the family for Christmas, with the result that she woke up to find their living room and half of Ozzy's hair on fire. After a failed attempt of whacking him with a magazine, she managed to douse her husband by pushing him into the fountain.
That part is fine — even if she does claim to have been laughing at his suffering. Where the horror begins is when Ozzy's assistant enters the picture. When panelist Liz Bonnin — known for presenting wildlife programs in the UK — asks where the assistant was throughout this first part of the story, Osbourne responds, with disgust twisting her features, "Sleeping!"
She seems to think that it's this assistant's responsibility to operate at such a pure level of subservience that sleep ceases to be a basic bodily function and only serves as a standby state for such times when assistance isn't needed. Bonnin's baffled, "How dare he…?" summarizes the natural human response to this level of entitlement, but Osbourne is just getting started.
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Her next step was to rouse the assistant from the guest house and send him into the burning building to retrieve the family's dogs, but not before grabbing valuable paintings. It's certainly understandable that a person would want their pets rescued in a situation like this, and maybe even ask someone else to do the saving if you don't feel up to it yourself.
It may not be a reasonable request, but emotions run high when pets are in danger. But the paintings? Do they not have insurance on these valuable works of art?
If I were the kind of person who valued my things above the safety and well-being of humans, I would definitely get those things insured. But maybe for Sharon Osbourne, having a disposable underling on hand is the best kind of insurance. That seems to be her thinking when she complains that he was "hemming and hawing" at the order to re-enter the burning building that she herself would not go into.
The most disturbing part of the story comes after the arrival of firefighters, who provide the assistant with an oxygen mask to ameliorate the risk of Carbon Monoxide poisoning. In her own words, Sharon Osbourne's response was to say, "How very dare you! You work here, and you get more paintings out right now!" and to pull the oxygen mask from his face and give it to her dog instead. The hierarchy of value in her head is so clearly warped to only account for what serves her needs and desires.
A dog has value as a companion, a painting has value as an asset, but a worker has no value as a human — only as means to their employer's ends. Their reliance on her wealth renders them subhuman.
Later on, when Sharon and Ozzy were laughing about the incident and the assistant expressed some small portion of their resentment at this inhumane treatment and the trauma Sharon Osbourne had inflicted — as well as some concern about the health of their lungs — Sharon, rolling her eyes, recounts saying, "If you don't think that's funny, do you think this is funny… you're fired."
No one thinks it's funny, Sharon. You seem to think this is a story of you being sassy and tough, but the truth is that you are the kind of monster that keeps sane people up at night. At this point, biting the head off a bat would humanize you.
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