Revolution? My Arse!
David Aaronovitch performed a great public service in dismantling the giant, yet remarkably inconsequential, ego that is Russell Brand.
"Life is full of contradictions and compromises of the kind that can mean condemning, say, the long-distance transportation of foodstuffs, while oneself (Brand) choosing to get married in a tiger sanctuary in India."
You say you want a revolution? My arse!
By David Aaronovitch -The Times
One night, two weeks ago, the comedian and revolutionary Russell Brand attended a Guardian event where an Oxford-educated man with a Welsh name (Owen Jones) asked him nothing, and where he was loved-up by a simpering audience (“I’ve not got the emotional maturity not to fall in love with you,” he was told by India from Brighton), and then went post-haste to the BBC Newsnight studio where he was asked gentle questions by an Oxford-educated man with a Welsh name, and shown a graph.
Perhaps the contrast between the two events was too sudden for a smooth adjustment. Brand was rude and surly. “This is the stuff people like you use to confuse people like us,” he told the interviewer, Evan Davis, about the graph, and then added a complaint about “an Oxford-educated man being rude to me, an autodidact”.
Having read his new book — which is uniquely worthless both as an exercise in writing and as a manifesto for social change — I feel able to dismiss Brand’s new self-ascriptions, both as self-taught man and revolutionary. He is neither.
An autodidact is not someone who, as Brand does, summons up a convenient line from Goethe cut and pasted from the endless shallows of Wikiquote (or, more probably, gets someone else to do it). An autodidact is, rather, someone who learns German and reads the original — as my father did. As to revolutionaries — successful ones tend, unlike Brand, to have plans and strategies, which is what makes them formidable, if no fun at orgies.
Far from being an autodidact, Brand creates a wall of sound and words designed to drown out the possibility of thought. He follows nothing through, sticks with nothing, but flits like a medallioned moth between sensations.
Although he is certainly bright enough to learn difficult things in a rigorous way, he is nowhere near disciplined enough to do it. So you have to describe him as self-dumbed-down. He is, if you like, auto-plumbic.
And far from being a revolutionary, he is really just another celebrity on an ego-trip. I don’t mean by that that he doesn’t care for the poor, the huddled masses and especially for the addicts. I don’t even mean that he is a hypocrite because he’s a millionaire, is discriminating enough only to have serious relationships with wealthy pop stars and heiresses and is chauffeur-driven everywhere.
Life is full of contradictions and compromises of the kind that can mean condemning, say, the long-distance transportation of foodstuffs, while oneself choosing to get married in a tiger sanctuary in India.
When Brand writes that, “of course I have to change as an individual and part of that will be sharing wealth, though without systemic change that will be a sweet, futile gesture”, I may note that such a sacrifice is just about the only sweet, futile gesture that Brand is not prepared to make, but that doesn’t invalidate any of his ideas.
And it doesn’t need to, because they invalidate themselves. Half of them are the kind of sub-Yoko mysticana that have been the “it’s really all about me” staple of pop stars, actors and princesses since the days of the Maharishi. The lost celebrity discovers its true self in a combination of a selection from transcendental meditation, kundalini yoga, Sufism, kabbalah, pseudoscience, the spiritualism of the Dalai Lama and colonic irrigation.
So Brand’s book is punctuated with dozy hippy drivel such as “If you can transcend the limits of the instinctual and anatomical self, you can become part of a kingdom of unified consciousness defined by power, glory and eternity.” As Lenin never tired of saying.
Brand believes in God. Or a god. And it’s in a chapter based on a Brandian exegesis of the Lord’s Prayer that the reader can find both the best and worst of the author.
There’s an arresting and genuinely well-written passage about his feelings about taking two young women home, partying with them in his Jacuzzi and then discovering himself having sex with them. “Like perfumed and gloss vultures,” he writes, “they peck my carcass and a petit mort is insufficient; I am like Frankenstein here, assembled from boneyard parts.”
I actually began to feel sorry for his alienation, until I remembered what it was he was actually describing. Then I started to worry for the vultures.
And then he adds, appallingly, “I don’t want to be led back to that. I want to be delivered from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever, Amen.” Psalm 23 would have been more appropriate: what to do when your rod and your staff comfort you no longer.
That’s the revolution from within. What about the one from without, the one that will not be a revolution of “guillotines and gulags” (well, they never will be, will they?) but instead “a powerful but gentle process where we align to a new frequency”?
Part of the “gentle process” seems to consist of people looting shops and burning cars because, as the spiritual Brand has somehow discovered, had she still been alive and not trampled by horses “Emily Davison would not be urging the disempowered people of today to vote, she’d be urging them to riot”.
The rest of it is just about “us” spontaneously getting together, taking stuff off people who don’t deserve it, giving it to people who do, and kind of working it out from there. In the epilogue, he finally tells us, in all seriousness, that all we need is love.
None of this would be of any significance if it didn’t tell you something about the retro spirit of the age. We need to find eight billion a year and perform a tricky rebalancing to make the NHS work, and the Brandistas — sweet, sloppy, lazy, entitled and loud — want to yoga and occupy the world back into the Age of Aquarius.
So unthreatening a revolutionary is Russell Brand that (let me now commune with the dead) Stalin would not even have bothered to have him shot. Just as I should not have bothered writing this review.
