Authors: Russell Brand
When they spoke of the ordinary deprivation of their origin and how it had been replaced by noble codes and duties, I teared up a little. By now I had put on my normal clothes and let my hair down; having made my point over ten kilometers, I needed to assert my cherished individuality again. I was envious and admiring of these reformed and gracious lads who had had their lives turned around.
I understood the pride—yes, pride, in both senses: honor in identity and unity of group that the onlooking sergeant had engendered.
“The Marines is unequivocally a good thing,” I concluded. Then I realized that if at any moment that sergeant sharply barked, “KILL MR. BRAND,” the boys would unthinkingly, unblinkingly, in one well-oiled, instantaneous clockwork blur, stand, aim, and shoot me dead, then sit and resume answering whatever question I’d been asking when they shot me.
The training removes the gap that exists between command and action; the protocol is inserted at an instinctual level, way down in the swamp of the mind.
The manipulation of ancient codes, the management of instincts—this is the mode of our day. The same way the computer I type this on has pop-up reminders to back up my phone or observe a birthday, we have in our own programming inherent alarms and systems. Procreate, form bonds, suspect strangers, be wary in new lands.
The same way our once-useful drive to consume scarcely available fat and sugar has become a debilitating hindrance in our menagerie of abundance, so too do our other instincts misfire, here in captivity.
These young men that are trained to kill are a fine example. What is training other than the emphasis on a particular set of behaviors? One need spend but a moment watching Andy Murray to recognize that his energy resources have been exclusively directed at proficiency in tennis to the observable detriment of other capabilities. In a press conference, he stares with juvenile unease at his heavily sponsored shoes. On the court, he is alive and firing.
I expect Andy Murray sacrificed a lot to achieve his excellence. The essence of sacrifice is yielding to a higher purpose. In his case, sporting supremacy.
In martial environments like the Marines or extremist training camps, pertinent information and behaviors are exalted; information and behaviors that are detrimental to the common cause are eliminated as best as possible. Humanity still echoes, though, around
the mind of an assassin as he looms above his hostage. Some irremovable cue—a tear, a cry, a smile like your mother’s—and the training peels back like old paint.
I suppose the discomfort around homosexuality in the military is an acknowledgment that a competing primal force, like sexuality, can reasonably vie with the tribalism and competitiveness harnessed by these militia ideologues. Sexuality and love.
I
DON’T WRITE THIS FROM A
T
EFLON EDIFICE OF HAUGHTY OBJECTIVITY
: The World Cup is on at the moment, England have just gone out in the group stages, and I have been yanked by atavistic strings into all manner of patriotic contortions. I watched England’s decisive match against Uruguay and weighed my personal requirements against the needs of the team.
“What would I give up for Ross Barkley to score, to put England level, to keep England in the tournament?” What would I give of myself for this greater good?
The fact is that in that pub under the ninety-minute spell, shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers with shared intentions, these psychological offerings were de rigueur. Everyone was thinking it. Everyone there felt the indescribable yearning.
Those feelings and urges lie latent, like flowers for Diana.
Before she dies, on a garage forecourt sit mixed carnations, indistinct in a green bucket. Then the news—Diana has died; the emotion is provoked, the sediment stirs, and now these petrol-infused and hopeless blooms have a destination. They are glumly collected en route to Kensington Palace and left in the cellophane tide that crashes like a drenched insistent knell at the gates.
The British people’s demands become childish. “Why isn’t the flag at half-mast?”
“Where is our Queen?”
In the madness of abstract bereavement, demented and priapic,
we demand palpable signs, roused to fury by the mournographic onslaught.
The situationists are right, we are drifting through space like Sandra Bullock in
Gravity
(a film in which gravity hardly ever appeared—what a swizz): no moral context, no cohesive story, no God, no one another.
The sudden withdrawal of the beautiful face of a seemingly kindly stranger is too real for us to bear.
What were the English before England, before the Romans, before the Normans, before the Celts? What name did we give ourselves? What calendar did we mark? What princess did we grieve for then?
In Albion when the sun rose, in Albion when the grass blows, in Albion when you hear sparrows in the hawthorns, who is your God then? Before there were three lions on a shirt, and one swoosh on a shoe, and an apple on your phone, who was your God then? Before Google and Gaga and Yahoo and Fanta, at what altar did we kneel then?
When we had Galahad and Merlin and Guinevere and Arthur, was there still this lack like a heart with alopecia?
Is there an emptiness in you as you walk your land, uneasy feet on uneasy streets, uneasy in the bedroom, uneasy even in the mirror, an uneasy creep to uneasy sleep, pulling the bedsheets up close; checking your phone, checking your phone, checking you’re not here all alone, to die alone?
How long can you go on like this? Have you made a pact? Will you hang on and hope you endure like Methuselah?
I read some chump’s upended brain dump: “Does Russell Brand know the Revolution he’s demanding would render his millionaire, movie-star position redundant?” You query this even as the tomb calls?
“How can he talk of Revolution, riding round his ivory tower on his high horse?”
Do you not see the gathering carrion, the black-and-white magpie sky? I know the band on the
Titanic
played on. Do you want to expire watching MTV, biting down on Hubba Bubba like a gum bridle as you canter to the knacker’s yard?
I
WENT ON A MARCH TO END AUSTERITY
. I
TELL YOU, THE
M
ARINES
march with more purpose. When ISIS move on Damascus, they stay on the saddle not fallen like Saul. When we march, we march for change; the march shows unity and it shows movement. I felt neither; I saw intransigent lines and people contentedly perched on either side.
Peaceful protest needn’t be flaccid. I felt that what was missing was faith, real faith, faith with intention. Activism too, it seems, will be increasingly played out on the cyber battlefields drawn by Anonymous and other Hacktivists. Nerd warlords like Edward Snowden, Aaron Swartz, and Jeremy Hammond have staked their lives and freedom in the conflict that, with my limited imagination, I can only envisage as
Tron
. Whilst the immaterial land of the Internet is corporately colonized, an invisible army fights to prevent digital flags being planted. By supporting vanguard organizations like these, as well as more-traditional protest movements, consensual momentum will eclipse the brittle scaffold of convention.
Whilst I like stability, routine, and comfort, I know I can handle disruption, and that is, I suppose, a good thing to know if you want the world to change.
Of course, there is a perennial war to fight against hypocrisy and sin and old programming. I can keep the patriotism and conformity under relatively good control when in England, as it’s trumped by anti-establishmentarianism. In America, though, I’m like some
St. George’s flag-draped John Bull, Enoch Powell character, defending the honor of the crown, shouting down Yankee insurgents.
When the royal wedding was on, I watched it; I nearly got hooked on
Downton Abbey;
I took part in the Olympics closing ceremony—all because of some infantile hook I’ve been unable to unsnag from my cheek. These techniques work. When I met the Queen, I almost curtsied. I have to force myself to resist the Disney charm of the royal family. They are part of a cultural narrative that’s as lazily entrenched as the spaceman wallpaper on my childhood bedroom wall. Their presence lights up the deeper pathways of my mind too, my yearning for structure and hierarchy. Then, more innocuously and rationally, every day I read stories about Harry’s bonhomie and Will’s imperial grace. The ordinariness of the new one, George, tethers this pantheon to the quotidian, as child seats are fitted and first steps taken. But if wisdom is acting on knowledge, they have to go. This luminous centerpiece of our neon matrix.
They are a symbol of ideas that do nothing but hurt: That class is okay, natural, normal, good. Privilege, excess, violence, oppression, nation. The abolition of the monarchy would be a powerful symbolic victory for a new world. A significant and necessary victory, though, would be a demonstrable cowing of our real opponents, the real masters of our universe: global corporations.
We are constantly goaded and pricked into localized resentment of impotent targets, on the basis of their nationality or sexuality or physical “difference.” The common thread shared by those consistently targeted is that they have no significant wealth or power.
Immigrants, for example, are not a wealthy demographic of fat cats, living it up on the spoils of the 2008 financial crash. Typically they are the most vulnerable, underserved, and exploited strata of society. I chatted to a cab driver yesterday, and he said he felt that Ukip represented him because of their stance on immigration. “It’s not all immigrants,” he stressed, “just the ones that come to this country to exploit our resources and give nothing back.”
I, of course, told him that what he was describing, whilst an appealing story, is a barely relevant fragment of the whole truth. That
the charge of exploiting our country, not contributing, and using our resources is much more legitimately leveled at multinational corporations: Vodafone, Starbucks, Boots, Topshop, all massive organizations that exploit our country and its infrastructure without giving back.
Their impact is far more significant than that of immigrants. Philip Green, who owns Topshop, is one of the wealthiest men in this country, yet he pays less personal tax to support the nation from which he extracted his wealth than the cleaners who work on the floors of his store.
I would love to say to every working person being pushed to the right by the inefficiency, indifference, and corruption of our politicians, “You are looking in the wrong direction.” Every time anti-Islamic fervor is stirred, our true exploiters rub their hands, knowing their marauding can continue.
As I keep saying, I am from Grays. I am from a place where Ukip have been voted in. Barking, in Newham, east London, where I lived with my nan as a kid, has always had occasional right-wing flare-ups. This frustration you feel towards immigrants and Muslims, this sense that you are being duped and ripped off: Can we all come together, just for a few years, and focus this antipathy on its rightful recipients? The banks, the government, the big corporations?
If you want to reapportion money and power you have to target the people and institutions that have it, not other poor people who are slightly different. Just for a few years let’s focus, together, on the people that have the power. Bring the passion of the terraces to the places of their work. Fill the streets with ordinary people of every color, alignment, and faith and together demand our country back. Demand a fair deal. Demand that which is already ours but will never be freely given and can never be achieved until we overlook the superficial differences and distinctions that they lower like a veil between us and we unite to overcome them. Then, if in a few years, if that hasn’t changed the world, let’s go back to killing one another.
For now, though, let’s kill a corporation.
This idea, I’m at pains to point out, like all the good ideas in this book, is not mine. I’ve always suspected that there were loads of viable social systems out there that were kept hush-hush because it would subvert the current order, and I was right.
Already we have realized that we could radically alter trade agreements to support the needs of the people and the planet, like supporting localized organic farming instead of assisting big businesses profit from mad endeavors like importing and exporting the same quantities of food and sending apples across the globe to be polished like spoilt brats before being sent home.
We have learned that we have to impede energy companies’ ability to profit from irresponsible practices in oil refining and fracking and convert to responsible, renewable energy.
We have learned that canceling personal debt would stimulate the economy more than any “too big to fail” bank quantitative easing.
That the money given to these corrupt institutions could easily be given to pay people to build a better society for us all.
That wealthy institutions and individuals denied the right to entomb themselves with private security would become more accessible and responsible.
That titles are used to create acceptance of exploitative hierarchies and we should remove these outmoded symbols of inequality and oppression.
That centralized and detached power, whether from the private sector or the state, disempowers people and that we need to be responsible for our own communities and government, which we can now achieve through technology.
From highly respected experts like Thomas Piketty and Naomi Klein, we have learned that, importantly, this change will not come without cohesive, unified resistance. We all need to come together and confront our shared enemy. The opponents of each of us, who come to our countries, use structures built by our efforts, and give nothing back in return.
And I’m not talking about immigrants.
The idea to kill a corporation comes from the magazine
Adbusters
.
In the issue I’m reading at the moment, the July 2014 issue, they point out that the 100 largest corporations in the world produce $7 trillion in sales and have $10 trillion in assets. With this money, they control governments through lobbying and donations, fund academic research so that the “scientific” view of the world adheres to their perspective—e.g., “There is no climate change”—and, most importantly, dominate consciousness by graffitiing our shared spaces and media with their peculiar philosophies.