Comedian Actor Russel Brand dismantles MSNBC show

[The Consul]

It starts when he says "I'm only flesh and blood. I have instincts."

Shoft grosper! Perfect.

I don't think Hey Joe could have handled it. He probably would have bashed Mika's brains out on his desk after the show.

[Luther Blissett]

At least amongst my peers, this video was everywhere yesterday.

And today, on the front page of reddit, is the smear:
TIL that Russell Brand was fired from MTV for dressing up like Osama Bin Laden the day after 9/11.
From a user who seems quite apolitical and interested in juvenile humor otherwise.

[streeb]

The latter? No doubt.

The former. Link?

There's so much here that I could highlight, but fuck it. It's better to just let it unfold.

Russell Brand on Margaret Thatcher: 'I always felt sorry for her children'

One Sunday recently while staying in London, I took a stroll in the gardens of Temple, the insular clod of quads and offices between the Strand and the Embankment. It's kind of a luxury rent-controlled ghetto for lawyers and barristers, and there is a beautiful tailors, a fine chapel, established by the Knights Templar (from which the compound takes its name), a twee cottage designed by Sir Christopher Wren and a rose garden; which I never promised you.

My mate John and I were wandering there together, he expertly proselytising on the architecture and the history of the place, me pretending to be Rumpole of the Bailey (quietly in my mind), when we spied in the distant garden a hunched and frail figure, in a raincoat, scarf about her head, watering the roses under the breezy supervision of a masticating copper. "What's going on there, mate?" John asked a nearby chippy loading his white van. "Maggie Thatcher," he said. "Comes here every week to water them flowers." The three of us watched as the gentle horticultural ritual was feebly enacted, then regarded the Iron Lady being helped into the back of a car and trundling off. In this moment she inspired only curiosity, a pale phantom, dumbly filling her day. None present eyed her meanly or spoke with vitriol and it wasn't until an hour later that I dreamt up an Ealing comedy-style caper in which two inept crooks kidnap Thatcher from the garden but are unable to cope with the demands of dealing with her, and finally give her back. This reverie only occurred when the car was out of view. In her diminished presence I stared like an amateur astronomer unable to describe my awe at this distant phenomenon.

When I was a kid, Thatcher was the headmistress of our country. Her voice, a bellicose yawn, somehow both boring and boring – I could ignore the content but the intent drilled its way in. She became leader of the Conservatives the year I was born and prime minister when I was four. She remained in power till I was 15. I am, it's safe to say, one of Thatcher's children. How then do I feel on the day of this matriarchal mourning?

I grew up in Essex with a single mum and a go-getter Dagenham dad. I don't know if they ever voted for her, I don't know if they liked her. My dad, I suspect, did. He had enough Del Boy about him to admire her coiffured virility – but in a way Thatcher was so omnipotent; so omnipresent, so omni-everything that all opinion was redundant.

As I scan the statements of my memory bank for early deposits (it'd be a kid's memory bank account at a neurological NatWest where you're encouraged to become a greedy little capitalist with an escalating family of porcelain pigs), I see her in her hairy helmet, condescending on Nationwide, eviscerating eunuch MPs and baffled BBC fuddy duddies with her General Zodd stare and coldly condemning the IRA. And the miners. And the single mums. The dockers. The poll-tax rioters. The Brixton rioters, the Argentinians, teachers; everyone actually.

Thinking about it now, when I was a child she was just a strict woman telling everyone off and selling everything off. I didn't know what to think of this fearsome woman.Perhaps my early apathy and indifference are a result of what Thatcher deliberately engendered, the idea that "there is no such thing as society", that we are alone on our journey through life, solitary atoms of consciousness. Or perhaps it was just because I was a little kid and more interested in them Weetabix skinheads, Roland Rat and Knight Rider. Either way, I'm an adult now and none of those things are on telly any more so there's no excuse for apathy.

When John Lennon was told of Elvis Presley's death, he famously responded: "Elvis died when he joined the army," meaning of course, that his combat clothing and clipped hair signalled the demise of the thrusting, Dionysian revolution of which he was the immaculate emblem.

When I awoke today on LA time my phone was full of impertinent digital eulogies. It'd be disingenuous to omit that there were a fair number of ding-dong-style celebratory messages amidst the pensive reflections on the end of an era. Interestingly, one mate of mine, a proper leftie, in his heyday all Red Wedge and right-on punch-ups, was melancholy. "I thought I'd be overjoyed, but really it's just … another one bites the dust …" This demonstrates, I suppose, that if you opposed Thatcher's ideas it was likely because of their lack of compassion, which is really just a word for love. If love is something you cherish, it is hard to glean much joy from death, even in one's enemies.

Perhaps, though, Thatcher "the monster" didn't die yesterday from a stroke, perhaps that Thatcher died as she sobbed self-pitying tears as she was driven, defeated, from Downing Street, ousted by her own party. By then, 1990, I was 15, adolescent and instinctively anti-establishment enough to regard her disdainfully. I'd unthinkingly imbibed enough doctrine to know that, troubled as I was, there was little point looking elsewhere for support. I was on my own. We are all on our own. Norman Tebbit, one of Thatcher's acolytes and fellow "Munsters evacuee", said when the National Union of Mineworkers eventually succumbed to the military onslaught and starvation over which she presided: "We didn't just break the strike, we broke the spell." The spell he was referring to is the unseen bond that connects us all and prevents us from being subjugated by tyranny. The spell of community.

Those strikes were confusing to me as a child. All of the Tory edicts that bludgeoned our nation, as my generation squirmed through ghoulish puberty, were confusing. When all the public amenities were flogged, the adverts made it seem to my childish eyes fun and positive, jaunty slogans and affable British stereotypes jostling about in villages, selling people companies that they'd already paid for through tax. I just now watched the British Gas one again. It's like a whimsical live-action episode of Postman Pat where his cat is craftily carved up and sold back to him.

"The News" was the pompous conduit through which we suckled at the barren baroness through newscaster wet-nurses, naturally; not direct from the steel teat. Jan Leeming, Sue Lawley, Moira Stuart – delivering doctrine with sterile sexiness, like a butterscotch-scented beige vapour. To use a less bizarre analogy: if Thatcher was the headmistress, they were junior teachers, authoritative but warm enough that you could call them "mum" by accident. You could never call Margaret Mother by mistake. For a national matriarch she is oddly unmaternal. I always felt a bit sorry for her biological children Mark and Carol, wondering from whom they would get their cuddles. "Thatcher as mother" seemed, to my tiddly mind, anathema. How could anyone who was so resolutely Margaret Thatcher be anything else? In the Meryl Streep film, The Iron Lady, it's the scenes of domesticity that appear most absurd. Knocking up a flan for Denis or helping Carol with her algebra or Mark with his gun-running, are jarring distractions from the main narrative; woman as warrior queen.

It always struck me as peculiar, too, when the Spice Girls briefly championed Thatcher as an early example of girl power. I don't see that. She is an anomaly; a product of the freak-onomy of her time. Barack Obama, interestingly, said in his statement that she had "broken the glass ceiling for other women". Only in the sense that all the women beneath her were blinded by falling shards. She is an icon of individualism, not of feminism.

I have few recollections of Thatcher after the slowly chauffeured, weepy Downing Street cortege. I'd become a delinquent, living on heroin and benefit fraud.

There were sporadic resurrections. She would appear in public to drape a hankie over a model BA plane tailfin because she disliked the unpatriotic logo with which they'd replaced the union flag (maybe don't privatise BA then), or to shuffle about some country pile arm in arm with a doddery Pinochet and tell us all what a fine fellow he was. It always irks when rightwing folk demonstrate in a familial or exclusive setting the values that they deny in a broader social context. They're happy to share big windfall bonuses with their cronies, they'll stick up for deposed dictator chums when they're down on their luck, they'll find opportunities in business for people they care about. I hope I'm not being reductive but it seems Thatcher's time in power was solely spent diminishing the resources of those who had least for the advancement of those who had most. I know from my own indulgence in selfish behaviour that it's much easier to get what you want if you remove from consideration the effect your actions will have on others.

Is that what made her so formidable, her ability to ignore the suffering of others? Given the nature of her legacy "survival of the fittest" – a phrase that Darwin himself only used twice in On the Origin of Species, compared to hundreds of references to altruism, love and cooperation, it isn't surprising that there are parties tonight in Liverpool, Glasgow and Brixton – from where are they to have learned compassion and forgiveness?

The blunt, pathetic reality today is that a little old lady has died, who in the winter of her life had to water roses alone under police supervision. If you behave like there's no such thing as society, in the end there isn't. Her death must be sad for the handful of people she was nice to and the rich people who got richer under her stewardship. It isn't sad for anyone else. There are pangs of nostalgia, yes, because for me she's all tied up with Hi-De-Hi and Speak and Spell and Blockbusters and "follow the bear". What is more troubling is my inability to ascertain where my own selfishness ends and her neo-liberal inculcation begins. All of us that grew up under Thatcher were taught that it is good to be selfish, that other people's pain is not your problem, that pain is in fact a weakness and suffering is deserved and shameful. Perhaps there is resentment because the clemency and respect that are being mawkishly displayed now by some and haughtily demanded of the rest of us at the impending, solemn ceremonial funeral, are values that her government and policies sought to annihilate.

I can't articulate with the skill of either of "the Marks" – Steel or Thomas – why Thatcher and Thatcherism were so bad for Britain but I do recall that even to a child her demeanour and every discernible action seemed to be to the detriment of our national spirit and identity. Her refusal to stand against apartheid, her civil war against the unions, her aggression towards our neighbours in Ireland and a taxation system that was devised in the dark ages, the bombing of a retreating ship – it's just not British.

I do not yet know what effect Margaret Thatcher has had on me as an individual or on the character of our country as we continue to evolve. As a child she unnerved me but we are not children now and we are free to choose our own ethical codes and leaders that reflect them.

[slimmouse]

Reading that last piece has truly made my day. Many thanks Streeb.

When I first read it, I hadn't noticed who the author was.

My summary having done so?

May the force be with Russell Brand

It surely has to be with him, when you can write and think from the soul like that.

[barracuda]

What I see in the OP video is three people semi-silently considering what it might be like to fuck Russell Brand.

[slimmouse]

What I see in the OP video is three people semi-silently considering what it might be like to fuck Russell Brand.

Well all I can say is that it surely wouldnt be a bad idea for the three semi silent ( in so many ways) to attempt to understand where the man is coming from and subseuquently get it on with him spiritually.

It would probably turn out to be quite the thrill, even if it wasn't the kind of thrill they might have hoped for.

[streeb]

Glad you enjoyed the article, slim.

What I see in the OP video is three people semi-silently considering what it might be like to fuck Russell Brand.

That, sir, is exactly what I saw, too. Most obviously in the flutters that overcame the shaft-grasper. I'm just too inhibited to bring it up.

He's allegedly very good at doing that to people. Jesus... I wanted to fuck him.

[H_C_E]

I had never cared for Brand's humor. But I watched the clip of him on MJ,
and the interview on page one of this thread. I quickly picked up on the fact
that something had changed with him. He was quicker, much more present.

Then I was told that he'd cleaned up. Interesting that George Carlin, Bill Hicks
and now Brand, acquired a serious, previously missing edge after giving up
certain intoxicants. That might not be the case for all people, and it might
help some to *not* clean up. Hell, Robin Williams was much funnier while
he was still coked up. That's my perception anyway.

Wonder what Doug Stanhope would be like if he gave up the alcohol.

Anyway, I think Russell Brand has a potent edge, and he's going to
be a powerful voice for good at a time when it is dearly needed.

How long until sudden cancer?

[stoneonstone]

The Guardian article is extremely thoughtful and articulate. Some extremely well expressed, intelligent observations and summations.

He's made me laugh before. But now I expect he will ultimately meet a bad end.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Tried to watch this a few times now, can't do it. Grates at my soul. I can't tell if it's him or them but suspect it's both. A lot of that has to do with how much I currently look like him, so that's alarming...I also can't watch that free Jesus movie without getting profoundly disoriented.

I think a lot of it is the fact I feel/sense he was trying to emulate John Stewart's turn on Tucker Carlson, in the wrong environment and without as much preparation or focus.

It's not that I dislike the cat -- his outspoken stance re: the War on Drugs is brave and awesome stuff, and he's a funny motherfucker.

Just had a hard time interfacing with this, glad he's making waves, though.

[DrVolin]

That article on Thatcher is an amazing read. I found myself comparing his experience as a child of Thatcher to my own as a child of Pierre Trudeau. Complete opposites. He describes Thatcher as the stern mother, always taking stuff away from people for no discernible reason. Trudeau was the free spirited father, wilfully shocking voluntary outcast, the spoiled brat with a conscience, the pro-union scion of an industrial establishment family, come down, in the words of the great poet Gerald Bostock, from the upper classes to mend our rotten ways, flipping Nixon the bird, driving his kids through the country in a red convertible, and laughing off his wife's rebellious nights at Studio 54. While Thatcher was smashing society, Trudeau was building multiculturalism and teaching us the importance of his effortless bilingualism. In the US, Reagan, more typically for an American, was selling the vision of the City on the Hill. The vision was an illusion, the city unatainable by any road open to you and I. But they believed in it, the Americans, and they still do, armed with the faith of those who need no evidence but that of revelation. And where are we, thirty years on from the three of them? All in the same sad place. Obama, Cameron, Harper; NSA, GCHQ, CSEC; Debt, debt, debt.

[The Consul]

It's all heroin in the handlebars under the bridge now.

[Belligerent Savant]

.

8bit stole my thunder - caught that Brand clip in the last day or so but wasn't in a position to post it


This from a 2011 thread:

I barely know who Russell Brand is. I think he's annoying as shit (once I realized who he was, that guy in the Sarah Marshall movie, which I only have seen because of my stepdaughter).

I thought more or less the same, and knew little of the bloke, but then stumbled upon this interview [it may have been initially linked in this forum somewhere]:

[Part 1]


[Part 2]


Some astute observations on the use of 'celebrity culture' in mainstream media.
One example of someone with a bit more depth than we may initially presume..

http://gawker.com/a-different-kind-of-p ... -511549370

Today marks the eighth day of Bradley Manning's court-martial for leaking more than 700,000 United States government documents to Wikileaks. Although the 25-year-old former Army intelligence analyst has confessed to disclosing classified information, including diplomatic cables and war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq, Manning has not pled guilty to his most serious allegation, “aiding the enemy,” a capital offense that could result in a life sentence.

Many people think this charge—an accusation that purports Manning knew he’d also be giving intelligence to Al Qaeda by leaking sensitive information to Wikileaks—is trumped-up, fear-mongering, fraudulent bullshit. That's the (less polite) perspective of a volunteer group of independent producers and filmmakers, who in collaboration with the Bradley Manning Support Network, spent the last month corralling more than 20 notable figures to appear in the IAmBradleyManning.org video above, a clip they're releasing for the first time in full here today.

Among the recognizable figures who agreed to voice their disapproval of Manning's treatment are director Oliver Stone, married actors Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard, Pink Floyd's Roger Waters, talk-show icon Phil Donahue, and comedian Russell Brand, who we spoke with about Manning earlier this month, before he publicly shamed a trio of inane MSNBC hosts. Brand was celebrating his 38th birthday on the day we talked and did not find an occasion to call us a "shaft-grasper," unfortunately. A lightly edited transcript of our phone conversation follows.

Why are you talking about Bradley Manning on your birthday?

I don't know a great deal about international espionage, but sometimes one senses that an issue is drifting in a certain direction, and just by speaking out in a small way, you can make a subtle difference on that perception. Some people have made their mind up no matter what: "Bradley Manning is a traitor because of revealing classified information." It's very difficult to impact those people. W.B. Yeats said, The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity. But it might be nice, if I, from my gentle position—bouncing around on the Left elegantly and Englishly—suggest that it doesn't seem like this person is acting particularly out of self-interest, but rather [Manning] was motivated out of a different kind of patriotism: a genuine love of the people of this country and concern for the people.

So what's your realistic expectation when you lend your name to a campaign like this?

That you'll get a degree of abuse from people who are intrinsically opposed. The best you can do is draw the attention of people who are otherwise unsure or curious.

The culture has been expertly constructed so that what's now regarded as esoteric information is everything except for stuff that directly concerns Kim Kardashian. So everything other than that, you might as well be speaking Aristotle in Greek. For me, I live, to a degree, in popular culture. So if I say, "Oh, that Bradley Manning seems that he was really trying his best to expose information he thought was important to American people regarding what was being done in their name," all I'm hoping is that people who would otherwise entirely ignore it may have a flickering awareness, and some who would have had a flickering awareness would investigate further. So it's a very modest ambition. I'm not singlehandedly imagining that I could make any particular impact.

You're Tweeting about what's happening in Turkey, you're Tweeting about supporting Bradley Manning, you're Tweeting links to Kickstarter campaigns. Do you consider that your constant and various endorsements will lessen the impact of your individual involvements?

No. For me, it's like, one day, I'll Tweet a cute little kid saying he wants to be a vegetarian and another a photograph of my mates.

Please—it would be delightful for me that if somewhere among the verbiage, you were to put that I'm under no illusions as to the impact of what I'm saying. I happen to believe that Bradley Manning has the right to a fair trial; it seems clear to me that some of the charges against him are mendacious and duplicitous from the outset. So I'm just saying, "Keep an eye on that." The things I'd say I'm highly qualified to talk about are drugs and alcohol abstinence, social consciousness broadly, and sex. Under my libertarian umbrella, occasionally Bradley Manning or the demonstrations in Turkey will fall under my shade. That's all.

You're British, and this is technically an American situation, so how do you respond to critics who say that Bradley Manning's trial is none of your business?

I think it's a global issue. I eschew those kinds of categorizations at a time when we have to start thinking and behaving as one species in collusion with an ecological system.

Besides, who defines the parameters of these arguments? Hey, an English person can't talk about an American thing! Oh yeah, I remember now, from that rulebook that fell out of the sky at the dawn of time! Hey, what is American by the way? Some word people said in relation to a geographical mass a couple of hundred years ago! [laughing]

As long as you know that all of this stuff is arbitrary—that karate is invention, that Catholicism is invention, that America in an invention—but that humanity is an actual thing, we don't have to all pretend to believe this shit.

What's actually important? A human being doing a thing that was quite bold—possibly from a position of some personal trauma—but that regardless has brought attention to important stuff. We all know that shit goes on! But he's brought palpable, tangible evidence of mendacious—oh no, don't want to use that word again—conduct apparently for the protection or for the furtherment of the American people.

I've reached the point, Camille, where it's an intuitive understanding [that] I don't trust any of these people anymore.

Do you support of the general idea of whistleblowing? Or is your support of Bradley Manning's actions specific?

I think [whistle-blowing] is necessary, Camille. I think it's really brave. We know that institutions have a tendency toward corruption. And we are, to some degree, dependent on people within those institutions to arbitrate their conduct. No one within those institutions in higher positions is going to go, "Oh, we've got to be honest: we've done some dodgy stuff." So it's going to take some sort of rare quirk, some peculiar anomaly like Bradley Manning to demonstrate or highlight injustices.

Do you think Bradley Manning is a hero?

I suppose. But we have to be careful how we use these terms, particularly when you're talking to a journalist. Don't make me look like a dickhead.

I planned to run our conversation.

Will you? How post-modern is this piece of writing on Gawker?

Here's what I would say: If the defining characteristic of heroism, from the perspective of constructing a myth or a screenplay, is the protagonist's way to sacrifice himself for a greater good, by that definition—which I think is as good a definition as any of a hero—then he would have to be.

If you turn that into "yes" when you write this up, then you are bad.

[Belligerent Savant]

.

The latter? No doubt.

The former. Link?

There's so much here that I could highlight, but fuck it. It's better to just let it unfold.

Russell Brand on Margaret Thatcher: 'I always felt sorry for her children'

Conniption also links it in this thread Re: Thatcher:

The Guardian


Russell Brand on Margaret Thatcher: 'I always felt sorry for her children'

The actor and comedian recalls a bizarre recent encounter with the Iron Lady, and how it prompted him to think about growing up under the most unlikely matriarch-figure imaginable

Russell Brand
April 9, 2013
comments (2575)


Margaret Thatcher, the year she became leader of the Conservatives, and the year Russell Brand was born. Photograph: Keystone France

One Sunday recently while staying in London, I took a stroll in the gardens of Temple, the insular clod of quads and offices between the Strand and the Embankment. It's kind of a luxury rent-controlled ghetto for lawyers and barristers, and there is a beautiful tailors, a fine chapel, established by the Knights Templar (from which the compound takes its name), a twee cottage designed by Sir Christopher Wren and a rose garden; which I never promised you.

My mate John and I were wandering there together, he expertly proselytising on the architecture and the history of the place, me pretending to be Rumpole of the Bailey (quietly in my mind), when we spied in the distant garden a hunched and frail figure, in a raincoat, scarf about her head, watering the roses under the breezy supervision of a masticating copper. "What's going on there, mate?" John asked a nearby chippy loading his white van. "Maggie Thatcher," he said. "Comes here every week to water them flowers." The three of us watched as the gentle horticultural ritual was feebly enacted, then regarded the Iron Lady being helped into the back of a car and trundling off. In this moment she inspired only curiosity, a pale phantom, dumbly filling her day. None present eyed her meanly or spoke with vitriol and it wasn't until an hour later that I dreamt up an Ealing comedy-style caper in which two inept crooks kidnap Thatcher from the garden but are unable to cope with the demands of dealing with her, and finally give her back. This reverie only occurred when the car was out of view. In her diminished presence I stared like an amateur astronomer unable to describe my awe at this distant phenomenon.

When I was a kid, Thatcher was the headmistress of our country. Her voice, a bellicose yawn, somehow both boring and boring – I could ignore the content but the intent drilled its way in. She became leader of the Conservatives the year I was born and prime minister when I was four. She remained in power till I was 15. I am, it's safe to say, one of Thatcher's children. How then do I feel on the day of this matriarchal mourning?

I grew up in Essex with a single mum and a go-getter Dagenham dad. I don't know if they ever voted for her, I don't know if they liked her. My dad, I suspect, did. He had enough Del Boy about him to admire her coiffured virility – but in a way Thatcher was so omnipotent; so omnipresent, so omni-everything that all opinion was redundant.

As I scan the statements of my memory bank for early deposits (it'd be a kid's memory bank account at a neurological NatWest where you're encouraged to become a greedy little capitalist with an escalating family of porcelain pigs), I see her in her hairy helmet, condescending on Nationwide, eviscerating eunuch MPs and baffled BBC fuddy duddies with her General Zodd stare and coldly condemning the IRA. And the miners. And the single mums. The dockers. The poll-tax rioters. The Brixton rioters, the Argentinians, teachers; everyone actually.


Margaret Thatcher visits Falkland Islands Margaret Thatcher visiting British troops on the Falkland Islands in 1983: the war was a turning point in her premiership. Photograph: taken from picture library

Thinking about it now, when I was a child she was just a strict woman telling everyone off and selling everything off. I didn't know what to think of this fearsome woman.

Perhaps my early apathy and indifference are a result of what Thatcher deliberately engendered, the idea that "there is no such thing as society", that we are alone on our journey through life, solitary atoms of consciousness. Or perhaps it was just because I was a little kid and more interested in them Weetabix skinheads, Roland Rat and Knight Rider. Either way, I'm an adult now and none of those things are on telly any more so there's no excuse for apathy.

When John Lennon was told of Elvis Presley's death, he famously responded: "Elvis died when he joined the army," meaning of course, that his combat clothing and clipped hair signalled the demise of the thrusting, Dionysian revolution of which he was the immaculate emblem.

When I awoke today on LA time my phone was full of impertinent digital eulogies. It'd be disingenuous to omit that there were a fair number of ding-dong-style celebratory messages amidst the pensive reflections on the end of an era. Interestingly, one mate of mine, a proper leftie, in his heyday all Red Wedge and right-on punch-ups, was melancholy. "I thought I'd be overjoyed, but really it's just … another one bites the dust …" This demonstrates, I suppose, that if you opposed Thatcher's ideas it was likely because of their lack of compassion, which is really just a word for love. If love is something you cherish, it is hard to glean much joy from death, even in one's enemies.

Perhaps, though, Thatcher "the monster" didn't die yesterday from a stroke, perhaps that Thatcher died as she sobbed self-pitying tears as she was driven, defeated, from Downing Street, ousted by her own party. By then, 1990, I was 15, adolescent and instinctively anti-establishment enough to regard her disdainfully. I'd unthinkingly imbibed enough doctrine to know that, troubled as I was, there was little point looking elsewhere for support. I was on my own. We are all on our own. Norman Tebbit, one of Thatcher's acolytes and fellow "Munsters evacuee", said when the National Union of Mineworkers eventually succumbed to the military onslaught and starvation over which she presided: "We didn't just break the strike, we broke the spell." The spell he was referring to is the unseen bond that connects us all and prevents us from being subjugated by tyranny. The spell of community.

Those strikes were confusing to me as a child. All of the Tory edicts that bludgeoned our nation, as my generation squirmed through ghoulish puberty, were confusing. When all the public amenities were flogged, the adverts made it seem to my childish eyes fun and positive, jaunty slogans and affable British stereotypes jostling about in villages, selling people companies that they'd already paid for through tax. I just now watched the British Gas one again. It's like a whimsical live-action episode of Postman Pat where his cat is craftily carved up and sold back to him.


The Orgreave miners' strike in 1984. The Orgreave miners' strike in 1984. Photograph: Alamy

"The News" was the pompous conduit through which we suckled at the barren baroness through newscaster wet-nurses, naturally; not direct from the steel teat. Jan Leeming, Sue Lawley, Moira Stuart – delivering doctrine with sterile sexiness, like a butterscotch-scented beige vapour. To use a less bizarre analogy: if Thatcher was the headmistress, they were junior teachers, authoritative but warm enough that you could call them "mum" by accident. You could never call Margaret Mother by mistake. For a national matriarch she is oddly unmaternal. I always felt a bit sorry for her biological children Mark and Carol, wondering from whom they would get their cuddles. "Thatcher as mother" seemed, to my tiddly mind, anathema. How could anyone who was so resolutely Margaret Thatcher be anything else? In the Meryl Streep film, The Iron Lady, it's the scenes of domesticity that appear most absurd. Knocking up a flan for Denis or helping Carol with her algebra or Mark with his gun-running, are jarring distractions from the main narrative; woman as warrior queen.

It always struck me as peculiar, too, when the Spice Girls briefly championed Thatcher as an early example of girl power. I don't see that. She is an anomaly; a product of the freak-onomy of her time. Barack Obama, interestingly, said in his statement that she had "broken the glass ceiling for other women". Only in the sense that all the women beneath her were blinded by falling shards. She is an icon of individualism, not of feminism.

I have few recollections of Thatcher after the slowly chauffeured, weepy Downing Street cortege. I'd become a delinquent, living on heroin and benefit fraud.

There were sporadic resurrections. She would appear in public to drape a hankie over a model BA plane tailfin because she disliked the unpatriotic logo with which they'd replaced the union flag (maybe don't privatise BA then), or to shuffle about some country pile arm in arm with a doddery Pinochet and tell us all what a fine fellow he was. It always irks when rightwing folk demonstrate in a familial or exclusive setting the values that they deny in a broader social context. They're happy to share big windfall bonuses with their cronies, they'll stick up for deposed dictator chums when they're down on their luck, they'll find opportunities in business for people they care about. I hope I'm not being reductive but it seems Thatcher's time in power was solely spent diminishing the resources of those who had least for the advancement of those who had most. I know from my own indulgence in selfish behaviour that it's much easier to get what you want if you remove from consideration the effect your actions will have on others.

Is that what made her so formidable, her ability to ignore the suffering of others? Given the nature of her legacy "survival of the fittest" – a phrase that Darwin himself only used twice in On the Origin of Species, compared to hundreds of references to altruism, love and cooperation, it isn't surprising that there are parties tonight in Liverpool, Glasgow and Brixton – from where are they to have learned compassion and forgiveness?

The blunt, pathetic reality today is that a little old lady has died, who in the winter of her life had to water roses alone under police supervision. If you behave like there's no such thing as society, in the end there isn't. Her death must be sad for the handful of people she was nice to and the rich people who got richer under her stewardship. It isn't sad for anyone else. There are pangs of nostalgia, yes, because for me she's all tied up with Hi-De-Hi and Speak and Spell and Blockbusters and "follow the bear". What is more troubling is my inability to ascertain where my own selfishness ends and her neo-liberal inculcation begins. All of us that grew up under Thatcher were taught that it is good to be selfish, that other people's pain is not your problem, that pain is in fact a weakness and suffering is deserved and shameful. Perhaps there is resentment because the clemency and respect that are being mawkishly displayed now by some and haughtily demanded of the rest of us at the impending, solemn ceremonial funeral, are values that her government and policies sought to annihilate.

I can't articulate with the skill of either of "the Marks" – Steel or Thomas – why Thatcher and Thatcherism were so bad for Britain but I do recall that even to a child her demeanour and every discernible action seemed to be to the detriment of our national spirit and identity. Her refusal to stand against apartheid, her civil war against the unions, her aggression towards our neighbours in Ireland and a taxation system that was devised in the dark ages, the bombing of a retreating ship – it's just not British.

I do not yet know what effect Margaret Thatcher has had on me as an individual or on the character of our country as we continue to evolve. As a child she unnerved me but we are not children now and we are free to choose our own ethical codes and leaders that reflect them.

[Belligerent Savant]

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