Fellas:
That was quite an interesting interview, and it's always nice to see people with social influence speak so eloquently and truthfully about the inherent flaws of our current political and economic paradigm.
Here's why I'm not quite ready to suck his cock though:
It's easy to abstain from the political processes when you are in a economic position to do so. For HIM elections don't matter, because regardless of who is in office (Labor or Conservative, Democrat or Republican) he can be a comedian and make money, buy medical and dental insurance, tour the world and live a happy and healthy life while simultaneously waxing poetic and "fighting" the establishment. His decision not to participate in the current political processes is a luxury he enjoys and not, by any means, a noble or grand gesture.
I think we need to face the fact that we may be in a similar situation as Mr. Brand. I assume that all of us on this email list, like Brand, have been able to take advantage of life's opportunities and secure a stable life for ourselves. For us, elections may not be so consequential.
So let's be very clear! Someone earlier said they are "proof positive that voting makes no difference." - No you're not. You are proof positive that voting makes no difference for you. There is a clear distinction. Our jobs provide us with health insurance regardless of who occupies the White House, and should we lose our jobs, we have the education and skills to secure such insurance by other means.
However there are many more vulnerable members of our society for whom elections are indeed consequential. For example, the overwhelming majority of SNAP (Food Stamp) participants are poor families with children, seniors, or people with disabilities. Close to half of all participants are children, and over half of all non-elderly, non-disabled adult participants live with children. When you have one party that wants to cut the program entirely and another that wants to support it, elections do matter ( for those who get to eat based on its existence).
I agree that the system is inherently flawed, and that the only way to really change things might be an ugly revolution, but who among us is now willing to give up our place (comfort zone) in the system we so vehemently deride? You? Me?Brand? Are we ready to give up our establishment jobs, cancel our credit cards, stop buying gasoline, close our bank accounts and join the ranks of the desperate?
In my estimation, fostering the dissemination of factual information is how, at this point, we can best make a difference, but our rhetoric shouldn't lead us away from the reality that we must first work within the system before we can break out of it, and in the meantime more people need health coverage and children need to fucking eat!
(For the record, I'm never gonna be ready to suck his cock or any other cock. )
REPLY:
Love the response, particularly the re-emphasis of your refusal to fellate Mr. Brand... though have you ever seen him in person? It may change your mind...
Silliness aside, I agree with the spirit of your message; it is indeed easier for him -- and any of us -- to speak of such ideals from our relatively lofty perches (at least when compared to millions of humans in other parts of the world). I've alluded to this in prior emails I've sent to this group.
And I see your point Re: voting, though the fact remains that we have 2 elitist parties to choose from in our National "elections", and that BOTH parties serve only the interests of the few/their lobbies. The People are not being serviced. The politicians no longer represent the people, and are increasingly being more OVERT in their indifference/apathy.
The fact they -- for example -- dangle the option of Food Stamps vs. No Food Stamps as an incentive (and more importantly, as a signal that there is a difference between the two parties when for all intents and purposes there isn't) to vote for one party or another insulting and a disservice to the people, and simply another mechanism to perpetuate the charade of a variance in philosophy between the "two" Parties. HOWEVER, in PRACTICAL terms, you're absolutely right: those that NEED such services are ABSOLUTELY at the mercy of "the vote" and its outcome.
But as we all know, votes can be tampered with. They can be compromised. They can be bought/subject to influence by those with the resources/influence/lobbies to do so.
The poor (or those in need of food stamps) have NO SUCH mechanisms at their disposal, and as such, have minimal/no leverage and/or influence over the outcome, regardless of how many of them vote.
The system is broken. Sure, Brand may be hypocritical. He may not be the best/ideal spokesperson given his current life of luxury. But he's throwing things out there that NEED to be thrown out there.
That said, I won't be 'sucking his cock' anytime soon myself. His intentions may not be entirely pious -- but the fact he's saying these things publicly, and it's garnering a substantial amount of attention, is certainly not a bad thing.....
for now. Let's see how those with money/power choose to act on this, if in fact his words begin to carry more influence than "THEY" prefer.
Lastly, this editorial he penned touches on a couple of your sentiments Re: his position of privilege in comparison to many others... he clearly is acutely aware of his perch.
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/20 ... revolutionA couple EXCERPTS from the [rather long] article:
I should qualify my right to even pontificate on such a topic and in so doing untangle another of revolution’s inherent problems. Hypocrisy. How dare I, from my velvet chaise longue, in my Hollywood home like Kubla Khan, drag my limbs from my harem to moan about the system? A system that has posited me on a lilo made of thighs in an ocean filled with honey and foie gras’d my Essex arse with undue praise and money.
I once, during the early steps of this thousand-mile journey to decadent somnambulance, found myself embroiled in a London riot. It was around the bafflement of the millennium and we were all uptight about zeroes lining up three wide and planes falling from the sky and the national mood was weird.
At this point I’d attended a few protests and I loved them. At a Liverpool dockers march, the chanting, the bristling, the rippedup paving stones and galloping police horses in Bono glasses flipped a switch in me. I felt connected, on a personal level I was excited by the chaos, a necessary component of transition, I like a bit of chaos however it’s delivered. The disruption of normalcy a vital step in any revolution. Even aesthetically, aside from the ideology, I beam at the spectacle of disruption, even when quite trivial. As a boy a bird in the house defecating on our concept of domesticity as much as our settee, a signal of the impermanence and illusory nature of our humdrum comforts. The riot in question came when I was working at MTV and for the first time in my life had money, which to me was little more than regal letters to be delivered to drug dealers.
My involvement in the riot came without invitation or intention, I was in fact oxymoronically shopping (emphasis on the moron) with a stylist in the West End, at the expense of MTV, which is perhaps the planet’s most obvious purveyor of neurodross and pop-cultural claptrap – like a glistening pink pony trotting through your mind shitting glitter.
I was smacked up and gacked up and togged up in the nitwit livery of late-Nineties television, a crackhead Harlequin with Hoxton hair, when it came to my attention that Reclaim the Streets had a march on. On learning this, I without a flicker of self-awareness palmed off my shopping bags jammed with consumer treats and headed for the throng. Just before the kettling and boredom, while things were still buzzing, bongos, bubbles and whistles, I was hurt when a fellow protester piously said to me: “What you doing here? I’ve seen you, you work for MTV.” I felt pretty embarrassed that my involvement was being questioned, in a manner that is all too common on the left. It’s been said that: “The right seeks converts and the left seeks traitors.” This moral superiority that is peculiar to the left is a great impediment to momentum. It is also a right drag when you’re trying to enjoy a riot.
AND ANOTHER SNIPPET:
"The absurdity of our localised consciousness and global ignorance hit me hard when I went on a Comic Relief trip to Kenya.
Like most of the superficially decent things I do in life, my motivation was to impress women more than to aid the suffering. “A couple of days in Africa,” I thought, “and a lifetime cashing in on pics of me with thin babies, speculate to accumulate,” I assured my anxious inner womaniser.
After visiting the slums of Kibera, where a city built from mud and run on fear festers on the suburbs of Nairobi, I was sufficiently schooled by Live Aid and Michael Buerk to maintain an emotional distance. It was only when our crew visited a nearby rubbish dump that the comforting buoyancy of visual clichés rinsed away by the deluge of a previously inconceivable reality. This rubbish dump was not like some tip off the M25 where you might dump a fridge freezer or a smashed-in mattress. This was a nation made of waste with no end in sight. Domestic waste, medical waste, industrial waste formed their own perverse geography. Stinking rivers sluiced through banks of putrid trash, mountains, valleys, peaks and troughs all formed from discarded filth. An ecology based on our indifference and ignorance in the “cradle of civilisation” where our species is said to have originated. Here amid the pestilence I saw Armageddon. Here the end of the world is not a prophecy but a condition. A demented herd chewed polystyrene cud. Sows fed their piglets in the bilge. Gloomy shadows split the sun as marabou storks, five foot in span with ragged labial throats, swooped down. My mate Nik said he had to revise his vision of hell to include what he’d seen.
Here and there, picking through this unending slander, children foraged for bottle tops, which had some value, where all is worthless.
For a while when I returned to my sanitised house and my sanitised state of mind I guiltily thumbed bottle tops for a moment before I disposed of them; temporarily they were like crucifixes for these kids, sacrificed that I may live in privilege. A few weeks later I was in Paris at a Givenchy fashion show where the most exquisite garments cantered by on underfed, well-bred clothes horses. The spectacle was immaculate, smoke-filled bubbles burst on to the runway. To be here in this gleaming sophistication was heaven. Here starvation is a tool to achieve the perfect perpendicular pelvis.
Now, I bow to no one in my appreciation of female beauty and fancy clobber but I could not wrench the phantom of those children from my mind, in this moment I felt the integration; that the price of this decadence was their degradation. That these are not dislocated ideas but the two extremes are absolutely interdependent. The price of privilege is poverty. David Cameron said in his conference speech that profit is “not a dirty word”. Profit is the most profane word we have. In its pursuit we have forgotten that while individual interests are being met, we as a whole are being annihilated. The reality, when not fragmented through the corrupting lens of elitism, is we are all on one planet.
To have such suffering adjacent to such excess is akin to marvelling at an incomparable beauty, whose face is the radiant epitome of celestial symmetry, and ignoring, half a yard lower down, her abdomen, cancerous, weeping and carbuncled. “Keep looking at the face, put a handbag over those tumours. Strike a pose. Come on, Vogue.”
Suffering of this magnitude affects us all. We have become prisoners of comfort in the absence of meaning. A people without a unifying myth. Joseph Campbell, the comparative mythologist, says our global problems are all due to the lack of relevant myths. That we are trying to sustain social cohesion using redundant ideologies devised for a population that lived in deserts millennia ago. What does it matter if 2,000 years ago Christ died on the cross and was resurrected if we are not constantly resurrected to the truth, anew, moment to moment? How is his transcendence relevant if we do not resurrect our consciousness from the deceased, moribund mind of our obsolete ideologies and align with our conditions?
