The writers over at Media Lens have really outdone themselves. This will be in the next edition of the textbooks about media analysis and what happens once you go against the status quo. Russel Brand has made the mistake of categorizing and identifying what is wrong with our economic systems and society. Watch as the liberal press rallies against what can only be a threat to the system they inhabit.

Part 1 – The Fun Bus

 

 

“Brand’s Newsnight performance, then, was an inspiring cri de coeur. But a 10-minute, impassioned, ill-formed demand for ‘Change!’ from a lone comedian is not a problem for the media’s gatekeepers. It makes for great television, enhances the illusion that the media is open and inclusive, and can be quickly forgotten – no harm done.”

http://youtu.be/gpYFafChgJc?t=2m10s

 

Brand’s new book, ‘Revolution,’ is different – the focus is clear, specific and fiercely anti-corporate. As we will see in Part 2 of this alert, the media reaction is also different.

Brand begins by describing the grotesque levels of modern inequality:

‘Oxfam say a bus with the eighty-five richest people in the world on it would contain more wealth than the collective assets of half the earth’s population – that’s three-and-a-half billion people.’ (p.34)

And:

‘The richest 1 per cent of British people have as much as the poorest 55 per cent.’ (p.34)

But even these facts do not begin to describe the full scale of the current crisis:

‘The same interests that benefit from this… need, in order to maintain it, to deplete the earth’s resources so rapidly, violently and irresponsibly that our planet’s ability to support human life is being threatened.’ (p.36)

For example:

‘Global warming is totally real, it has been empirically proven, and the only people who tell you it’s not real are, yes, people who make money from creating the conditions that cause it. (pp.539-540)

We are therefore at a crossroads:

‘”Today humanity faces a stark choice: save the planet and ditch capitalism, or save capitalism and ditch the planet.”

‘The reason the occupants of the [elite] fun bus are so draconian in their defence of the economy is that they have decided to ditch the planet.’ (p.345)

And so ‘we require radical action fast, and that radical action will not come from the very interests that created and benefit from things being the way they are. The one place we cannot look for change is to the occupants of the bejewelled bus.’ (p.42)

The problem, then, is that ‘we live under a tyranny’. (p.550) The US, in particular, ‘acts like an army that enforces the business interests of the corporations it is allied to’. (p.493)

But this is more than just a crude, Big Brother totalitarian state:

‘A small minority cannot control an uncooperative majority, so they must be distracted, divided, tyrannised or anaesthetised into compliance…’ which means ‘the colonisation of consciousness by corporations’. (p.165)

Brand notes that 70 per cent of the UK press is controlled by three companies, 90 per cent of the US press by six:

‘The people that own the means for conveying information, who decide what knowledge enters our minds, are on the fun bus.’ (p.592)

He even manages a swipe at the ‘quality’ liberal press:

‘Remember, the people who tell you this can’t work, in government, on Fox News or MSNBC, or in op-eds in the Guardian or the Spectator, or wherever, are people with a vested interest in things staying the same.’ (p.514)

Thus, the ‘political process’ is a nonsense: ‘voting is pointless, democracy a façade’ (p.45): ‘a bloke with a nice smile and an angle is swept into power after a more obviously despicable regime and then behaves more or less exactly like his predecessors’. (p.431)

The highly debatable merit of voting aside, anyone with an ounce of awareness will accept pretty much everything Brand has to say above. Put simply, he’s right – this is the current state of people, planet and politics. A catastrophic environmental collapse is very rapidly approaching with nothing substantive being done to make it better and everything being done to make it worse.

Even if we disagree with everything else he has to say, every sane person has an interest in supporting Brand’s call to action to stop this corporate genocide and biocide. A thought we might bear in mind when we subsequently turn to the corporate media reaction.

 

Part 2. – Backlash.

Below, we will see how many of the same corporate journalists are now directing a comparable campaign of abuse at Russell Brand in response to the publication of his book, ‘Revolution’. The impact is perhaps indicated by the mild trepidation one of us experienced in tweeting this very reasonable comment from the book:

‘Today humanity faces a stark choice: save the planet and ditch capitalism, or save capitalism and ditch the planet.’ (p.345)

Sure enough, we immediately received this tweet in response:

‘As a big supporter of your newsletters and books, I’m embarrassed by your promotion of Brand as some sort of visionary.’

Mark Steel explained in the Independent:

‘This week, by law, I have to deride Russell Brand as a self-obsessed, annoying idiot. No article or comment on Twitter can legally be written now unless it does this…’

Or as Boris Johnson noted, gleefully, in the Telegraph:

‘Oh dear, what a fusillade of hatred against poor old Brandy Wandy. I have before me a slew of Sunday papers and in almost all there is a broadside against Russell Brand…’

Once again, the Guardian gatekeepers have poured scorn. Suzanne Moore lampooned ‘the winklepickered Jesus Clown who preaches revolution’, repeating ‘Jesus Clown’ four times. Moore mocked:

‘To see him being brought to heel by an ancient Sex Pistol definitely adds to the gaiety of the nation.’

After all: ‘A lot of what he says is sub-Chomskyian [sic] woo.’

An earlier version of Moore’s article was even more damning: ‘A lot of what he says is ghostwritten sub-Chomskyian woo.’

This was corrected by the Guardian after Moore received a letter from Brand’s lawyers.

The Guardian’s Hadley Freeman imperiously dismissed Brand’s highly rational analysis of corporate psychopathology:

‘I’m not entirely sure where he thinks he’s going to go with this revolution idea because [SPOILER!] revolution is not going to happen. But all credit to the man for making politics seem sexy to teenagers. What he lacks, though – aside from specifics and an ability to listen to people other than himself – is judgment.’

Tanya Gold commented in the Guardian:

‘His narcissism is not strange: he is a comic by trade, and is used to drooling rooms of strangers.’

In the Independent, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s patronising judgement was clear from the title:

‘Russell Brand might seem like a sexy revolutionary worth getting behind, but he will only fail his fans – Politics needs to be cleaned up, not thrown into disarray by irresponsible populists’

Alibhai-Brown commented:

‘It is heartening to see him mobbed by teenagers and young people… Brand, I fear, will only fail them.’

Grace Dent of the Independent perceived little point in throwing yet more mud:

‘with the lack of a political colossus on the horizon like Tony Benn, we can make do with that guy from Get Him To The Greek who was once wed to Katy Perry. I shall resist pillorying Brand any further. He looks exhausted. I’m not entirely evil’.

Sarah Ditum sneered from the New Statesman:

‘Russell Brand, clown that he is, is taken seriously by an awful lot of young men who see any criticism of the cartoon messiah’s misogyny as a derail from “the real issues” (whatever they are).’

Brand fared little better among the male commentators of the liberal press. The title of David Runciman’s Guardian review read:

‘His manifesto is heavy going, light on politics and, in places, beyond parody. Has the leader of the rebellion missed his moment?’

Runciman wrote:

‘This book is an uncomfortable mashup of the cosmic and the prosaic. Brand seems to believe they bolster each other. But really they just get in each other’s way. He borrows ideas from various radical or progressive thinkers like David Graeber and Thomas Piketty but undercuts them with talk about yogic meditation.’

As we saw in the first part of this alert, there is a strong case for arguing that mindfulness – awareness of how we actually feel, as opposed to how corporate advertising tells us we should feel – can help deliver us from the shiny cage of passive consumerism to progressive activism.

Alas, ‘too often he sounds like Gwyneth Paltrow without, er, the humour or the self-awareness. The worst of it is beyond parody… his revolution reads like soft-soap therapy where what’s needed is something with a harder edge’.

Also in the Guardian, Martin Kettle dismissed ‘the juvenile culture of Russell Brand’s narcissistic anti-politics’.

Hard-right ‘leftist’ warmonger Nick Cohen of the ‘left-of-centre’ hard-right Observer was appalled. Having accumulated 28,000 followers on Twitter (we have 18,000) after decades in the national press spotlight, Cohen mocked the communication skills of a writer with 8 million followers:

‘His writing is atrocious: long-winded, confused and smug; filled with references to books Brand has half read and thinkers he has half understood.’

This is completely false, as we saw; Brand has an extremely astute grasp of many of the key issues of our time.

As ever – think Assange, Greenwald, Snowden – dissidents are exposed as egoists by corporate media altruists:

‘Brand is a religious narcissist, and if the British left falls for him, it will show itself to be beyond saving.’

Cohen strained so hard to cover Brand in ordure he splashed some on himself, commenting:

‘Brand says that he is qualified to lead a global transformation…’

Not quite. Brand writes in his book:

‘We don’t want to replace Cameron with another leader: the position of leader elevates a particular set of behaviours.’ (p.216)

And:

‘There is no heroic revolutionary figure in whom we can invest hope, except for ourselves as individuals together.’ (p.515)

Similarly, Cohen took the cheap shot of casually lampooning Brand’s ‘cranky’ focus on meditation:

‘Comrades, I am sure I do not need to tell you that no figure in the history of the left has seen Buddhism as a force for human emancipation.’

We tweeted in reply:

‘@NickCohen4 “no figure in the history of the left has seen Buddhism as a force for human emancipation”. Erich Fromm, for one.’

Cohen was so unimpressed by this response that he immediately blocked us on Twitter.

Writing from that other powerhouse of corporate dissent, the oligarch-owned Independent, Steve Richards praised Brand’s style and decried the right-wing conformity of journalism, before providing an example of his own. He lamented Brand’s ‘vague banalities’ and ‘witty banalities’:

‘He is part of a disturbing phenomenon – the worship of unaccountable comedians who are not especially funny and who are limited in their perceptions… We await a revolutionary who plots what should happen as well as what is wrong.’

In the same newspaper, Howard Jacobson effortlessly won the prize for intellectual snobbery:

‘When Russell Brand uses the word “hegemony” something dies in my soul.’

Oh dear, does he drop the ‘haitch’? For Jacobson, who studied English at Cambridge under the renowned literary critic F.R. Leavis, it was ‘a matter of regret’ that Brand didn’t ‘stick to clowning’. Why? Because it detracts from the enjoyment of a comedian’s efforts ‘to discover they are fools in earnest’. Brand, alas, has not ‘the first idea what serious thought is’. To read the book is to know just how utterly self-damning that last comment is.

James Bloodworth of the hard-right Left Foot Forward blog, commented in the Independent:

‘Russell Brand is one of those people who talks a lot without ever really saying much.’

Bloodworth clumsily sought to mock Brand’s clumsiness:

‘Well-intentioned, he can often come across like the precocious student we all know who talks in the way they think an educated person ought to talk – all clever-sounding adjectives and look-at-me vocabulary.’

Words like ‘hegemony’, perhaps. Or as Nick Cohen wrote in 2013: ‘He writes as if he is a precocious prepubescent rather than an adolescent…’

Bloodworth’s damning conclusion:

‘Millions of people may be fed up of the racket that is free market capitalism, but this really is Revolution as play, and in indulging it the left risks becoming a parody of itself.’

I’ve excluded the right-wring press section, click on the links to go to media lens if you are interested in what cheerleading section for corporate hegemony has to say.