Revolution

by Russell Brand

  Visionaries like Daniel, inspired by mentors like Buckminster Fuller and Terence McKenna, can pull down new possibilities—conveniently, in Daniel’s case, by loafing around the jungle, chomping up drugs. Human cultures have always had on their peripheries thinkers like these; the challenge for the rest of us is the realization of these visions. Even this actually only requires us to act in union to achieve our mutual objectives.

  20

  Submarine

  IN THE NEXT PART OF OUR BOOK WE ARE GOING TO DISCUSS HOW WE bring corporations into line with common-sense thinking, how we the people can have authority and ownership of the organizations we work within, how we can end corporatization and end homelessness forever.

  First, though, I’d like to boast about what I call “my time in the U.S. Marine Corps.” I hope the gravitas of the tale will not be diminished by my admission that the period that “my time” encompassed was about twenty-four hours.

  I went to their San Diego training camp to learn how people behave when their individual identity is forcibly subsumed into a group identity. My whole life, I have sought comfort in individualism. I escaped the banality of my background with the flamboyance of my haircut, the low expectations of my class with the grandiosity of my parlance, and the fear of being ordinary by becoming a professional weirdo. In a way, my success in show business represents little more than the harvesting of my psychosis. I made my idiosyncrasies and flaws beneficial by exaggerating them.

  That is not how they do things in the U.S. Marine Corps. When we arrived at Camp Pendleton, me and my mates who were filming me—that’s how I made life bearable in the past, by filming it—I had already, at the first sign of barbed wire and barbed remarks, done an about-turn more deft than any military maneuver that I’d subsequently perform.

  The thing with the Marines is, they don’t fuck about. That could be a slogan for them, in fact: “The Marines—we don’t fuck about.” As I arrived at the camp, on the phone to my best mate and manager, the aforementioned Nik, I was demanding this macabre social experiment be canceled. I was a one-man Stanford experiment: I was the subject and the observer, and I wanted neither role. All I wanted, with burgeoning intensity with each camo-clad man I passed, was my mum.

  Nik said I should stay, which incidentally has been his position whenever he’s received these phone calls from sex-addiction centers and drug rehabs. “Come on, pal, give it a go,” he intones in his Old Trafford bray. “Give the Marines a chance,” he said. “You’ll learn from it.”

  I’ve always had the problem of being unable to envisage the nature of a situation prior to its commencement. This means I’m in a state of perpetual shock while doing things that I’ve agreed to.

  The Marines is a pretty extreme example. When I came up with the idea to do it—or agreed to do it—I just had an image of myself as Rambo, with a dressing-gown belt round my head, doing something irresponsible and impressive with a knife. That’s it, a mental photograph of a moment. Reality doesn’t behave like that. Although sequential time as experienced by humans is likely an illusion contrived by our animalistic experience of an expiring anatomy, it don’t feel like that when you’re on an obstacle course getting coated off by a drill sergeant.

  There was no warm-up time. You know when you go to a fancy hotel? (If you don’t, don’t worry; these are the very kind of privileges that will be collectivized or banned come the great day.) Well, when you arrive, there are some protocols: Someone’ll give you a drink, maybe you’ll get shown round and given a little cold wet flannel in a packet to refresh you from your drive. These niceties ease you into your new environment. There’s none of that in the Marines. Within ten seconds of Nik hanging up on me, I was in the barracks, surrounded by hard-looking fuckers doing Marine shit.

  They shouted hello and gave me a rucksack that was as big as I was and pointed to a car-boot sale’s worth of khaki crap that I was expected to pack.

  I’d been greeted—if that’s the word; it was more like a well-drilled ambush—by five double-tough-looking skinheads in combat fatigues, who I was informed were to be my instructors, and the only reference for comprehension that I could reach for in my head was the five martial-art animals that teach the Kung Fu Panda. “It’s okay,” I thought. “I’m just in the film Kung Fu Panda.”

  The first thing I was commanded to do—addressed by my surname, which I’ve never liked having bellowed at me—was put the giant pile of stuff, including three sleeping bags and a shovel, into the big but annoyingly not big enough for the job rucksack.

  I squatted on the floor with the most Nazi-looking of the furious five looming over me, shouting encouraging slogans like “Move it, you maggot.” To give you some idea of the physical dimensions of this hollering cyborg, I give you Dolph Lundgren from the film Rocky IV, or simply a wet dream of Adolf Hitler. He was so blond and tough, like an evil Milky Bar kid gone buff.

  Now, I don’t like packing at the best of times; I have existential problems with the concept. It involves for me a perspicacious sorcery with which I am ill at ease.

  In my room prior to a trip, case open on my bed, possessions strewn about the room, I am confronted with an unknowable conundrum:

  Right. I’m me, but I’m not me now,

  I’m me in the future,

  on holiday in Crete.

  Right, what’ve I got on?

  Now put it in the bag.

  I can’t see into the future—I just told you, I can’t envisage stuff. I can barely see into the present.

  It was clear from Dolph’s phlegm-flecked imperatives that I was not only expected to pack but also to pack in a particular style, pertaining not to the contents but to the manner of my movements. I was obviously being too effete and ineffective, because he eventually began jamming stuff in himself. Gripping in his veiny claw one of the three sleeping bags, he thrust it into the quickly decreasing chasm of the rucksack like rewound footage of a vet angrily delivering a calf.

  My query as to the necessity for three sleeping bags didn’t even warrant a response, but really, why would you ever need three? Any camping trip that results in the loss of two sleeping bags ought be swiftly cut short to prevent further calamity—an argument that my Aryan orderly brushed off with the same cold-eyed indifference that he afforded the scratch he got on his knuckle from one of my many gem-spangled rings.

  Our eyes met as the blood rose, but I curbed my nan-like impulse to go, “Ooh, are you okay, dear? Do want a plaster? That’ll sting,” as I thought it would be bad for morale.

  I was loudly informed that the reason we were packing this bag seemingly designed to cater for a disastrous and repetitive holiday was that at three in the morning—or “oh three hundred hours,” as Dolph called it—we’d be getting up to do a ten-kilometer hike, carrying a 75-lb. bag, with seventy other trainee Marines. As well as being startled by the extraordinary distance and punishing baggage, I was concerned that one military maneuver contained both imperial and metric measuring systems. “Make yer mind up,” I thought.

  The final futile instrument to be willed into the bulging knapsack was a collapsible shovel. “Do all the Marines carry shovels?” I asked. Dolph responded in the affirmative. “Then in the event that one is required, could I not borrow one of theirs?”

  This inquiry, which some may have seen as indication that they were dealing with a strategic mastermind the likes of which we’ve not seen since Alexander the Great, barely warranted a grunt. Instead of being awarded a Purple Heart, I was sent off to a kind of broom cupboard to put on my fatigues.

  I am at pains to point out that I was not granted the proper U.S. Marine uniform, which I was looking forward to wearing, but instead got a kind of “You forgot your PE kit so get something from the lost property” parody of a Marine uniform. I was well vexed.

  I also had to tie my hair up in a bun, so gone too was my hope of undertaking this rapidly growing nightmare as a kind of latter-day Cuban revolutionary. More Frank Spencer than Che Guevara.

&nb
sp; I realized with a shudder how much of my sense of self I’d unwittingly invested in tight garments and rock-’n’-roll jewelry when I emerged from the broom cupboard in my lost-property uniform. I was trying to distance myself from the clothes while wearing them, like a cat resists a plunge towards a full bathtub. The revulsion is magnetic.

  Blessedly, Pendleton is not bestrewn with mirrors or I may not have been able to proceed; as it was, the giant pointless knapsack was thrust onto my back and I was marched—that’s right, marched—to an obstacle course. The biggest obstacle being that I’d avoided PE as a kid.

  My indulgent mum, a single mum of an only son, would let me skip games, pandering to my teary complaints as a former fat child herself. This, I suppose, is where a father figure would come in handy, a loving, authoritative strong male to affectionately shove you into adversity. As it was, notes were written and physical activity strenuously avoided, until I discovered that some exercise had an orgasm at the end of it. This syndrome of “fatherless” boys is a much-cited problem that military organizations effectively resolve: Personal identity put aside, a male ideal upon which to focus is provided and pursued.

  Another word for obstacle course is “assault course,” and I can see how both terms have flourished, because, when I finally embarked on the horrific sequence of logs and fences and nets and ropes, assaulted is how I felt. They may as well’ve called it a “humiliation course.” The other Marines—that’s right, “other” Marines—hopped, zipped, and sauntered across each awful vicissitude like butch Nijinskys. Then came my turn.

  I hate doing things I’m shit at, especially in front of people who are good at them. The only way that obstacle course could’ve been made more traumatic is if they’d brought along a girl I fancied to watch. With each tentative tiptoe and stumble, I had to inwardly assure myself that I was a good comedian and that my life was not pointless.

  “I am addicted to comfort,” I thought as I tumbled into the wood chips.

  I have become divorced from nature; I don’t know what the names of the trees and birds are. I don’t know what berries to eat or which stars will guide me home. I don’t know how to sleep outside in a wood or skin a rabbit.

  We have become like living cutlets, sanitized into cellular ineptitude. They say that supermarkets have three days’ worth of food. That if there was a power cut, in three days the food would spoil. That if cash machines stopped working, if cars couldn’t be filled with fuel, if homes were denied warmth, within three days we’d be roaming the streets like pampered savages, like urban zebras with nowhere to graze. The comfort has become a prison; we’ve allowed them to turn us into waddling pipkins.

  What is civilization but dependency? Now, I’m not suggesting we need to become supermen; that solution has been averred before and did not end well. Prisoners of comfort, we dread the Apocalypse. What will we do without our pre-packed meals and cozy jails and soporific glowing screens rocking us comatose?

  The Apocalypse may not arrive in a bright white instant; it may creep into the present like a fog. All about us we may see the shipwrecked harbingers foraging in the midsts of our excess. What have we become that we can tolerate adjacent destitution? That we can amble by ragged despair at every corner? We have allowed them to sever us from God, and until we take our brothers by the hand we will find no peace.

  My mate Mark Stone worked for Ford. When we left school, my eyes were trained on the glimmer of far-off hills—one word, block high across the sky. Mark became an apprentice at Ford’s in Aveley, nearby. I never told him that I thought his pride gauche. That when he spoke of “our place,” meaning the factory where cars were assembled, that to me that sounded odd. He felt connected to his work and proud as a man who loved speed and cars that he knew how to make them. We’d bomb about in Essex lanes in his customized van—Ford, of course—and smoke draw. Mark was content, well paid, connected. I was signing on and fraught. Desperate, feeling only what I didn’t have, that I was subject to some terrible injustice. That Olympus had erred and given me the wrong life. It was okay for Mark to work as skilled labor and listen to hip-hop and do nights on doors in clubs in Dagenham and have rows and pull birds. I am fated for better things. Better things.

  I got a grant to go to drama school, I got a habit, I got a cool jacket and cool friends. Mark would come up and visit me in London, still talking of “our place.” He’d drop me off a bit of gear and indulge my fantasies of fame. “I’ll be your bodyguard, Russ,” he’d say, but we both knew he loved it at Ford’s, with his mates, making things.

  When Mark died on a motorbike at twenty-nine, I didn’t cry. I didn’t go to the funeral. I was too busy making it to grieve for a mate who lived for making things. I was a junkie by then. Now I know what Mark meant by “our place” and his easy pride in what he made. He knew himself, and in his heart that factory was his; it didn’t matter where the profits went. I wanted power. Mark already had it.

  They closed Ford’s down, of course. They put their factory somewhere else, where people work for less. The system they deploy doesn’t measure pride or connection; it measures only profit. They talk to us all friendly, use our language, whispering in seductively avuncular vernacular, in their slogans, in their ads. They use our labor while it suits them, till it doesn’t, then they’re gone. Like Dracula on a jugular, they kill the thing they feed upon.

  Where is this connection that Mark felt at his place? That I looked for in fame? That these Marines appear to have as they skip by like this assault course is a poppy field, whilst I spit out the wood chips?

  I feel embarrassed by their insistent encouragement. They treat me like I’m one of them, and I’ve always found that hard. Like I might leak lachrymose gratitude, like the Elephant Man or a blind boy in a story from my nan.

  Up I get, though, and the course that beneath their stomped ballet rolls with them like an airport walkway, with me rises and undulates and slaps me about the face, a belated chastisement for missing games. They’re nice about it, though, and as I accept their consolations I silently thank God for making me famous. “Thank you for the gleaming bandages, the glamorous mummification, that I can die quietly here, behind the walls of my marvelous tomb.”

  I sought ways on the camp to reassert my identity, which I was hoping extended beyond back-combed hair and lacquered-on pants. I spied a nesting robin travailing at an air vent but stopped short of eulogizing on this neat emblem of tenderness and nature, in case the rest of the battalion thought it a bit poncey.

  We went to the Mess, which was actually quite tidy and organized, to eat what passes for vegetarian food in the Marines—I imagine that Marines who don’t eat meat are a small demographic. I then chatted to a few lads. Mostly they were working-class boys who were always destined to end up in a violent gang of some description and had sensibly joined a very well-funded one.

  We went back to the dorms to do more Marine things—time has blessedly relieved me of the details. I do recall, though, just before bedtime being sat in my pants with the other lads around a podium while a senior Marine read accounts of, what in my mind seemed to be, a daily round-up of marine acts of heroism around the world.

  As I surveyed the faces of the sleepy adolescents, now dressed in combat pajamas—which are much less intimidating than the daytime getup—I recognized that what was in effect happening was that we were being read a bedtime story.

  This was to soothe us before we clambered into our thin sponge bunks. Instead, though, of a tale of courageous rabbits or mischievous wizards, it was a harrowing logbook of violence and assaults; but to those lads, it was a lullaby.

  As I watched these lost boys cocooned in their military cradle and concocted excuses not to fulfill my obligation to stay for three days but to weasel my way out, by any means necessary, I remembered what I’d heard about madrassas. Those are the schools in some Muslim regions—Pakistan for example—that are often funded by Saudis. Some I’m sure are legit and just teaching theology or whatever, but apparently there
are extreme versions. In these more off-book and antagonistic establishments, young lads are taken from their village (it could be a city, what do I know) and indoctrinated into fundamentalism to become hard-core soldiers. Or terrorists, depending on which side of Dick Cheney you’re on. The lads are immersively indoctrinated into a militant ideology, which must seem all the more appealing if received in total isolation. Apparently they never meet women, are amped up on hatred, and only receive affection from the fellas that run the place, who will one day make their approval contingent on acts of homicidal or even suicidal valor.

  This is how the perpetrators of the 2008 attacks in Mumbai were likely raised—their only access to love from handlers who groomed them into terror.

  I watched a documentary about them, and the conversations between the lads doing the bombing and shooting in India and their superiors in Pakistan were perversely touching: “You’re doing well, brother. Now torch the room, in God’s name.”

  Me and an ex-girlfriend watched this documentary, Terror in Mumbai, whilst in the Taj Hotel, the location of considerable carnage that day. Hostages were killed there; one wing was set ablaze. She insisted we snuggle down in the darkness of a room where the atrocities took place and watch the harrowing affair unfold on film.

  It was eerie to see the corridor outside our room in grainy CCTV, with armed young men bustling through and kicking down doors.

  Most disturbing of all is the innocence and humanity of the killers as they nervously conduct the execution of hostages. One lad tentatively negotiates with his handler to see if there’s any way he can avoid killing them, by now infected with the inevitable empathy that we feel even when powerfully conditioned against it.

  The mundanity too is striking; he sounds like a schoolboy trying to get out of sports day, rebutted by an austere mum.