“Do I have to kill them, brother?”
“Yes,” replies his impatient superior, “just get on with it in God’s name.”
I imagined the killer as a seven-year-old boy with no route to affection but via these bellicose uncles. How severely behavior can be shaped by environment; as surely as we learn language, we have our compass set in the amoral abyss by our early inculcators.
You hear a muffled gunshot, and the lad shakily returns to the phone for his approval. “Well done, brother.”
When they arrive at the opulent and then easily penetrable Taj Hotel, you hear when they report back to base their utter amazement at the consumer treasures within:
“Brother, you won’t believe the size of the TVs in this place.”
“Don’t get distracted, in God’s name, brother,” replies the irked handler as if dealing with a wayward Cub Scout enchanted by a lily.
The Marines, after their bedtime story, have a kind of final head count, I guess to check that no one’s absconded. We stood by our beds, the seventy of us, and each had to sequentially shout the corresponding ascending number, to ensure we still totaled seventy. I was the penultimate Marine—well, not quite Marine, something less than that, a sub-Marine. I watched with dreadful certainty as, like upward-tumbling dominoes, each lad hollered his number. “Sixty-five, sixty-six …” It’s getting closer. “Sixty-seven, sixty-eight …” Why, yes, of course, now it’s my turn, and in my underpants in a room full of Marines I chant, “Sixty-nine,” like Kenneth Williams. It’s all I can do to stop myself winking.
We then settle into our brittle sponge beds for the night—individually, as I remember; I think gayness was still frowned upon in the military at that time—for what seemed to be barely a teaspoon of sleep before being awoken at 3:00 a.m. to participate in a rehearsal for Armageddon.
Out in the floodlit concrete expanse, battalions moved in inhuman harmony. Clichéd sounds all about me—unified boots on hard floor, rifles twirled and hugged in a murderous tango. They sang those call-and-response songs that they do in Full Metal Jacket or Platoon that are mostly incongruously misogynistic limericks, speculating on the likely characteristics of different nationalities of vagina. Eskimos—cold; Indian—spicy; Vietnamese—initially appealing but ultimately an unruly quagmire that leads to humiliation. I made the last one up. In fact, I may’ve made the whole thing up, but it was that kind of mood, a bit nationalistic and blokey, as I imagine one might expect from a nocturnal drill in the U.S. Marine Corps.
I suspect you’d be given short shrift if you complained on the basis that you were finding the whole experience a bit sexist or too tough. I think within minutes you’d find yourself the subject of a hurtful ditty, and that’s just for starters.
It felt like the end of the world. I get prophetic flashes. There, I’ve said it. There are times when I see reality unfurl—not like the future is revealed, more like the past, or the present, like I can see the projector from which the spectacle is emitted. In the moment I feel dread. I watched them—maybe it’s my own cultural indoctrination, I’ve watched a lot of films and gone on a lot of conspiratorial websites, so my mind too has been narrativized; I’m not free from tales and agendas. I saw the earth crack open and yawn belligerent fire and the sea take back her bounty. The animals in nightmarish calm know the end is nigh and move to high lands. The unduly unfurled flags are lashed by rain and untethered from their masts by lightning.
All nature converges; the purple sky bears down on the cleaved soil as Earth roars. The furious ocean envelops her lover, as long-somnolent beasts rise up from the deep. Things don’t fall apart; they move suddenly inward, in vengeful implosion. Alone in this dark reverie, I stagger through the sepulchral ballet, as men move as dead men do, in dumb harmony.
The rhythm of my own two feet silences my dreaming. Now I am them, and the dawn rises. We march through verdant and dusty Californian hills. I look at the others and try to stay in the middle. Some of them are so strong and young—athletes. These men are training; for me this rehearsal does not lead to a performance; it leads to a swift and grateful departure and a wry reminiscence. For them it leads to death.
They’re so young. Once in a while they pass and sometimes vary in color. Mostly, though, they are indistinguishable and young as they march past. Sometimes one will be wearing glasses and, like in a lazy movie, this is a placeholder for character, for individuality, vulnerability.
Senior Marines marshal the pups; they have thicker necks and more-certain voices, even the fog on their breath is more forthright, molecularly tighter. Drilled exhalations, their breath no longer theirs to give.
My mates are filming me and offering encouraging looks and sweet smiles, but I swear, twerp that I am, I have already Stockholmed myself into deep fraternity with the troops.
“You pansies,” I hear myself think of my former friends from yesterday on Civvy Street, “you don’t know what it means to be a Marine.”
There are deep codes awoken here as we march in unison, our metronomically beating feet hypnotizing away individualistic need. Lurking at the bottom of the pond of my mind among the weeds is a slumbering thing not nurtured by MTV or Pfizer or Coke or our other neon-pagan deities. It jolts in the dirge at the ancient siren.
At the end of the 10k hike, I feel all proud and misty-eyed, choked on camaraderie. The commander of Camp Pendleton gives me the lid of a wooden ammo box with a brass plaque on the top that says I’m brave. I inwardly flood. It is the kind of engraving you’d have at the bottom of a pub-darts trophy—any sports trophy. I’ve never had a trophy, so I am especially susceptible. Like all these fatherless boys, in Pendleton or Pakistan or Birmingham or Compton or Cardiff, any token of belonging is embraced.
I truly felt, ultimate objective aside, that the Marines had something beautiful about them. Fraternity, initiation, mentoring, honor, valor, duty—beautiful male attributes in a society in which masculinity is maligned. I can get a bit like that, a bit D. H. Lawrence, a bit jazzed on unexamined humanity. When I chatted on camera to a pair of perfectly assembled teen Marines who sat handsomely in their fatigues, rifles pristine and bolt upright at their sides, I was overwhelmed by the salvation that the military offers to boys that may otherwise have fallen through the cracks.
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 pro
ficiency 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.
21
Cheeky The Phone
I DON’T WRITE THIS FROM A TEFLON 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?
22
“Corporacide”
I WENT ON A MARCH TO END AUSTERITY. I TELL YOU, THE MARINES 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, al
l 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.
Revolution Page 20
