Russell Brand on Revolution [New Statesman Magazine]

[theKed]

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/10/russell-brand-on-revolution

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.

...

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.”

[silverweb]

1. My God, he uses words magnificently!

[font color="navy" face="Verdana"]It's only in the past few weeks that I've become tuned into to Russell Brand, but everything I've seen or read from him since then has increased my appreciation.

This is a man who will inspire change.

[theKed]

2. It's a really lengthy

article, but very well written. Quite colloquially written, but it just underscores the seething intellect he has. I was dismissive of him, too, for a while until I sat down and watched some of his actual interviews.

[silverweb]

3. Same here.

[font color="navy" face="Verdana"]The interviews completely changed my initial opinion of him, which was dismissive like yours. This article is nothing short of amazing.

[arcane1]

4. Kicking to read later!