Here comes Brand-ee Boo Boo

I watched alleged Comedian and activist Russell Brand on the Lawrence O'Donnell program on MSNBC a week ago and witnessed the unimaginable. The usually shoulder-first O'Donnell looked  overwhelm by the accented stream of Brand's improvised blend of social critique and self-regarding arrogance. O'Donnell that the interview was more fun than he had counted on. It's my suspicion was saying nice things so that Brand,a man with an allergy to combs and shampoos from appearances, wouldn't raise his voice any higher. Stage lights might have shattered his guest gotten any more shrill.Russell grinned, that grin turning into a sneer, and then he slouched in the chair in a ridiculous posture that I am sure he thought made him menacing like the best idealized renderings of Batman, waiting in the shadows to strike at evil doers again, unseen and unheard.

 Yeah ,he's a bright fellow, but Russell Brand is a blithering, blurting idiot who seems constitutionally incapable of having a conversation . His lefty-anarchist talking points are well and good as far it goes, but they are old ideas, old rhetoric , old insights. He reminds of the kind of the sort who reads Ayn Rand at 17 and is convinced that they are a genius being oppressed by collectivists and free loaders ; the sad part is that they never grow out of it. Brand, in his variation of bad manners, is similar because he discovered Marx, Chomsky and  all manner of post-Soviet leftism and used the abstractions to inflate a personality that has the charm of a box of rusty zippers. It's not that I'm not sympathetic to much of what Brand is talking about. I and everyone else, though, have a choice as to who we listen to about issues and solutions for intractable problems. 

For the good of the causes he says he supports, Brand is their worst enemy, a self-regarding brat with a vocabulary who cannot or will not get over himself long enough to test the merits of his notions in honest exchanges. He is manic, perhaps he should be under professional care. The tragedy is that sooner or later his audience will find a new shiny object to distract themselves with and Russell Brand will be consigned to the Hollywood Squares ghetto of used up celebrities. But even that doesn't exist as an option any more. As more people die of disease, gun shot wounds , unnatural disasters and the like, this braying donkey will sicken the audience that deigned to lend him an ear and both eyes. Waiting for this guy to do something really fucked up; an accident will happen here. Watch this space.