Last night, I watched uncomfortably as Russell Brand ranted at Jeremy Paxman on BBC’s Newsnight. Coming across more as a disaffected first-year-undergraduate-soc-and-pol-student than any sort of credible political commentator, Brand demonstrated not only an unsettling propensity towards demagoguery, but to be the most frustrating kind of citizen. That is, one that doesn’t vote. In fact, Brand has never voted. I can’t help but be reminded of a section from David Foster Wallace’s Rolling Stone piece, Up Simba, in which the late writer asserts:

If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don’t bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don’t bullshit yourself that you’re not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote.

When challenged on one of his seemingly preprepared and painfully superficial diatribes, Brand resorts to court jester-esque buffoonery, obfuscation and flattery. Don’t get me wrong, I quite like Russell Brand. Back in the day, I listened to his Friday night Radio 2 programme and occasionally found him to be quite funny. His retort to Bob Geldof at the 2006 NME awards was particularly sharp. But with each passing year, Brand seems to be burrowing further down the rabbit hole of overindulged celebrity irrelevance. To hear him talk fervently on the widening disparity between rich and poor is ridiculous. He has become a walking sound bite. A platitude. A patronising solipsist with messianic pretensions. Is he a socialist? An anarchist? A Marxist? Well, it doesn’t seem to be any of these, Russell Brand seems to be in it for himself. His contrived and tediously contrarian political opinion is so evidentially driven by vanity that it’s incredibly difficult to separate the sincere from the burlesque. On Ghandi, Orwell wrote that “saints should always be judged guilty until they are proven innocent”. Brand is neither a saint nor innocent, he is a man full of rhetoric but lax on ideas. We all have our complaints about the modern political system, what we need are solutions. In many ways, he reminds me of Patrick Bateman, the unsettling protagonist in Brett Easton Ellis’, American Psycho:

…there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.

There doesn’t seem to be any real depth to anything Brand says. He’s just a product. An ornament. The face of 21st century narcissism and neurosis. An impotent cult of personality appealing to a generation that should read more. A low resolution photocopy of a Bill Hicks routine. And that’s coming from a fan.