Brand salience
Are Russell's antagonists really interested in the truth? And have we been here before?
The Times has form. The Times of London, that is. In January 1825, it referred to Edmund Kean, ‘the greatest actor of the time’1, as …
That obscene little personage
… and maintained a ferocious campaign against him. And yet, a few years earlier, in 1814, Thomas Barnes, then theatre correspondent of The Examiner but soon to be editor of The Times (from 1816), had written that Kean’s performance of Shylock was ‘the union of great powers with a fine sensibility’ and that Kean's acting was actually too good for the public.2
Now, okay, I doubt Russell Brand would claim to be a great actor but I suggest the comparison with Kean is justified in that Brand, like Kean, is a prominent entertainer who has made no secret of his sexual appetite and promiscuous behaviour - the kind of behaviour that, in retrospect, might cause a Gillette razor to droop.
Kean had liaisons with many women and cavorted with prostitutes during the intervals of the plays in which he starred. Brand has talked and written about his prodigious sexual adventures. He admitted it, so it’s not as if anything was hidden or undercover. In fact, both Kean and Brand were quite open about their behaviour. Why, then, did The Times, and companion media, turn on Brand? And why now?
The immediate stated cause for concern by the media is one of consent. Were all of Brand’s sexual activities consensual? If some were not, that could mean that illegal acts took place. But, right now, neither you nor I nor anyone else knows what the truth of the matter is.
So why is it that, now, in the television presentation of it all, the women involved are labelled ‘victims’ and ‘survivors’ and have voiceovers dubbed by actors? Doesn’t this imply pre-judgment of the issue? I’m not defending rape, but I do defend the principle that someone, anyone, is innocent until proved guilty. Justice cannot be based upon the activities of a kangaroo court.
Back in the early nineteenth century, Lord Byron, no less, declared the opinions that were killing off the ‘merry England’ of the Georgian Era as constituting an Age of Cant. This was, of course, the genesis of what was to become the morally more rigid but commercially productive Victorian period, infused with the Protestant work ethic. In 1838, the year of Victoria’s coronation, a historian of rural customs wrote:
We are become a sober people. England is no longer Merry England, but busy England; England full of wealth and poverty – extravagance and care3
It was the start of the modern era, including the nation states and social mores and business formats that grew to dominate the 20th century.
So, last but not least, why now?
I’ve written about this before. It is, I admit, a hobbyhorse of mine: see The Age of Cant 2.0 and even my first Substack post A Different Perspective on The Great Reset . It all has to do with the kind of socio-moral panic that accompanies every Great Reset.
A Great Reset always features:
a breakthrough technology
a socio-moral panic
censorship to enforce the new socio-moral orthodoxy
In the new dispensation that is now being enforced as part of the current Great Reset it seems to be viewed as right and proper to, for example, allow a schoolchild to decide that he or she has been born in the wrong body, but absolutely not okay to hear about what might be termed robust or even aggressive heterosexual behaviour. That, it seems, is redolent of toxic masculinity.
As with the venom aimed at Edmund Kean at the time of the previous Great Reset, there seems to be a compulsion by upholders of a new dispensation to display their virtue by organizing a witch hunt against a conspicuous target.
An irony - indeed a hypocrisy - of the Kean campaign was that its initiator, Thomas Barnes, was himself ‘a sinner’, committing one of the very crimes that he accused Kean of committing. Barnes lived with another man’s wife.
I wonder how whiter than white Russell Brand’s antagonists are? Neither you nor I nor anyone else knows, at the moment, whether Russell Brand committed any crime. And, personally, I don’t think that the style of investigation that is taking place is likely to get at the actual truth. But it would be interesting if Brand’s persecutors were to be subjected to the same treatment.
Wilson, Ben. The Making of Victorian Values - Decency & Dissent in Britain: 1789-1837 (2007)
Wilson, Ben. Ibid
Wilson, Ben. Ibid