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| <back | home Interview with The Yes Men by Amy Landau In their hilarious new movie, “The Yes Men,” Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno expose the depths of their shockingly absurd escapades as impersonators of the World Trade Organization. They attend corporate trade conferences throughout the world in the guise of WTO officials, say outrageous, atrocious things, and get away with it. In their unique way, the Yes Men have turned the notion of “identity theft” on its head by performing what they define as “identity corrections.” In the film, Bonanno explains, “We target people we see as criminals and we steal their identity to try to make them more honest or present a more honest face. [We] ...create public spectacles and in some kind of poetic way reveal something about our culture that’s profoundly a problem.” In the past, the Yes Men (there are currently 300 of them but 300,000 job openings) have “corrected” such disturbing entities as George W. Bush and Dow Chemical, among others. The following interview is a compilation of questions answered by Mike Bonanno via email and extracts from the FAQ page of The Yes Men’s website, republished here with permission. Why are you called the Yes Men? You know how a funhouse mirror exaggerates your most hideous features? We do that kind of exaggeration operation, but with ideas. We agree with people, while turning up the volume on their ideas as we talk, until they can see their ideas distorted in our funhouse mirror. Or that’s what we try to do, anyhow, but as it turns out, the image always seems to look normal to them. What effect do you want to create with your actions? On a pragmatic level we want to contribute to a global movement that places the needs of people and the environment before that of capital and business. On a more idealistic level, we want to demonstrate that the emperor has no clothes (as in the WTO lectures we gave in Salzburg and Finland) and show that another world is possible (as in the WTO lecture we gave in Sydney). What do you say about the tendency of your audiences to accept passively your presentations, without any outburst whatsoever? At first we were surprised that audiences of so-called experts were able to accept the nasty ideas we were spinning, such as creating a “free market in democracy by allowing corporations to buy votes directly from people.” But when we realized that our ideas were really not all that different from the current reality, it made sense that people didn’t want to say anything. Letting the rich do whatever they want — free markets — seems like a pretty funny way to address poverty, so if people aren’t going ape-shit about that, then it comes as no surprise that people aren’t going to go ape shit when we say something that stays within that logic.... What do you think these responses indicate about the mindset of the corporate man? Ready to goosestep. Fully in sync with the bottom line of the commanding operation. And not just the corporate man: the corporate woman, the academic man, the political woman, the alcoholic child. Many, many people, regardless of education, are easy prey for the ideas of the corporate decision-makers. Present them with a decision: they will accept it! This is why it is important for citizens to decide what sorts of corporate decisions are and are not acceptable. It is never possible to count on the highly educated to filter the okay from the rotten. It is not possible to expect that PhDs will always be on the lookout for the fascist and murderous. On the other hand, people appeared to applaud the last speech in Australia about the dissolution of the WTO. Were those people especially progressive-minded, or did the Yes Men hit a chord with them at last? They were not progressive, but they were humans responding to a humane idea. None of the other audiences responded enthusiastically to the horrible status quo. So the Sydney audience was enthusiastic; in our book The Yes Men: The True Story of the End of the World Trade Organization (reviewed in HopeDance at http://tinyurl.com/6j33g) you can read about more of their responses over lunch. How did you feel when the students in NY finally rose up in disgust when they learned that the WTO was up to recycling shit for food? We felt great. And we didn’t have to get to the shit part for the students to revolt; that was just the icing on the cake. They were revolting throughout the entire hour-long lecture. You have stated that you don’t regret pulling off your more recent 2004 Dow stunt on the BBC (announcing Dow’s plans to make amends for the disaster and to grant victims 12 billion dollars in compensation) even though it must have greatly disappointed survivors. Can you explain why you feel as you do? Two reasons: 1. Our intention was to get news about Bhopal into the US, where most people don’t even know what happened there in 1984, let alone that a person still dies every day from residual pollution that has never been cleaned up. Right there in Dow’s headquarters — Midland, Michigan — most people don’t realize that Dow still refuses to do the slightest thing to repair the damage they are responsible for. In getting the news to these folks, we succeeded wonderfully: hundreds of articles about the event made it into the US press, whereas on most anniversaries of the accident, it hasn’t even found its way into one mainstream source. (Note: Whereas much of the UK press focused on the “false hopes” angle, almost none of the US press did, perhaps because they had to spend the column-inches explaining what Bhopal was in the first place. Since the UK wasn’t our target — almost everyone in the UK had heard plenty about Bhopal in the media — the coverage there just didn’t matter.) 2. The Bhopali activists we’ve spoken to are very happy with these results. In fact, they were happy about them the same day, as soon as they got over their disappointment. Why would we care about what anyone else thinks? 3. We’re not trying to win a popularity contest. Now that your movie is out and you’ve become even more visible, are you concerned that the Yes Men as Andy and Mike (especially Andy) may have blown their cover? Not too worried really... so far nobody has recognized us (especially Andy). But, there is always hope for the future! In the scene with the magazine articles in the movie, you talk about triggering people’s activism. Have you seen it happen? We have heard from people who have said they got interested in these issues because of seeing the film or reading about the pranks in the paper. We are interested in reaching people with ideas — ideas that can travel on the backs of stories. What’s your opinion of the mainstream media’s response to your actions? Very nice. Mainstream journalists almost always get our serious points, and transmit it to the journalism consumer. A lot of these people (journalists) really want to write about important things, but in the US, at least, you can’t cover the WTO or the Bhopal anniversary just because they’re tremendously important. We can provide the fodder, sometimes, that lets these subjects get covered. Like the WTO, it appears that you go jet setting all over the place. Where do you get your funding and how do you support your daily existence? Think of it as weird vacationing — eek-o-tourism, maybe. The stress is quadrupled and the scenery is for shit, but it gives us a nice emotion just like vacationing ought. If we can afford to take a vacation once a year or so, we can afford to take a weird vacation too. Of course, it just so happens that we can’t afford to take a vacation, so we’ve had to rely on the generosity of friends and acquaintances in various places (Salzburg, Tampere, Sydney). We support the Yes Men mostly with our day jobs, and then with some grants from private foundations. We got some money from the Herb Alpert foundation and from Creative Capital. The film is now available in the US on DVD. Learn more about the Yes Men from their website: http://www.theyesmen.org. Amy Landau also interviewed Rev. Billy in this issue and is a contributing writer for HopeDance. She can be reached at Amy.Landau@gmail.com. <back | top^ |