Canada
joined a select group that includes George W. Bush, Dow Chemical and a
few other corporate bastions when the culture-jamming Yes Men took on
the Tories' climate-change policy in Copenhagen.
At least, that's The Yes Men's version of the story.
By early morning Tuesday, the joke they pulled on Canada had already been added to their Wikipedia entry.
Pulling
off elaborate hoaxes that mimic reality in fine detail, The Yes Men
have operated for a decade on the media fringes with Mike Bonanno and
Andy Bichlbaum as their most visible front men. Not that Bonanno and
Bichlbaum are their real names.
Bichlbaum is Jacques Servin, 46, whose day job is a professor at Parsons School of Design in New York City and who told The New York Times this month that he once impersonated the grandson of the Ayatollah Khomeini in high school in Tucson, Ariz.
Bonanno
is Igor Vamos, 42, a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in
Troy, New York, who claims to have switched hundreds of voice boxes
between Barbie dolls and G.I. Joes.
Their method is reductio ad absurdum:
taking a message to its most absurd lengths, often by posing as
corporate spokesmen. And now, just like Michael Moore and Sacha Baron
Cohen, they have a movie.
The Yes Men Fix the World is
a documentary about their mockumentary exploits that opened last summer
in Britain and recently in the United States, forcing them to ditch
their covers and venture into the real world as themselves.
In
an interview in 2007 with Bill Moyers, Servin explained what they do as
"a form of journalism. A lot of the issues that we address, journalists
want to cover. Sometimes it's the reason they've gone into journalism.
But editorial control won't let them unless there's a good little hook
behind it. So we've found a way to create funny spectacles that give
journalists the excuse to cover issues."
When the Yes Men movie opened in the U.K., The Guardian
did a cerebral analysis of the evolution of absurdist, ironic comedy,
starting with Jonathan Swift and ending with Vamos, who compared their
work to Baron Cohen's. "We're doing similar things, though his messages
are a lot subtler and less overtly political. I know a lot of people
wonder why he doesn't engage more."
Like Baron Cohen, The Yes
Men excel in creating fake websites and fake news conferences. "It's
always rewarding to announce the future you want to see," Vamos told The Guardian. "You can see on people's faces the realization that this could actually be happening."
On
Monday in Copenhagen, it was Canada announcing a climate change
about-face, although it wasn't their first shot at Canada. Two years
ago, in Calgary to promote a book and another documentary, they crashed
an oil and gas trade show to announce memorial candles made from the
remains of a former ExxonMobil janitor.
This year, they created a letter-perfect copy of The New York Times dated
July 4, 2009, which was hawked on the streets of Manhattan and heralded
the end of the Iraq war. They recruited newspaper vendors on a website
promising, "a year of work involving dozens of collaborators comes to a
head. Take a break in your commute to pick up materials, then
distribute them. Note: You don't know who did this."
One of
their most elaborate schemes was Servin's announcement on the BBC News
five years ago that Dow Chemical had agreed to clean up the site of the
1984 pesticide gas leak in Bhopal, India, that killed at least 8,000
people immediately and many more later from the after effects. Dow's
stock reportedly dropped $2 billion.
