The two masterminds who make up The Yes Men, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonnano, stopped by the area recently to promote their new film. "The Yes Men" shows the pranksters pretending to be WTO representatives at conferences and on TV, and lecturing a classroom on the value of using recycled human waste in hamburgers.
They aren't wasting their promotional tour. When I met them in a hotel room, they were wearing ridiculous red-and-blue shirts and ties (with phony nametags); they are traveling around distributing bogus brochures detailing the policies of President Bush. You can't know until you read the fine print ("I volunteer to help generate more greenhouse gases if it results in a competitive edge for my country") that the document is fake. I began by asking the Yes Men about their current tour.
Andy Bichlbaum: We're going around the country basically stumping for Bush. ... We went to this 99-cent store outside of Redding, Calif. A lot of poor people there, almost all of them voting for Bush. We went there with a petition, which we asked them to sign, supporting Bush's tax cuts for the top one percent, and supporting that general policy of giving the tax cuts to the richest people. A couple of them got it, and refused to sign at that point, which is better than we've done. Usually people sign, no matter what. So that's the kind of thing we're trying to do.
Mike Bonnano: Until the election, we're going around trying to correct Bush's identity. ... and then we'll stop doing Bush-related stuff, and we'll have to start doing Kerry-related stuff. It's a bit of a digression for us, because we really have been working on the issue of corporate globalization for a long time. Kerry represents just a slightly softer version of the same problem.
Andy: It's really a difference of degree.
Q: What is that phrase, "Identity correction"?
Mike: We all know what identity theft is; that's become popular these days. But there are really large criminals out there, criminals operating on a global scale, and we feel like those people need to have their identities corrected. So we assume the identity of these wealthy criminals in order to try to make them more honest. It's kind of a twist on identity theft.
Andy: It's like, in the 1770s Daniel Defoe wrote this pamphlet on behalf of the Radical Anglicans. He was appalled by their policies, they were proposing banning all Protestants from public office, so he issued a pamphlet under their name suggesting that Protestants should actually all just be executed en masse instead. And some of the Anglicans stood up and said, "Hey, that's not a bad idea." And he was put in the stocks for a few days as punishment. ... so it's an old thing, people for centuries have adopted identities in order to make them clearer.
Q: Have you guys run into legal situations where you could be put into the stocks, as it were?
Mike: The thing that's weird about what we do is that most lawyers don't have a clue whether it's legal or not. For instance, the first time we went to Salzburg to represent the World Trade Organization, at a conference on international trade law, we thought we might ask a few lawyers if what we were doing was illegal, and nobody knew. It's this kind of nebulous zone. And as it turns out, nobody noticed that we weren't the WTO, even though we proposed things like opening a free-market democracy by selling votes to the highest bidder, and outlawing the siesta in Spain and the long lunch in Italy. All those things went under the radar anyway, as just part of normal WTO-speak.
Q: Do you enjoy the actual theatrical aspect of your stunts?
Andy: Yeahhhhh ... (they both laugh). It's actually excruciating. It's not hard, exactly, to fool these people, because they come believing you, so you'd have to work pretty hard to make them disbelieve you. It's fun, in a way, but it's a bit sad to be saying these horrible things to people.
Mike: There's definitely a bit of a rush involved, a little bit of suspense, we don't know the outcome. Each time we go into a conference hall, we go in fully expecting a disaster to occur. I was surprised that we weren't locked up or thrown away, or whatever they do to you in Finland or Austria.
Andy: The part I like best is walking around afterwards and talking to these people that I imagine are powerful, and trying to engage them and listen to what makes them tick. Sometimes it's much more shocking than anything we could come up with. Like people saying, "Yeah, the WTO should just meet in secret, without anybody knowing, that would be much better for everybody." Some really crazy stuff. In Finland, a woman was angry about the costume (a jumpsuit with an inflatable phallus, with a TV monitor for observing employees). And we thought, maybe we got somebody, maybe she understood it. But it turned out she was just appalled by the shape of the thing, and that it implied that women could not be factory owners. And that was a bit of a shock, but kind of fascinating.
