RES Columns: Q & A
Jokers Wild: The Yes Men
Words: David Alm
The Yes Men are not what they seem. Donning pressed gray suits and imported silk ties, members of this nebulous group travel the world posing as right-wing reactionaries. They crash conventions, conferences and parties, where they gain the trust of their unwitting foes before pulling ingenious and cunning "activist pranks" -- from delivering virtually fascist speeches to nominating Ed Meese, the Attorney General under Reagan and a kingpin behind the Iran-Contra scandal of the mid-1980s, for president.
The Yes Men began in 2000, when Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno were mistakenly invited to represent the World Trade Organization at conferences around the world after setting up a fake WTO Web site. Only "semi-employed" at the time, they went anyway and gave speeches mocking everything the WTO stands for -- but amazingly, very few got the joke. So the two friends decided to keep at it, raising the bar each time in a not-so-stealth protest against the powers that be. Since then they have appeared (under false pretenses, of course) at countless events and on several television programs. They were also the guys who created the anti-Bush Web site, GWBush.com, which elicited George Junior's famous remark, "There ought to be limits to freedom."
With a forthcoming documentary by Dan Ollman, Sarah Price and Chris Smith (who previously collaborated on the 1999 festival hit, American Movie) and a book published by Disinformation Press -- both titled The Yes Men -- at least some of these political pranksters won't go unnoticed much longer. And with any luck, neither will their efforts to oust the current administration.
Q. How did you three meet?
The two biological men met a number of years ago under circumstances too lengthy and, well, too harrowing to describe in the pages of RES. The full story, with color pictures for those of firm constitution, is featured in our forthcoming book. We met the biological woman (Ina Howard) last year in connection with efforts to make us more intelligent.
Q. How many Yes Men are there now?
We can't say for sure how many there are, but we know for a fact that the number must be huge. For example, after spending two days recently with 650 supposedly right-wing zealots, at the Heritage Foundation's annual "Resource Bank," we determined that at least half of these people had to be fake. I mean, have you ever tried to read a book by Ayn Rand? And yet about 30 of them were from the "Atlas Foundation," a "think tank" devoted to her "thought." Yeah, right!
Another group, called "For Our Grandchildren" (ha!!), pretends to claim that Social Security is unfair to African Americans because "African Americans have lower life expectancies than other Americans. This means that in Social Security's live-long-or-lose-out program, most African Americans lose out." What a sick joke!! To make it sicker, they even hired a couple of African American temps to wear ostrich costumes and pretend to be protesters. (Look, not all Yes Men have taste -- some of us wander right off the deep end.)
Q. What was your grandest hijinks?
Remember "Mission Accomplished" and "Bring it on"? Among our more modest successes, perhaps, was shutting down the WTO in Australia. After all, we shut it down.
Q. How do you maintain your composure while impersonating people whose policies you detest?
Well, if reading a prepared speech, it helps to just read the damn speech. If conversing with people over cocktails, the cocktails help. Then it's like suddenly having license to be as stupid and crazy as you ever wanted to be at a party.
Q. Do you ever think people are catching on?
All the time, but that's paranoia. You really have to whack them over the head. Nominating Ed Meese for President isn't enough, nor is inflating a three-foot golden penis. The trick is to avoid talking to students or other people of active curiosity.
Q. Now that you're gaining some fame, will you have to revise your approach in order to remain under the radar?
The movie that's been made about some of our behaviors will make it harder for the two of us on the poster to show our regular faces in certain places. But we have plenty of irregular faces that we've saved up over the years. And there are countless Yes Men about whom a movie has not lately been made, so it's not really a problem anyhow.
Q. Can you describe a dream scenario for the Yes Men?
You know the last scene in Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator? Mistaken for Hitler at the border of Austria, the Jewish barber makes a speech to the soldiers waiting to start the Anschluss: "Greed... has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed." The soldiers all agree and call the Anschluss off. Perhaps Bush could be made to announce this truth today?
Q. Will the Yes Men keep at it even if the Democrats take back the White House?
Would the barber of Berlin have kept up his tricks even if the Nazis had been defeated before 1945? In any case, all bets are off on what's possible if these monsters win in November....
