VIRTUAL INTERVIEW OF ANDY BICHLBAUER
Andy, is the Yes Men a Satire?
In their past impersonations of the WTO, The Yes Men chose to make satire in the tradition of Johnathan Swift`s "A Modest Proposal". They pushed free-trade agendas to their logical conclusion, arguing for abolishing the siesta, selling votes to the highest bidder, and even allowing managers to administer electric shocks to sweatshop workers from afar by using a futuristic telepresence technology embedded in a three foot long golden phallus. (for details on this see www.theyesmen.org ) The problem with that approach: there was no reaction. Nobody in the audience was outraged. Audiences didnt think there was anything wrong with the horrible ideas presented by the WTO, even though they were nearly the moral equivalent of Swift's "Modest Proposal". The audience respected the presenters so much, that they simply went along with them. So, having failed at satire this time the Yes Men decided to take the high road and simply be honest. When they were accidentally invited to speak as the WTO at an accounting conference in Australia, they took the opportunity to do what they really wanted to doand thus on Tuesday this week, in front of an audience of accountants and dignitaries that even included the Australian Counsul-General of Canada, they announced the end of the WTO, and its replacement with the Trade Regulation Organization. And sincerity worked. The sincere lecture got a sincere response. All the participants agreed that in light of the way that gap between rich and poor has been growing in the world, somthing had to be changed. The post-presentation luncheon turned into a think-tank for what the new Trade Regulation Organization can offer, and how it can be put in the service of helping people.
Why are you targeting the WTO in your most recent action?
WTO is nice symbol of all that is happening corporations- vs.-democracy-wise.
How has the WTO responded to your site and your episodes? Have they issued any press statements?
Yes, they have. They told Alexandre Piquard of the French magazine called Transfert that they were very nice (the WTO). "Nous sommes gentils" is how they put it. That's all I know. To another journalist (Barnaby Feder of the New York Times) they said they "deplored" it (the Bichlbauer situation- -not his toxic pieing and death but the whole situation) but believed in free speech, more or less. So I think here we have contradictory statements, sort of. After all, deploring is not your typical nice sort of emotion to convey. I mean, if I see you on the street and say "I deplore you" and then see you at local bar and say "I am so nice," are you going to believe me? But then, the WTO isn't really just some guy walking around on the street.... Do you have any more hoaxes in the works? We haven't done any hoaxes! If you mean representing the WTO more honestly than they represent themselves, yes, we do--we have been invited to a conference somewhere in Oceania. In the spring. We look forward to it very much.
What are you expecting from your action?
Dramatic illustration of things. As dramatic as a three-foot penis!
But, I mean, you maybe want to prove that people can easily believe everything they heard if it's presented as serious, isn't it? Or you want to disrupt the official speach of WTO by doing fake presentation?
Well, it is already entirely well-known that people believe what is presented with the voice of authority. It is just not so widely understood that *people in positions of responsibility and power* believe what is presented with the voice of authority. And that one huge voice of authority is very clearly the WTO. Others, for example, are corporations. So that these supranational corporate bodies, which are less and less responsible to anyone--to national democracies, for example-- are really not checked, are really not watched with anything near the proper amount of attention. That's bad!
A Question about your lecture and performance at the "Fibres and Textiles for the Future" seminar arranged at the Tampere University of Technology (Finnland). In your lecture you ended up wearing a golden leotard with a three-foot phallus, explaining the purpose of the "Management Leisure Suit" was to allow managers, no matter where they were, to control their remote workforces in the developing world. Why did you do it?
Basically, it's because the WTO is a really big deal that has a lot to say about what happens and what doesn't. And you take a look at the things they say in the press and on their website and it's so ludicrous, so infantile. They say things like "Letting big companies do whatever the fuck they want anywhere in the world will lead to cleaner air because the companies will have really big profits and therefore so will the countries they are in and then those countries will spend that extra money on buying equipment that's better for air quality." This is really the gist of what Mike Moore has said. Given this sort of idiotic idea, it's really funny to see how much respect this organization gets from truly smart people. And we wonder: just how totally repulsive could it be and still get respect and allegiance from those really smart people? Could it, say, proclaim something like "Voting should be privatized--companies should be able to purchase votes for president"? Could it say "Today's remote labor system is a lot like slavery, but even better"? Could it say "Gandhi was really misguided"? Would people clap? The answer has always been a resounding YES -- and that's why we are The Yes Men. We say YES too! What was the reaction from delegates? After the lecture, Mike and I wandered around the enclave and spoke with people in various environments-- at lunch, at dinner, in the lobby, etc. Always people understood what the lecture had been about. Always people said it was not offensive. Under other circumstances they would have found it offensive, but because it was the WTO saying these things, they were ready to goosestep. And they were so friendly! Apple wine and pretzels! Hearty handshakes! Sometimes, great earnestness and desire to continue relations into the future between our camp and yours. Do you have a card? Here is mine. Let us read one another's position papers! I like you!
What was the reaction in the hall?
They gave us more than polite applause. They gave us robust applause. And the president of the conference mentioned the talk at least three times in public—once right after, once during the day, and once during his dinner announcement, right before the traditional Finnish folk music part. Each time, he said how grateful they all were for this very nice presentation by this WTO representative. (In Salzburg they were listening too, though apparently not quite as well. Perhaps they were less smart? Or perhaps the performance was less clear? I have learned to enunciate. SLAVE- RY. GAN-DHI. E-LEC-TRO-CU-TION.) What does this say about corporate man's likelihood to examine and temper the power of the mouthpiece of the (not entirely hypothetical) extremely driven organization, whether it be his own or another's? 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 Ph.D.s will always be on the lookout for the fascist and murderous. Fortunately, it is possible to establish laws that regulate the behavior of corporations and the like. That way, it is not necessary to rely on the alertness of Ph.D.s to yell when scary things get said or, in the event, done. What did the WTO say to that incident? They have told at least two reporters (from Transfert, and from New York Times) that they "deplore" us. "Deplore"! Well, we deplore them! Those dumb-asses! Also, in Transfert, they suggested we should wear masks of Mike Moore's face and run around yelling angry epithets about him. That would be funny, they said. They are really stupid! Of course, we are also very stupid. Mike and I, we can laugh for hours about these things that we do, just like the WTO laughs when people wear Mike Moore's face. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! We are really dumb that way. But we think journalists like our funniness better, and that's why they write articles about us. And they also get some serious points in, that they come up with within their own heads.
Who are you targeting with this kind of action? The guys you do the presentation for? Or somebody else?
NOT the guys we’re doing the presentation for-- and here you have touched on a very important key. Our aims: 1. The first aim was to show how easy it is to transmit and have accepted extremely dangerous, even fascistic ideas, if one has the name of the WTO. 2. The perceptive will notice that these ideas are in fact only logical extensions of the WTO's own immediate ideas--and illustrating that is our second aim. In fact both aims go together: we want to show that we have a situation now in which there is this incredibly powerful and sometimes violent blok--the WTO, the corporations it serves, etc.; we can call it the "money blok" or something--and the only critical eye on this blok is that of what has come to be called the "anti-globalization" movement. No one besides this movement seems to be paying any attention whatsoever, nor has any moral compunctions about what goes on. We have found this to be dramatically the case among lawyers (http://theyesmen.org/wto/), industrial Ph.D.s (http://theyesmen.org/finland/), and also an unknown audience that watches business TV (http:// theyesmen.org/tv.html). The responsibility for paying attention is therefore squarely on the shoulder of the "anti-globalization" types--something they already know, of course, but we just aim to illustrate it nice and clearly.
