Yes, Yes, A Thousand Times Yes!
Monday, August 9th, 2010Man. I talk a lot about change. How global change can only result from individual change, how individual change occurs when we are authentic and fearless. I talk a lot about this here and in person and I carry these ideas into action as best I can in my personal life, but I have got nothing — nothing — on the Yes Men.
If anyone is sincere it’s these guys. If anyone is fearless. If anyone has balls of goddamn titanium-plated diamond it’s these guys.
The Yes Men are just a couple regular dudes who use cheap suits, painstaking research, and visionary wits to purport themselves as spokesmen for corporations and organizations. (More accurately, they purport to be assistants or deputies of actual spokesmen, who unfortunately had to cancel at the last moment.) They appear at trade shows, conferences, even on television, and deliver statements on behalf of these companies and organizations. The statements they make are not the usual corporate evasion, buck-passing or blame-laying, but admissions of guilt and pledges of reparation. Eventually they’re found out, and the organizations they’ve (mis)represented are left to either step up to the plate and do the right thing, the thing which has been promised and which ignites fires of surprise, gratitude and progress in peoples’ hearts, or to whine about being the victims of a cruel hoax and shouldn’t we all feel sorry for them ‘cause their wallets aren’t bursting quite enough to afford ounce one of compassion or justice.
For example, in 2004 they landed a TV interview by creating a website for a non-existent DOW Chemical ethics department, then waiting for someone to notice. Someone did. The BBC. The BBC was putting together a report on the twentieth anniversary of the catastrophe at Bhopal, India. Union Carbide owned the chemical plant that leaked, but since then DOW bought them out. DOW immediately settled Union Carbide’s debts in the US. Three years passed without any word on a settlement for the survivors and families of the dead in Bhopal. The 18,000 dead. The Yes Men agreed to appear on the BBC News special. I won’t say more because I don’t want to spoil it. Except that when they were ridiculed for giving false hope to the people of Bhopal what did they do? Hang their heads and say sorry? Shit no. They did what DOW wouldn’t: they went to Bhopal to find out what the people really think, really feel, and really want.
If you’re interested. No. If you’re interested or not, even extremely not, I encourage you to watch this documentary the Yes Men have made and distributed of their work. It is incredible. It is massively inspiring. The video is freely available to watch, to copy and to distribute. Get the torrent right here, or buy the DVD from their website. The video begins with an introduction explaining that the US Chamber of Commerce has demanded all copies of the video itself be collected and (I may be recalling this wrong) destroyed, as part of a lawsuit filed by the Chamber against the Yes Men. I’m delighted to do my part by spreading it.
If this kind of thing suits you to the core, you can also get involved by signing up at the Yes Lab. The Yes Men are looking to breed in a cellular, Improv Everywhere sort of way. Their mission is geared specifically toward financial corruption, so I can’t imagine it as the be-all end-all answer to the world’s problems, but damned if it won’t wake a lot of people up to the idea of change. Especially change as an individual pursuit. Hell, an individual responsibility.
Do yourself a favour and watch. Do the world a favour and get in the spirit.
~J
