Culture jamming Yes Men have big balls

                Picture swiped from the Yes Men website.

The Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy NY was packed for the 'sneaky' public premier of  The Yes Men Fix the World.  RPI associate professor, Igor Vamos (aka Mike Bonanno) let the first public US audience preview his new movie to a warm reception on Tuesday night. 

Soon the rest of the world will see the introduction of the faux Haliburton creation known as the SurvivaBall. Bonanno and his partner Andy Bichlbaum (real name Jacque Servin) fool corporate events, public announcements and major news networks with a series of antics designed to shame misbehaving entities into acknowledging the shame associated with negligent actions (Bhopal - Union Carbide) and greedy ambitions. While their own actions have been given equally dubious ethical assessments, the duo defends their actions while simultaneously taking down the whole of capitalism in a much more riotous and humor ridden atmosphere and design than Michael Moore has seemed to come up with since he sailed a sick group down to Cuba for medical care. 

 Igor Vamos answered questions from the audience afterwards about the movie, it's distribution and it's reception at film festivals. The official opening is today in New York City. The hope is that various venues will surface and expand as the film is introduced across the country. Issues like Climate Justice and local activism were discussed. Bonnano/Vamos offered copies of their fake New York Times and New York Post issues that they coyly distributed in a stunt city wide as recently as this September. The single Yes Man suggested a price of $10 a piece to help raise funds for the Sanctuary and the movie's cost. Members of the audience were fully involved with not only the movie, enjoying multiple bouts of laughter, but also with the star and producer himself. Many RPI faculty were as well as dozens of students from RPI. 

  Any hip observer of the Yes Men has to admit that their stunts are top notch hoaxes. Masterfully interjecting themselves into events of powerful corporations, government glad handing and even a BBC broadcast that tanked Dow Chemical stock by 2 billion dollars hours after the broadcast, Bonnano and Bichlbaum are unrelenting in their perpetualization of demanding accountability from the masters of industry and to a lesser extent, the government. While it's certainly entertaining and interesting to see the Yes Men pull off a golden skeleton prank at risk conference. The hilarious fake recounting of a Mobil Exxon worker named Reggie recycled into a candle that smells like a human burning and subsequently put into the hands of attendees, puts the Yes Men mischief at the level of the Norse God, Loki. 

  The raking of free market think tanks comes as the movies intellectual line in the sand. Exhuming Milton Friedman and his modern day disciples becomes an exercise in repititious mockery and image evoking leading that comes off as intellectually lazy, but wonderfully engaging to easily bemused progressives. At one point each interviewee is asked to supply a personalized image of the noble examples of wealth and prosperity that these DC hobbled creatures envision themselves associated with. As images of the Katrina aftermath, pictures of the Capitol and eventually a fall into gay figures in black and white cartoons behind pompous old white men expounding on the virtues of Capitalism take hold, there is no wonder that the new media of poltical documentary need not answer to age old standards of reason or facts. I would remind the Yes Men that the Cato Institute must have been watching Borat too when it  punked them back with some libertarian antics from Competitive Enterprise Institute funded culture jammers, Bureaucrash. 

  During his after screening talk, Vamos/Bonnano seemed to suggest that only political action would ultimately prove to be the mitigating factor in seeing things like climate justice pursued. Like Michael Moore, he believes that democracy is the ultimate tool that will allow production of raw resources to be regulated before it filters out into the consumptive capacities of the average dull and uninformed American. While Dow and Exxon Mobil are great targets when it comes to corporate malfeasance and issues like planet distruction through better chemical placement, crony capitalism and their violent statist partners are not the inevitable end all free market behavior. The idea that government can be recaptured for a nebulous public good in order to protect us from the life sucking quality of product creation, seems naive at best. 

While not defending Dow or the Indian government, the horribleness of that particular situation doesn't trump the capacity of some cadres and cabals to organize as the 'state' and summarily cause the deaths of millions then for no other cause then glory, ambition and power during the course of war, just or otherwise. These are the deeper circumstances that free market economists like Friedman's libertarian contemporaries like Murray Rothbard understand. Coupled with various Austrian School thinkers like Mises and Hayek, it's not surprising that uber critics of crony capitalism don't look much farther than Friedman. 

Some in the audience were emboldened enough to make catcalls for Obama to be in Copenhagen for the climate talks and others suggested that capping 'breeding' would be a best solution. While Bonnano/Vamos deftly countered such wild conclusions with the same humourous qualities found in the film, it's seems clear that democracy is the new code word for collectivism without the burden of such perjorative terms as socialism. Vamos equates universal health care with freedom using the example of Great Britain and has little burden placed upon him to answer from the neo-hippy crew that made up this audience. 

To be clear, I liked the movie. Watching corporate or bureauaecratic chumps be the butt of a well done spoof or hoax is uproariously entertaining. The level of creativity and design that went into these schemes is so far unparralled in modern documentary in my limited experience. Companies and governments that don't see these guys coming deserve what they get in my opinion. No question there's a herd of chuckleheads out there living off their corporate or government teat. 

The free market can function effectively without regulation. To be certain bad actors and groups have done bad things that they haven't been held accountable for. Usually this is because of an insidious cultural collusion that transcends any noble seperation between private and public. The Yes Men understand our world and its false actors and players very well. But whether or not they grasp the fundamental difference between a voluntary transaction or a coerced preferable outcome is yet to be seen. There is a push back coming from other artists and productions that seem like their from the right. It's unclear if they'll get as much grassroots traction or critical reception.

To their credit, they've retained their rights to this production and I hope it hits many diverse groups besides the leftist radicals present last night. Rewarding the deligence and partnership of the Sanctuary has my warmest appreciation. Perhaps the greatest revelation to this Examiner was the fact that neither Yes Man has been vigorously pursued with legal actions by the very behemoths they seek to slay. Thus hope is offered to aspiring rabble rousers wherever they maybe. Reducing the fear of meaningful retaliation in the face of criticism will be key to any future artist or media activism.

I'm sure that I will not be alone in my criticism of this feature. Unfortunately the levels of attack will come in a very brusque and unenlightened tendancy towards partisan bickering and posing.

Note: Permission for the Yes Men movies poster was not obtained in the spirit of their own pursuits and habits. I trust that the Examiner will not be harmed by this action and doubt the Yes Men will see it as anything but further promotion.