Jonathan Swift Meets Abbie Hoffman

By Evan Derkacz, AlterNet. Posted October 4, 2004.

Andrew Bichlbaum and Michael Bonanno were late; they thought for sure there was only one time zone in all of Europe. Realizing their mistake the two men piled into the stall of a nearby toilet to prepare for a textiles conference in Tampere, Finland. Moments later they found themselves in a sparsely filled auditorium to make a presentation "on behalf of" the World Trade Organization.

After a rousing primer on slavery, the Civil War (it interfered with the natural arc of the slave trade which surely would've evolved given time), and the "problem" of the intransigent sweat shop work force, Bichlbaum explained that while the executive of today needs to keep an eye on those volatile third-world employees he or she still wants flexibility, leisure...freedom. With that intro, Bonanno literally ripped the three-piece suit from Andy's body revealing a skin-tight gold lamé "Executive Leisure Suit."

It gets better.

Andy pulls a strap activating a three-foot phallus, on the end of which sits a video screen. Cameras in distant factories allow the "on-the-go" executive to monitor employees while wires woven into the suit's fabric enable our foot-loose and fancy-free manager to administer gentle electrical shocks to employees. And they don't even have to leave the ninth green to do it. Some nervously looked around, some giggled audibly, but nobody questioned the ethics, authenticity or plausibility of the presentation.

Ridiculous? Not after you've seen, with your own eyes, the antics of a couple of WTO-crashing performance artists calling themselves the Yes Men. The film, appropriately titled The Yes Men, follows the exploits of Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, (think Jonathan Swift meets Abbie Hoffman), and opened this weekend in select theaters. Armed with a proliferation of outrageous ideas (and the imprimatur of the WTO), the two provocateurs, try as they might, raise no eyebrows whether proposing to reinstitute slavery, recycle food, or sell the votes of disaffected Americans to the highest bidder.

The story boils down to this: Two veteran activists who seem to identify with Groucho Marx as strongly as they do, say, Noam Chomsky, were introduced shortly before the watershed protest of 1999 in Seattle. Bichlbaum's resumé included reprogramming one of "The Sims" video games to include dozens of Speedo-clad hunks kissing in the background. Bonanno was a key player in the Barbie Liberation Organization, whose marquee action saw them exchange the voice-boxes of talking Barbies and G.I. Joes, sending them on their way to the shelves of America's toy stores, to be sold to vulnerable American preteens.

The meeting of these two deeply disturbed and hysterically funny minds immediately led to a parody of the official WTO website at GATT.org (clearly this was in the days before corporations and organizations bought every iteration of a URL that resembles their name to prevent situations just like this one). Currently, for example, the front page of the site features this quote on the Iraq War: "In a free market, companies like Halliburton and Exxon should be funding their own market expansion projects instead of depending on their government for help." Yet, despite this satirical take on world trade, the site proved such a convincing simulacrum they began receiving invitations to represent the WTO at conferences across the globe.

Because they rely on shock (both the shock of their increasingly bizarre presentations and the fact that none of these players in the world of international trade seem the least bit moved) I don't want to give too much away. Suffice it to say, apart from the scene above, another even more astonishing prank features Andy on CNBC's Marketwrap as "WTO representative – Granwyth Hulatberi." On live TV he debates Barry Coates, Director of the anti-WTO, World Development Movement, arguing WTO policies are justifiable because powerful nations are, well, powerful enough to implement them and that privatized schools would produce more Milton Friedmans and fewer Abbie Hoffmans.

Evan Derkacz is a New York-based writer and contributor to AlterNet.

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