I pretty much dropped out of following politics after last November's election. The fact that this president could be reelected was absolutely stupefying. The city of San Francisco seemed like it had been hit by a bomb. People walked around in a daze and I was one of them. Intellectuals like to think that reason will eventually prevail, and maybe it will, but in that election it obviously did not. I couldn't read the newspaper for weeks (although even our president has said he doesn't read any newspapers)--it was just too depressing. Thinking about politics, and the state of the world at large, has just been too much, especially while dealing with the daily difficulties of life.
Protests don't work; countering the right's organization with leftist 527s doesn't work; voting doesn't work; it doesn't seem to matter what the left does, we're going to lose to the shouting monkeys on Fox News.
My roommate rented a DVD yesterday called
The Yes Men and we watched it yesterday. It's about a group of people that set up a Web site,
www.gatt.org, that looked a lot like the World Trade Organization's Web site. GATT stands for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade that allows U.S. and multinational corporations to send American jobs overseas (and across the border to Mexico) to third world workers who work in often squalid conditions usually without healthcare, the 8-hour work week or a living wage.
The Yes Men is Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, two pranksters with purpose. Bichlbaum was a software designer for the Sim City games in the '90s when he made the male characters run around and make out with each other. Bonnano was behind a well publicized prank that switched the voiceboxes of Barbie dolls and G.I. Joes, snuck them back into stores and were eventually sold to the unwitting public as a commentary on culturally created gender roles. The G.I. Joes would say things like "Let's go shopping" and the Barbies would talk about dead men telling no tales.
The two began receiving e-mails from corporate organizations asking for a speaker from the WTO to present lectures at business conferences and to appear on television news shows. So they did.
Bichlbaum appeared on CNBC in Europe as a representative of the WTO and took on an anti-globalization lecturer, encouraging the education of children on the ideas of conservative economist Milton Friedman instead of Trotsky and Abby Hoffman. He made points that the corporate world would most likely agree with, yet said things much more bluntly.
This continued at a lecture in Finland that the two attended. Bichlbaum was to give a speech on the future of textiles. He spoke about slavery, but called it involuntary labor, and said that the North should never have attacked the South in The Civil War because slavery would have been made irrelevant by the free market anyway. He pointed out that the costs of maintaining a slave in the United States in present days would be far more expensive than using workers in third world countries. At the end of the lecture Bonnano ripped off Bichlbaum's three-piece suit to reveal the WTO's management leisure suit prototype made of gold pleather and featuring a inflatable phallus with a television screen. From the screen the manager could view his sweatshops in foreign worlds and control workers through electrical devices implanted in workers. All this was met with applause from the audience and they were invited to a VIP reception later at the conference, were written about in newspapers who also believed they were from the WTO. Later stunts involved a lecture on a joint WTO/McDonald's human waste recycling program to end starvation in third world countries and a lecture in Australia on the dismantling of the WTO in its current form into a humanitarian organization.
What was encouraging about the last two stunts were that the economics students who were presented with the human waste recycling were outraged that the WTO would only focus on profits and not people and that the corporate accountants were glad to hear that the WTO would be restructuring itself to eliminate wealth disparity between the richest and poorest countries. Maybe people are reasonable after all. Maybe, if in some way people can be presented with the facts, can critically listen to the shouting monkeys, maybe things can change.
