The Power of Positive Swindling

GETTING TO YES: Mike Bonanno (left) and Andy Bichlbaum, better known as The Yes Men.

How The Yes Men tricked Bush and the WTO into telling the truth.

by Sam Adams

If Sun Tzu had lived into the media age, you can bet he would have added a corollary to The Art of War: "Sometimes the best way to defeat your opponent is to prevent others from taking him seriously." The Yes Men may not have might on their side, but they've proven pretty adept at taking the powerful down a peg.

Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno were united by a common interest in what's come to be known as "culture jamming"—turning the weapons of media back on the corporations who own them and the politicians who control them, and making the unassailable seem merely ridiculous. Bonanno was a member of the Barbie Liberation Organization, who made headlines in the early 1990s by switching the voiceboxes of talking Barbie and GI Joe dolls and sneaking them onto store shelves just in time for Christmas, while Bichlbaum, a computer programmer, slipped Speedo-clad musclemen into the background of an aggressively macho computer game. Their first major joint project was the parody Web site www.gwbush.com, which prompted George W. Bush to remark, "There ought to be limits to freedom," followed by www.gatt.org, a similar bogus site for the World Trade Organization.

Rather than mounting a frontal assault, Bonanno and Bichlbaum perform what they call "identity corrections," which is to say they don't pervert their targets' rhetoric so much as reveal the truths behind it: The Yes Men's version of the WTO freely admits its only interest is in helping corporations turn a profit on the back of less-powerful nations. So perhaps it was inevitable that the casual or irony-impaired reader might take one of their sites for the real thing, which is how Bonanno and Bichlbaum ended up receiving e-mails through the gatt.org site requesting the presence of a WTO representative at various international conferences. (Sample e-mails can be seen at www.theyesmen.org.) The invitation proved too good to turn down, and so Hank Hardy Unruh, Granwyth Hulatberi, Dr. Andreas Bichlbauer and a series of other oddly named WTO representatives were born, extolling the benefits of unrestricted trade from Finland to Australia.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the stunts pulled by The Yes Men in the documentary of the same name by Dan Ollman, Sarah Price and Chris Smith is how mildly their audiences react to their outrageous proposals. "If it hews close to the line of what they're used to, it's like you can say these things and people just miss the details," says Bichlbaum, who stopped in Philadelphia with Bonanno on his way to this year's Republican National Convention. "The WTO philosophy, neoliberalism, is about enabling commerce to do anything. At the root of it is that greed is good and might makes right, and if you just let greed run its course, everything will be OK." In other words, you can tell a group of Finnish textile executives that globalization is a safe, cost-effective alternative to slavery and they won't bat an eye—at least until you strip off your business suit to reveal a sheer gold lamé "Management Leisure Suit," complete with a massive phallic projection which allows you to keep track of your workers from anywhere in the world.

The WTO, Bonanno says, was particularly susceptible to this kind of performance-art attack because of its "faceless, bureaucratic" nature. But, he says, "it's possible to do this with lots of other organizations which do have a public profile, as long as you don't have to be them personally. You can be someone who works for them, or something along those lines." Thus, Bonanno and Bichlbaum have taken to the road in recent weeks purporting to be Bush supporters pushing his "Healthy Forests" initiative—in reality a huge sop to logging interests—with the help of his new mascot, Smokey the Log.

The human element of The Yes Men comes from watching Bonanno and Bichlbaum, as well as sundry helpers—their Web site notes, "Anyone can be a Yes Man"—beating deadlines, scrounging for thrift-store suits and gnawing their nails as each event approaches. "Each time, it's incredibly nerve-wracking for us to do," Bichlbaum admits, even though they quickly realized that the chances of them getting arrested were relatively small. In a sense, their trepidation is a tribute to the vestigial power of authority. Even though Bonanno and Bichlbaum have no respect for the WTO, they can't quash their anxieties, no matter how irrational. Consequences or no, they're somewhere they're not supposed to be.

Of course, it's that element of daring that has made The Yes Men the subject of dozens if not hundreds of newspaper articles over the years, not to mention the documentary in question. "Growing up, I always felt there was a certain kind of powerlessness," Bonanno recalls. "There's not real opportunity for any individual to say anything, even to participate in the political process. So this idea of these kind of publicity stunts as a way of getting access to the media became very attractive." Attractive, and ultimately, effective.

The Yes Men opens Friday at the Ritz Bourse. See Sam Adams' review on p. 35.