{"id":8112,"title":"Yes Men","kind":"bio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/yes-men","version":"8a62f871a093254fbd5aaa65f3b1f07fe0cfe43606b148848f10af4a6df853d6","modified":"2011-06-18T00:01:12+00:00","credits":[],"authorKeys":[],"subjects":["bio"],"metadata":[{"label":"First name","value":"NULL","url":null},{"label":"Last name","value":"Yes Men","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Yes Men.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2011. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/yes-men.","publication":null,"risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/8112.ris"},"links":[{"label":"https://www.theyesmen.org/","url":"https://www.theyesmen.org/","relationship":"record body link","contentType":null},{"label":"http://www.eviltwinbooking.com/","url":"http://www.eviltwinbooking.com/","relationship":"record body link","contentType":null}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":22430},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":617}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"This is a list of questions that the Yes Men have been asked at least once by reporters writing articles, or by people watching lectures, or by friends scratching heads. These are real questions not pulled out of an ass! If you have an unanswered question, please email it to questions@theyesmen.org so that we can bop it over the head like a soon-to-be-delicious sturgeon. How does a person turn into a Yes Man? A person becomes a Yes Man by exposing, perhaps deviously, the nastiness of powerful evildoers. If this describes what you do (the exposing, not the evildoing), and you want your story here on this website, please fill out a Report of Identity Correction. What benefits does mischief have over more traditional protest? None! For chrissakes. This is like asking if the bangles in the cake\u0027s icing are better than the mustard. (Who asked this question anyhow?) Even if we were the bangles (we are not), we would look like crap without the icing. If we were the mustard (we are not), we would taste like crap minus the lollipop. And so on. Traditional forms of protest are more important than ever today: street protest, direct action, rallies, lawsuits, letter-writing\u2026 All this and more is necessary to make change happen. Plus, what we do is traditional (see below). Why haven\u0027t you been fed to the bears, or at least arrested? Isn\u0027t what you do illegal? Perhaps it is! And we don\u0027t know! Bears would be too good for us, but our targets don\u0027t want the risk. At least that\u0027s our theory. Anytime anyone has done something about us--saying they \u0022deplore\u0022 us, complaining that we\u0027re a Political Action Committee, whatever--they\u0027ve looked ridiculous to the press. On the other hand, what we do might not be illegal. Lawyers don\u0027t seem to know; the ones we\u0027ve asked can\u0027t point to such-and-such a law that means we\u0027re in trouble. But then the law is pretty irrelevant, as far as corporations are concerned--if they want you silenced, they just throw a totally bogus lawsuit at you, that invariably gets thrown out, and in the meantime ties you up in red tape. That\u0027s called a SLAPP suit, and it\u0027s the main way corporations silence community activists whose causes aren\u0027t sexy enough for the media to be interested. Like the WTO, it appears that you go jetsetting all over the place. Where do you get your funding? Think of it as weird vacationing--eek-o-tourism, maybe. The stress is quadrupled, the scenery is for shit, but it gives us a nice emotion just like vacationing ought. If we can afford to take a vacation once a year or so, we can afford to take a weird vacation too. Of course, it just so happens that we can\u0027t afford to take a vacation, so we\u0027ve had to rely on the generosity of friends and acquaintances in various places (Salzburg, Tampere, Sydney). Also, after doing this for a while on what we could scrape together and get donated to us, we\u0027ve found ways to supplement our income giving lectures, selling total crap, and getting art grants from foundations with funny people in charge. What\u0027s your opinion of the mainstream media\u0027s response to your actions? Very nice. We do what we do because we think it is funny. We can laugh for hours about these things, we are really stupid that way. Mainstream journalists sometimes think we\u0027re funny too. But almost always they get the serious point too, and transmit it to the journalism-consuming consumer. A lot of these people (journalists) really want to write about important things--but many of them need an excuse that\u0027s fairly innocuous (i.e. won\u0027t piss off the big-name corporate interest in town, whether that\u0027s Mr. Potter or ExxonMobil). What themes have been extolled by the Yes Men at presentations and how were they recieved? Eat, destroy, swallow, devour, glutch, gobble, quaff, marf, munch, lunch, inhale. Hurrah, cheer, kudos, honor, exalt, extol, salute. In more detail? When we went to the International Legal Studies Conference in Salzburg, we delivered a speech that we thought would make people think twice about WTO policies. We suggested that the siesta in Spain be made illegal because it gets in the way of work. We suggested that a \u0022free market\u0022 be established in the realm of democratic government by allowing the buying and selling of votes... we even showed them a website that could make the process very efficient. All of these ideas simply follow the free market philosophy at the core of the WTO to its logical extreme, which is of course quite illogical when you look at the facts. And the facts are that in the last 25 years the poor of the world have gotten even poorer... while the rich have gotten astronomically richer. And all that during the implementation of policies that the WTO claim will help the poor. Of course, these kinds of twisted ideas of what is right for the weak or the poor are not new--there was a bizarre logic that supported colonialism too. Unfortunately, our current religion of free-trade is so strong that despite our best efforts to satirize the logic, the various audiences we spoke to simply agreed with every sinister, corrupt, and disgusting idea that the \u0022WTO\u0022 could muster. So we learned exactly how frightening this reality is. Your accounts suggest the audiences make virtually no response at the time of the presentations--no questions, booing, heckling; only polite applause. Mightn\u0027t this be better interpreted as a sign of incomprehension than of acquiescence? Was anyone listening? In Finland, they certainly were listening. After the lecture, we wandered around the enclave and spoke with people in various environments--at lunch, at dinner, in the lobby, etc. Always people understood what the lecture had been about. Always people said it was not offensive. Under other circumstances they would have found it offensive, but because it was the WTO saying these things, they were pretty much ready to goosestep. What do you think these responses indicate about the mindset of the corporate man? Ready to goosestep. Fully in sync with the bottom line of the commanding operation. And not just the corporate man: the corporate woman, the academic man, the political woman, the alcoholic child. Many, many people, regardless of education, are easy prey for the ideas of the corporate decision-makers. Present them with a decision, they will accept it! This is why it is important for citizens to decide what sorts of corporate decisions are and are not acceptable. It is never possible to count on the highly educated to filter the okay from the rotten. It is not possible to expect that Ph.D.s will always be on the lookout for the fascist and murderous. On CNBC, you got very vicious. Instead of satirical schemes, you talk mostly about how might makes right and all that. Why? Well, you might think of us as surgeons in a funhouse. A clever surgeon, having failed to affect the heart by poking at the appendix, spleen, lungs and colon, will then try poking straight at the heart. Because of the faith of our Salzburg audience in the one true neoliberal theory, every derivation of that theory--from the extreme to the morbidly extreme--had failed to get much reaction. With just three TV minutes rather than twenty, why not try poking right at the heart? Why not speak about neoliberal theory itself, the object of faith, rather than its various implications? Defoe, like us, had suggested an action item deriving from faith: not the selling of votes to large corporations, but the execution of all the non-Anglicans. What if, instead, Defoe had described the basis of the Anglicans\u0027 theory? What if, instead of urging \u0022the gallows instead of the fine\u0022 for Protestants, whose perfidy was entirely well established, Defoe had instead examined how it was that this perfidy was so well established? The Protestants, those nether insects, are of course entirely correct when they claim there is no evidence they are different from us. Of course there is not! But let us look at \u0027evidence\u0027 in a relative way. There is, on the one hand, the evidence of fact, eyes, and science--with which the Protestants, that generally ragtag bunch, are so obsessed--and there is the evidence of the great assumptions of Anglicanism, which we--with the highest Anglican educations, and the greatest Anglican knowledge--know with the certainest certainty to be certain. This is how we can be sure that a Protestant, although scientifically the same as an Anglican, is as different from him as the miniature hound of Megiddo [17th-century English for cockroach] is distinct from the sun! And furthermore--if the evidence of books cannot sway you--is it not true that in the entire history of Egypt and subsequent civilizations up to our own, there was not a single Protestant ruler? Might this kind of speech have spurred second thoughts among at least some of the radical Anglicans, when even the most horrible applications of the theory could not? This was our theory, and why we decided to be frank and straightforward on satellite television. How far do you think you can go before someone began questioning? What do you generally think it would take to startle or even shock these people? Perhaps a rumpled suit would help. Milgram\u0027s study suggests that. Your speakers presumably circulate among the delegates after their presentations. What sort of reception do they get? Very friendly! Apple wine and pretzels! Hearty handshakes! Sometimes, great earnestness and desire to continue relations into the future between our camp and yours. Do you have a card? Here is mine. Let us read one another\u0027s position papers! I like you! Can you describe how these events function or how they are run? Quite nicely. Each is accompanied by a (free) tasty lunch and always some wine. They are in the rich part of town, so you can walk around in a suit without raising eyebrows. Why are you called the Yes Men? You know how a funhouse mirror exaggerates your most hideous features? We do that kind of exaggeration operation, but with ideas. We agree with people--turning up the volume on their ideas as we talk, until they can see their ideas distorted in our funhouse mirror. Or that\u0027s what we try to do, anyhow--but as it turns out, the image always seems to look normal to them. What are your ideas and ideals? We are your standard-issue revolutionaries. For example, we would hope that our impostures so shame Messrs. Cheney and Bush that they crumble into regime dust along with their motley assortment of clever-ass thugs. How does this work in reality? We are not sure. So far the above has not happened, but it will. Can you describe a dream scenario for the Yes Men--something too good to be true, but one you\u0027d jump at if you at the chance, and what you\u0027d do? You know the last scene in Charlie Chaplin\u0027s The Great Dictator? Mistaken for Hitler at the border of Austria, the Jewish barber makes a speech to the soldiers waiting to start the Anschluss: Greed has poisoned men\u0027s souls; has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed.... Even now my voice is reaching millions... victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.... Soldiers! Don\u0027t give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you and enslave you.... Soldiers! Don\u0027t fight for slavery, fight for liberty. The soldiers cheer wildly and call off the Anschluss. Perhaps a faux Bush could announce this today? I\u0027m sure our troops would cheer.... Will the Yes Men keep at it even if the Democrats take back the White House? Especially if! All bets are off on what\u0027s possible if the current monsters win in November.... What are your principal methods? Principally the broad back-and-forth, or, for difficult stains, rapid-fire circular motions. After all, a clean suit is an absolute prerequisite for successful imposture. The suit can be gotten in your average thrift store for around 20 USD (16 euros, 2000 yen). Who and what inspired the Yes Men? Both the methods and the goals of the Yes Men are as hoarily ancient as, say, lemonade. Criticizing those i","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":22430,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}