The Timely Tricksters

We’ve written several posts about the trickster archetype and how it appears over and over in synchronicity. Now in the wake of the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, we’ve encountered a pair of tricksters who prepared for what was coming. Their names are Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno. Together, they call themselves The Yes Men. This movie was recommended to us by Carol Bowman.

Their schtick is to pose as executives from major corporations and appear at conferences and give preposterous speeches emphasizing greed in the aftermath of disasters. Other times, they create fake news by announcing largesse acts of corporate benevolence. For example, they posed as top executives of Dow Chemical and announced at a televised conference that they were donating billions of dollars to the 3,000 victims of the Union Carbide disaster in India that took place in 1984. (Dow had purchased Union Carbide.) The result of that fake announcement: Dow stock lost $2 billion that afternoon.

The tricksters are featured in a couple of documentaries, including The Yes Men Fix the World. Through their fake website, they were invited to a conference in New Orleans one year after Katrina. Corporations were ready to rebuild the city, and they were working with HUD to demolish public housing and replace it with  pricey townhouses. The poor were being thrown out of their homes, and calling it a second Katrina. So the Yes Men, posing as chief assistants to the head of HUD, announced that HUD was saving  and rebuilding public housing. They even held a well attended ceremony at the site where they revealed it was a hoax, perpetrated to shame the powers that be – corporate and government.

One of the funniest segments in the documentary featured a fake New York Times, published July 4, 2009. The top headline read: IRAQ WAR ENDS, a sub-heading read: Troops to Return Immediately. Another article featured a headline that read: Nation Sets its Sights on Building a Sane Economy.  A story that didn’t even make the front page was about George W. Bush being indicted for war crimes. One hundred thousand copies were printed and distributed for free. As one person on the street said after looking at the fake Times, “It’s got all the news that we’d like to see really happen.”

In the midst of all the bad environmental news and corporate malfeasance, this documentary is a hilarious change of pace, and right on the money – the BIG MONEY! Five stars for the tricksters.