An Open Letter to the Yes Men: Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno
Say NO! to meaningless sloganeering and empty gestures!
From Amazon.com: Multinational corporations have many enemies but few as creative and funny as the Yes Men. In 1993, Mike Bonanno made news by switching the voice boxes of Barbie and G.I. Joe dolls and returning them to store shelves. In 1996, Andy Bichlbaum made a splash by programming kissing, swimsuit-clad men into 80,000 copies of an action video game. When the two met, a collaboration was born. In 1999, they created a Web site parodying that of the World Trade Organization (WTO).Though the WTO denounced the spoof site, and though its creators felt the satire was self-evident, legitimate speaking invitations began arriving by e-mail. Undaunted, the Yes Men donned thrift-store suits and went where they’d been asked, posing as WTO spokemen and making outrageously callous statements. Their audiences were unfazed, prompting the Yes Men to raise the stakes again and again.
In 2008, the Yes Men premiered The Yes Men Fix the World at Sundance, a movie which follows the two as they infiltrate the world of big business and pull off outrageous pranks that highlight the ways that corporate greed is destroying the planet. Invited to present their film at the Jerusalem Film Festival, they originally agreed and then pulled out, citing their adherence to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel. Asked why they don’t boycott the Congo or the US, Andy Bichlbaum said that “we haven’t been invited to the Kinshasa Film Festival (and we wouldn’t have been able to afford the private security force if we had been). More importantly, changing U.S. policy (and the direct and indirect results of that policy, e.g. in the Congo) is going to take a lot more than a boycott—whereas in Israel, a boycott could actually work.” Given that the bulk of their revenue comes from the US, one can’t help note that that sure is a convenient answer.
The duo then wrote an open letter to the organizers of the Jerusalem Film Festival articulating the reasons for their decision not to present their film there. I in turn decided to write an open letter to Andy and Mike expressing why I will no longer pay to see their films or buy their books. Read it after the bump!
