the yes men

04.03.08

this is a repost of a blog I wrote just now on myspace:

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so I just watched this great documentary that one of my teachers introduced me to, called "The Yes Men."

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This is what it's about:

"The Yes Men, a movie, follows a couple of anti-corporate activist-pranksters as they impersonate World Trade Organization spokesmen on TV and at business conferences around the world.

The story follows Andy and Mike from their beginnings with GWBush.com, and on to their tasteless parody of the WTO's website. Some visitors don’t notice the site is a fake, and send speaking invitations meant for the real WTO. Mike and Andy play along with the ruse and soon find themselves attending important functions as WTO representatives.

Delighted to speak for the organization they oppose, Andy and Mike don thrift-store suits and set out to shock their unwitting audiences with darkly comic satires on global free trade. Weirdly, the experts don’t notice the joke and seem to agree with every terrible idea the two can come up with.

Exhausted by their failed attempts to shock, Mike and Andy take a whole new approach for one final lecture."

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so I got on the website (theyesmen.org), and this is what I found:

1) How does a person turn into a Yes Man?

A person (male or female) 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 let us know.
More precisely, there are all kinds of ways of doing what we call "Identity Correction." Soon, we'll post a little list of some ways that we've thought of. There are plenty of ways that we haven't thought of, too.


8) Speaking of Bhopal—didn't you create false hopes in Bhopal with your latest Dow stunt?

No. For 20 years, the victims of Bhopal falsely hoped that Dow and Union Carbide would do something to ease the suffering that they'd caused: a hope that was, apparently, completely false and unreasonable. What we did on December 3 was create false certainties: those who heard our announcement didn't falsely hope, they were falsely certain that their suffering was at long last over.

(so then I think, "that's kind of weird, that's my birthday, I wonder what happened...?")

[insert about 20 more FAQ's]

30) Are you afraid of being recognized?

The world's largest industrial disaster (Bhopal) is still not recognized by many - so how would we be?

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so then I get on Wikipedia and search for it...

and here's what I found:

"The Bhopal Disaster of 1984 was an industrial disaster that was caused by the accidental release of 40 tonnes of methyl isocyanate (MIC) from a Union Carbide India, Limited (UCIL, now known as Eveready Industries India, Limited) pesticide plant partly (50.9%) owned by Union Carbide located in the heart of the city of Bhopal, in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.

The BBC gives the death toll as nearly 3,000 people dead initially and at least 15,000 from related illnesses since, while Greenpeace cites 20,000 total deaths as a conservative estimate.

According to the Bhopal Medical Appeal, around 500,000 people were exposed to the leaking tables. Approximately 20,000, to this date, are believed to have died as a result; on average, roughly one person dies every day from the effects. Over 120,000 continue to suffer from the effects of the disaster, such as breathing difficulties, cancer, serious birth-defects, blindness, gynaecological complications and other related problems.

In 2007 Indian writer Indra Sinha published his novel, Animal's People, based on the Union Carbide disaster and its aftermath. A magical realist novel, it is written from the point of view of a boy who is transformed by the chemical leak, and has to walk on all fours like an animal. The novel was short-listed for the Booker Prize in the UK in 2007."

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december 3, 1984. thats my birthday... I guess you learn something new everyday...

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the point?

- one person (well about 5) can really do something...

- get pro-active. create the revolution.

- check out the yes men, it's totally worth it.

- and also, you might want to Wikipedia your birthday, just in case...