A Cruel Hoax? Or Identity Correction?
PHP: Obviously, Dow has a pretty mean publicity machine themselves, and they seem to have done something interesting in the way they threw it back on you guys: look at these heartless hoaxers getting the people of Bhopal’s hopes up only to dash them. I don’t know that Dow was necessarily behind that message, but it seems to have just hit the media instantly—CNN hitting you with it, the BBC—and uniformly “You guys are heartless; this is a cruel hoax on the people of Bhopal,” which to me looks like PR work.
MB: It definitely was in the case of the HUD thing. It was the HUD spokespeople who said that.
PHP: Is it really a cruel hoax? Obviously that’s something The Yes Men thought about.
MB: We considered it beforehand, and we consulted with the activist groups that had been working in Bhopal about whether we should go ahead with it, because we’d been worried about that. They said “Yes. Go ahead with it,” and “No, don’t tell anybody about it beforehand. That way you won’t risk having your cover blown.” These groups are organized by consensus, so it’s not like you can just tell the leader and they can make a decision. And their goals are the same as yours, so you’ll end up in the right place.
Sure enough, we did. And what we’ve found is that a lot of people make assumptions about victims and about their level of sophistication. There’s this very, very deeply ingrained condescension: thinking that because these people are victims they’re necessarily helpless not just at dealing with their problem but at understanding how it fits into broader geopolitics.
In fact it’s quite the opposite. Typically those victimized have a much easier time identifying who actually perpetrated the crime against them. They don’t lose sight of the fact that it’s Dow—or [Dow subsidiary] Union Carbide—that caused the accident, that it’s Union Carbide that never cleaned it up. They don’t lose sight of the fact that Dow took over [when they acquired Union Carbide]. For those people, they live with it every day.
It was really interesting for us, because of course we also initially believed the first reports, and we did feel bad for a couple days until we ended up talking to Bhopal activists, who were like, “No, this is great! Of course we want hundreds of articles in the U.S. press, where Dow’s headquarters is; where shareholders might read it; where we need to keep this issue alive.”
Because their goals are nothing short of setting precedent. They don’t want anybody else to clean up the mess in Bhopal. They want Dow to clean it up, because they say “We don’t want this to happen to anybody else.” If we let it happen here, it could happen again somewhere else; they really want to uphold the Polluter Pays principle. In some ways they’re far more sophisticated about it than most people who ended up criticizing us for victimizing them would think.
And the same thing happened in New Orleans with public housing residents. I mean, they’re out of their homes, you know. They also didn’t attend the contractor conference that we went to; there wasn’t anybody there who’d been kicked out of public housing—
PHP: —finding out how to place government reconstruction bids—
MB: —and they didn’t suddenly believe they were going to get back into their houses because Andy made the announcement. It was revealed as a hoax before it was on the news as true. So it was entirely a fiction that they were victimized by it. So even though it made it on the news, there’s a shot in the film of a TV reporter asking a woman evicted from public housing what she thinks of the hoax. She says “Maybe it’ll take a hoax like this to get them out here to see what we’re going through. A hoax is what it is, and a hoax is what we got.” And despite that interview, that report that evening was still that we had played a “cruel trick”. That same woman, without her face appearing, was used as voiceover of one of those we’d played it on. That was a clear cut example of the journalists not really being journalists at all, but going in knowing what story they were supposed to tell and then telling it despite the facts.
PHP: It’s almost as if they’re taking talking points directly from these people’s media staffs, isn’t it?
MB: Well that’s precisely what they did. They had a story. They identified, “Well, we’ve got Protagonist and Antagonist; they each say something. We need to reinforce what they say, and any more complexity than that is too much.”
PHP: For the American viewer?
MB: “Too much for the viewer”, or “We don’t understand it.”
There was one journalist doing his homework and actually covering the story. That’s the radio reporter in New Orleans who busted us, and who then says to Andy, to his credit, “O.K. So tell me why you did it.” And you don’t have him telling the audience why we did it. [laughter] It’s like, just give me the facts; all I want to know is what really happened here.
PHP: Is this an illustration of Noam Chomsky’s point that the media really know their bread is buttered on the side of the people with the big media staffs who can provide them with a 24-hour feed?
MB: Yeah. And it’s a really good example of where the pace of capitalism is collapsing something that you need for democracy, because carrying the profit motive into the media sphere means basically that you don’t get decent news coverage from the more expensive forms of media on issues that require informing people sufficiently for decision making. Obviously if people are going to make informed decisions, we need knowledge; and there’s obviously countries with whole sets of laws about that. The reason television reporting is a hell of a lot better in the U.K. is that they have this massive agency called the BBC (which they’re trying to do away with, day by day).
PHP: Speaking of the BBC, I was a bit surprised that it was this BBC reporter [Channel Four’s John Snow] who kind of ripped into you and Andy about Bhopal.
MB: Well, the BBC was a little burned, obviously, from that Bhopal thing, but I don’t think that was part of the motivation. I just think that Americans aren’t used to seeing what happens on British TV news, which is that you don’t have hosts tossing softball questions to anybody. They interrogate whoever they have on.
So in a way I don’t blame him, and one of the great things in the movie is those performances that provide drama. Without the accusations from HUD and so forth, there’d be nothing to rebut.
PHP: Just one more thing kind of surprises me, and that is that when you put a $2 billion dent in somebody’s market cap, even a behemoth like Dow where that’s just north of pocket change—I don’t think The Yes Men would ever go out and torch a Starbuck’s, but is it comparable in some way? Is there an element of vandalism there?
MB: We wouldn’t. But I’ll tell you: the other night when we led the [opening night] audience over to the Immigration Detention Center [in Greenwich Village, where a panoply of immigrants are detained without regard to habeus corpus], and we were standing outside of there, I thought “This isn’t enough, man! We should break these fuckin’ doors down. We should bring angle grinders in and release these people. Here we’ve got 200 people standing outside the Immigration Detention Center, and we’re this close to these people who are in there for no reason.”
They’ve done no crime; in many cases they’re political refugees who’ve just arrived in the country because we’ve got that Statue of Liberty thing standing out there and they believed what they heard at home, that if you could just get here you’d be free. And instead they end up in jail; they don’t speak the language and they’ve got no clue what the fuck is going on. And you’re like “This is a massive injustice. And maybe if we just had these mobs, we could just, you know, release them!”
So on the one hand, it’s like, yeah. We’re not doing enough vandalism. On the other hand, something like affecting the share price: it unfortunately bounced back, of course [after Dow’s rebuttal of the story], and we learned this lesson about the market rewarding bad behavior and punishing good. I think that where vandalism can be smart and is appropriate, it should be happening. I’ll put it that way. And yeah, we would fully endorse that.
PHP: Even as artists, then, you clearly just don’t buy this idea that art shouldn’t cause damage to property.
MB: No! I mean in everything that we do we follow a moral and ethical code of conduct which is about not hurting people or the environment. But when it comes to property, we consider it on a case by case basis: I mean, whose property, and what message does it send?
Of course the first thing the U.S. Government does when they roll into Iraq is a little bit of iconoclasm. Tear down Saddam Hussein—
PHP: —or stand by as the National Museum is looted of civilization’s earliest antiquities.
MB: Right. These sorts of things are part and parcel with the exercise of power and the spread of capitalism, and they are totally violent.
