Movies: Saying 'Yes' to civil disobedience

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When the Yes Men, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, visit a city, usually it's either to perpetrate one of their media-savvy pranks at the expense of a multinational corporation or to promote their activities via their new documentary, "The Yes Men Fix the World."

When Bichlbaum visits Salt Lake City on Friday, he will not only be present for the movie's opening at the Broadway Centre Cinemas, he also will share the stage with Tim DeChristopher.

Bichlbaum said DeChristopher, now facing federal charges for his fake bidding on BLM oil and gas leases last December, has taken civil disobedience to a new level.

"That not only changed things concretely by taking that land off the auction block at least for a while," Bichlbaum said in a phone interview this week, "but it very viscerally communicated to a lot of people that this was a very important issue, because Tim is willing to take this risk. ... It's the most effective action I've heard of in a very long time."

Civil disobedience, Bichlbaum said, "is not rocket science. You can just get off your butt and do something and -- who knows? -- it could have enormous repercussions."

DeChristopher returns the compliment. "They are some of the most brilliant activists that we have working in this country," DeChristopher said. "I've been inspired by their work."

Bichlbaum and DeChristopher will take part in a Q-and-A session after the 7:25 screening of the film. Then they will reconvene at the bar Toasters, 151 W. 200 South, Salt Lake City, for an "activists workshop" -- along with author/activist Terry Tempest Williams and DeChristopher's lawyer, Pat Shea.

DeChristopher called Bichlbaum and Williams "two of the most creative leaders we have in the movement," and Friday's workshop will have them "lending their brilliant minds to whatever issues people want to work on."

In "The Yes Men Fix the World," Bichlbaum and Bonanno (who wrote and directed the documentary) show off some of their biggest and most spectacular stunts.

For example, in 2004, Bichlbaum masqueraded as a Dow Chemical spokesman, telling a BBC interviewer that the company would take financial responsibility and pay billions to the victims of the 1984 tragedy in Bhopal, India. In that chemical explosion at a Union Carbide plant, thousands of people were killed and scores continue to suffer. (Dow acquired Union Carbide in 2001.) The news spread worldwide, and Dow's stock lost $2 billion in value in 23 minutes.

"We got 600 articles in the U.S. press written about the Bhopal catastrophe with our appearance on the BBC," Bichlbaum said, touting one metric of the prank's success.

Another sign that the Yes Men's tactics are working: For the first time, one of their targets is suing.

The plaintiff is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which objected to Bichlbaum posing as a chamber spokesman at an Oct. 19 news conference, announcing that the chamber had reversed its long-standing opposition to climate-change legislation. The event ended in chaos when a real chamber official entered and yelled "This is a fraudulent press conference!" -- but not before some news organizations, including Reuters and the National Journal , reported the prank as fact.

One reason the Yes Men's pranks succeed, Bichlbaum said, is that news outlets are so understaffed that fact-checking errors and corporate-created news releases can slip into the news product.

In a famous stunt last fall, the Yes Men (in collaboration with other groups) turned the tables on the media. They printed and distributed 100,000 fake copies of The New York Times , dated six months after President Barack Obama's election and featuring "All the News We Hope to Print." ("IRAQ WAR ENDS" was the lead headline.)

The Yes Men repeated the prank in September, timed to a UN meeting on climate change, with a fake New York Post bearing the headline "We're Screwed."

The Post spoof didn't aim to attack Rupert Murdoch's right-leaning tabloid on political grounds. "We were trying to show that [the Post ] could actually transmit real news," Bichlbaum said.

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