Ed Gillespie
Proving that much of the way the world works is quite literally beyond satire, everyone's favourite corporate hoaxsters The Yes Men are back with a new film 'The Yes Men Fix the World' which I went to see in Brixton the other night.
Following their first eponymously titled movie 'The Yes Men', in which they set up a fake copy of the WTO website and then got invited to speak on the WTO's behalf with some quite amazing results (in which they promoted the idea of 'selling your vote' to barely a ripple of dissent)...this time they've raised the bar.
The chameleon-like Andy Bichlebaum poses as a representative of Dow chemical company and announces on BBC worldwide to an audience of 300 million people that the company plans to fully compensate the victims and rehabilitate the site of the terrible Bhopal chemical plant disaster in India...knocking a cool $2B off their share price in the process!
Determined to create something very close to Futerra's heart: salience of what the world could be like they then, in partnership with many eager others, wrote and produced a version of the New York Times with the news 'they hoped to be able to report'; which included delicious headlines such as 'Oil companies create fund to tackle climate change' and 'Bush indicted on treason charges'.
The faces of New Yorkers breaking into gasps of shock and smiles of glee as they read the unlikley but not impossible headlines was truly a joy to behold and it's almost worth going to see the film just for that reason - the triumph of the possible!
But the best moment was when Andy poses as a representative of the US Housing and Urban Development Department (HUD) at a post-Katrina reconstruction event in New Orleans.
Preceeded on the speaking platform by New Orleans' oleaginous mayor Ray Nagin...who told a story along the lines of 'Truth and Lies go swimming. They have a fun time, but then Lies gets out of the water and puts on Truth's clothes. So Truth gets out too and runs naked after Lies. So you often have dressed-up Lies pursued by the naked truth'.
Stepping up to the mic, Andy opened his address with 'I'm not sure how to follow that. I feel kinda naked here...'
Genius. Think Bruno with ethical balls (or maybe don't)
Article originally posted on the Futerra Sustainability Communications website.
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