Please Tell Me It's Just Another Hoax!

Yes Men’s Antics Get Them Sued, but Do They Get Results?

By Christopher Foss

October 28, 2009

So it's official…unless it's a just another hoax (Let's hope so!).  According to www.environmentalleader.com , the U.S. Chamber of Commerce announced it will sue The Yes Men, an activist group that uses trickster PR tactics to humiliate corporations and other entities into foregoing short-term financial interests and doing the right thing by the environment.  

On October 9^th, the Yes Men went live with a website parodying the Chamber of Commerce site, staged a mock press conference and, Yes!, put out a false press release declaring that the Chamber would support climate legislation that included “a stiff carbon tax.”

While one can appreciate how furious this might make the Chamber’s members – a quick review of the elements of the so-called “hoax” suggests this is not a malicious hoax per se… If you follow the link “Full prepared comments here” smack in the body of the release it’s clear this doesn’t cut it (as some commentators suggest) as a “War of the Worlds”/ Wellesian-caliber hoax.  There can be little doubt of the parodic intent of the “prepared comments” Take these lines, for instance:

"Let's remember Lehman Brothers, a committed, solid member of this Chamber, who in the interest of short-term gain scuttled a century. They ate lamb, but were left without wool when the cold, hard winter set in."

I don’t know what to make of the mainstream media outlets that picked up the story – yes, in all seriousness!

The big question in all this is not whether the Yes Men will be successfully sued (I doubt it.  Apparently there is ample judicial precedent supporting parody) – no, it’s whether the Yes Men’s guerrilla PR tactics work…in the sense of, beyond being funny, really bringing attention to the issue, for instance, of responsible business with respect to climate change.  And most important, will the Yes Men antics actually goad companies or government agencies representing corporations into changing their policies as they effect the environment?

The jury’s still out on this basic question.  It might be argued that the Yes Men approach is not entirely unreasonable in light of what can only be described as corporate America’s past irresponsibility when it comes to ethics, the environment and human rights.  Short-term thinking in support of short and long-term greed, stonewalling and misrepresentation of their stance to the public and journalists have been, until recently, quite common among members of the private sector. 

The serious focus on sustainable business practice has only recently gained favor as the both ethically and economically prudent course for business.   Government lobbyists and bodies like the Chamber of Commerce are not currently in step with enlightened business – and clearly this needs to change.  Several companies have recently opted out of Chamber membership (i.e., Pacific Gas & Electric, Apple, PNM Resources, and Exelon) in response to the Chamber’s opposition to climate change legislation – oh yes, and after one of the Chamber’s officials said the Chamber planned to stage the environmental equivalent of the "Scopes monkey trial" -- a reference to an early 20th century court case in which prosecutors attacked the scientific foundations of the theory of evolution.  Crazy stuff! 

In my professional life (I currently serve as director of communications for Intertek Sustainability Solutions), I have and will continue to focus on working with companies in their effort to align strong social and environmental performance with strategic business goals.  Moreover, I’m well aware that many companies “get it” – big time!  So it’s particularly onerous when the leadership of the Chamber of Commerce flouts global warming science and lobbies against tempered legislation, such as a carbon emissions tax, which many in business believe to be an elegant and market-friendly approach to limiting the emissions currently altering the earth’s climate at an alarming rate.

Maybe, just maybe, we do need Yes Men.

What Balloon Is Frank Rich Living In Anyway?

Christopher Foss
October 26, 2009

The following may at first have you believing I’m a conservative. Actually, I'm abona fide liberal with a bleeding heart just like Frank Rich - or so I thought. Upon reading Frank Rich's Sunday editorial "In Defense of the ‘Balloon Boy’ Dad," (New York Times, October 25), I feel compelled throw open my window like Howard Beale in the movie, Network, and scream: "Stop the bleeding-heart liberal blood-letting!" - except that's it's maddening tongue twister and I have a bit more to say than that.

So my question for general consumption: What balloon is Frank Rich living in anyway? In defending Richard Heene, little Falcon a.k.a. "balloon boy"'s dad, Rich declares the "balloon boy" incident a "reflection of our time"...

Rich insists we have to "look past the sentimental moral absolutes"...and he asks that we muster some sympathy for the devil, in this case the "Bad Dad," Mr. Heene.

Sure, sympathy's one thing, but to blow up the already hyper-inflated Balloon Boy episode to iconic proportions, suggesting the hoax represents an "epitaph of an era" – is quite another...and, worse, I worry about the potential a widely read editorial like his has to galvanize Fox News conservatives who already make a habit of decrying bleeding heart liberalism with annoying regularity. Must we give these fringy types fodder?

Rich twists the proverbial balloon into all sorts of cartoon shapes when he speculates, as follows: "Richard Heene is the inevitable product of this reigning culture, where “news,” “reality” television and reality itself are hopelessly scrambled ..."

Rich will occasionally demure: "None of this absolves Heene of blame for the damage he may have inflicted on the children he grotesquely used as a supporting cast in his schemes,” he states, “But stupid he’s not. He knew how easy it would be to float ‘balloon boy’ when the demarcation between truth and fiction has been obliterated."

First of all, I wonder how accurate it is to portray Heene as a savvy exploiter of a media climate that "obliterates the demarcation between truth and fiction."

But what is one to make of Rich’s core thesis that Balloon Boy Dad is simply part of the fictionalized news media culture we are all complicit in? 

Rich discerns a kind of "poignancy in [Heene's] determination to grab what he and many others see as among the last accessible scraps of the American dream." After all, Heene, a construction worker by trade, had had some difficulty finding work in recent months...(Is there a chance he was too busy appearing on "Wife Swap," the ABC "reality" program and, um, concocting the ornate balloon boy hoax to focus on his usual craft and trade? According to news accounts, Heene spent endless hours with the balloon in his garage).

Rich claims that reality TV programming is "among the country's last dependable job engines" - and so with more than a little inference, Rich is suggesting that Heene was just "at work" when he perpetrated his hoax.

Rich writes: "Heene is a direct descendant of those Americans of the Great Depression who fantasized, usually in vain, that they might find financial salvation if only they could grab a spotlight in show business."  

As Rich might say: What bloviating mush! By any standard, it's a stretch to suggest that Heene's hoax was just show business as usual ...or for that matter the quite to-be-expected behavior of desperate souls trying to cope in these recessionary times.

Rich proceeds to equate Heene’s empty balloon hoax with the toxic financial instruments, "inflated by the thin air of unsupported debt", that helped crater the economy Heene was left to contend with.

Quite a stretch!

He laments that Heene, "unlike the reckless gamblers at the top of Citigroup and A.I.G., may be the one with a serious shot at ending up behind bars." Paleese!  How can Rich in all seriousness conflate Heene's hot air balloon with inflated stock prices and rampant unsupported debt?

For some reason I can’t bring myself to feel that sorry for Heene, and his essentially pathetic behavior.  What’s more, in an era of Fox News' Glenn Beck routinely claiming that Obama is perpetrating a conspiracy to bring fascism to America, I wonder if we really need the spectacle of a liberal commentator bleeding out entirely? Liberal I may be, but I am concerned how casually and casuistically Rich refers to moral absolutes as "sentimental."

The Heene Hoax, may perhaps reveal a few truths about the state of our news-as-entertainment culture, but I'll go out on a limb here and maintain with “sentimental” certainty that the Heene's hoax is totally indefensible. 

As I say, what balloon is Frank Rich living in? The New York Times balloon, I'm afraid. While this newspaper still stands for me and other so-called liberals as "the paper of record" - I have never seen a piece in its pages trotting out highfalutin wrong-headedness at this grotesque level.

The Rich piece which as usual takes up a sizable chunk of the paper's Sunday editorial real estate, betrays a marked bias in his "defense" of Heene, and while it may reflect an understandable desire to factor in broad socio-economic effects that could have played a role in motivating Heene, this sort of slant on the facts does the cause of liberalism – bleeding heart or otherwise – no good at all.