* * *
Our acquaintance started when I ran into a giant polar bear backstage. The bear was having trouble with the authorities, and guards were trying to throw the bear out. A man named Igor Vamos was standing behind the bear—arguing with the guards. There were two naked people covered in sweat inside of the bear’s fur. Their plan was to get on the stage, get out of the bear, and talk about climate change, about melting ice caps. Why naked? Animals are naked—why aren’t we?
We did not think twice; of course we took the bear under our protection. We spoke to Bianca Jagger, and Bianca also became a strong bear supporter. She was saying that the bear is right and we need to care about climate change. Don’t we?
It did not work out, though, in that instance. The guards were unbeatable and the bear did not make it to the stage. But Pussy Riot met the Yes Men.
Every time you think about actions, about pranks, remember how many of them were rehearsed and carefully planned but simply prevented by authorities. In my experience this covers about 40 percent of actions. It can be rather frustrating, but that’s the rules of the game. Perhaps I should make a whole catalog describing our art protest actions that were prevented by police or FSB.
The Yes Men are Jacques Servin, Igor Vamos (the man with the bear), and lots of friends and supporters, other activists who prefer to stay unknown. The Yes Men have been doing actions for twenty years. They have made excellent movies: The Yes Men (2003), The Yes Men Fix the World (2009), and The Yes Men Are Revolting (2014). They promoted a supposed Halliburton product called a “SurvivaBall,” which protected against climate change–related natural disasters. They produced their own fake edition of the New York Times, dated July 4, 2009—80,000 copies of which were given to people on the streets of New York and Los Angeles. The paper imagined an alternative future that had already arrived, with headlines like “Iraq War Ends” and “Nation Sets Its Sights on Building Sane Economy.” “All the News We Hope to Print,” said the tagline on the front page. There were stories about establishing universal health care, a maximum wage for CEOs, as well as an article in which George W. Bush accuses himself of treason for his actions during his years as president.
In 2004 Servin, in character as a Dow Chemical spokesman, went on the BBC and said Dow was going to give $12 billion to the untold thousands of victims of the Bhopal chemical plant disaster in India in 1984. Which is what Dow Chemical should have done. The financial market’s reaction was to tank Dow stock to the tune of billions. Oh no! Money for deserving victims?
Jacques Servin is a professor at the Parsons School of Design in New York, and Igor Vamos, an associate professor of media arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In 2014, students at Reed College invited Vamos, an alum, to give the commencement address. During the address and backed by a press release, Vamos announced that Reed was divesting its $500 million from fossil fuels. It wasn’t, but students had been pushing the trustees to do so.
Rule № 6
SPOT AN ABUSE OF POWER
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We can identify specific abuses of power and bring them to everyone’s attention.
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First there was Greek civilization. Then there was the Renaissance. Now we’re entering the Age of the Ass.
JEAN-LUC GODARD’S PIERROT LE FOU
President? My big toe would make a better president.
SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS
Words
lie, cheat, steal (everybody’s doin’ it); or, who is mr. putin and what does it have to do with mr. trump?
If we measure the success of a politician by his/her ability to reflect the main tendencies of her/his time, then Trump and Putin are triumphant. They both manage to reflect the worst impulses that the times have brought us—they are greedy, ethics-free, uncaring.
“Oligarchic elites, while they may disagree on just about everything else, are firmly united in their desire to defend their wealth,” German economic sociologist Wolfgang Streeck says in the book How Will Capitalism End?
If you ask me what I would like to say to President Putin, I’d tell you that I don’t feel like talking to him. To my mind he is a waste of space.
Putin, the man who has co-opted the ideology of Russia today, doesn’t even have a coherent set of beliefs. “I cannot imagine my country being isolated from Europe,” said Putin in an interview with the BBC in March 2000. He didn’t mind Russia being a part of NATO, either. Today, antagonism with Europe, America, and NATO seems to be Putin’s favorite game in his playground.
Stealing money from the Russian people may be Putin’s only enduring idea. As a former KGB agent, Putin simply doesn’t believe in beliefs. Anyone who “believes” could be bribed or intimidated and is therefore vulnerable. And you can’t arm yourself with a belief. Money, prison, or a gun can neutralize any “conviction.”
Putin remains an ordinary KGB agent, and—paradoxically—that’s the secret of his success. Putin came into his enormous power by pure accident. He was appointed by the oligarchs in 2000, with the oligarchs believing that Putin would be their puppet. They believed it because Putin is a truly unexceptional human being.
Putin is petty, uncaring, spiteful, incapable of love and forgiveness, and incredibly insecure. He’s nervous, especially when he tries to hide his tremor under a hypermasculine bravado. Trust, compassion, and empathy are second-rate emotions in Putin’s world—that is, in a KGB agent’s world.
* * *
Somebody told me an anecdote about the KGB. I believe this story might be true.
Candidates come to the KGB to apply for a job. They have passed the basic exams, and now they are told they have to take one last test, and everyone who passes it will be hired.
Each is shown a room in which he sees his wife. The examiner says, “Here is a gun. Go in and shoot your wife for the sake of the Motherland, and you’re hired.”
Everyone refuses except for one man. Shots are heard from the room, then shouts, scuffling, and sounds of a struggle.
The candidate emerges from the room and brushes himself off.
“The rounds turned out to be blanks, so I had to smother her,” he says.
* * *
Putin will never allow himself to be creatively or intellectually open. He is a well-trained agent. Anything that may make him emotionally vulnerable is harmful. Thus, having a heart is harmful.
He is a professional at corrupting people’s souls with material goods, opportunities, and if needed, fear. Good intentions and honesty don’t exist in reality, Putin thinks. A pragmatic, smart, effective player could not let sentimentality decrease his productivity. Remember the main hero of Bertolucci’s The Conformist? He embodies the banality of evil. He is a pale, insignificant opportunist who nevertheless has enough power to crush beautiful, sophisticated worlds. If he finds a flower in his hands, he’ll destroy it: its beauty is alien and intimidating to him.
Putin claims to be a religious person. He’s not. The same with most of the Republicans in the United States, who are killing freedom and rights in the name of God. If they opened the New Testament and actually read it, it would become clear to them that Christ would throw up if he saw what they are doing.
Putin condemned Pussy Riot for dancing in a church and protecting women’s rights, saying that he’ll save Christianity from devilish witches like us. It seems that Putin has no clue about early Christianity; otherwise he would know that Christ and his followers were rebels and not Caesars. Putin is not able to conceive of the virtues that constitute the heart of every pure religion: the readiness to give yourself away, willingness to sacrifice, an unconditional lust for truth and justice. Putin understands only the safe, comfortable, bureaucratic type of institutional religion that confirms the status quo.
Religion is a useful facade, a masquerade for Putin. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t seem to remember that he came from the KGB, which has prosecuted, arrested, and killed hundreds of thousands of Soviet people just because they dared to believe in God. Now Puti
n has changed face: now he’s friends with the deeply corrupt and infected institution of the Russian Orthodox Church. Obviously, facades are interchangeable. There is no person who is irreplaceable, as Stalin liked to say. Or: there is no person I cannot fire to save my petty ass, right?
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others,” George Orwell writes in 1984. “We are interested solely in power, pure power. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.” And power that exists for its own sake is by definition an abuse.
When I’m going through Putin’s qualities and can’t find anything of worth, I unwittingly start to think about another petty person I know. Trump is his name.
Putin and Trump share a bunch of qualities (besides business and political connections and being dangerously corrupt and crooked). They share a belief that people are motivated only by self-interest. They are distrustful of human sincerity or integrity, selfishly and callously calculating the profit from every social transaction. They believe that all connections have to be profitable transactions. And they believe this religiously. Trump is maniacally obsessed with “winning.” He was able to simplify the whole wide world to the degrading alternative of win or lose. And the KGB agent Putin also knows that you have just two options: you eat someone or you’ll be eaten. In Trump and Putin’s world, we don’t really care about human dignity; we care about human capital. Dignity is not profitable.
“In general it is possible to divide mankind into two categories,” wrote Vladimir Bukovsky, a dissident who spent twelve years in psychiatric prison hospitals, labor camps, and prisons within the USSR, “those you could share a cell with and those you couldn’t.” I don’t think I could share a cell with someone for whom a human is just a number, a pawn that can be manipulated for their personal gain.
There is one set of laws and regulations for the 1 percent, and another for the 99 percent. It leads to the relentless exploitation of both “human capital” and the environment for short-term profits. It leads to kleptocracy, to private profiteers sucking money out of education and health care, assaults on women’s rights, imperial adventurism, and the demonization of the other.
Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote in an article titled “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%” (Vanity Fair, May 2011):
1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret. . . . In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs [see?] and Iran. Governments would compete in providing economic security, low taxes on ordinary wage earners, good education, and a clean environment—things workers care about. But the top 1 percent don’t need to care.
As Bernie Sanders puts the main principle of our political era, “When you see a social problem, you financialize, you privatize and you militarize.”
The wealthy have their own version of political struggle. This struggle manifests itself in their stinky, shady financial schemes, which ruin the lives of opponents, killing them sometimes. Finding sneaky ways to not follow their own laws or simply creating new ones (a favorite trick of Putin’s).
“In this world laws are written for the lofty aim of ‘the common good’ and then acted out in life on the basis of the common greed,” Saul Alinsky wrote in Rules for Radicals. And the wealthy are fantastically well organized. Again, if we need to pick up what elites all around the world know very well how to do, it is how to protect their own wealth. Everybody has a right to be my servant, they think. If we, the left (or “the up” or “the high,” as my friends who don’t like binary oppositions call it), progressive activists, want to oppose them somehow, we have to learn how to be fantastically organized too.
There is no friendship or comradeship in the world when only power and profit are worshipped. No trust, love, or inspiration. There are business and political alliances based on a recognition of each other’s power and influence, i.e., deeply based in mutual fear and mistrust. It’s scary to lose power in such a toxic environment. Once you lose protection, your fall toward the abyss starts. Those who licked your ass yesterday will be happy to use your skull as an ashtray today.
alt-right fascists
“Fascism was right since it derived from a healthy national-patriotic sensibility, without which a people can neither lay claim to its existence nor create a unique culture.”
This is a quote from Ivan Ilyin, Putin’s favorite philosopher.
“It is not Russia that lies between the East and West. It is the East and West that lie to the left and right of Russia,” says Putin (Komsomolskaya Pravda, December 5, 2013). Any imperialist exceptionalism is about as unexceptional in my eyes as it gets.
When Noam Chomsky was asked by the Nation (June 2, 2017) what’s the story with Brexit, Trump, Le Pen, Hindu nationalism . . . nationalism everywhere, he said yes, it’s a real world phenomenon. “It’s very clear, and it was predictable. . . . When you impose socioeconomic policies that lead to stagnation or decline for the majority of the population, undermine democracy, remove decision-making out of popular hands, you’re going to get anger, discontent, fear [that takes] all kinds of forms. . . . People are very angry, they’re losing control of their lives. The economic policies are mostly harming them, and the result is anger, disillusion.”
It’s a simple plan. First, create inequality and structural violence. Second, scapegoat the “others” as an explanation of what’s wrong. Third, offer nativism and more privileges for the privileged as a solution. That’s how we got Trump, Brexit, Le Pen, Orbán, etc.
Putin’s playing these games too: he plays on the complex of rage, pain, and impoverishment of the Russian people caused by the Machiavellian privatization and deregulation that happened in the 1990s. “Do you want to go back to the ’90s?” It’s his main trick. The same old story: using fear to get the power and the money.
* * *
We are all victims of a strange misunderstanding that politics and our everyday lives are somehow disconnected. I meet people here and there, in different countries, who say that they don’t care about political issues because the issues don’t have any significant influence on their lives. Interesting.
The professionalization and elitism of politics went much too far. The atomization of the people went too far. These are two sides of one coin, and you know for sure that the coin doesn’t belong to us either. The situation is predictably getting worse, because the less we participate in collective actions, the less we believe that we have any power as individuals who can join forces and fight back. Sometimes it feels like “united” is just an airline that asks you to pay money for your backpacks and leg space.
Margaret Thatcher said, “There is no society, only individuals.” Noam Chomsky reveals that she was paraphrasing Marx, who in his condemnation of repression in France said, “The repression is turning society into a sack of potatoes, just individuals, an amorphous mass can’t act together.” That was a condemnation. For Thatcher, it’s an ideal. There is no society, only atomized consumers.
When we believe it’s up to professionals to decide how to run our countries, we start to think that even political revolution or radical change can be effected by another professional instead of us. A professional revolutionary, I guess. It makes us think that we can delegate somebody to clean up our shit in politics, like we pay someone to clean our place after a huge messy party, while we’re dying in bed devouring Advil.
Wrong. We can outsource ugly factories, but we cannot outsource political action. Lack of involvement and engagement brought us to the point we are at right now, a moment of political desperation and social alienation, a situation where “equal opportunity” sounds like a joke. We cannot hand over responsibility, even to Bernie Sanders or the ACLU. It simply will not work. Berni
e, the ACLU, or Bikini Kill will do their best, but we’d all need to become Bernie ourselves if we wanted to get a real new deal.
* * *
It may be calming to think there is somebody wise and powerful who will take care of us. I’m Russian, and we have an insanely strong traditional desire for paternalism. There has to be someone who’ll come and make the world a better place. But more often, they will not come. And if they do, there is a very good chance they will be assholes. Absolute power turns everybody into an absolute shit.
Some more advice from one of the most brilliant of political organizers, Saul Alinsky. “It is not enough just to elect your candidates. You must keep the pressure on.” “The separation of the people from the routine daily functions of citizenship is heartbreak in a democracy.” I tend to trust these words.
Putin and Trump, these men devoid of convictions or beliefs, happen to be perfect figures for the twenty-four-hour hyped news cycle, where we are ping-ponged back and forth between indifference and hysteria.
The media universe fills us with a feeling of total helplessness, total defeat. We don’t know what is truth and what is a lie, especially when we are fed lies labeled as truth and vice versa. We’re constantly being fed shocking stories that leave us feeling hopeless, isolated, and powerless. Pure despair. All-inclusive blackouts. No surprise that we have anxiety attacks.
When I turn on the TV, I feel miserable. The universe is falling apart, and I don’t know how to keep it together. It’s against our nature to be overwhelmed with bad news and to not have the power to fix it. It leads to frustration, rage, desperation. What every human being needs is to have a set of tools to overcome the horror. Our aim should be to create this set of tools.
What makes me hopeful is that I experienced something in my life that tells me this separation could be overcome.
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