ID: In one interview you said that when you and Morgan Spurlock started the film
you had to limit what you could say while making it. In what way were you
limiting what you could and could not say here?
RB: To say that consumer society has real basic problems is a very big critique.
You have 600 issues there. So, we decided to make it a Christmas movie. Within
the narrative commercial Christmas is the villain. Immediately we found that
certain issues got emphasized. Children. The movie is based on how commercial
Christmas impacts children. Disneyland, video games, it’s got a lot of kids from the get-go. Children and imbeddedness. There were
families, children in America, sweatshops, which is children in other
countries. Basically it was the organizing factor in any statements that we
would make, any drama that we would make, is based in the world of children in
commercial Christmas. So, lots of issues were deemphasized by choosing to go in
that direction, such as the climate crisis. Bill McGibbon mentions the climate
crisis when we are coming through Minneapolis. He says we can’t keep shopping like this; we are going to derail the Earth’s physical systems, particularly the climate. But climate is giving a real gift;
you don’t have to buy a gift to give a gift. Spend half as much, give twice as much.
Christmas is the issue, and kids were the world in which we inhabited. Some
people who have been critical of What Would Jesus Buy? say that it’s pretty sprawling. That it’s all over the place. But for us, we say it may be sprawling, but it’s the most focused thing we ever did. We’re in the world of the performance arts. We are New York performance artists; we
get a lot more free range generally than the film offered us. We had a message;
we had things that we said again and again. Yea that I walk through the valley
of the shadow of debt. I will not fear the Shopacalypse.
There were several days that I had ten or twelve interviews. Savatri and I would
sit in the hotel room and they would just keep coming in. One time the
publicist brought in this right-wing Christian blogger, and I answered his
questions in our life-of-Jesus way of talking, that we’ve developed for Christian people. Then we had the editors of Hustler come in
right after. They’re libertarians, they are first amendment purists. It’s amazing how little our story changed from person to person. We’re saying if we change our approach to Christmas, we could change the rest of
the year. We have taken this very important social ritual and distorted it, and
we’re paying a terrible price for that.
ID: It seems to me that the anti-consumerist message is central to many issues,
which makes it somewhat non-partisan. Do you get a partisan reaction from
different media outlets?
RB: To some degree I respond to the conversation the way I am responding to you
right now. We try to speak in the vernacular; you don’t want to drift over into political rhetoric or academic rhetoric. You don’t want to drift into a rhetoric that is a sub-culture of some kind. Try to stay
in a spoken word mode that will reach the maximum number of people. The New
York Times did features for years on Reverend Billy, then after the movie and
after there was a little more fame there, they started saying “no, we’ve done so many articles on him.” You can’t be a small celebrity. You have to be someone who has a movie every six months,
then you get to come back. But when I was unknown they kept doing features on
me, but now I don’t know. I’d like the New York Times to have an awareness of consumerism that is more
progressive; they are the paper of record. We have all this popularity with
Christians and we live in New York but can’t get the New York Times to respond…all it says is that there is a shift taking place. If the world is changing,
such that we have an emergency in the eco-system of life, of which we are a
part, that doesn’t let us stay on the right wing and the left wing. People rise up for different
reasons and respond. If Christians are able to jump up and say, "I’m a radical, I’m a radical environmentalist, I’ve shrunk my carbon footprint to nothing and sold my car," but someone who reads
the New York Times every morning and has voted with liberals all their life
says, "I can’t go that far. I’m on jets all the time. I’ll own a big home and heat it," then the Left-Right thing is broken down. And
that has happened to some extent. The climate is pressuring this old corrupt
political system that we’re a part of. It’s shaking us all up.
ID: Reverend Billy is a fascinating vehicle for social activism. The film
briefly touches on you having a tough day at the Wal-Mart headquarters, largely
because nothing happens. Yet it seems that a better day may have been your
protest at Disneyland where you are arrested. What is a good day or a bad day
for Reverend Billy? It appears that that binary is quite different for you than
the average American.
RB: When I was in jail in LA, it was bad because I was scared and it was
dangerous. But when I’ve been in jail in New York, it’s not nearly as dangerous because I kind of know the Tombs. The time I went to
jail in Chicago, I was just in the precinct house and that wasn’t really prison. Atlanta, I was in and out, I was just detained in the basement
of the Marriot. The bulk of my imprisonments have been in the Tombs in New
York, and they watch out for me, they know me there. I’m still sitting in the cell for hours with people coming down off of drugs and
schizophrenics. I leave my collar on, because I feel safer. No one knows for
sure that I’m not a holy man of some kind.
ID: Do you ever take that opportunity to speak your message to anyone in jail?
RB: Yes, you find yourself having lots of political conversations in jail.
Far-ranging conversations.
ID: Is it a different conversation speaking in that context rather than
preaching to shoppers walking Times Square?
RB: In some ways it’s not so different. I remember in one prison I was scared because I think they
thought I was a cop. I didn’t have my uniform on. I didn’t have my collar and my white suit on. So I thought they were suspicious of me.
They were, and they came up and asked me, “What are you doing here?” I said, "I just want to tell you the truth, I’m scared, and so I’m just going to tell you what happened to me, believe it or not. Me and about
thirty other people, mostly students, from this class I was teaching with my
wife, we went into a Starbuck’s and I ended up dancing on the counter. I got tackled by this ex-Marine. It’s a Starbuck’s; they aren’t a fair trade company, they don’t pay their workers fairly, they are a union busting company here, the baristas
can’t get organized, people in Guatemala and Ethiopia and Columbia are suffering
from the collapsed market due to globalization; those kids are starving. In the
western highlands of Guatemala the doctor-to-person ratio is 1 to 85,000, and
those people are out in the groves bringing coffee beans to Starbuck’s." So, I’m talking like that and these guys start laughing. These are some giant Hispanic
guys from East LA, with giant Mayan tattoos on their backs and I was talking
about their relatives. From then on, they protected me, they called me
Starbuck. There was always one of these guys, from that gang, near me for the
rest of my imprisonment. I was protected by my activism in that context, by
being honest with these guys.
ID: So how do you scale a day like that to something like the day at the
Wal-Mart headquarters, when this is not working?
RB: I’d say the worst days are when so many Americans just don’t seem to care. We are beaten up by thousands of exposures to advertisements
everyday and we start to become dull. We start thinking that that kind of
critical thinking isn’t something we can do. The kind of thinking you’d have to do to have a political conscious. Sometimes you feel like it’s too little too late. That maybe we’ll only gradually change, like the corporations green-washing campaigns. We will
try to keep the system basically the same as it is. You feel like American
radicalism is impossible. But American radicals are who started this country;
they’re who abolished slavery and defeated fascism. The thing that did it was large
groups that were counter-intuitive and just plain brave, I sometimes feel like
we can’t do that anymore.
ID: What would you say to people who say that your anti-consumerism message is
either too vague, or is common knowledge at this point? That most of society
knows that Wal-Mart carries sweatshop goods and that it’s wasteful to drive to the corner store, but they either don’t care or they choose not to hear you?
RB: Just lately much of America seems to have stopped shopping. Kohl’s is down 15%, Target is down 20%, Sharper Image is bankrupt. We have a major
shift in how people are spending money. SUVs are just being dropped off; people
are dumping their SUVs for two grand. In the commercial press they say this is
a result of consumer confidence dissolving, people being afraid. That’s partially true. But it’s also true that people are excited about the changes. We get e-mails everyday
from people who are saying, "Guess what I’ve done, I’ve found a way to feed my family without going to big industrial stores, I’ve found a hardware store where I can still go and it’s not Home Depot." People are finding it exciting to change the way they live,
they feel better about themselves. It goes both ways.
New York is a consumer-ravaged town; a lot of the neighborhoods are dead. It’s kind of a vertical version of what is happening in the suburbs. A lot of
people describe it as though it’s day has gone. Our experience is that the centers of cultures have cultural
impacts long after the economic center they developed has faded away. An
example would be London or Rome. New York was the center of much of the world’s activities, economic, artistic and so forth. If it is no longer, people learn
from us anyway. It’s our theater. When we resist a Starbuck’s here we’ll get an e-mail from someone in New Zealand who is trying to do the same thing.
We have a clear role. If this project seemed wacky at the beginning, more
artistic than political, there is a clarity that we feel now. There is too much
of an emergency.
