Amy Goodman, TruthDig, November 20, 2007
“Black Friday” is the name retailers have given to the day after Thanksgiving in their attempt to make Christmas synonymous with shopping. On Black Friday, Americans are expected to flock to the malls and shopping centers, eager for discounts, armed with plastic. Business analysts fill the airwaves with predictions on how the fickle consumer will perform, how fuel prices and the subprime mortgage crisis will impact holiday shopping. Black Friday is followed by Cyber Monday,” a name coined by the retail industry to hype online shopping. Listening to the business news, one would conclude that the future not only of the U.S. economy but of humanity itself depends on mass, frenzied shopping for the holidays.
Rev. Billy is the street preacher played by Bill Talen, a New York City-based anti-consumerism activist who is the subject of a new feature-length documentary hitting theaters this week, “What Would Jesus Buy?” The film is produced by Morgan Spurlock, who gained fame with his documentary “Super Size Me,” in which he showed his physical and emotional decline while eating only McDonald’s food for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a month.
In the movie, Talen and his amazing Stop Shopping Gospel Choir cross the country in two biodiesel buses, holding public faux-Gospel revivals denouncing the “Shopocalypse,” our crass, corporate, credit-driven consumerist culture and its reliance on sweatshops abroad and low-wage retail jobs at home, while celebrating small-town, Main Street economies, the strength and value of fair-trade shopping, and making do with less.
“We are here today, 28 days before Christmas,” Rev. Billy intones at the outset of his tour, to his home congregation in Greenwich Village, “behind so many layers of billboards, with supermodels looking down on us in their Christmas lingerie, billboards covered with fake Dickensian gingerbread lattes-we’re going to go out across this shopping-addicted country.” He added later, “We will sit down and defeat the bulbous yellow feet of the most famous corporate logo in the world, and the one that has chosen to steal our children’s imaginations for 80 years, the devil, Mickey Mouse.”
En route to Disneyland from New York City, the reverend and his flock stop by the Mall of America in Minnesota, Wal-Mart’s world headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., and numerous Starbucks shops and big-box stores like Target and Staples-educating and engaging, confronting and confounding, with creative street theater and direct action. In Traer, Iowa, we meet Michael Reuman, whose clothing store has been open for more than 100 years: “Wal-Mart is killing small-town America. We’ve got two sons, and I have not encouraged either one of them to come back to the store. There’s no future here.”