(Excerpts from an exclusive phone interviewer Emmanuel Goldstein conducted with stylist Hal Foster - the man behind the biggest anti-shopping performance artist's coif around, Reverend Billy.) November 4, 2008
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EG: So this whole stop-shopping church thing is simply your elaborate marketing ploy?
HF: That’s right Biff. Without me this phenom known as Reverend Billy would still be out in some virgin forest starving chained to a tree or worse back in the burn treatment center after visiting a place like Bravo 20. You know where I found this guy right? He was on the coast of some godforsaken island just off NY collecting ticks with tweezers mumbling nonsense about some Lab 257, still reeking of Fresh Kills. He was a nobody, goin nowhere but the pen. Look at him now, an ice cream suit out on Fox News preachin the glorious Word of my handiwork.
EG: How did you arrive at such an extreme anti-consumerist ruse? Did you really think it would resonate?
HF: Look, I’m not a smart man but I know you’ve heard of the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Dixie Chicks. Protest sells. Big. Things like anti-War or global warming, they’re too big, too cumbersome or too unreliable time-wise. B Hussein Obama could win, I think we’ll give him this one so Palin and Rove can step in permanently. So Gitmo, the Iraq quagmire, like Nam it will end ignominiously. But Christmas keeps coming, birthdays, Hallmark holidays, the shopping that fills the voids in your life don’t even have a real season. These are tried and true American values. Malls are the cathedrals and big boxes private chapels. The economy is contracting because slowing debt growth has finally overtaken perceived growth to burst the bubble. The same recession I saw in the late 80s, larger of course; but I knew I could rely on Greedspan, knew he wouldn’t let me down.
EG: So you planned for the recession by creating an shopocalyptic profit prophet? Isn’t that cynical and duplicitous to deflate the opposition by grooming a false iconoclast? Wouldn’t it ultimately undermine your hypercapitalist position by exposing the flawed foundation and presenting an alternative?
HF: Nader? Third party politics? You think I’m a lone wolf in this pursuit? It’s simple, divide and conquer. They will never truly organize because they don’t have the capital to counter our assault. So in short, yes it is as much cynical as it is realistically in my best interest. Corporations are people, but are also the modern saintly icons, cardinals and bishops under Pope Media. Who is a better target than the church?
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