When I first came to this country 20 years ago, Guy Fawkes Night was something of a mystery. I enjoyed the bonfires, but thought them a bit vengeful at this distance; and I missed Hallowe’en. These days I don’t miss Hallowe’en, but I am still mystified by the celebrations around Mr Fawkes. That said, perhaps less so now that he has become the mask behind which the Occupy Wall Street movement operates; and that today, November 5, has been declared “Bank Transfer Day”. Don’t build a bonfire: move your money to a credit union or a more ethical bank, and you can be as present in what’s being billed as the uprising of the 99 per cent as if you were in a tent in Zuccotti Park, New York – or in front of poor old St Paul’s Cathedral.
Watching events in front of that edifice called to mind the Reverend Billy – and as it happens, a new book, The Reverend Billy Project: From Rehearsal Hall to Super Mall with the Church of Life After Shopping (University of Michigan Press), has just landed on my desk. Listening to the Archbishop of Canterbury speak about the protest made me wonder what the Rev would say. Who’s the Rev? Well, in civilian life he’s plain Bill Talen, but over the past dozen years he has become an important counter-cultural voice. At the end of the 1990s he launched what became the Church of Stop Shopping — latterly the Church of Life After Shopping. Talen, in white jacket, clerical collar and voluptuous quiff, rants like a revivalist preacher and has gathered around him a troupe of activists who provide a fine combination of entertainment and moral provocation.
“When the preaching started hitting its stride for the first time it was arranged around compelling evil,” Talen says of his protests centred on the Disney Store in Manhattan at the turn of the century. Evil? Really? But he goes on: “The sweatshop basis for the economy of Disney; the 20,000 sweatshops around the world; the marketing juggernaut that attacks childhood imagination.” He is “trying to save the souls of the tourist- consumers” — having just walked through Times Square, it is clear that his work is not yet done.
If we’re lucky, he might show up in London. Keep an eye out. Too few voices in this movement have thought hard about what they want and what they believe in — the Rev is one of them. Listen out and hear the word — amen.
Erica Wagner
November 5 2011 12:01AM
revbilly.com
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11/13/11 Why we need Reverend Billy | The Times