The Yes Men cometh.

2004 was not such a bad year. The Dow Chemical Company apologized for the toxic destruction of Bhopal, India. A documentary film captured the disbanding of the World Trade Organization (WTO). And campaigners for Bush brazenly sought support for global warming.

If these headlines missed you, then meet the Yes Men, your guides to a satirical world based on clever parody that sometimes fools the media. Headed by Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum, the Yes Men are a band of social activists who thrive on spoofing the policies of a politician or corporation. Here's how they work. They claim a web domain name that resembles one of their targets to create a comically subversive site, and their target's representative at forums and as experts on the news. They highlight hypocrisies in politely outlandish presentations. They make unexpected admissions on the air, and earnestly defend the most blatant abuses. When political and business groups protest against the Yes Men, they only help to "publicize issues that otherwise wouldn't get discussed on the pages of the mainstream press," in Bonanno's phrase.

The Yes Men currently claim 327,000 members dedicated to exposing what Bichlbaum calls "the nonsense thinking that runs the world." The 2004 documentary film The Yes Men reveals how the group exchanged the voice boxes of Barbie dolls and GI Joes in one of its early projects. The Yes Men now assume the voices and guises of their targets, getting easy entree into big business and politics. "A lot of big think tank meetings don't have door policies--all you have to do is walk in," says Bichlbaum.

The Yes Men's parody website for Dow Chemical (wwew.dowethics. com) combines the company's name with an uncommon suggestion of corporate responsibility. On November 29, 2004, the BBC TV News contacted the dowethics site for commentary on the twentieth anniversary of the Bhopal tragedy. Bichlbaum went on the air as Dow spokesman Jude Finisterra to admit the company's guilt, and to make an improbable promise to compensate its victims. Dow issued a response, including an article condemning Jude's apology (www.bhopal.com/ index.html). But the company only provided more fodder for the Yes Men, who put out a news release proclaiming "Dow Website Has the Best Facts," written by a spokesman claiming to be Dow's "Corporate Vice President for Environment, Health, Safety, Responsibility, Philanthropy, Ethics, Decency, Citizenship, and Social Concerns."

In the Yes Men's hands, the web remains a democratic weapon, where an official site has to catch up to imitators that mirror its appearance, while magnifying its lies. The Yes Men co-wrote "Reamweaver," a program that lets them easily copy and alter domains. They also operate "nagging" software that opens every page of a site, grinding down a company's server. Even if their uses of the Internet are curtailed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (both explained on the Yes Men's site), Bonanno maintains that with technologies, "there are always loopholes."

The mass media's dependence on experts provides one loophole for the Yes Men. By falling for imposters as official spokesmen, the media have given the Yes Men mass exposure. States Bichlbaum from experience, "You can be nervous, bumble your lines, sweat profusely, faint, or even inflate a yard-long dong from your hips [as he did with the Yes Men's "Management Leisure Suit"], and no one will think that you're not who the program says you are."

The film The Yes Men follows Bonanno and Bichlbaum (alias "Andreas Bichlbauer" in Austria, "Hank Hardy Unruh" in Finland, "Kinnithrung Sprat" in Australia, and "Granwyth Hulatberi" on CNBC) around the world as they impersonate WTO representatives. Using WTO terminology, powerpoint slides, and 3-D animation, the Yes Men give straight-faced demonstrations of the gold "Management Leisure Suit" with its inflatable phallus, and present plans to eliminate the siesta in Europe, let corporations bid for votes, and turn first world waste into Third World McDonald's hamburgers. The film ends in Australia, where the Yes Men declare the WTO voluntarily dissolved.

The Yes Men's brand of activism seems made for a documentary film. We see them donning the suits of economic leaders, although with thrift store shoes. We wait for their audiences to realize something is amiss, turning typical cut-away shots into documentary double takes. But the Yes Men's careful preparations and performances produce no outcry. They do not confront a hostile crowd until presenting their "Re-burger" scheme to a group of college students in Plattsburgh, New York. Bichlbaum interprets their audiences' lack of reaction as proof of how "you get absolutely no advantage, in the business world, from questioning the bases of the whole system." But the main reason for the acceptance of the Yes Men's schemes lies in the context of WTO protocol that they mimic so well, and that the film does not show. Without the perspective of the activists' foes, the film is, ironically, less radically funny than it should be.

Yet the movie verifies the vitality of the Yes Men's methods through the web, mass media, and in person. The makers of the documentary have also covered the Yes Men's travels across the country in the three months before the last election, in a bus adorned with a "Yes, Bush Can!" banner the Yes Men solicited voters to sign a "Patriot Pledge." The pledge confirms your willingness to have a nuclear waste facility in your neighborhood; to send your kids to North Korea and other hot spots; to abrogate privacy rights for warrants, phone taps, medical records, borrowed library books, and (a space for you to fill in the blank); to remain married despite hating your spouse; to support tax cuts for the rich at the expense of your Family (please list your children and their Social Security numbers), and "to embrace global warming as a useful weapon in the trade wars."

By embodying their targets, the Yes Men engineer acceptance of authority into a vehicle for change. Even conservatives may be converted into unknowing revolutionaries through policies fixed by the activists. The future looks ripe for and rife with Yes Men.

ILLUSTRATED BY YUKO SHIMIZU 

Gabriel M. Paletz is writing a book about Orson Welles that shows the director's dedication to the best of elite and popular culture throughout his career.