December 7, 2014 - 15:31
This weekend, a family member called my attention to the performance artist “Reverend Billy,” who, along with his “Church of Life After Shopping Chorus” and the “Not Buying It Band,” puts on shows denouncing the “Shopocalypse.”
I share this form of "guerilla theater" with you both as inspiration for your own upcoming performances of “extended contact zones,” and because it attempts to connect human justice with earth justice: “A lot of people believe these are separate issues, but we’re coming to the point where we have to have a single view of the violent occupation of the people by the elites,” “Reverend Billy” maintains. The loss of both human rights and earth rights, “Reverend Billy” preaches, are “essentially created by the same set of problems: corporatised democracy, steroidal capitalism, and racism.”
If you are intrigued, a Dec. 5, 2014 article from The Guardian gives some background on Reverend Billy and his take-off on the old American tradition of the “self-invented preacher and the self-invented church”: see “In the US, consumerism is how we operate.”