Reverend Billy’s Call to Action and Run for Mayor

After I read that Reverend Billy, an activist-crusader-turned-humorous-and-fake-but-prophetic “preacher” is a legitimate Green Party candidate for New York City mayor, I had to join his Facebook group, “Reverend Billy Talen for Mayor of NYC.” Last week, I received a message from him in my inbox, below.

After I read that Reverend Billy, an activist-crusader-turned-humorous-and-fake-but-prophetic “preacher” is a legitimate Green Party candidate for New York City mayor, I had to join his Facebook group, “Reverend Billy Talen for Mayor of NYC.” Last week, I received a message from him in my inbox, below.

Rev. Billy has been a prophetic, if satirical, voice against consumerism, suburban sprawl, corporate corruption, sweatshops, big-box stores, and all things leading to a depleted human community and moral depravity. Taking on the persona of a charismatic preacher, he and his award-winning gospel choir from the “Church of Life After Shopping” (formerly the Church of Stop Shopping) are the new practitioners speaking more truth to power through satire and metaphor than the “truth” on the cable news channels, already made famous by Steven Colbert and the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Naturally, he predicted the economic crisis we all know so well, which he deemed the “Shopocalypse.”

Here are Reverend Billy’s words, which I encourage you to reflect or post upon:

“When the great depression hit the roaring 20’s – Americans turned their back on the Prohibition and other fundamentalist faiths and turned their energy toward growing their social consciousness. What happened in the 30’s invented the modern social net, the ideal of the middle class, the American dream for millions. So says Frank Rich this week in the Times, and sometimes he is a really good teacher.

“Our fundamentalist faith this time was Shopping. It controlled our behavior with a strictness and totalizing paralysis, and represented itself (like all fundamentalist faiths) as Freedom, Youth, Status and let’s say – utopian America… Now the billboards have nothing to say. They are going blank. The products have lost their voice. The executives are like the emperor with a paunch and a g-string. There is a kind of silence across the land as the big corporations relinquish control.

“The billboards aren’t shouting at us, but we’re still slumped in the trains with iPods stuck in our heads. This “growing social consciousness” needs to start right away. There is no ideology ready to go, no “-ism” that everyone knows. More like the challenge of single tasks. There is something to do for each of us. Those blank billboards, fill them up with images. But we have to take off our iPods first and look up.

“Social consciousness might come from a song by The Roots or Joe Strummer – on that iPod – but social change won’t. We have to get off the consumer train, climb the sign with our paint, risk arrest, and make our new message which ultimately will get more of us to put our cell phones down, take our iPods out, cross the property line, climb into the abandoned wreckage of Wall Street and take it over.

“The fundamentalists have withdrawn for the time being. They are going to jail. The Bible belt crazies seem just desperate. We have our opening. Stop waiting for Obama and force the issue, wherever you are. Tell us about it and inspire us. We’ll do the same. Amen?”