by Amy Goodman, King Features Syndicate
Reverend Billy wants you to stop shopping. "Black Friday" is the name retailers have given to the day after Thanksgiving in their attempt to make Christmas synonymous with shopping. On Black Friday, Americans are expected to flock to the malls and shopping centers, eager for discounts, armed with plastic. Business analysts fill the airwaves with predictions on how the fickle consumer will perform, how fuel prices and the subprime mortgage crisis will impact holiday shopping. Black Friday is followed by "Cyber Monday," a name coined by the retail industry to hype online shopping. Listening to the business news, one would conclude that the future not only of the U.S. economy but of humanity itself depends on mass, frenzied shopping for the holidays.
• Reverend Billy preaches fair-trade in Austin, Texas. Photograph by Joe Flood.
•Reverend Billy is the street preacher played by Bill Talen, a New York City-based anti-consumerism activist who is the subject of a new feature-length documentary hitting theaters this week called "
What Would Jesus Buy?" The film is produced by Morgan Spurlock, who gained fame with his documentary "Super Size Me," in which he showed his physical and emotional decline while eating only McDonald's food for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a month.
In the movie, Talen and his amazing Stop Shopping Gospel Choir cross the country in two biodiesel buses, holding public faux-gospel revivals denouncing the "Shopocalypse," our crass, corporate, credit-driven consumerist culture and its reliance on sweatshops abroad and low-wage retail jobs at home, while celebrating small-town, Main Street economies, the strength and value of fair-trade shopping, and making do with less.