Hoax

There's a grand tradition of American hoaxsters, like NYC favorite Alan Abel from his founding of S.I.N.A. (Society for the Indecency to Naked Animals) in 1959 through to his fake lottery win hoaxes in 1990 and just this year again. At its best, a great hoax turns our assumptions about how institutions operate against those institutions, exposing them to some sort of light.

It turns out an already documentaried group, The Yes Men, just took the piss out of the Gulf Coast Reconstruction and Hurricane Preparedness Summit, one member pretending that he was actually a Federal housing official and making all kinds of promises:

Activist Andy Bichlbaum, pretending to be HUD "Assistant Deputy Secretary Rene Oswin," told hundreds of businesspeople at a forum the agency would reverse policy and reopen housing units now targeted for replacement by mixed-income development.

He promised to "fix New Orleans, not just for the benefit of a few but for everyone."

The audience applauded the speech, and the moderator thanked "Oswin" for the "dramatic announcement.

Bravo, bravo said the room full of Louisiana officials and 1,000 contractors. Contractors who may want the housing pulled down so they can get a piece of a bigger construction work pie.

But the capper to the hoax, the true icing and delight:

Toward that end, he said, Wal-Mart would withdraw its stores from near low-income housing and "help nurture local businesses to replace them."

Wal-Mart was unmoved. "As evidenced by the fact that we recently reopened two stores in the New Orleans metropolitan area, there is absolutely no truth to these statements," said spokeswoman Marisa Bluestone...

...Finally, to ensure another hurricane does not inundate the city, Exxon and Shell have promised to spend $8.6 billion "to finance wetlands rebuilding from $60 billion in profits this year," he said.

Wal-Mart has already made their denial (they've moved 2 stores into New Orleans), but maybe the oil companies get shamed into giving something?

Shamed. Right.

So that's my kind of hoax, against the hoaxiest Presidential administration since Richard Nixon, since Harding, arguably since the establishment of the Republic.

As opposed to this kind of hoax.