Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping has a new book, “The Earth Wants YOU” (City Lights, 2016). It is poetic, dedicated, intense and darkly funny. Focusing on climate change, Billy Talen—a performance artist who wrote a column for the Light when he lived in West Marin—challenges us to help jumpstart “this last-minute revolution against the apocalypse.”
If he draws upon the righteous anger of the preacher, Reverend Billy also conveys the vulnerability and catharsis of speaking the truth. There is a quiet passion in his voice that sometimes sounds pained, like a man who carries the burden of the real in a country that doesn’t want to face it. But it wouldn’t be a burden if he didn’t believe things can change for the better.
Last week, he spoke with Charles Schultz about the failures of the environmental movement, the genetic demand for beauty and the need for radicalism—and getting fired from The Station House. He will be on the Local Organon at 1 p.m. on Friday, April 22 on KWMR, and will read at the Point Reyes Community Presbyterian Church at 7 p.m. on Saturday, April 23. The event, presented by Point Reyes Books, is free—but all you rich people better buy his book and CD.
Charles Schultz: What about anger? In this culture, if you are angry, it means something is wrong with you; maybe anger is a public health issue and should be illegal. Everyone is supposed to be nice and in agreement. But isn’t anger the authentic response to the perception of injustice?
Billy Talen: When I moved to California, I got a near-lethal dose of the New Age. The Reverend Billy character and the Stop Shopping Church developed out of my need to invent a way to land righteous anger back in the culture. And ironically, some of the granting streams that finance the Zen Center and the Esalen Institute were among the first to give funds to work on this post-religious preacher—this preacher who prays straight to life and bypasses the patriarch. What do the late-night Elvis-impersonator T.V. preachers do? They try to stand in for the Old Testament, fulminating God, that jealous, adolescent God. I took that character and used its facility for anger, but have progressive language coming out of its mouth, to subvert it. In retrospect, it looks like we were working in both directions: we were subverting New Age pacifism.
I knew that there was an increasing inability to express yourself as the world filled up with the white noise of the digital era, when everyone and their uncle was publishing their own newspaper straight out of their mouth into their computer. You have, on the one side, all these fundamentalist preachers screaming, and on the other side people who believe that just healing yourself is a political act, which it is not.
Charles: Then there are nonprofits and charities that make money by dawdling in between the people who care and the problems to be solved. Professional environmentalists who get their money from the fuel industry or utilities, and greenwash their clients and manage the people who want change—they seem to be the worst of all.
Billy: The central preoccupation of the book is how do we manifest a social movement, and how do we start a revolution in 2016? The challenges are great. The corporate messaging is so virulent right now, the white noise pouring out of every aperture. The environmental movement is so weak on the world stage, but the earth is the stage.
You have a failed environmental movement. There are wonderful people working at the Sierra Club—some of them are so great—but the Sierra Club collectively is something else. You could say the same thing of individuals within Coca-Cola! I posit that the answer to jumpstarting this last-minute revolution against the apocalypse is to be found in the earth itself. And that is an anti-Western idea; that is an idea I got living in West Marin County—that is, not from the industrial age, certainly not the Silicon Valley age.
We have to help each other do it: to take the earth up into your body and direct yourself at the gate of the coal-fired power plant, and then go through that gate. That’s the earth saving itself through us. Anything short of that… …we’ve done what’s short of that! We’ve done what’s short of that for years. Policy, theory, signing petitions, buying panda tote-bags. We’ve come up short. The emissions go up every month, and we’re not doing it. The fossil fuel companies are still extracting, still drilling. They’ve given value to what they’ve found, and the value is owned by those companies and it’s on the big board and it is being traded. Nobody has said, “How do you stop that?”
Charles: I have a friend [Paul Fenn] working on a piece called the “Localist Platform.” He is saying we need to turn our local governments into a secular, municipal temple. After Obama was elected, all these environmentalists and technologists go to D.C. or to the big climate summits and they think, “We’ll get the ear of the powerful.” His idea is reestablishing self-government, rather than a march to melt the emperor’s heart, as the means of addressing climate change.
Billy: At the People’s Climate March, we marched for hours and hours and hours. And I discovered that the police had routed us around Central Park, down and then out 42nd Street because the Clinton Family Fund was at the top of the Times Square Sheraton with Gates and Monsanto people. The elites at the top of the fuel empire were dining and sipping cocktails 45 stories up; the 400,000 people marching were their entertainment. They may have some sense that the Visigoths are at the gate; maybe Hillary Clinton has some idea of the power of Bernie Sanders now. But the Paris climate talks, the conservative self-congratulatory documents they created—I don’t think we have gotten their ear. Our protests are a part of their budgets.
Charles: You talk about the need for “trespass.” What do you mean by that?
Billy: We recently sang “Monsanto is the Devil” in front of Central Park Conservancy, which has 70 trustees with names like John Paulson and Henry Kravis. Those people are the robber barons; they’re the guys in Florence who gave money to Michelangelo. They are spraying pesticides in Central Park, and they don’t think they have to disclose it to the public.
Charles: There is an organization here called Mow & Sow. It was started by a woman called Donna Sheehan, who stopped roadside spraying of herbicides along Highway 1 after a long battle. Just an interesting tactical note: she called a rally and declared victory. And once she declared victory, the state conceded.
Billy: That’s a really great idea. I would like to use that on Central Park.
Charles: We have all those heirs to industrial fortunes out here, too. I see a lot of “simple” people out here who just can’t stop flying—100 tons of jet fuel at a spell—to Asia to do this anti-Enlightenment escapism. It is like poor people have to keep buying and rich people have to keep flying. The consumption of trinkets or experiences, the constant motion and displacement; that can never stop.
Billy: I’ve flown to Paris twice in the last six months. It is a hell of a thing to wake up in the City of Lights. It is not just the jet. France is mostly powered by nuclear plants; the City of Lights comes from splitting the atom…. We have our local temple, our community gardens and parks and libraries; we are leading parades around the neighborhoods in New York and we are doing our local thing as best we can. But I can’t imagine not being able to fly, to preach and to sing and excite people in their activism. How would we do that without being international figures?
Charles: It is one of the paradoxes of modern living. I am not accusing you of being a bad person.
Billy: Well, it has to change. I know that local temple idea is so counterintuitive. It is so hard to imaging flying by walking 50 feet, flying by being local, flying by having a richness of details in your life around you, the emotional richness of a local life. We have this compulsion to go over the horizon, and get into a foreign language newspaper somewhere. A few years ago the guy from Virgin Airlines, the ultimate Brit yuppie, promised us a veggie-powered jet. That was a serious request that went to him, and we thought he was young and hip enough to understand the request. Naomi Klein writes about the demise of that: that whole idea crashed and burned.
Charles: You mean green capitalism?
Billy: Yes, there were big promises of various kinds. Naomi Klein has a whole chapter [in “This Changes Everything”] on gigantic green capitalist promises that turned out to be stalls, turned out to be ways to keep people not doing anything for a few years. Which is what the People’s Climate March turned out to be, which is what the Paris climate talks are turning out to be. Those middle-ground promises by this existing system: we must learn to ignore them.
Charles: What about our virgin-whore complex out here? If the park stays pure, then Chevron can go to town on Richmond. Let loose!
Billy: Or Ecuador. But there is no purity: the postcard aesthetic of beauty is over. I grew up in the northern prairie states. I remember this tremendous feeling about the icy vastness of the north. It was impenetrable. In South Dakota you feel it, that untouchability, unfathomability that looms over you. That is no longer pure; that is now melting. My first dreamscape, and it’s gone.
Charles: My generation doesn’t remember the lost landscape. We were born into a world in which all of the infrastructure of destruction was already in place. We don’t have a memory of that destruction, so we don’t have that anger. You have a memory of the loss of beauty.
Billy: I think that we all have a genetic demand in our body for beauty. People I know who had childhoods in urban wastelands, they find beauty in the rainbow of a snowflake on a fire escape. They find a moment of beauty and respite in nature. I keep being surprised at the virulence of earth activism coming from high school kids, and you look at their neighborhoods and wonder how they know they want the earth to be safe. They have lived in a destroyed world, but they find hope. I know Obama has destroyed that word hope, and we’ll have to find a new one.
Everybody has the opportunity to be an earth person right now. The whole idea of consumerism—and its subset, militarism—is to separate us from the earth, to forget about it, to objectify it. We have to help each other to become radical Americans again. It is time to be radical Americans again. We have done that in the past, to the surprise of the world, several times. And we have to do it again now. That will be experimental, that will be counterintuitive, that will take us out of our safe place. But we can and we must! Earthalujah! The earth wants you. The earth knows that, and it can be a source of power that no religion can possibly be. The earth itself will tell us. That’s how I’m hitting the road. That’s the message of the Church of Stop Shopping.
Charles: What about the election?
Billy: We’re working hard to keep direct action—or as we say, non-violent dramatic action—going. Singing all the right songs in the wrong places: trespassing music. When this Presidential thing blows over, there will be something else that arises. I think it is about the local. But I will vote for Bernie and many of our people work to support him. If he is elected, hopefully he won’t go the way of Clinton and Obama. We have had a problem with that, this Henry V thing. People saying what they need to say to get in, and then suddenly they’re much different. We need to have Seattle activists and Portland bridge-danglers, we need to have dramatic direct actions and thousands upon thousands of citizen warriors. Law enforcement must come over to the earth movement. We must have police who care for our children in another way. The media coverage of Snowden, Manning, Assange—those three are far more important to the earth movement than the Sierra Club. The system they exposed is the earth-hating thing. We must have media that stops pretending that climate change is one issue among 20 issues.
Charles: Norman Solomon told me if the newspapers ran the news every week, they would be out of business in a month. And this interview is for the Light, which I’m told you wrote for.
Billy: I was a columnist, at least. I went around reporting on the local arts in West Marin. I also washed dishes at The Station House.
Charles: Pat Healy is still here.
Billy: Yes, I understand Pat is very much there. Pat, of course, fired me. How do you fire a dishwasher for incompetence? Actually, she did the right thing. I was not up to her specs. The Station House is better for having fired me.
Charles: Can I keep that in?
Billy: Absolutely. Fired. By the way, she was very nice about it. I asked her, “Before I go, would you sing me a song?” She said, “No.” Wow. She refused to sing a song for me as she cut me off. Pat, someday you’ll sing for me, and the Stop Shopping Choir will sing a song for Pat.
Charles: Will you exorcise the Station House while you’re in town?
Billy: Does that mean I have to stop eating there?
Charles: No.