Mike Janssen

I walked in to the Busboys and Poets at 5th and K Sts. in D.C. just as the show was getting underway. Reverend Billy was descending a spiral staircase in the middle of the two-story space, and the noise he and his entourage of 16 singers, dancers and performers — the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir — was turning heads throughout the restaurant. The Reverend was clad in a cerulean jacket with matching slacks, a black shirt, and a priest’s stiff white collar. Most of his performers, who ranged widely in age and appearance, wore shiny green robes. One was an older man with a long gray beard and green granny glasses. Another, younger one sported a fanciful mustache. Dark lines ringed the eyes of a young singer with a brilliant smile who exposed tattoos on her arms when the sleeves of her robe slid up. The ensemble went through a set of double doors and into a back dining room, and before joining them I waited an inordinately long time at the bar for a beer. I reflected on the irony that my desire to consume was keeping me from hearing the beginning of Reverend Billy’s show, which was sure to focus on the evils of rampant consumerism. Eventually I went in to the crowded room and was guided to one of the few empty seats, which was directly in front of Reverend Billy. As the night went on and Billy’s spit or sweat or a commingling of both rained upon me and into my pint of beer when he declaimed before me, I wondered if the seat had been empty for good reason. At one point, as one of Reverend Billy’s sermons was reaching a fervent crescendo, he placed his palm on the crown of my head, and I laughed to disguise my embarrassment about being singled out. Billy’s choir sings high-energy, spirited, gospel-styled songs about topics such as not shopping at Wal-Mart, or Starbucks exploiting Ethiopian coffee farmers by paying them miserable amounts for their beans. I tend to be inattentive to listening to lyrics as it is, even in person, and sometimes I just got too overwhelmed by the spectacle of the whole choir to follow what people were singing. I knew little about Reverend Billy before I showed up at Busboys last night, and what I did know had caused me to expect amusing gimmickry and little more. Instead I found myself in the middle of an earnest and stirring service, a revival of sorts. Although the trappings of religion were being put to other ends, and though past experience has not tuned me to resound to religious song in particular, I found the framing of the message of peace, love and anti-consumerism to be powerful and genuine rather than purely ironic. Reverend Billy and his singers are not joking. Billy evinced a sense of humor, but the presentation was heartfelt. In what seemed to be about the middle of the evening, Reverend Billy told an inspiring story about being in Pittsburgh for the meeting of the G20. I’d paid little attention to coverage at the scene at the G20, and I’m glad I heard Reverend Billy’s account. He described the sea of young protesters outside the building where the G20 was meeting behind a wall that cost millions to erect, protected by a phalanx of recruits in military outfits (Billy described them as Robocop costumes), all lined up. Billy said the international cohort of protesting youth were dressed as trees and dolphins and other organisms, defying their humanness and exploring other species, and acting out these species. Their anarchic organismic ecosystem contrasted with the closed-off nature, the rigidity, the privation of the world leaders. He also drew what I thought to be a compelling parallel between the uniformity of the security at the G20 — the people standing as a human wall, the horizontal lines formed by their chins and their waists — with the structural evidence of gentrification in our cities — buildings all looking the same, condominiums going up in New York and in the neighborhood of DC where we were all sitting. It’s a problem when such sameness rules, whether among people or the structures people live in. Billy fed all of this into a message of peace — the importance for activists focusing on all causes not to forget peace, that peace is inside us, the Earth is inside us, and there are tornadoes and tsunamis (fallout from global warming) because these things are inside us too. I was listening to him speak and began thinking about how an answer was for all of us to love each other, to accept each other as we are, which I think is really a hard thing to do. Even when I think I’m doing it, I still catch myself focusing quite often on what makes other people different from me — not what we have in common. Billy made mention of “sexy peace,” which made me smile. And as he spoke and his passion mounted, his choir, who had taken seats on the stage and in seats around him, began to hum and moan, and people in the audience did too. Then a guy sitting to my left yelled out “Love more!”, and the uptick in the room’s energy was palpable. Billy said “Amen”, echoed by the audience, and we also began yelling “Love more!” At this point I was moved to think of Kenneth Koch’s “Some General Instructions”, one of my favorite poems, in which Koch writes, “Enjoy the people you see. Put your hand out / And touch that girl’s arm.” The evening was invigorating. It was good for me to be among activists and to reconnect with those desires to strengthen community in the face of corporate interests. I don’t consider myself an activist — I don’t think of myself as a very “political” person. If anything, I’m a Taoist anarchist who would simply like to ignore the powers that be, hoping that without my cooperation, they will just shrivel up. Yet I know that I’m often complicit in what is a destructive system, so simply ignoring it is not enough. After Reverend Billy and his entourage left the room, singing of course, the audience clapping, and as the crowd began to disperse, I thanked the guy next to me for yelling “Love more!” He made a difference last night.