Having a Gas

            There’s nothing funny about the tragedy that hit Bhopal in 1984, when a pesticide production plant, owned by the American company Union Carbide, due to improper handling, sprung a leak which spilled enough volatile chemicals over the surrounding area to leave over twenty thousand dead and poison the local water so that the number continues to rise to this day. What’s even less funny is that to this day, Union Carbide (Later acquired by Dow) has yet to take any responsibility for this disaster, let alone make an attempt to compensate people for the deaths of livelihood, love ones and the wide spread and varied degenerative diseases. Perhaps ironic that it happened in 1984, but certainly not funny.

            Some of the responses, however, are. They’re very funny. Take the organization Sambhavna, for example. Sambhavna is a treatment center for those who have been impacted by the spill, but it is also a center to educate people about the disaster and to protest the continued ambivalence of Dow. Their protests have involved such tactics as hiding in the bushes of executive’s houses until midnight and then popping out with brass bands. They have given people looking for kinky phone sex the number of Dow’s main office. A woman’s group associated with them has begun presenting Dow executives with brooms at every opportunity, because (as we were told) when an Indian woman gets seriously angry, the broom comes out. Finally, in a master stroke, members of Sambhavna formed a front organization and registered to co-sponsor Dow’s “Blue Planet” run, and at the last minute switched it to a “Brown Planet” awareness event. The thing about that move was, when some of the legitimate sponsors heard about it, they followed suit and cut ties with Dow.

            This is a kind of protest I can get behind. Protest that’s chiefly structured around being funny. For one thing, it’s practically a tautology to say everyone enjoys having a good time, and so if that is the form your protest takes, you’re going to reach a large swath of people. For another, it’s inherently non-violent.

            It makes me think on social justice and guerrilla theater in America. Despite my respect for what it accomplishes, and my occasional participation in it, in the majority of my experience, American social justice theater is preachy and uninteresting. Somewhere between trying to make me feel guilty for things I’ve never done and where they all speak in unison (again), these performances just loose me.

            So I had to ask my self why I wasn’t feeling the same aversion towards Sambhavna’s tactics as I do towards most similar performances. The answer I came to was, they were actually not performances. These aren’t the scripted, rehearsed, “Oh, now we’ve got you because we’re saying things that are so radical” efforts of well meaning, but still relatively privileged people in America. For these people, this is less Guerilla Theater, and more guerilla war. It comes out of their real, and desperate need for immediate attention, which is only mitigated by their commitment to non-violence. That’s where the laughter comes from for them. They need to be heard and now, but they won’t do harm to do it. That means they get people’s attention in the best way the can. There is no performance space for them. They’re fighting on every battle field they can find, and with those in power blocking every avenue to them, they must look to the unconventional and the bizarre.  In that way, they are soldiers. Others seem like children playing war.