"Profound Ambivalence" by Dan and Cheryl for 100 Performances in the Hole

















"Profound Ambivalence" by Dan and Cheryl
Third Strike: 100 Performances for the Hole

SOMARTS, San Francisco

Dec. 10, 2011

Text for "Profound Ambivalence"


Frame Capitalism and the Conference of Polluters


(Original edit was posted on Monday, December 5, 2011 at Capitalismisover.com. This edit produced for a 2 minute piece by Dan and Cheryl at 100 Performances in the Hole, Dec 10, 2010.) Text by Cheryl Meeker

We in the west think that Darfur was torn apart due to ethnic conflict, while according to David Morse it was a resource war. He writes:

“The most sophisticated technologies deployed are, on the one hand, the helicopters used by the Sudanese government to support the militias when they attack black African villages, and on the other hand, quite a different weapon: the seismographs used by foreign oil companies to map oil deposits.

Why are the dots never connected between wars like those in Darfur and exploitation by the oil industry? Morse points to the subsidies provided to media by the car industry… the slickest, most fantasy-driven ads: the car ads.

The ideology that dominates our media is so strong that alternative narratives are taken with a minimum of seriousness, as Slavoj Zizek points out, without the necessity of the kind of prohibition of films dealing with time travel and alternate history as happened in China in April. But — try to imagine another system here in the US? “It is easy for us to imagine the end of the world (says Zizek)– see numerous apocalyptic films, but not end of capitalism.”

At the failing Durban climate talks, civil society activists erupted in protest yesterday, blocking the plenary halls, chanting “Climate Justice Now!” “Don’t Kill Africa!” “World Bank out of Climate Finance,” “No Carbon Trading,” and “No REDD!”

Anne Petermann, director of Global Justice Ecology Project, ejected from the meeting, said: “I took this action today because I believe this process is corrupt, this process is bankrupt, and this process is controlled by the One Percent”

Kumi Naidoo, Greenpeace Director, also ejected, wrote to negotiators, “Twenty years after our victory against apartheid here in S Africa, with great urgency we call for a similar breakthrough” -- “You may not have felt it inside the rarefied air-conditioned corridors of the conference centre, but a restless anger stalks this land – driven by a new apartheid that has trapped half of humanity in a deadly embrace of poverty, inequality and hunger”

“Our institutions – local, national and global – are rapidly losing legitimacy,” Naidoo wrote. “Someday soon – the victims of rising temperatures will find their voice. Your job is to meet their hopes before you meet their anger.”

Meanwhile – here in the US, it is business as usual. In fact, Fox Business blames the new Muppet movie and its predecessors for the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Dan and Cheryl are a product of Dan Spencer and Cheryl Meeker