Recipe for a More Perfect Union II
Mr. Fish extends the conversation with a question: What's the Alternative?
In his October 19, 2022 open letter to his “chums” on Patreon.com, accompanied by the illustration above of the author bent over his typewriter, Mr. Fish asked for feedback about his proposed project for a book about the alternative and underground press from the 60s and early 70s. “Somehow, we survived the 60s,” Mr. Fish wrote, referencing that brief moment of euphoria many of us experienced as a generation of Americans stood on the “threshold of successfully recalibrating the democracy in a way that might’ve eventually had us thriving responsibly and morally as a nation.” But alas, the neoliberal, endless growth oligarchy would have none of that, and as a result we now find ourselves teetering on the brink of Armageddon. “Unfortunately, this is where we are now as a culture,” Fish pointed out, “surrounded by the distracting burlesque of inarticulate clowns juggling our common fate like raw eggs while we are confined to our seats and made to sit on our hands, wincing powerlessly in anticipation of an endless cascade of ghastly spats.”
Mr. Fish is anything but inarticulate, and his prose is every bit as lively and compelling as his graphic art, but what struck me as I read his launch piece was the way his sane vision of reality matched my late friend Gib Perkins’s take on things, especially his willingness to “extend the conversation further,” a tendency also in alignment with Gib’s keenness to take the topic at hand to the highest level of discussion possible. My esteemed friend Gib was a brilliant scientist with the heart of a saintly artist, and like Mr. Fish, he was a great teacher. Reading Mr. Fish’s exploratory essay, I recalled Gib’s memorable quip about the relationship between suffering and reality. “People suffer because they’re out of alignment with reality,” Gib would often say, as he attempted to open the doors of perception in the obstructed brains of his listeners. As a scientist, what Gib had in mind was a phenomenon he called “quantum reality,” a dimension that he surmised was akin to what the Zen masters call “Big Mind,” the perceptual energy that facilitates the ability to see the world whole via an evidence-based understanding of the universe as defined by the laws of Thermodynamics and ecology instead of the delusional, ideological chaos manufactured by the wealthy propagandists, media Barrons and venal, gaslighting politicians, the banal reality Bill Hicks described in Mr. Fish’s opening essay. “We are experiencing a reality based on a thin veneer of lies and illusions,” Hicks said. “A world where greed is our God and wisdom is sin, where division is key and unity is fantasy, where the ego-driven cleverness of the mind is praised, rather than the intelligence of the heart.”
In addition to his expertise as an award-winning chemist, my dear departed friend Gib was also an ecologist who appreciated the virtues of cultivating regenerative human relationships with the natural world in addition to fostering greater equality, tolerance, and honesty in our societal arrangements. Gib’s quest was always to “see the world rightly,” as he put it, and he defined reality in the context of the multidimensional realm of the Buddha, the inner humility of the Beatitudes of Christ, the inclusiveness and unity of true democracy and the recognition that we would all be better off in this world if we organized our affairs based on a paradigm of mutual aid and brotherly love instead of the insane neoliberal pursuit of Empire, conspicuous consumption and perpetual war.
Gib Perkins, chemist, ecologist, philosopher.
But back to Mr. Fish’s question: what’s the alternative? Speculating about how Gib might respond, I imagined it would include some radical ideas about how to dismantle capitalism, and he would surely agree with the proposition that if the pecking order remains configured as the economic model Mr. Fish describes in his essay, “designed to conceal the manipulations of the market forces whose only purpose is to guarantee that capital flows in one direction, upward, and that shoppers be made compliant and even enthusiastic about their participation in the pecking order of hierarchy by buying into the sadistic hoax that the rich and powerful have always been and must always be allowed to remain as the trusted arbiters of our collective fate,” then the alternative is revolution, since it has been well established, at least here in America, that the aforementioned paradigm rigged for the benefit of the equestrian class is a bad deal for 99% of the people as well as the planet and that in order to survive, revolt is the only rational response. As Pink Floyd cofounder Roger Waters concludes at the end of his moving interview with Chris Hedges on The Chris Hedges Report, “You better stand, you better stand your ground… That’s what we have to do, we’ve got to stand and fight these bastards, or they’ll just roll over us.”
I also think it’s likely that Gib’s vision of an alternative society would reflect a moral direction “toward greater freedom, liberality and tolerance,” to borrow Substack columnist Robert Hubbell’s phrase, and I conjecture that because he was a systemic thinker, Gib would agree with Sam Carliners’s point in the April 21, 2022 edition of Scheerpost, that “the climate crisis is not the fault of individuals, but of the capitalist class and their institutions of violence.” Right up there at the top of the list, for example, with the degenerate MAGA Republican Party, is the U.S. military which is now considered the world’s largest climate polluter, emitting more CO2e (carbon-dioxide equivalent) than Morocco, Peru, Sweden, Hungary, Finland, New Zealand, Norway, and Switzerland combined. (Cutting back on unnecessary global wars of empire, mostly waged to increase the profits of American arms merchants, would represent a huge carbon offset.)
Another significant American institution in league with the military/industrial establishment is the U.S. Congress whose members Mark Twain presciently described during the last Gilded Age as America’s “only truly criminal class.” Congressional moral malfeasance has only worsened since Twain’s era and as Matt Taibbi points out in the October 28, 2022 TK News, “The last time Congress enjoyed widespread public confidence was after 9/11, when the institution scored an 84% approval rating. That number dropped as low as 9% in 2013, and had been on the relative upswing lately, reaching 23% in a recent Gallup survey. Numbers are low for a reason, and a big one is trust—Congress hasn’t inched above double digits in the ‘great deal’ of trust category since 2000, and it’s at 3% now. Irrespective of politics, the public expects members in both parties to backstab and sell each other out at the first opportunity.”
Exacerbating these trends is the aforementioned GOP of Trump, another nefarious American institution posing as a legitimate social enterprise now openly dedicated to destroying democracy. In view of the dysfunctional character of representative government as now assembled, I think Gib would agree that dealing effectively with the overarching threat of global warming will require nothing less than a massive grassroots revival of democratic values, the very virtues the GOP seeks to destroy. In our many discussions about politics, Gib revealed that he harbored no illusions about the integrity of the corporatized system now in place, aptly defined by Gore Vidal as “one political party with two-right wings.” Neither party, especially the GOP, espouses a vision that makes sense in the face of the obscene economic inequality that condemns over half the nation to live in poverty. If we really cared about democracy and the common good, including the well being of all the species that inhabit the planet with us, we would not tolerate an economy that forces the majority of us to trudge in slavish servitude to the fascist oligarchy that’s usurped the power of the people. Gib rightly predicted that the system as it is now organized would have to go the way of the dinosaurs in order to avert catastrophe.
As Lewis Mumford famously said, all thinking must now be ecological, an insight that defines the transformative nature of the collective “attitude adjustment” that’s necessary to turn things around. I don’t believe Gib ever imagined our present predicament in which the American people are held hostage by an illegitimate Supreme Court and an arrogant political class corrupted by corporate money that have set the stage for global suicide, but he was keenly wary of the machinations of the military/industrial/congressional establishment and the threat it posed to democracy. Aptly named the Merchants of Death, the neoliberal warmongers now manipulating the levers of power are implementing policies that are the antitheses of the framers’ vision for the Republic. It’s maddening to realize that our grandchildrens’ future is in the hands of these traitorous miscreants. As Michael T. Klare concludes in his May 22, 2022 Scheerpost article, “The world’s ruling elites have chosen to place their geopolitical rivalries above other concerns, including planetary salvation. As a result, global warming is indeed likely to surpass 2 degrees Celsius sometime during this century. It’s a given that almost unimaginable calamities will ensue, including the inundation of major cities, monstrous wildfires, and the collapse of agriculture in many parts of the world…To have any chance of success in limiting global warming to tolerable levels, the climate-action movement will somehow have to overturn an elite consensus on the importance of geopolitical competition—or else. Or else, that is, we can kiss the Planet Earth goodbye.”
Gib was an inveterate skeptic, so I don’t think he would be surprised that while the Shakespearian political tragedy starring Donald J. Trump and his degenerate cronies plays out in the dominant media, global warming, the most significant issue of our time, gets scant attention. During president George Bush’s preemptive war in Iraq, Gib often pointed out how the nation’s fourth estate had been corrupted by corporate money, facilitating the destruction of democracy and enabling the consequent ascendancy of a fascist oligarchy. He also predicted that in the end these champions of the status quo would reap only sorrow from their predatory capitalist kleptocracy machine as it destroyed its resource base, the precious planet Earth, just as Marx predicted. Indeed, Gib thought their actions would guarantee an unhappy destiny, noting that as scripture informs us, the wages of such sins against the sacred creation upon which all living things depend, is Death. From the looks of things out there in TV Land these days, we are right on course toward fulfilling the ancient Cree prophecy that only “when the last tree is cut down, the last fish eaten, and the last stream poisoned, will we realize that we can’t eat money.”
Astute student of history that he was, Gib understood the importance of organized political action and the power of a unified working class to initiate change, but he also emphasized that our spiritual lives needed some serious attention as well. “Living a happy, well-balanced life is an inside job,” he would often say, echoing the sober prophecy of poet Kenneth Rexroth that “when the light of interiority is extinguished, civilization perishes in catastrophic ruin.” When Gib died from complications of Lyme disease in 2006, his many friends grieved the loss of a beloved sage and compatriot who had been a deep wellspring of wisdom and encouraging guidance in matters affecting what comedian Bill Hicks called the “intelligence of the heart,” the only true source of alternatives to the mendacity that deludes us.
In the words of E.O. Wilson,one of the most eminent biologists of our time, “conservation biology….is a discipline with a deadline.” Unfortunately money and power has trumped what President Theodore Roosevelt said when he stood at the edge of the Grand Canyon, gazing out at its magnificence and contemplating it fate, “leave it as it is.” But there are those out there like , Mr. Douglas Tallamy, a professor in the department of entomology and wildlife ecology at the University of Delaware , who are advocating for change in his book ,Nature’s Best Hope and his website, homegrown national park.org. Check it out and start planting!
I wish that I could have met Gib. We need a hundred million Gib’s on this planet - time - now! Thank you for an enlightening discussion on our current situation and how we can navigate out of it.
A Buddhist approach to our view on life and our “plight” is very helpful in dealing with the challenges before us. Long live Gib! He is in our DNA with his knowledge and wisdom. Thanks for sharing it with us while you were living amongst us, Gib!