The loudest, most obnoxious mass of Christians had come to the general agreement that, the more Jesus loved you, the wealthier and more powerful He would make you in this world. He did this to balance out all the Muslims, Confucians, and other heathens Satan in His nastiness rendered wealthy and powerful. The only explanation for the majority of wealthy, powerful people in the world not being Christian was that, even though Jesus could easily win against the Devil, sometimes He let the Devil win, by mistake or on purpose, just to keep everyone guessing. If the overall picture were simple to interpret, faith wouldn’t be the test it was known it to be. And so, even under the simplistic, dogmatic doctrines of Dominionist Evangelical Christianity, there was room for confused outcomes.
And thank God for that!
Tom Brokaw was a simple, millionaire news-whisperer and fly-fisherman who called the generation that profited most from the FDR public works program—in other words an entire generation of welfare leeches—the “Greatest Generation.” Once in late September of the year 2022 (by the old TV Guide calendar), he wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times. In it he bragged about his friendship with – no, not post-modern Homer, David Letterman – Yvon Chouinard, son of a Froggy Canook mechanic who reluctantly became an outdoor apparel tycoon.
Brokaw, in an attempt to show how low he was slumming it by hanging out with a fellow millionaire, kept calling the guy a “dirtbag,” which was apparently some slang term rock-climbing skiers liked to call each other, and had not much to do with bags of dirt at all. He also referred to Chouinard’s early life as a leisure sportsman rock climber and skier as “hardscrabble,” a term usually used to describe the lives of poor farmers. Rocks are indeed hard, and Chouinard probably found Scrabble a challenging game as a child, but that did not qualify his life as “hardscrabble.” It’s no surprise that Tom Brokaw, who coined the incorrect moniker “Greatest Generation,” should describe the life of an avid outdoorsman who became an apparel capitalist as “hardscrabble.” Tom Brokaw didn’t really know what words meant. A survey of his coverage of US foreign policy during his years as propaganda parrot confirms this.
Brokaw wrote his piece, entitled braggadociously, “Yvon Chouinard Is the Founder of Patagonia. He’s Also My ‘Dirtbag’ Friend,” shortly after Chouinard made loud news by turning his company, Patagonia Incorporated, over to a non-profit pro-ecological consortium. They would still make Patagonia products, in as sustainable a way as they possibly could, but now 100% of the profits would go to supporting the work of grassroots environmental groups.
Wealth inequality would not be one of the consortium’s targets, because only through capitalist wealth-creation could Chouinard have amassed the money required to pay back the world, or what he considered the world, for the damage he’d reluctantly done by reluctantly becoming a reluctant CEO, able to bring his friend Tom Brokaw on “long hauls to Iceland,” as Brokaw put it, once again painting luxury, i.e. a ride in a jet, as hard work, the way one might refer to a dogsled trek across the wild tundra. But then again Brokaw thought standing in a river in waders smoking cigars with David Letterman was the equivalent of coaxing rice out of the bare Earth.
Also name-checked in the op-ed piece was Yvon and Tom’s close dirtbag friend, Doug Tompkins, another hardscrabble sporty outdoorsman who founded the non-pretentiously French-named apparel company, Esprit. Whereas Yvon believed capitalism could be pursued responsibly, Doug walked away from capitalism, having amassed enough wealth to buy an entire region of South America and establish it as a wild preserve fiefdom, putting the land in trust despite the will of its human inhabitants like an absentee feudal lord.
But that’s how things had to be done back then, under the yoke of capitalism. Human communities had to rely on the good will of individual benevolent custodians of property, distribution, policy, and wealth the likes of FDR, Andrew Carnegie, and the owners of Costco.
And if they weren’t benevolent and possessed no good will, humans and everyone else were merde out of luck.
One area Tompkins’ trust helped preserve was the Chiloé Island-Corcovado Gulf region of Chilean Patagonia. A complex of cold-water coral reefs, inland channels, archipelagos, fjords, fresh watersheds, and intermingling ocean currents, the region attracted increasing tourism, part of Tompkins’ entrepreneurial plan to sustain the inhabitants whose ability to decide he’d usurped, and the trend continued even after Tompkins’ death in 2015 from hypothermia resulting from a hardscrabble kayaking accident.
It’s unclear, however, if the Tompkins trust understood the adverse effects on blue whale reproduction caused by the increased noise from burgeoning ship traffic. The preservation of the zone’s wildness overtook entrepreneurial development though, enough to support the comeback of the blue whale population.
One whale understood the situation very well. That whale’s name, translated from blue-whalesong, was Florbitty Glubblebubber. Florbitty was born in Corcovado National Park, and realized almost immediately that she was the reincarnation of Doug Tompkins himself. Blue whale mind activity exists most expressively in the part of consciousness that in humans is devoted to dreaming. Thus Doug’s widow, Kris, who oversaw much of the trust’s environmental preservation work before and after Doug’s demise, was visited in a dream by Florbitty in the whale’s dream-guise as Doug.
Florbitty Dream-Doug held a series of seminars in the venue of Kris Tompkins’ unconscious. They were like Ted Talks but through the mixed media of dreamscape and whalesong. The immersive discourses finally proved to Kris that the cultural and material logic of capitalism, whether for profit or for one couple’s private idea of environmental preservation, was the problem. She had been trying to put out a fire by spraying it with lighter fluid.
Kris Tompkins awoke one morning after the final night of the multi-night seminar of dreams a changed woman. She immediately booked a tour of major cities of the world as the first convert to Cetaceo-homo-sapianity. She also began to devolve the Tompkins holdings to local community land conservators who in turn granted it to families of all types under conditions of responsible stewardship agreed on by a coalition of sustainable agriculture and ecological maintenance practitioners elected to non-contiguous terms of no more than three years. And that was how the apocalypse came to be limited to about half the disaster it could have been.
SuperTrue®? Yes. So SuperTrue® that you will not find a trace of it in the mainstream media of the time. Now, though, with the advent of Dreamsong Media Immersion techno-ritual practice, we can all enjoy tales told by mushrooms, euphausiids, quarks, cabbages, quasars, and kings from time immemorial to the far distant future. We no longer have to rely on the faulty and biased quackery of the likes of Tom Brokaw. The world is our singing oyster of knowledge and imagination.
And this has been the Moment of Truth. Good day!