American Dreamer
It would be easy to make R. Buckminster Fuller an early apostle of globalization. Indeed, his cherished word 'synergy' has lately been so successfully co-opted by financiers and corporations to rationalize so many callous strategies for global profiteering that it may well qualify as one of the most abused words of the late twentieth century. But I am going to take another tack. The 1999 'Battle of Seattle' WTO protest, as well as the more recent Washington D.C., Prague, Genoa, Barcelona, and Cancun protests against the G8, the World Bank, and the IMF, show us that stark battle lines between globalism and local values of all sorts — economic, ecological, civic, cultural, and religious — have already been drawn in our midst. With the fighting factions forming, on which side of the police line would Bucky Fuller stand today? The short answer is that he would not approve of the way 'globalization' is going today, any more than he sanctioned corporate greed in his lifetime.
Core structure
- An Imaginary Symposium
- Archaeology of a Vision
- Yankee Ingenuity
- American Dreamers
- The Original Vision
- The Way Things Are
Main ideas
- There are many ways of assessing Bucky Fuller's legacy.
- The American dream has always been to some extent an immigrant's vision — of economic opportunity, of political liberation, of back-to-the-Earth rusticity, or of religious millenarianism.
- Fuller would not approve of the way "globalization" is going, any more than he sanctioned corporate greed in his lifetime.
Why it matters
It documents a Fuller-related source project in a form that can be compared against the rest of the corpus, situating his vision and legacy within the contested terrain of globalization and the American dream.
Sources
- american_dreamer/index.md — book project directory (repo-local source tree)
- american_dreamer/american_dreamer.md — full text
- american_dreamer/ — source project root