When a Medal of Freedom winner publishes a book saying "the USA we have known is now bankrupt and extinct" and that doesn't make headlines, we know right away that journalism lacks integrity. Walter Kaufmann (Princeton University) warned us about journalism. I sent "headlines we'd like to see" to WaPo at the time. "Medal of Freedom Winner Declares USA Bankrupt!" I was living in DC back then, making trouble with my typewriter.
WIRED and such have little choice but to fall into the trap of calling him a crackpot (as he hoped they would, Brer Rabbit style ("please don't throw me into the briar patch")). When you call someone with that many patents, awards, degrees, published works a "crackpot" you pay a price, as what does that make the rest of us by comparison? Setting the bar a little high are we? Idiocracy ensues, with WIRED paving the way.
So now we're in the situation where a thinker advertised to the world for his positive futurism (officially) is not read in schools because too much of a threat for speaking truth to power.
Like how could one possibly claim to know or teach American History and/or Literature and not include that bit about a top celebrity turning a top subversive? How can we claim to have any "public schools" whatsoever when the geometry for which Bucky was explicitly given an award is not shared? If you don't read Grunch of Giants in high school, let alone college, you must not have had real teachers. Phony baloney is what you got. Oh, and now they want you to pay back those loans? For what again? For the heritage you never got?
Instead of indulging in outrage, I can just sit back and laugh, knowing privatization is complete, the public schools are all dead, and Bucky was entirely correct in his prophesy and proclamation (as close to a declaration as we'll ever need).
The corporate media need very much to prop up their tawdry version of Uncle Sam (an imperialist psychopath), lest we see through it all and make Exxon pay for its own team of goons, rather than tapping into a privatized mercenary force funded by unrepresented Americans who's heritage was denied them in their schooling.
They don't even share Bucky with the military do they? Grunch of Giants at West Point? Probably only the CIA reads it (required) as it's mentioned so often.
After two generations of not teaching easy simple streamlining tetravolume stuff to 4th or 8th or 12th graders (already certified useful by highest authorities), I think it's more than obvious we don't have a free press or a real public education system.
I feel free to endlessly mock the true believers and their pathetic substitute for real learning.
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It's not like I'm saying that just because MF winner publishes yadda yadda, that we must all agree it's true, i.e. "yes of course the US is bankrupt and extinct, the great Bucky hath spoken."
Not at all. No one has that kind of power. The book jacket calls it satire.
It's just a once-adulated, much-awarded, icon of positive futurism, did in fact write that, and gave his reasoning and context, and then was awarded the MF (not tossed in jail).
It's the historical facts of the matter I'm underlining, not that we have to treat Fuller's writing as edicts.
These facts are what're so amazing and crazy-interesting, especially when you factor in there's a newfangled kind of geometry, and geodesic domes and... wow. Why not in schools? Are we really that afraid of our own past?
Lets just share the facts. Then be skeptical and critical, say why he's wrong and so on.
But to just claim he's a crackpot, so we're justified in our silence, no that doesn't fly it all.
Too double standard.
If Bucky's a crackpot, after so many faculty positions, awards, patents, inventions, then what are we, who think that way about him?
