The American dream, by Andreessen and Disney

Marc Andreessen has just published a call to action, It's Time to Build, which has been getting a lot of action, pro, con, and sideways. Here's how it opens:

Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it.

Many of us would like to pin the cause on one political party or another, on one government or another. But the harsh reality is that it all failed — no Western country, or state, or city was prepared — and despite hard work and often extraordinary sacrifice by many people within these institutions. So the problem runs deeper than your favorite political opponent or your home nation.

Part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination. But the other part of the problem is what we didn’t *do* in advance, and what we’re failing to do now. And that is a failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability to *build*.

We see this today with the things we urgently need but don’t have. We don’t have enough coronavirus tests, or test materials — including, amazingly, cotton swabs and common reagents. We don’t have enough ventilators, negative pressure rooms, and ICU beds. And we don’t have enough surgical masks, eye shields, and medical gowns — as I write this, New York City has put out a desperate call for rain ponchos to be used as medical gowns. Rain ponchos! In 2020! In America!

It made my heart sing. Yes, we've lost the will to build.

And then I read the whole thing and began to think about it. I'm not sure what I think. It's complex, tricky, moves in multiple directions. Let's skip over most of it and jump to the fifth paragraph from the  end:

In fact, I think building is how we reboot the American dream. The things we build in huge quantities, like computers and TVs, drop rapidly in price. The things we don’t, like housing, schools, and hospitals, skyrocket in price. What’s the American dream? The opportunity to have a home of your own, and a family you can provide for. We need to break the rapidly escalating price curves for housing, education, and healthcare, to make sure that every American can realize the dream, and the only way to do that is to build.

Now I've got a place to start, the American Dream.

But I want to go back half a century to a version of that dream shaped and articulated by Walt Disney, who made a long and fruitful career out of mining, refining, and modeling his version of the American Dream. He started making cartoons in the 1920s, moved to live-action films after World War Two, including nature documentaries, put it all on television in the 1950s, and built Disneyland in the middle of the decade.

His last project was something he called E.P.C.O.T. – Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. It was never built. Instead, we have Disney World, and the associated theme park called Epcot. Uncle Walt's original concept was not a theme park. Here's a promotional video where he lays it out:

The first five minutes is an account of Disneyland, which you may skip over it you wish. Uncle Walt starts narrating at about 5:13. The good stuff starts at 9:30, when Disney starts laying out the E.P.C.O.T. concept. Here's how he ends his part of the story:

But where do we begin? How do we start answering this great challenge? Well, we’re convinced we must start with the public need. And the need is not just for curing the old ills of old cities. We think the need is for starting from scratch on virgin land and building a special kind of new community. So that's what E.P.C.O.T is: an Experimental Prototype Community that will always be in the state of becoming. It will never cease to be a living blueprint of the future where people actually live a life they can’t find anyplace else in the world.

Everything in E.P.C.O.T will be dedicated to the happiness of the people who live, work, and play here, and those who come here from around the world to visit our living showcase.

We don't presume to know all the answers. In fact, we’re counting on the cooperation of American industry to provide their very best thinking during the planning and the creation of our Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. And most important of all, when E.P.C.O.T has become a reality and we find the need for technologies that don’t even exist today, it’s our hope that E.P.C.O.T will stimulate American industry to develop new solutions that will meet the needs of people expressed right here in this experimental community.

Well, that's our basic philosophy for E.P.C.O.T. By now, I'm sure you're wondering how people will live and work and move around in our community of tomorrow, so in the next few minutes we will go into detail about some of our preliminary sketches and layouts. Remember though, as I said earlier, this is just the beginning! With that thought in mind, let’s have a look.

At that point (c. 12:20) we move to a presentation of those preliminary sketches and layouts.

I have no idea what Andreesen thinks, or would think, about this (I don't know whether or not he has seen it). And I'm certainly not urging it on him or on anyone else as a model to be emulated and realized. I offer it simply as an example of what a serious, gifted, accomplished, and influential man, a man who believed passionately in the arts, technology, and business, had to say about the American Dream.

Where'd it come from? Disney was born into a middle-class, though not particularly prosperous, family in Chicago in 1901. For what it's worth, his father, Elias, was a socialist. The family moved to Missouri when he was four and then back to Chicago in 1917. He went into the army, then back to Chicago, and moved to Hollywood in 1923. By that time he was in the cartoon business, which would be the focus of his activity through the end of World War Two, when his interests shifted, though of course he never abandoned cartoons.

By the time he began thinking about his experimental city in central Florida (while having his agents surreptitiously buy up land) he'd been interacting with, manipulating and being formed by, the American Dream as some version of it took form in his cartoons, live-action films, theme park, and television program. Note also that Disney had tremendous faith in technology. He (that is, his company) developed it for films and for Disneyland and he promoted it in his television programming. That promotional video – destined, not for the public, but to convince Florida lawmakers and officials to give him extensive control over his parcel of land – is the fruit of that four decades of work and creativity. (Disney died two months after he'd taped his narration for that film.)

Consider the historical context of that conception, the fabulous fifties and into the sixties. But also, the Cold War, the civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam, and protests against it, and the rise of the counter culture. How did E.P.C.O.T. speak to that? 

Where is the American Dream now, in a badly fractured America?