or Powell's or me• • •
"Mike and Jon, Jon and Mike—I've known them both for years, and, clearly, one of them is very funny. As for the other: truly one of the great hangers-on of our time."—Steve Bodow, head writer, The Daily Show
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"Who can really judge what's funny? If humor is a subjective medium, then can there be something that is really and truly hilarious? Me. This book."—Daniel Handler, author, Adverbs, and personal representative of Lemony Snicket
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"The good news: I thought Our Kampf was consistently hilarious. The bad news: I’m the guy who wrote Monkeybone."—Sam Hamm, screenwriter, Batman, Batman Returns, and Homecoming
April 23, 2008
New Tomdispatch
The Great Silence
Our Gilded Age and Theirs
By Steve FraserGoogle "second Gilded Age" and you will get ferried to 7,000 possible sites where you can learn more about what you already instinctively know. That we are living through a gilded age has become a journalistic commonplace. The unmistakable drift of all the talk about it is a Yogi Berra-ism: it's a matter of déjà vu all over again. But is it? Is turn-of-the-century America a replica of the world Mark Twain first christened "gilded" in his debut bestseller back in the 1870s?
Certainly, Twain would feel right at home today. Crony capitalism, the main object of his satirical wit in The Gilded Age, is thriving. Incestuous plots as outsized as the one in which the Union Pacific Railroad's chief investors conspired with a wagon-load of government officials, including Ulysses S. Grant's vice president, to loot the federal treasury once again lubricate the machinery of public policy-making. A cronyism that would have been familiar to Twain has made the wheels go round in these terminal years of the Bush administration. Even the invasion and decimation of Iraq was conceived and carried out as an exercise in grand-strategic cronyism; call it cronyism with a vengeance. All of this has been going on since Ronald Reagan brought back morning to America.
—Jonathan Schwarz
Posted at April 23, 2008 09:20 AMThere is a typo in that passage–
…Ronald Reagan brought back morning to America.
"Morning" is missing a "u."
Posted by: Ashley at April 23, 2008 12:56 PMAshley: The painful drip, drip, drip of trickle down.
Posted by: Mike Meyer at April 23, 2008 04:29 PMThat's one effing awesome column.
Posted by: bobbyp at April 23, 2008 04:30 PMWhat a fantastic article! After Bush won his re-election, I started saying that we were entering another bad period, akin to 1890-1920, which was a terrible time in America (Jim Crow, depression, more and more legalized bigotry, monopoly, no social services at all to combat the evils of industrialization, embattled unions). Now someone has really researched it and come up with very compelling similarities between this time and that.
One of the most depressing similarities is the inability or unwillingness of government, including the judiciary, to act to restore the principles of our democracy to our nation.
I hope the end result is another housecleaning akin to the one that the Progressives eventually brought about.
Posted by: Lori Stokes at April 24, 2008 09:34 AM
