Are We Living In 2d Gilded Age? Let's Ask Mark Twain
"Google '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 déjá 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 outsize 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 policymaking.
"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 were 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.
"Reagan's America was gilded by design. In 1981, when the new rich and the new right paraded in their sumptuous threads in Washington to celebrate at the new president's inaugural ball, it was called a 'bacchanalia of the haves.' Diana Vreeland, style guru (as well as Nancy Reagan confidante), was stylishly blunt: 'Everything is power and money and how to use them both ... We mustn't be afraid of snobbism and luxury.'"
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