Twain, Gould, and Mammonism; Strickland

Posted on December 2, 2010 in Accountability Class Reading

I’m deep in Mark Twain’s Autobiography, a curious document which consists of his dictated remembrances, newspaper clippings, and a biography written by his second child, Susy. It does not follow any sort of neat line, but jumps about like a carnival ride landing here in his lecture circuit days, there in his boyhood, and here in his opinions of the current day. One passage that I have just read speaks to our time:

Jay Gould had just then reversed the commercial morals of the United States. He put a blight upon them from which they have never recovered, and from which they will not recover for as much as a century to come. Jay Gould was the mightiest disaster which has ever befallen this country. The people had desired money before his day, but he taught them to fall down and worship it. They had respected men of means before his day, but along with this respect was joined the respect due to the character and industry which had accumulated it. But Jay Gould taught the entire nation to make a god of money and the man, no matter how the money might have been acquired. In my youth there was nothing resembling a worship of money or of its possessor, in our region. And in our region no well-to-do man was ever charged with having acquired his money by shady methods.

The gospel left behind by Jay Gould is doing giant work in our days. Its message is “Get money. Get it quickly. Get it in abundance. Get it in prodigious abundance. Get ir dishonestly if you can, honestly if you must.”

How true! A new American feudalism arises before our eyes and it has bought the traditional check against its progress, the media. Ted Strickland, who was recently narrowly defeated as Ohio’s governor, thinks part of the problem is that the Democrats have failed to speak about these conditions in language which voters understand.

Instead of embracing populism, they have retreated into intellectual elitism.

Strickland says:

“I think it has to do with a sort of intellectual elitism that considers that kind of talk is somehow lacking in sophistication. I’m not sure where it comes from. But I think it’s there. There’s an unwillingness to draw a line in the sand.”

This intellectual elitist concurs with Strickland’s assessment. As the governor asks “How many times do you have to be, you know, slapped in the face?”

It’s class warfare and my class needs better generals.