Rampant speculation! Easy Money to make Money Easy! A totally Korrupt Kongress!
Greed run amuck! Wide-spread Poverty! Huckster Preachers! Politicans and other crooks professing the Bible!
Sound familiar? It's a plot summary for Mark Twain's 1866 book, THE GILDED AGE, a tale of today...!
Amazingly, if you substitute The Internet for Land Speculation, (Not that we don't have our own current Land Speculators!!)...
And if you switch computers and voice over IP for "railroads and mines."
Mark Twain's story could STILL be a story of our time!
(Of course the "manners" have changed...back in Mark Twain's time manners were still used as a superficial coverup for the baser hidden motives.) Unlike today...
We surely live in THE GILDED AGE...REDUX!
What can be learned by all this...?
Well every Gilded Age seems to be followed by its "Progressive Era."
The Gilded Age of 1870-1900 ended with the TR and Wilsonian Progressives..., 1901-1920.
There was the rise of yellow journalism...and the muckrackers and others who attacked the wealthy elites, who, by then, were simply ruining the nation to satisfy their own selfishness and greed.
Sound familiar...?
ARE BLOGGERS THE NEW MUCKRAKERS FOR THE COMING NEW PROGRESSIVE ERA THAT WILL SURELY START WITH THE 2008 ELECTIONS...?
It's coming.... It always does.
Because history sort of repeats itself...even if sometimes it only rhymes, as Mark Twain once noted.
