A former presidential candidate thinks the pyramids were made for grain, the President makes headlines with porn stars and mayors across the country are somersaulting backwards to get Jeff Bezos to come to their town.
"Veep" is looking more like a newsreel than an escapist sitcom. Real politics is oftentimes the farce now, a spectator’s sport worthy of a trip to the concession stand (or minifridge). Stale rhetoric matches more stale rhetoric, absurdities abound and every election is painted as a Manichean clash between Satan and Jesus. The whole of American politics seems to be an exercise in morally-gilded demagoguery where how loud you’re yelling counts more than what you are saying.
Welcome to The Gilded Now.
One hundred and forty years ago, author Mark Twain lamented the massive inequality of his day, veiled by an ostensible pursuit of good and wrapped in the gold leaf of progress. His Gilded Age has been remembered for vote-buying, hefty voter turnout and political veins bursting with corporate cash. American "democracy" was a farcical play wherein politicians pretended to be righteously beholden to public will but self-dealt behind the elaborate, gold-hued charade.
Others have compared today’s problems to those of Twain’s time, primarily focused on the recent resurgence of appalling societal inequality. But the comparisons shouldn’t stop there.
In the modern adaptation of this drama, railroad tycoons are replaced by the CEOs of Amazon, Facebook and Google. And major American cities are happily bending their law into giving tax credits and deductions in order to secure corporate headquarters. In Boston’s recent and shiny “Yes"-laden proposal to Amazon, city officials even offered a program to give zero-interest loans to Amazon employees to buy houses.
Each individual cog in this damaging system begrudgingly goes along because of past outcomes and future threats. In the increasingly blurred domains of business and politics, we’ve been stuck in an endless escalation of rhetoric and action made acceptable by the ever cognitively present, evil other.
Mass communication and constant social media sharing has helped reshape the smallest aspects of everyday life into a perpetual political project. Everything is staged as a Good vs. Evil smackdown, run by the DNC and GOP, paid for by super PACs and fueled by fear. The narrative is building in its ludicrousness — all the better for the puppet masters who win regardlessly, all the worse for the health of our shared experiment in democracy.
The first Gilded Age was a time of technological, social and cultural transition which only came to its close with the crisis of WWI and the devastation of the Great Depression. Twain is oftentimes (probably mis-) attributed with saying that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it definitely rhymes.
