Mark Twain glosses P's Jay Gould bust in Cof L49 (from the 100 year-awaited autobigraphy)

[alice wellintown]

In today's sneering press and in today's sug, smug and sneering
academy, Twain would be sneered at for his nostalgic revisionism and
his Christan ethnocentrism, not to mention his mortal sin against the
demagogues who burn flags of American Exceptionalism any time the
words _moral_ and _nation_ are used in the same paragraph. That bust
of Cicero that Bartleby's boss complains to, saying,  Byron would not
put up with a man who prefers not to enrich John Jacob Astor, is
probably alluded to in that CL49.

On Sat, Nov 20, 2010 at 2:46 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> ON THE AMERICAN BUSINESS CLASS
> “The multimillionaire disciples of Jay Gould — that man who in his brief life
> rotted the commercial morals of this nation and left them stinking when he died
> — have quite completely transformed our people from a nation with pretty high
> and respectable ideals to just the opposite of that; that our people have no
> ideals now that are worthy of consideration; that our Christianity which we have
> always been so proud of — not to say vain of — is now nothing but a shell, a
> sham, a hypocrisy; that we have lost our ancient sympathy with oppressed peoples
> struggling for life and liberty; that when we are not coldly indifferent to such
> things we sneer at them, and that the sneer is about the only expression the
> newspapers and the nation deal in with regard to such things.”
>
> "The multimillionaire disciples of Jay Gould, etc."...----including Pierce
> Inverarity.
>
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