I saw something recently and since then I've seen it occasionally again, and began to ruminate on it.

At the hospital where my son was born there was one of those typical big plaques filled with the names of known and not-know names of families who had donated money. Amidst them all as I did a quick perfunctory perusal I noticed the entry "Anonymous." It cheered me greatly. I thought to myself, that's how it should be. Just give because you believe in something, without the kind of self-aggrandizement incentive.

It always galls me when some wealthy patron has to pin his/her fucking family name all over everything. In NYC we have to be accosted by the names of insufferable greedheaded goons like Langone, the proprietor of Home Depot, and the asshole Koch Bros, who flaunt Daddy's money like spoiled brats to make our lives more miserable commensurate with their over-inflated but still-not-enough egos, bank accounts and holdings.

Donating "anonymously" is socialism, in a sense. Only narcissistic, insecure, self-important assholes with astronomical amounts of money stashed resort to the odious and unbecoming practice of plastering their name in vainglorious inanity all over everything. Their twisted capitalist brain's assuring themselves it's good for their "branding."

Why do we fall over ourselves to applaud and revere the overlord oligarchs who drop millions and millions into the donation box, when in reality it amounts in relative numbers to them dropping the equivalent of what to us would be a few coins falling out of of our right pockets? Mark Twain wrote a brilliant and scathing essay on this matter called, "Banquet For A Senator."

Here's a few lines from it:

However, I am willing to waive moral rank and associate with the moderately criminal among the Senators – even including Platt and Chauncey Depew – I have to draw the line at Clark of Montana. He is said to have bought legislatures and judges as other men buy food and raiment. By his example he has so excused and so sweetened corruption that in Montana it no longer has an offensive smell. His history is known to everybody; he is as rotten a human being as can be found anywhere under the flag; he is a shame to the American nation, and no one has helped to send him to the Senate who did not know that his proper place was the penitentiary, with a chain and ball on his legs. To my mind he is the most disgusting creature that the Republic has produced since Tweed’s time.

I went to the dinner, which was served in a small private room at the club with the usual piano and fiddlers present to make conversation difficult and comfort impossible. I found that the Montana citizen was not merely a guest but that the dinner was given in his honor. While the feeding was going on two of my elbow neighbors supplied me with information concerning the reasons for this tribute of respect to Mr. Clark. Mr. Clark had lately lend to the Union League Club, which is the most powerful political club in America and perhaps its richest, a million dollars’ worth of European pictures for exhibition. It was quite plain that my informant regarded this as an act of almost superhuman generosity. One of my informants said, under his breath and with awe and admiration, that if you should put together all of Mr. Clark’s several generosities to the club, including this gaudy one, the cost to Mr. Clark first and last would doubtless amount to a hundred thousand dollars. I saw that I was expected to exclaim, applaud, and adore, but I was not tempted to do it, because I had been informed five minutes earlier that Clark’s income, as stated under the worshiping informant’s breath, was thirty million dollars a year.

Human beings have no sense of proportion. A benefaction of a hundred thousand dollars subtracted from an income of thirty million dollars is not a matter to go into hysterics of admiration and adulation about. If I should contribute ten thousand dollars to a cause, it would be one-ninth of my past year’s income, and I could feel it; as matter for admiration and wonder and astonishment and gratitude, it would far and away outrank a contribution of twenty-five million dollars from the Montana jailbird, who would still have a hundred thousand dollars a week left over from his year’s income to subsist on.

It reminded me of the only instance of benevolence exploded upon the world by the late Jay Gould that I have ever heard of. When that first and most infamous corrupter of American commercial morals was wallowing in uncountable stolen millions, he contributed five thousand dollars for the relief of the stricken population of Memphis, Tennessee, at a time when an epidemic of yellow fever was raging in that city. Mr. Gould’s contribution cost him no sacrifice; it was only the income of the hour which he daily spent in prayer–for he was a most godly man–yet the storm of worshiping gratitude which welcomed it all over the United States in the newspaper, the pulpit, and in the private circle might have persuaded a stranger that for a millionaire American to give five thousand dollars to the dead and dying poor–when he could have bought a circuit judge with it–was the noblest thing in American history, and the holiest.