Ghosthunters grabbers and grifters: What would Jonathan Swift say of our times?
Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift  we need you more than ever.
This week marks the 350th birthday of the brilliant Irish writer  born Nov. 30  1667. That we know of  Swift  at all is one of the sweetest fortunes of literary history.  His  father died of syphilis before Jonathan was born. A wet nurse whisked him to England for three years. He depended on the generosity of an uncle. He was almost killed by a mail bomb. But despite those precarious turns   Swift  became a poet  a priest  a political operator and  of course  the greatest satirist in the English language.
The longevity of  Swift ’s work is a testament to its potency because no genre fades as quickly: Satires are the cut flowers of literature. Time wilts their wit  fading their bright colors like old political cartoons that poke fun at fat cats we no longer recognize. (Voltaire adored Samuel Butler’s 1663 mock heroic poem “Hudibras ” but try reading it now without footnotes.)
[Jonathan Swift: Not (entirely) the misanthrope you thought you knew]
W.B. Yeats knew what he was talking about when he said of  Swift   “Imitate him if you dare.”
Consider the remarkable persistence of “A Modest Proposal ” published anonymously in 1729.  Swift ’s ironic phrase is such a hardy part of our language that it’s easy to forget how unlikely it is that we’d still be referring to a 3 000-word political pamphlet almost 300 years later. Originally titled “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country  and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public ” the essay burns with rage at a privileged class willing to ignore and rationalize human suffering. Although the plight of starving Irishmen may be unimaginable to us today  the centuries have done nothing to mute  Swift ’s savage indignation.  He  still sounds as timely as last night’s “Daily Show.”
If you haven’t read “A Modest Proposal” since high school  look it up again and be astounded. Speaking in the voice of a perfectly reasonable bureaucrat   Swift  begins by describing the piteous state of beggars and their children “all in rags  and importuning every passenger for an alms.” In response to this “deplorable state ”  he  announces a solution  “having no other motive than the publick good of my country  by advancing our trade  providing for infants  relieving the poor  and giving some pleasure to the rich”:
Much of Swift’s essay is taken up with various statistics and logistical explanations  a hellacious spreadsheet of infant flesh to lay out the case for utilizing 100 000 children nursed to approximately 28 pounds each. In those well-modulated sentences   Swift  washes individuals and their pain away. As John Stubbs writes in his recent biography   Swift  possessed an “unequalled capacity to endow a ludicrous line of argument with an air of steadfast reason.” The bloody solution of “A Modest Proposal” is easy to laugh off as a bit of grotesque hyperbole  but the real horror of the essay remains its bland  bureaucratic tone — the same sterile language of accounting that justified American slavery  the Holocaust or any scheme that slices human lives into the columns of a ledger.
If politicians haven’t changed their menu much in 300 years  the rest of us still face the same risk of indigestion. Remember that “Gulliver’s Travels” ends with the intrepid narrator isolated and disgusted. Orwell assumed that Gulliver reflected his creator’s morose character and claimed that  Swift  suffered from a “general hatred of humanity” stoked by a perverse obsession with mankind’s sins and weaknesses. Stubbs argues that the image of  Swift  as a “misanthropic monster” is not entirely fair  but Gulliver’s fate is instructive  nonetheless.
Now that we’re all strident critics trading the day’s outrages across Twitter and the dining room table  how are we to avoid being sickened by our own bitter indignation? The bile in a satirist’s mind must be balanced with hope  or the whole enterprise is doomed. Surely   Swift  wouldn’t have bothered to poke fun at cruelty  incompetence and hypocrisy unless  he  believed  on some level  that such scalding exposure could awaken a better nature.
On  his  350th birthday  it’s good to remember that despair is the satirist’s temptation and the citizen’s poison.
[TGT]we need you more than ever.
This week marks the 350th birthday of the brilliant Irish writer  born Nov. 30  1667. That we know of  [TGT] is one of the sweetest fortunes of literary history.  [TGT]  father died of syphilis before Jonathan was born. A wet nurse whisked him to England for three years. He depended on the generosity of an uncle. He was almost killed by a mail bomb. But despite those precarious turns   [TGT]  became a poet  a priest  a political operator and  of course  the greatest satirist in the English language.
The longevity of  [TGT] is a testament to [TGT] potency because no genre fades as quickly: Satires are the cut flowers of literature. Time wilts their wit  fading their bright colors like old political cartoons that poke fun at fat cats we no longer recognize. (Voltaire adored Samuel Butler’s 1663 mock heroic poem “Hudibras ” but try reading it now without footnotes.)
[Jonathan Swift: Not (entirely) the misanthrope you thought you knew]
W.B. Yeats knew what he was talking about when he said of  [TGT]“Imitate him if you dare.”
Consider the remarkable persistence of “A Modest Proposal ” published anonymously in 1729.  [TGT] ’s ironic phrase is such a hardy part of our language that it’s easy to forget how unlikely it is that we’d still be referring to a 3 000-word political pamphlet almost 300 years later. Originally titled “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country  and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public ” the essay burns with rage at a privileged class willing to ignore and rationalize human suffering. Although the plight of starving Irishmen may be unimaginable to us today  the centuries have done nothing to mute  Swift ’s savage indignation.  He  still sounds as timely as last night’s “Daily Show.”
If you haven’t read “A Modest Proposal” since high school  look it up again and be astounded. Speaking in the voice of a perfectly reasonable bureaucrat   Swift  begins by describing the piteous state of beggars and their children “all in rags  and importuning every passenger for an alms.” In response to this “deplorable state ”  he  announces a solution  “having no other motive than the publick good of my country  by advancing our trade  providing for infants  relieving the poor  and giving some pleasure to the rich”:
Much of Swift’s essay is taken up with various statistics and logistical explanations  a hellacious spreadsheet of infant flesh to lay out the case for utilizing 100 000 children nursed to approximately 28 pounds each. In those well-modulated sentences   Swift  washes individuals and their pain away. As John Stubbs writes in his recent biography   Swift  possessed an “unequalled capacity to endow a ludicrous line of argument with an air of steadfast reason.” The bloody solution of “A Modest Proposal” is easy to laugh off as a bit of grotesque hyperbole  but the real horror of the essay remains its bland  bureaucratic tone — the same sterile language of accounting that justified American slavery  the Holocaust or any scheme that slices human lives into the columns of a ledger.
If politicians haven’t changed their menu much in 300 years  the rest of us still face the same risk of indigestion. Remember that “Gulliver’s Travels” ends with the intrepid narrator isolated and disgusted. Orwell assumed that Gulliver reflected his creator’s morose character and claimed that  Swift  suffered from a “general hatred of humanity” stoked by a perverse obsession with mankind’s sins and weaknesses. Stubbs argues that the image of  Swift  as a “misanthropic monster” is not entirely fair  but Gulliver’s fate is instructive  nonetheless.
Now that we’re all strident critics trading the day’s outrages across Twitter and the dining room table  how are we to avoid being sickened by our own bitter indignation? The bile in a satirist’s mind must be balanced with hope  or the whole enterprise is doomed. Surely   Swift  wouldn’t have bothered to poke fun at cruelty  incompetence and hypocrisy unless  he  believed  on some level  that such scalding exposure could awaken a better nature.
On  his  350th birthday  it’s good to remember that despair is the satirist’s temptation and the citizen’s poison.