Newt Gingrich's Modest Proposal

I made a reference to author Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal” in the last blog. Some may not recall what this was about. It was written in England around 1700 at a time when there was hunger and privation in the English province of Ireland.
English upper classes had no more desire to actually assist the hungry and the poor than do most middle and upper class Americans today. They fretted and tutted about the problem—and opined concerning the low moral standards of the Irish that caused the problem, but did nothing significant to help alleviate it.
So Swift took a critical look at the actual situation. Two things stood out: Too many Irishmen; too little food. (It may not have helped that most large farms in Ireland were owned by absentee Englishmen who shipped the produce home to sell for profit),
How do you deal with too many people, too little food? Mr. Swift came up with what he called his MODEST PROPOSAL. Tongue in cheek, he suggested that the Irish cook and eat their extra children, thereby solving both the problem of starvation and excess population.
The fustudious (my word) English lacked the wit to recognize satire—but did at least have the grace to be outraged at the notion. In fact Swift took quite a bit of heat for what he wrote. Alas, even those who accepted his explanation did little to help the Irish.
I compared the conservative Republican (‘liberal”) manifesto—Contract with America—of 1994 with Swift’s Modest Proposal. Unfortunately, of course, Newt Gingrich and his fellow Republicans in 1994 were dead serious when they spoke of cutting off food to mothers of illegitimate children to prevent children from being born out of wedlock.
They utterly failed to recognize the Swiftian irony in their proposals. (And they may also have missed the Biblical passage, James 1:27. 27 Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.)
Conservatives in 1700 AND 2000 were good at yammering about the last half the verse while ignoring the first half. It does very little good to remind them of the first half at all. Newt Gingrich’s come the same in all centuries.
(Swift is also author of the “children’s book” Gulliver’s Travels, which like the modern Wizard of Oz is also a political satire. He realized that when writing biting satire, it is wiser to make it sound like a book for kids.)
Unfortunately, in 1994, the Democrats lacked anyone with the cleverness to retaliate with a good satire of their own that might have reduced the Republican Contract to its inherent silliness. So the conservatives got away with their proposal (which they lacked the smarts to understand was almost self-parodying} and took over Congress and, eventually, the White House.
(Incidentally, there were historical reasons why a lot of Irishmen—including Ted Kennedy’s father—backed the Germans against England in World War II. We had to send troops and threaten to invade to make them stop. Their own modest proposal?)
More later.