A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift

At roughly 20 pages, this may be the shortest item on "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die" – we'll see. If we measure by the amount of rage, bitterness, and sarcasm per word, it may also be one of the most highly concentrated.

The phrase "modest proposal" has entered the common lexicon over the last 300 or so years to mean a suggestion for solving a problem that's so outrageous it's beyond comprehension. Swift's original "modest proposal" here is intended to solve the problem of poverty and overpopulation among Ireland's working class. It consists of the suggestion that when the Irish poor have babies, they have the opportunity to sell those babies at about one year of age to the wealthy for meat. Yikes.

The narrator sensibly treats this suggestion as a serious plan for most of his essay, making it all the funnier and at the same time all the more horrifying. Once in a while he slips in a literal joke, as in the statement that we might as well give the wealthy the opportunity to literally eat the poor, since they've been doing so metaphorically for years.

Another good, but bitter, joke comes at the essay's close. The narrator assures us that his motives for publicizing this idea are perfectly pure – he has no thought of profiting himself by selling any babies of his, since his children are long past their sell-by date and his wife is past the age of bearing children.

But the most bitter segment here comes when the narrator insists that he doesn't want to hear about any other ideas for relieving the Irish poor, and lists a few such notions, like taxing the rich some minuscule amount, asking politicians to dedicate themselves to the people's benefit rather than their own advancement, and things of that nature. These ideas, he insists, have been suggested already, and there's no point in bringing them up again until it can be shown that they'll be put into action. I remember reading somewhere that Swift himself had written essays suggesting those ideas before and gotten nowhere. "A Modest Proposal" seems to be his way of saying "You don't like a logical, rational idea? Fine. Here's an illogical, irrational one. Now what are you going to do?"

I don't know for sure what the reaction of Swift's contemporaries was to "A Modest Proposal", although I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that some pearl-clutching dunce took it seriously and gasped with outrage. Like a lot of satirists, Swift got that kind of reaction throughout his writing life from people who didn't understand how satire works. It seems that as time went on, he just got more and more outraged at injustice and stupidity. He eventually succumbed to mental illness, and no wonder. At least we can appreciate him now.

Benshlomo says, There's nothing like giving stupid people a hard time to get their attention.