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The 'Woke' Satire Of Jonathan Swift Stings Ron DeSantis Where It Hurts

The 'Woke' Satire Of Jonathan Swift Stings Ron DeSantis Where It Hurts

Being something of a smart aleck, I’ve sometimes joked that while I may look white, actually I’m Irish. All eight of my great-grand parents were born there. Indeed, there was a time during the Great Potato Famine of 1845-52 when my ancestors were treated rather worse than Black slaves in America. Millions of Irish peasants starved even as the country exported plentiful foodstuffs guarded by British soldiers.

As valuable property, Black slaves never died of hunger.

So, the Irish fled to America in “coffin ships,” so-called because many thousands failed to survive the journey. The best way I know to understand this historical tragedy is to read Joseph O’Connor’s terrific novel Star of the Sea.

(Joseph is the older brother of Sinead O’Connor, the singer whose recent death was mourned all over Ireland. A talented family, the O’Connors of Glenageary.)

Nor were the Irish, being Catholic, particularly welcome in America. But so what? None of that has affected my own life in any practical way. Nor have I noticed that Irish-Americans behave better than anybody else when it comes to race.

(In the old country, of course, they’ve only recently quit murdering each other over what’s basically a 17th century religious quarrel.I once asked a correspondent in Belfast how they could tell each other apart, as on TV they all looked like my uncles and cousins. The shoes, she responded. The shoes!)

My first great literary hero was the immortal Irish satirist, Jonathan Swift. The first time my wife saw tears in my eyes was visiting his tomb in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. He’d died in 1745, author of perhaps the most penetrating anti-racist essay in the English language. An Anglican clergyman marooned for life in his native Ireland, Swift thought of himself as an Englishman.

But the appalling poverty of the native Irish troubled him, so he wrote A Modest Proposal, a pseudonymous essay proposing a useful reform: “I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasee, or a ragoust.”

The author expressed confidence that his proposal would be well received by absentee English “landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children.”

The 1729 pamphlet was published anonymously, because had its authorship been proven—although pretty much everybody in Ireland could guess who’d written it—Swift could have been imprisoned, or worse.

Anyway, here’s where I’m going with all this: Because I am, in fact, white, and because Irish history threatens no vested American interests, nobody has ever suggested that my studying it is in any way improper. Nor, certainly, tried to ban it. Had Swift been a Black man, I’m sure, his works would be illegal in Florida. Arkansas too.

Consider the scene in Gulliver’s Travels where the gigantic hero extinguishes a fire in the Lilliputian Queen’s chambers by pissing on it. (The author’s response to Queen Anne’s ingratitude for services done the crown.) Not to mention the scene where enormous teenaged Brobdingnagian girls perch tiny Gulliver on their nipples. Whoa, Nelly!

Moms for Liberty, which is what they’re calling the United Daughters of the Confederacy these days, would banish the novel from every library in the land.

I think my favorite moment during the absurd controversy over Florida and Arkansas’ efforts to ban Advanced Placement African-American History classes from being taught in public schools, was when Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Department of Education published a letter claiming that “The content of this course is inexplicably contrary to Florida law" [my emphasis].

Meaning they can’t explain it. Not what they intended to say, I suspect. This is what happens when you enlist semi-literate ideologues to defend us white folks from…

Well, from what?

As near as I can tell, from history itself, and from the idea that Black citizens of a state where chattel slavery was legal until 1865 and Jim Crow segregation laws replaced it right up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and where race riots and lynchings were not uncommon just might have a perspective on its history different from the white majority’s.

DeSantis’ slogan is literally “Florida is where woke goes to die.”

In Arkansas, Gov. Sarah Sanders too derides the very idea of an African-American perspective as “critical race theory,” and “indoctrination.” Black people have no legitimate point of view and it’s literally illegal to say otherwise in a public-school classroom. Here in the United States of America.

So where does that leave somebody like me, an aging white man whose education in these matters has been sadly neglected?

Thinking maybe I need to take that African-American history course.

Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of The Hunting of the President..

Elizabeth Wasn't Bad, But The World Is Losing Its Taste For British Royalty

Elizabeth Wasn't Bad, But The World Is Losing Its Taste For British Royalty

As a person whose eight great-grandparents were born in Ireland, my enthusiasm for British royalty is rather limited.

Irish Times columnist Patrick Freyne may have put it most succinctly: “Having a monarchy next door” he wrote in 2021, “is a little like having a neighbor who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window, and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories. More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbor who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.”

That said, I never took it personally. I’d pretty much overdosed on ethnic nationalism by age 12 or thereabouts, tired of being told there was a proper“Irish” opinion on every imaginable topic, and that it agreed with my maternal grandfather’s. I don’t recall how he answered when I asked why he spent so much time talking about a foreign country he’d never visited. It was a rhetorical question. Many of my classmates at school had grandparents with one foot in the Old Country — Ireland, Italy, Poland, wherever. We were American kids.

Even so, at our wedding, to give you some idea, my mother demanded to know of Diane’s family, “What nationality are you people, anyway?” (Louisiana French.) They were flabbergasted. Indeed, my wife was never forgiven for not being named Ginger O’Grady. But that was nothing to do with me.

But no, I never held all that sad history against Queen Elizabeth. So her ancestors caused mine to die of famine. Nothing she personally could have done about it. Insofar as I could tell, she played the hand she was dealt with grace and dignity. Even back when she was Princess Elizabeth, driving ambulances during the London Blitz and giving radio pep talks to British children.
She reigned a very long time.

Out of curiosity, I checked the front page of the Irish Times on the day she died. The lead story was the arrival in Dublin of country singer Garth Brooks for a series of shows. He’s hugely popular there; the Irish love ballads. The queen’s death was relegated to the bottom of the page. Coverage was respectful, but muted, in contrast to the worshipful spectacle on American TV.

No matter. What the English have given us — Irish, American, Canadian,Australian, Indian, et al.— is their language: The language of Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Austen, Tolkien and Orwell. Also of Jefferson, Twain, Joyce Carol Oates, andTa-Nehisi Coates. If you love books, you’re pretty much an Anglophile, as I certainly am.

My English friends vary from stridently anti-monarchist to mildly sarcastic about the Royal Family. “It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true,” Orwell wrote in 1941, “that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during God Save the King than of stealing from a poorbox.”

“Unquestionably,” indeed.

“Bloody royals,” snarls my friend Lawrence from his garden on the Isle of Wight. Useless parasites all, he insists. He even quarrels with my observation that Duchess Kate is terribly beautiful. Too scrawny, he thinks. He’d surely agree withTwain’s suggestion that they be replaced with a family of cats.

“They would be as useful as any other royal family, they would know as much, they would have the same virtues and the same treacheries,” Twain wrote, “they would be laughable, vain, and absurd and never know it, they would be wholly inexpensive, finally, they would have as sound a divine right as any other royal house.”

Indeed, millions around the world find themselves riveted by the ongoing soap opera that is the Royal Family. All those castles, all the tiaras and crowns, and the Queen’s kin are every bit as crazy as your own: complete with racist
grandad, adulterous uncle, his doomed, betrayed wife, a second funny uncle with a lech for underaged girls, not to mention grandson’s preening, Drama Queen wife…

The British royals behave every bit as badly as the inhabitants of any Arkansas trailer park or New Jersey tenement. Millions derive great comfort from that.

Upon Queen Elizabeth taking the throne in 1952, Churchill described the monarchy as“the magic link, which unites our loosely bound but strongly interwoven commonwealth of nations.” If anything, she presided over its steady, inevitable demise. Born to the globe-spanning British Empire, she leaves her son and heir King Charles III pretty much all that’s left of the United Kingdom: England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

Even that may not last, leaving Charles ruler of a small island nation in the North Atlantic. Even so, Elizabeth left it better than she found it. Had I been born to her privileges and burdens, I’d also have chosen to spend my time on a country estate surrounded by dogs and horses, to all appearances the best of the lot.

The Irish Were Once Despised Refugees On These Shores, Too

The Irish Were Once Despised Refugees On These Shores, Too

Long ago and far away, I sometimes joked that I only look white: actually, I’m Irish. These days, people have no idea what you’re talking about. Courtesy of Ancestry.com, I’ve since learned that all the family stories are true: all eight of my great-grandparents were born in Ireland. Mayo and Cork, for the most part, counties where rebellion against centuries of English oppression ran strong.

As a lad, I was taught that being Irish took precedence over being American. There was a mandatory “Irish” view on damn near everything—although family members argued fiercely about what it was.

Often it was the women against the men. My father had friends of every ethnicity that he’d made in the Army and playing ball. “You’re no better than anybody else,” he’d often say. “And nobody’s better than you.”

My mother mistrusted anybody who wasn’t blood kin.

I thought that was nuts by third grade.

Anyway, what with Irish-surnamed lunkheads helping Trump spread his bigotry far and wide, it seems appropriate to remind people that from the 17th century onward, every racial slur that was ever used to describe black slaves was first applied to the native Irish.

Micks were routinely described as donkey strong, but stupid. They were good at music, dancing and prizefighting, but congenitally lazy and unreliable. The Irish were sexually promiscuous, dirty, foul-smelling drunks.

Irish satirist Jonathan Swift’s 1729 pamphlet “A Modest Proposal” remains a searing indictment of the colonialist mentality—as shocking now as then. Might impoverished asylum-seekers whose children are caged along the U.S.-Mexican border, for example, not turn a nice profit by offering them as a delicacy for rich men’s tables? “I rather recommend buying the children alive,” Swift wrote with savage irony “and dressing them hot from the knife, as we do roasting pigs.”

During the Irish Potato Famine from 1845 to 1850, more than a million of the native Irish died of starvation even as the island exported food to England. A million more emigrated, many on the aptly named “coffin ships” vividly described in Joseph O’Connor’s brilliant novel “Star of the Sea.” (The author is singer Sinead O’Connor’s older brother.) Not long ago, Canadian authorities recovered the bones of half-starved Irish children who died in an 1847 shipwreck on the Gaspe Peninsula.

And how did Americans react to the Irish diaspora? Pretty much the same way Trump supporters are reacting to Spanish-speaking asylum seekers on our southern border. The anti-immigrant party of the 1850s called itself the “Know-Nothings.” In 1855, Abraham Lincoln wrote a friend about them:

“I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can anyone who abhors the oppression of Negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we begin by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except Negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except Negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”

He could have written it last week.

Alas, we can’t urge Trump to go back where his family came from, because his big flapping mouth might land him in prison. Having had their fill of it under Adolph Hitler, the Germans have criminalized what they call “Volksverhetzung,” or “incitement of the people.”

In Germany, it’s illegal to urge “hatred against a national, racial, religious group or a group defined by their ethnic origins, against segments of the population or individuals because of their belonging to one of the aforementioned groups…or calls for violent or arbitrary measures against them.”

The penalty is three months to five years.

I much prefer First Amendment free speech protections, but you can’t say the Germans don’t know where these things can lead. The law has mainly been used to prosecute Holocaust deniers. Several European countries (Ireland included) have similar laws, although they are rarely invoked.

So anyway, that’s where I’m coming from as a direct descendant of refugees. What we have here is a perfect storm of Trumpism, equal parts ignorance and bigotry. Only Trump, (born in Queens) could tell Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, (born in The Bronx) to go back where she came from.

Sure, Ocasio-Cortez asked for trouble with her childish “women of color” gibe at Nancy Pelosi, of all people.

But if he has no idea what he’s talking about, Trump absolutely knows what he’s doing. No more pussy-footing. The 2020 presidential campaign is going to be the ugliest race-based, free-for-all any of us has ever seen.

And if it works, you can bend over and kiss America goodbye.