A Modest Proposal

There was another satire he wrote, Jonathan Swift.

I think it was a pamphlet that he wrote called A Modest Proposal around the time of some strife with the colonization of Ireland.

I think he suggested that like The Modest Proposal, it's a satire.

He's... proposing quite seriously that Irish people should eat their babies.

yeah, yeah.

I gave Sorry to Bother You a rewatch and it made me realize that the artist you remind me of the most is Jonathan Swift, the Irish satirist who wrote Gulliver's Travels and The Modest Proposal.

And I was thinking like, how do you relate to the genre of satire? Because satire has also always been a very bourgeois thing.

It's a way of saying, here are the problems.

While Swift himself was a priest in the Church of Ireland and thus part of the Anglican tradition, he knew where to poke his own church, as well as the Catholic and other Reformation traditions.

Swift's most famous satire, Outside of Gulliver, might be a modest proposal, an attack on how the poor were seen by the wealthy in Ireland.

If you know anything beyond Gulliver's Travels and a modest proposal, it might be that Jonathan Swift was the first to approve his cathedral singer's participation in a small production to aid Irish orphans, something performed by a club of fiddlers on Fishamble Street.

It was Handel's Messiah.

Today we remember the man who once made a proposal that the rich eat the children of the poor to helping launch a beloved Christmas masterpiece.

The example you gave, though, of how do we eliminate poverty? My first thought was, well, you could kill all the poor people.

Like, that's an AI solution, right? Like, there's no more poverty, right? But the other one about eliminating hunger, it called to mind an essay called A Modest Proposal.

Are you familiar with that? It's kind of a famous work in literature.

It's written by an essayist named Jonathan Swift.

There was a potato famine going on and also in the 19th century.

So there was a massive problem of poverty and famine in Ireland.

And he wrote this essay called A Modest Proposal.

And it was his the solution that he offered was to just simply eat the poor people and like there would be no more famine.

He continued to give business to Sarah, his widow, for the next five or six years.

And his most famous Irish type of publication, The Modest Proposal, was produced by Sarah.

And with all due respect to both Sarah and John Harding, they weren't very good printers.

It's a very poor production.

I have a quick question.

If anyone here is familiar with Jonathan Swift, famous for Gulliver's Travels and also for his satirical writing, namely A Modest Proposal.

Depends on your definition of familiar.

Rings a bell.

And I was I was thinking of something.

I would like your opinion on it.

A modest proposal regarding firearm ownership in the United States.

For instance, here's the take.

...

A Modest Proposal.

[laughs]

That's what it was called.

Jonathan Swift.

A Modest Proposal.

Jonathan Swift, thank you.

[laughs]

I have no children, by which I can propose to get a single penny, the youngest being nine years old, and my wife past childbearing.

End of A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift

You know what? It sucks to be bored.

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Yes, it was Jonathan Swift.

He wrote a great story called A Modest Proposal.

It was about the Irish Troubles all those years ago.

In it, he suggested that the way to solve the trouble was you had to eat the babies of the Irish because that would stop them growing up into revolutionaries.