Here ya go, Frank ;-)
Posted on 11/07/2026 12:11:36 PM PST by Borges
First published in 1726, Jonathan Swift's adventure novel has been chopped, changed and adapted ever since. Is it a "misanthropic satire" or a "fantastical nursery tale"?
You may be familiar with the story of Lemuel Gulliver. He wakes up after a shipwreck only to be pinned down by ropes and surrounded by tiny Lilliputians, who clamber up to the incapacitated adventurer.
It's a scene that's been replicated and satirised ever since Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels was published in 1726, 300 years ago.
Yet fewer may know of Gulliver's darker exploits, where the voyaging anti-hero encounters scientists inserting bellows into dogs, or the society of enlightened-yet-murderous talking horses, the Houyhnhnms, who calmly debate eradicating the Yahoos, their brutish human-like cohabitants.
In the three centuries since Swift set out to "vex the world, rather than divert it", as he wrote, two Gullivers have competed for the public imagination: one, the excoriating, misanthropic satire that sends up the Crown, the Church and English politics, and the other, a fantastical nursery tale of an adventurer navigating worlds big and small.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
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To be honest, I have thought of Donald Trump tied down with ropes from federal judges opposing his every move. Now we’ll have to add an activist Congress against him replacing the weakling do-nothing Congress that should have put into law the things Trump had to resort to Executive Orders to get done.
Here ya go, Frank ;-)
Swift was Dublin-born and much of Gulliver’s Travels was a send-up of the British. If you’ve only seen the TV versions, you’ve not seen the best parts. Like the island of Luggnagg, where no one ever dies (and which ought to make you reconsider whether immortality is a blessing or a curse).
Swift also wrote a satirical essay titled “A Modest Proposal,” which allegedly was well-intentioned advice from an Englishman to the parents of Ireland on how to determine the optimal age for slaughtering their children for food.
Thanks. Not sure how much ahead of the excellent cartoonist I was, probably along with other FReepers.
Sadly, most of those ogres are now in stronger positions of power against Trump and us than before. They are gloating and laughing at us and ready to destroy the lives of the people and their innocent families for the “crime” of supporting Trump and being patriotic to the USA.
May God help us.
Heh heh. And there’s Soros watching from the reeds.
You beat me to it, we were just in Dublin last week, returned last Sunday. Had a great time, lucked out on weather. And Ireland is big into Halloween. Who knew!?
Anyway, I was going to bring up A Modest Proposal. A nephew of one our group is working at the Trinity University library and walked us through the Book of Kells and the library. When we went by a Swift exhibit in the library, I asked if he was familiar with A Modest Proposal. He was not. I was very emphatic that he needed to remedy that! I hope he did.
The Irish invented Halloween.
Samhain
Good grief has both the BBC and Britain fallen. Is it? Jeeze. Isn’t Swift read in school any more?
One of the great books.
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