On the Jerry Ford question, Jim Leahy gets the prize—me buying him a cup of coffee. He posted in first with Jerry Ford’s birth name (before he was adopted): Leslie Lynch King, Jr.
And the quotation in Middle English was from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales with Robert W. Wallace posting first (thus winning coffee from me) and Freiderich March a close second, Freiderich jesting with Wallace, saying Freiderich can recite it in Middle English (can Wallace?).
Today’s Question: What British satirist wrote “A Modest Proposal” whose full title was: “A Modest Proposal For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Becoming a Burden to their Parents or Country and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public.” And what was the modest proposal?
"A Modest Proposal" was his satire on abortion, proposing that children be killed, and further eaten, if memory is correct.
ReplyDeletewhich is probably why I'm going to get some of it wrong. But here goes anyway. For the name of the author, I'm going to go with Jonathan Swift, or if I've gotten the name wrong, at any rate the author of "A Modest Proposal" is also the author of "Gulliver's Travels" (which I'm sure has a different and much longer official title). In brief, the proposal was to have the (Catholic, of course) Irish eat their (many) children. Tom, keep up the good work; I very much enjoy reading this blog.
ReplyDeleteWasn't Swift's modest proposal that the Irish eat their children to survive the famine?
ReplyDeleteWas it the broad format of your question (topic vs. specific quote) that made it easier for so many -- including me -- to recognize the work of Swift, or did Swift's proposal really reach more American readers in the 20th and 21st centuries than the work of Milton and Shakespeare?
ReplyDeleteSwift was satirizing the, essentially amoral, "untilitarianism" of Jeremy Bentham and others and in general the mad tendency of the Britain he lived in to see human beings as cogs in a great machine of commerce, useful only if they were productive cogs and otherwise disposable. He proposed that the overpopulation problem and the problem of food shortages be solved in one brilliant stroke by killing surplus children and cooking them up as meaty treats for the discriminating gourmet palate. Of course such satire today would have no bite what with "surplus" children being killed by the millions in the abortion parlours and their parts being used in cosmetics or in various curative nostrums as in the whole stem cell debate. In the 60's a student of mine once read a Modest Proposal without recognizing it as satire and wrote a book report on it enthusiastically agreeing with what it proposed. He was a true modern and a voice of the age to come.
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