I borrow my title from Jonathan Swift, who was writing about the problem of starvation in eighteenth-century Ireland. Swift’s proposal for solving the problem, considered one of the best examples of irony in English literature, was for the starving Irish to solve the problem of starvation by boiling and eating their babies. Swift’s proposal was, of course, anything but modest. It was also satire—educated people of the time were not expected to take it seriously. Today’s Republican Party, however, has been proposing actions, while not as horrific as boiling and eating babies, would foster almost as much misery for the nation’s poor. Too many people, primarily Trump’s “base,” are willing to support everything he says.
Trump’s shutdown, of the government has caused even some considered his principal supporters to question the “rightness” of everything he says and does. David Cay Johnson, in It’s Even Worse than You Think, details the ongoing (and worsening) problems with the Trump Presidency. Trump is not, of course, the only president in history to have made a mess of everything. Richard Nixon was impeached and removed from office, but compared with Trump, he accomplished a great deal and was considered brilliant. The Watergate scandal ended his presidency on a sad note, but he went on to write nine books in an effort to rehabilitate his reputation.
Whether we will get an equivalent satirical view of the Trump Presidency remains to be seen. My sense is that it is unlikely, as the time for satire seems to have faded in the television age. Archie Bunker, from the show “All in the Family,” is, perhaps, a precursor of Trump, but the TV character has more redeeming features than seems to be the case with Trump. And, of course, times have changed. Satire is not as popular as it once was. Stephen Colbert of The Late Show is perhaps the best known current example of a “satirical” comedian. I am not sure that anyone’s mind has ever been changed by satire. Those “in the know” can laugh at the the problems delineated, but I’m not sure that satire ever changed anyone’s mind. And if things are going to change, minds have to change first.
I’m not sure how we get from “here” to “there.” The current crop of Republicans is either too worried about “Trump’s base” of support, or is intent on taking advantage of the current situation to “feather their own nests” to worry about who or how many might be hurt by Trump’s policies or what those policies have been doling to our national reputation in the world. To complicate matters, isn’t that stable, either. Two of our main allies, United Kingdom and France have been having their own problems. Malaise and discontent seem to be the rule rather than the exception. When I think about our current situation, a poem by William Butler Yeats comes to mind:
