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Thursday
Satirists owe an immense debt to Jonathan Swift and Charles Dickens, two of the English language’s finest practitioners of the art. I had this thought when satirist Alexandra Petri attacked Florida Surgeon General Joseph Lapado for eliminating childhood vaccination requirements. The Atlantic writer was particularly struck by a pious declaration that is reminiscent of the self-righteous workshop trustees in Oliver Twist: “Who am I as a government or anyone else, who am I as a man standing here now, to tell you what you should put in your body? Who am I to tell you what your child should put in [their] body? I don’t have that right.”
Or as Petri put it, “Sorry. We decided there were too many children.”
I don’t exaggerate when I say that Lapado sounds like a Dickens villain. The men responsible for the welfare of children in Oliver Twist are as intent as Lapado on keeping healthy substances out of children’s bodies:
The parish authorities magnanimously and humanely resolved, that Oliver should be “farmed,” or, in other words, that he should be dispatched to a branch-workhouse some three miles off, where twenty or thirty other juvenile offenders against the poor-laws, rolled about the floor all day, without the inconvenience of too much food or too much clothing, under the parental superintendence of an elderly female, who received the culprits at and for the consideration of sevenpence-halfpenny per small head per week. Sevenpence-halfpenny’s worth per week is a good round diet for a child; a great deal may be got for sevenpence-halfpenny, quite enough to overload its stomach, and make it uncomfortable.
Further on, in a passage that could also be applied to those Republicans determined to deprive impoverished children of school lunches and food stamps, we see the results of governmental neglect:
Everybody knows the story of another experimental philosopher who had a great theory about a horse being able to live without eating, and who demonstrated it so well, that he had got his own horse down to a straw a day, and would unquestionably have rendered him a very spirited and rampacious animal on nothing at all, if he had not died, four-and-twenty hours before he was to have had his first comfortable bait of air. Unfortunately for the experimental philosophy of the female to whose protecting care Oliver Twist was delivered over, a similar result usually attended the operation of her system; for at the very moment when the child had contrived to exist upon the smallest possible portion of the weakest possible food, it did perversely happen in eight and a half cases out of ten, either that it sickened from want and cold, or fell into the fire from neglect, or got half-smothered by accident; in any one of which cases, the miserable little being was usually summoned into another world, and there gathered to the fathers it had never known in this.
“Too many children,” of course, also brings to mind Swift’s “Modest Proposal.” Petri, a new mother herself, sets forth the case against children:
Their hands are too small. Sometimes they are sticky, and no one knows why. They say they’re eating their dinner, but you can see that they are just pushing it around on their plate. They come up to you on the sidewalk and tell you their whole life story for 10 minutes, wearing face paint from a birthday party three days ago. Some afternoons they announce that they are sharks, but they are obviously not sharks. They do this over and over again.
Here are the Modest Proposer’s concerns:
It is a melancholy object to those, who walk through this great town, or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads, and cabin doors crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags, and importuning every passenger for an alms. These mothers, instead of being able to work for their honest livelihood, are forced to employ all their time in strolling to beg sustenance for their helpless infants who, as they grow up, either turn thieves for want of work, or leave their dear native country, to fight for the Pretender in Spain, or sell themselves to the Barbadoes.
As I’m sure you know, the Proposer’s notorious solution is to start stewing, roasting, baking and boiling one-year-olds (“and I make no doubt that [they] will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout”). It is a testimony to Swift’s skills as a parodist that many initially missed his satiric point and thought he was serious.
After observing that the Florida Surgeon General’s advocacy for bodily autonomy comes as a shock given the state’s six week abortion ban— “this is America, where you can do anything with your body unless there’s a uterus in it”– Petri notes that Florida “is the first state to take the courageous step toward decluttering itself of excess children” (italics mine).
The satirist turns momentarily serious at this point, although here too she employs heavy sarcasm:
If we lose herd immunity, we will bring back diseases that had formerly been eliminated, and some children who would otherwise have been protected will perish. But no price is too high to pay in this pointless war against decades of lifesaving science. Confusingly, this effort is being taken up at the same time that people are Very Concerned [Elon Musk] about dropping birth rates, but it makes sense when you understand that they don’t like the children we currently have. They want us to make other ones instead.
Then comes the satiric clincher:
This is certainly one possible response to the epidemic of mass shootings: unleash another epidemic on our elementary schools. If I had to guess what kind of shot we would make sure schoolchildren got, I would have guessed wrong. I am always guessing wrong. I am always guessing that we want children to live.
At least Swift’s Modest Proposer is no hypocrite when it comes to decluttering. He’s open about not wanting children to live.
