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Wednesday
Ronald Reagan famously asked the question, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” and if the upcoming election were really to be determined by that answer, there would be no question about the winner. After all, four years ago thousands of people were dying and unemployment was soaring as Donald Trump mismanaged the pandemic in multiple ways. But instead of recalling those uncomfortable facts, many just recall that gas prices were low while Democratic governors were requiring that people wear masks and stay away from others.
The blaming continued the following year. Although, in 2021, the new Biden administration brought an end to the dying through the vigorous promotion of vaccines along with continued masking, Republicans have managed to convince many to focus on the measures taken to address the catastrophe rather than the catastrophe itself.
There’s a comparable situation in Gulliver’s Travels, which my faculty book group is currently discussing (at my suggestion). The palace of Lilliput has caught on fire and, having left his leather jerkin elsewhere (so that he can’t use it to smother the flames), Swift must find an alternative solution. First, the situation:
I was alarmed at midnight with the cries of many hundred people at my door; by which, being suddenly awaked, I was in some kind of terror. I heard the word Burglum repeated incessantly: several of the emperor’s court, making their way through the crowd, entreated me to come immediately to the palace, where her imperial majesty’s apartment was on fire. The case seemed wholly desperate and deplorable; and this magnificent palace would have infallibly been burnt down to the ground, if, by a presence of mind unusual to me, I had not suddenly thought of an expedient.
Now for the expedient:
I had, the evening before, drunk plentifully of a most delicious wine called glimigrim, (the Blefuscudians call it flunec, but ours is esteemed the better sort,) which is very diuretic. By the luckiest chance in the world, I had not discharged myself of any part of it. The heat I had contracted by coming very near the flames, and by laboring to quench them, made the wine begin to operate by urine; which I voided in such a quantity, and applied so well to the proper places, that in three minutes the fire was wholly extinguished, and the rest of that noble pile, which had cost so many ages in erecting, preserved from destruction.
Gulliver expects to be thanked for this service but quickly learns that no good deed goes unpunished. First, he is informed that it is a capital crime to urinate within the palace. While the emperor grants him a formal pardon, the empress is less forgiving. Feeling “the greatest abhorrence” for what Gulliver has done, she “removed to the most distant side of the court, firmly resolved that those buildings should never be repaired for her use: and, in the presence of her chief confidants could not forbear vowing revenge.”
Eventually, Gulliver learns from one of the court ministers, she tries to have him put to death, “having borne perpetual malice against you, on account of that infamous and illegal method you took to extinguish the fire in her apartment.”
Biden’s competent management of the pandemic, which contrasts so markedly with Trump’s, should have helped pave the way for an easy reelection. Unfortunately, the polls remain close as far too many Americans are proving to be small-minded and vindictive Lilliputians
Further thought: The lack of appreciation for Biden’s efforts puts me in mind of how Lilliput deals with ingratitude—or at least how it did so in its golden past before it became a degenerate nation. For the ancient Lilliputians, ingratitude was a capital crime:
[T]hey reason thus; that whoever makes ill returns to his benefactor, must needs be a common enemy to the rest of mankind, from whom he has received no obligation, and therefore such a man is not fit to live.
I’m obviously not advocating this for the GOP. Nor would Swift, for that matter, who has just found a dramatic way to emphasize the ugliness of ingratitude. He provides another instance of Lilliputian ingratitude later after Gulliver brings peace between Lilliput and its rival Blefescu (France) by stealing Blefescu’s fleet. Rather than thank him, the emperor declares him a traitor for not going futher, using his size to wipe Blefescu off the map. For his disobedience, Gulliver is to have his eyes shot out, which would result in him becoming an unresisting tool of the emperor’s imperial agenda.
And yet more thoughts: Since Gulliver’s Travels is a satiric allegory as well as an adventure story, both the palace and fleet incidents have real life antecedents. Apparently Queen Anne was so put off by Swift’s early satire Tale of a Tub (1704), a buoyant, profane and controversial exploration of religious excess, that she quashed all promotion hopes. Swiftian acerbic satire, one might say, is like pissing on a fire to put it out: critics only smell the stench while failing to acknowledge the necessity.
Something comparable happened in the early years while Swift was in the Tory administration. Through secret talks, the Tories paved the way for the Peace of Utrecht, which ended the bloody War of Spanish Succession. Those talks were illegal and therefore problematic, leading to Whig accusations of treason and selling out to the French, but much bloodshed was averted as a result. A comparable situation in our own time could be Biden messily pulling the United States out of Afghanistan, the longest standing war in our history–while arguably necessary, the action was roundly criticized.