Tag Archives: Gulliver's Travels

Swift and Food Stamp Cuts

By Robin Bates | Published: September 17, 2013

What would Jonathan Swift say to GOP radicals who seek to cut food stamps.

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Getting Tied Down in Syria

By Robin Bates | Published: July 10, 2013

Is there a danger that U.S. involvement in Syria will lead to a Gulliver-like disaster?

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Only Comic Satire Can Do NRA Justice

By Robin Bates | Published: January 17, 2013

It takes a Joseph Heller or a Jonathan Swift to capture the craziness of the NRA.

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Analyzing Loughner’s Booklist

By Robin Bates | Published: January 10, 2011

Like much of America, I am still in a state of shock over Saturday’s shooting of a Congresswoman, a judge, and 16 others. Like many I wonder if this was an example of a disturbed mind encountering the inflamed political rhetoric that has come to characterize American political discourse. (Add Arizona’s permissive gun laws into […]

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Obama, Idealist or Realist?

By Robin Bates | Published: December 28, 2010

2010 in Review There was an interesting dust-up last week amongst conservative intellectuals following the release of some more Richard Nixon tapes. Henry Kissinger can be heard making the following cold-blooded remark about Soviet Jews in 1973: “Let’s face it: The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign […]

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Laura Ingraham Is No Jonathan Swift

By Robin Bates | Published: August 10, 2010

Since I wrote about Swiftian satire yesterday, I was interested when a current political satirist was contrasted with Swift in yesterday’s Washington Post. Laura Ingraham has a new book out which purports to be the secret diaries of Bo, the White House dog.  In his review Steven Levingston concludes that, while the book is sometimes […]

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Emily Dickinson’s Deathbed Fly

By Robin Bates | Published: June 26, 2009

Okay, here is a second post on poems about small winged pests, written in honor of President Obama’s cool and cold-blooded killing of a fly. When I was a child, I used to enjoy the poem about “the funny old lady who swallowed a fly.” It is one of those repetition poems, with a new […]

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Bush, Obama, and Gulliver’s Travels

By Robin Bates | Published: June 3, 2009

I return for one last time to Swift, who provides invaluable perspectives for understanding contemporary politics. Swift was a shrewd student of political dynamics. His satire is often an allegorical depiction of real life people and incidents, and if one knows one’s history, one can read parts of Gulliver’s Travels as a roman à clé, […]

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Can Satire Change Lives?

By Robin Bates | Published: June 2, 2009

For a website devoted to whether and how literature can change lives, satire presents a special case. That’s because satire seems to have changing lives as its goal. Because of this apparent agenda, it fell out of favor with the high culture crowd in the heyday of the New Criticism.  The New Critics, who dominated […]

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