Like Father Like Son

Reading The Modest Proposal by Dr. Jonathan Swift was, again, another very confusing endeavor for me. I don’t know what it is about older literature that makes me not comprehend. It’s frustrating, but thankfully I was able to pull out a few important points to talk about.

Essentially, in the historical context that Dr. Webb provided, England had a lot of control over Ireland and their economy. Ireland was a devastated colony of England, and perhaps the experience Swift has is the onset of the Great Famine. The thing that really surprised me was how he brought up voluntary abortions done for reasons that I’m not certain of. I comprehend this passage as Swift telling us that women could not afford to feed their children so they would abort them? Am I interpreting that correctly?

Another startling point that the historical context page pointed out was how it might be relevant to our own world. How extraordinary is it that Swift wrote such a powerful scolding towards England and how it kind of reminds me of what the group discussed when reading Stuffedand Starved. This led me to the questions:

“Are we England?” and most importantly, “Are the poorer countries who provide for us and give us our Banana’s and other exports similar to Ireland in Swifts proposal?”
 

Based off of what was discussed in class from the Stuffed and Starved we actually have such a high demand for foreign goods that people in other countries are starving because all of their hard labor is going here! By what I gather from the reading it sounds like England did kind of the same thing to Ireland.
(Please contact me if I’m dead wrong).

The most interesting thing I got from this assignment is that England is the land of our forefathers, the United States being its offspring. How ironic that 300 years ago, Swift had wrote about the atrocities that were occurring in Ireland and now, present day, we’re doing the exact same thing to foreign countries…

Like father like son.