Kat passed along to me yet another example of a “satirist” taking a stab at “A Modest Proposal” and failing, miserably, because said “satirist” fails to understand satire. This has been rampant at college papers lately; the latest was written by a high-school boy. The twist here is that the school paper, evidently staffed by editors equally as uninformed about satire as the author, published the piece. The principal, after having read the piece, seized 500 undistributed copies and created a newspaper advisory board. As a result of this, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution decided to run the column, meaning that Justin Jones’ poor excuse for satire has now been taken up as a freedom of speech issue.
For a millennium, the world has been plagued with stupid people corrupting society and bastardizing the value of life for all of mankind.
The intellectually handicapped have been reproducing at a substantially greater rate than those with a fully functional brain.
The problem of the unintelligent reproducing is, and has been, a serious threat to society that has gone unchecked for far too long. It is the responsibility of man to solve this problem before a reverse Darwinism takes effect.
It is depressing to think (especially at the high school age) that people with a high IQ are generally stereotyped as “geeks” or “nerds” because they choose to do more intellectually stimulating activities like homework, and reading, instead of those activities preferred by their peers like power lifting, full contact football without head protection, or crushing cans on one’s head. So while the intelligent are exiled from the masses, the ignorant are cherished and embraced.
Due to the substantial amount of low IQ reproduction and relatively low amount of high IQ reproduction, the intelligent become fewer and farther between.
This isn’t satire; this is the whine of a high-school geek who can’t get a date even though he’s entitled to one, dammit, because he’s smarter than you!
Really, if one is going to try to claim the mantle of Swift, one really has to understand the form. Satire is notoriously difficult to pull off well. The idea is not to just use sarcasm to vent your spleen and slap the label “Swiftian” on it. Good satire has a target, and uses exaggeration to make clear who the target actually is — and it’s usually the people whose point of view is ostensibly being presented. So when Swift wrote about the deplorable conditions of the Irish and suggested that they should be able to sell their babies as food for the rich, he was not targeting the Irish. He was targeting the people who kept them poor and wrote them off as inferior, as well as the social scientists of the day who made a lot of grand pronouncements about fixing society. And Stephen Colbert is lampooning conservative pundits, not the targets of conservative pundits, with his performance.
Good satire can sometimes be misconstrued as an earnest attack on the ostensible subject of the satire, but that is usually done by people who identify with the point of view presented. For instance, I grew up hating All in the Family, in large part because my father cheered Archie Bunker on. It wasn’t until much later, when I watched it on my own, that I realized that the joke was actually on Archie, and the show is brilliant satire.
Jones’ satire fails not just because it screams “Revenge Fantasy of High School Geek,” but because it fails to satirize a point of view in order to illuminate the repugnance of that point of view. Take the actual “modest proposal” bit:
First off, charity should be outlawed. No longer should people be allowed to use their children as a source of income. People who cannot afford to have kids simply should not have kids. Unemployment benefits also must be disbanded — go get a job. That isn’t to say those with disabilities should not be helped, but not with handouts, just a hand. One of the greatest minds of the century, Stephen Hawking, is immobile. Yet the courageous Mr. Hawking still manages to make strides in the areas of physics, despite being confined to his wheelchair.
Second, the government should compile a standardized test to thoroughly analyze any and all 5th grade students in the country for IQ levels. Based on the results of the test, those who perform in the bottom 25 percent should be executed. The executions will not be inhumane; simple lethal injections while one sleeps would be sufficient. With the bottom of every class systematically removed, over time the world would inevitably thrive and prosper like never before.
It is true that, without the unintelligent, there will be no one to mess up one’s order at the local fast food joint, or people on the news to give one something humorous to talk about at the water cooler at work the next morning, but that is a sacrifice, as a race, that simply must be made.
If this guy had any skill at all, it would be clear that he’s mocking a point of view expressed by some sort of elitist natalist pundit (such as, say, David Brooks or Mark Steyn, both of whom are known to lament that educated white women are not reproducing fast enough or early enough), not that he is mocking people with low IQs. And yet that is exactly what he’s doing. He’s indulging in a fantasy about getting back at the socially-successful dumb jocks by killing them; he’s also equating poor with unintelligent, so he’s got some class and race issues to work out there.
The AJC really missed the boat on this, too. Here’s what Maureen Downey wrote on behalf of the editorial board:
If students knew enough about Irish-born satirist Jonathan Swift to parody him, it would be cause for celebration in most area high schools. Instead, it led to censorship at East Coweta High.
Senior Justin Jones burlesqued Swift’s 18th-century essay “A Modest Proposal” in the September issue of Smoke Signals, East Coweta High’s student newspaper. Lampooning complaints about the drag on the economy by poor Irish families, the great Swift wrote: “A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled.”
Titling his piece “Another modest proposal,” Justin suggested that the euthanasia of low-IQ students could alleviate the world’s woes. His essay and a critique of an East Coweta Princess beauty pageant by the paper’s managing editor Caitlyn VanOrden spurred a classic example of administrative overkill…
A “positive” school newspaper devoted to winning football scores is not only boring, but it doesn’t teach teenage journalists critical thinking skills. It doesn’t take courage to report that the high school band bought new uniforms. It does to challenge the status quo, and that’s what good school newspapers should do.
Clearly, Ms. Downey doesn’t understand what Swift was doing, either. Because if she really thinks that calling for the elimination of people with low IQs is challenging the status quo, she needs to get out more. By contrast, VanOrden’s critique of a school beauty pageant that doesn’t even have a scholarship justification *is* challenging the status quo. But calling for the elimination of welfare and the mass execution of unintelligent or disabled people? Not so brave:
Although the piece was meant as a satire and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s publication of it was meant as a political expression in support of freedom of speech, Jones’ words are reminiscent of the non-satirical, actual words of many of the nation’s and world’s leading contemporary scientific, academic, and political minds:
Renowned embryologist Bob Edwards said in 1999, “Soon it will be a sin for parents to have a child that carries the heavy burden of genetic disease. We are entering a world where we have to consider the quality of our children.”
Richard Lynn, Professor Emeritus at the University of Ulster, complained to Newsday in 1994 that the least intelligent people were having the most children and suggested a solution: “What is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of the population of incompetent cultures. But we need to think realistically in terms of ‘phasing out’ of such peoples…Evolutionary progress means the extinction of the less competent.
In 2005, British Tory Deputy Mayor Owen Lister suggested the guillotine for children with disabilities rather than the expense associated with their education and care. “These are children you can’t educate. It’s merely a matter of caring for them until they die, he said, “It shows how peculiar we are as a society on this matter that we spend this vast amount of money caring for disabled youngsters to very little purpose at all.”
Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton University, who unabashedly believes chimpanzees and gorillas have more moral significance than those with significant mental disabilities, has said, “It does not seem quite wise to increase any further draining of limited resources by increasing the number of children with impairments.”
Earlier this year, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported on a resolution before the Georgia Legislature that sought to apologize for the state’s forcible sterilization of 3,300 Georgians, many of whom had disabilities, who were deemed “unfit” for reproduction during the American Eugenics movement. And in February of this year, Cynthia Tucker, the editorial page editor, wrote a column on the same page of the paper that Mr. Jones’s column runs today, passionately arguing for the state to right its wrongs regarding the atrocities of the American eugenics movement.
I think we’ve seen from recent discussions here how very easy it is for able-bodied people to cavalierly disregard the bodily autonomy of the disabled, or to deny the humanity of those who are less intelligent. Jonathan Swift would be appalled that someone who sought to do the same thing was attempting to take the mantle of a Swiftian satirist.