(Host) Commentator Philip Baruth finds the ever-present subject of Iraq disorienting in any number of ways. But maybe the strangest thing is the way that, when listening to Donald Rumsfeld or Paul Wolfowitz or Condoleeza Rice, Philip hears the voice of Jonathan Swift.
(Baruth) Most people remember Jonathan Swift’s Gullivers Travels as a cute book about tiny people in the dollhouse country of Lilliput. But most everyone forgets that the nation of Lilliput is locked in a perpetual war with its nearest neighbor, an equally tiny and aggressive nation called Blefescue. This bloody war has its roots in an ancient disagreement about the proper place to crack an egg. “It is computed,” Gulliver reports, “that 11,000 persons have, at several times, suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end.”
Now, Swift was arguably crazy and obsessed with human excrement. And he was bitter. But he was also one of the most eloquent anti-war writers of his age. When Gulliver escapes from Lilliput he winds up in Brobdingnag, a world of 60-foot giants, where he is comparatively insignificant. When he finally gets the ear of the King, Gulliver tells the history of the English people in the noblest terms he can think of, pointing out their skill in war and offering the king the secret of gunpowder. The king is horrified: “I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
But its Gulliver’s Third Voyage — maybe the strangest and the least remembered — that has always struck me as the most prescient. In it,Gulliver finds himself on the flying island of Laputa. The island’s scientists have discovered a rare lodestone, something like a huge magnet, with which they can raise or lower their island at will. Suddenly Laputa reigns supreme in the world’s skies. Before long, they’ve begun to extort money from the nations around them by threatening to attack from above. If the surface-dwellers don’t pay, the islanders hover over their land, cutting off the sun and destroying their economy. If they still don’t pay, the islanders throw down stones, obliterating houses and stores and churches. And as a final solution, the islanders can always come in for a landing, crushing everyone and everything into a paste.
But something goes wrong – the land-dwellers get together and devise a counter-strategy. They erect huge metal spires, and when the islanders descend to crush them, the bottom of their island is punctured, the lodestone cracked, and everything falls to earth in a rain of fire.
Like I say, people forget this part of Gulliver’s Travels. But I was reminded of it the other day, watching Donald Rumsfeld call Germany and France “the old Europe” because they didn’t support the bombing of Iraq. Russia and China opposing U.S. military action is one thing; Russia, China, France, and Germany is quite another. That’s a lot of the world, I wanted to say to Rumsfeld, a lot of potential spikes under our island. That’s a lot of the world winding up to give us a good Swift kick.
Philip Baruth is a novelist living in Burlington. He teaches at the University of Vermont.