A big-eared Black guy, wearing Muslim robes, fist pumping his hot-looking mama complete with ‘Fro wig and matching designer machine gun. Oh, my. Whole lotta’ shaking’ goin’ on out there; every hue a finger can have being pointed this way and that. Maybe the fingers are pointing the wrong way.
I remember my first exposure to satire back at Fitch High School in Groton, Conn. I was a sophomore then, newly full of hormones and covered with zits, a quaking mass of biological confusion trying to pass for cool. My English teacher that year was Johnny Kelly, a skinny, short guy with a sweet smile who’d won something called the Boston Marathon a couple of years earlier. He taught from a huge “Reader of English Literature” we were all supposed to be reading from. The early stuff from Cotton Mather was as dry as week-old hay; the only thing bearable about Samuel Pepys was his name, which scored him 100 points over Thomas Hardy and those other dead English guys, all of whom wrote like they were on laudanum, whatever that was.
Thank God for Jonathon Swift! I remember turning to his essay “A Modest Proposal,” written at the height of the Irish potato famine, assuming it to be as dreadful as chapters from Hardy’s books about wheat fields. As I still read texts as literal facts strung together, some done terribly (Hardy), some much better (Mickey Spillane), my eyes popped when I got to his recommendation that Irish parents sell their kids to be eaten as tasty, rich morsels for aristocrats. Come again? To be eaten? With a fork? How could anybody mean that…
