Swift Kicks

I RECENTLY wrote a magazine piece about global warming. Wondering what it would look like to a fully credentialed researcher in the field, I passed it, via a mutual friend, to a professor of oceanography at a university in Texas. In due course our intermediary brought back the answer: “Marci cannot respond to your article. She says she is too busy counting isotopes in the Carioco Trench.” I could not help but smile at what came to mind: the Academy of Lagado in Book Three of Gulliver’s Travels, where scholars occupy themselves with such projects as extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers.

That is the place Jonathan Swift occupies in the minds of, I think, most literate people. His great satire takes to preposterous extremes the weaknesses of humanity at large and supplies us with ready parallels for most of the instances of pride, folly, and cussedness that we encounter in our passage through the world.

About the Author

John Derbyshire

Mr. Derbyshire is a former contributing editor of National Review.

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I RECENTLY wrote a magazine piece about global warming. Wondering what it would look like to a fully credentialed researcher in the field, I passed it, via a mutual friend, to a professor of oceanography at a university in Texas. In due course our intermediary brought back the answer: “Marci cannot respond to your article. She says she is too busy counting isotopes in the Carioco Trench.” I could not help but smile at what came to mind: the Academy of Lagado in Book Three of Gulliver’s Travels, where scholars occupy themselves with such projects as extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers.

That is the place Jonathan Swift occupies in the minds of, I think, most literate people. His great satire takes to preposterous extremes the weaknesses of humanity at large and supplies us with ready parallels for most of the instances of pride, folly, and cussedness that we encounter in our passage through the world.