What do Jonathon Swift and the Onion Have in Common?

A Modest ProposalWhat do Jonathon Swift and the writers of the Onion have in common? They are all brilliant satirists for their times. In Jonathon Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”, he  suggests that unwanted children should be killed for the purpose of saving resources and providing meat, much along the same lines as venison. He also allows for the possibility for a new meat market, with many customers attracted to the idea of fresh babies as delicious alternative to other meat.  

At the time, Jonathon Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” was of course, shocking to the literary community, especially as the essay listed a multitude of reasons why killing some of the babies would be a logical and beneficial thing to do.  Obviously, Jonathon Swift didn’t really intend to have his idea for baby-killing to be taken seriously as a proposal, but it did receive more than a little attention because of the subject.

Today’s pop culture is full of irony and satire, from the Onion to Jon Stewart, whose “fake news show” has become the number one source of “real news” for the young adults in the United States. Stephen Colbert has also taken up the reins first initiated by Jonathon Swift all those years ago, and both Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are more than adept at using satire to highlight the issues in politics in the media.

A current “problem” with satire has resulted from globalization- not everyone across the globe realizes that “The Onion” is satire or fake news. In 2009, a Bangladeshi newspaper mistook an Onion article about the moon landing as being a hoax as the honest to God truth. The newspaper ran the story, which quoted American  Astronaut Neil Armstrong as finally admitting to the world for once and for all that the lunar landing was indeed a hoax. The article then received international attention and the poor Bangladeshi newspaper had to retract their article and admit that they had been unfortunately duped.

As far as the Internet in concerned, often satire, sarcasm and irony reign supreme; however, that doesn’t stop a lot of readers from mis-reading the ironic as literal and misunderstanding the meaning.  I once mis-read an article about sex toys and Tom Cruise as the “real deal”, probably because I was hoping for it to be true. The article wasn’t a hoax, it was just on a site that I stumbled upon. I read the article a little too quickly and fell for it hook, line, and sinker, but fortunately didn't publish it in a newspaper.