Modest Proposal did nothing to ameliorate the suffering of Irish in the approaching famine of 1740, or the famines that followed in the century under continued English rule. Noah asks us to join him in the role of anthropologist, the outsider. ..…

Why don’t we just eat Irish children, Jonathan Swift proposed, modestly? ... Perhaps that is all satire can ever accomplish: the vexation of a powerful, enfranchised class and the sad acknowledgement by the rest of us as to how things are. ..…