We keep on with Jonathan Swift who in this piece is shortcircuited with Shrek 2. Find also a very short clip where Richard Rorty gives his opinion on the topic of Truth.
Jonathan Swift’s sarcastic attack in A Modest Proposal was primarily directed to the Anglo-Irish landlords on the treatment of the Irish peasantry. In the Letter to the Earl of Peterborough, 1726, Swift addresses instead the issue of dependence and subordination in the institutional relationships between London and Dublin.
Here the specific messages of early multiculturalist resentement, as it were, towards the centralising drive of the Westminster parliament take the form of a report to the Earl of Peterborough, the aim of such report being to inform about an official conversation held the day before with former minister of the treasury and then Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole. Swift’s mood is one of regret, disenchantment and failure: “My principal design was to set him right, not only for the service of Ireland, but likewise of England and his own administration. I failed very much in my design.” Swift’s sense of failure stems from his acute awareness of Walpole’s unwillingness to seriously engage on the topic of Ireland. He thus takes advantage of this report to pinpoint “some few grievances” that revolve around the most poignant issues of the moment, namely, (1) the subordinate status of Irish “free born subjects” who “ought to be on as good a foot as any subjects of Britain”, (2) the trade restrictions denying “the natural liberty of exporting manufactures to any country”, and (3) the impossibility of developing a non-dependent, locally appointed autonomous Anglo-Irish leadership in the administrative, educational and religious realms which were occupied by “persons who reside in”, “persons born in” and/or “persons from ” England. Then, in the second part of the letter, Swift shifts to the social and economical side of the Irish problem. As “the whole country, except the Scotch plantation in the north, is a scene of misery and desolation” he puts forward a whole series of itemized financial and commercial arguments in favor of a new fiscal policy and free trade which would alleviate the situation.
From a contemporary perspective, the Letter to the Earl of Peterborough could be read as an indictment against the terms which defined at the time the nature of mainland English political, economic, social and cultural hegemony over Ireland, not least as he often speaks on behalf of ‘the whole people of Ireland’. However, what Swift does is to voice the emerging unhappiness of an increasingly conscious elite being formed within the ranks of the Protestant colonial elite. As Roy Douglas et al. (2000:16) state in the first chapter “Conquest and Ascendancy” of the book Ireland since 1690 :
Their claim to be treated as an equal nation was based on the argument that as descendants of English settlers in Ireland they were entitled to the same rights as their fellow subjects in England. [But] the desire for legislative independence was entirely compatible with loyalty to monarchical government in the minds of the eighteenth century Irish Protestant
In short, yes: Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, wrote very critical political pamphlets in the 1720s in which he attacked Britain’s maltreatment of the Irish head on as well as angrily rejecting the right of the Westminster parliament to legislate for and over Ireland. But by the same token: did not the ultimate message of Shrek 2(2004) produced in the Far Far Away Kingdom of La La Land also imply that appearances don’t matter really, no matter how much of an ugly Ogre, pitiful Frog or stupid Donkey you may be on the surface? That what really-really matters is how beautiful, rightful and good we all are deep down?
Yes, right! Tell me who talks of your behalf and I will tell you whether to believe them or not.
