Roll Over, Jonathan Swift — David Shribman Offers A Modest Proposal For Our Dismal Time

Don't know about you, but this blogger is tired beyond weary because of the hurly burly of these days. This blogger no longer watches the TV news — any and all — with a brief amount of NPR news and watches/listens to sport events like the 2019 Women's World Cup. Instead of the lamestream media, this blogger depends on carefulyl-selected information in print. If this is a (fair & balanced) retreat from socio-political madness, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
A Modest Proposal to Survive the 487 Days Till the Election — (But Who’s Counting?)
By David M. Shribman


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For this Fourth of July, amid picnics and parties marking Independence Day around the country, let me offer a Modest Proposal.

This is not a proposal for the Irish of the 18^th century to solve their problems by selling their children for human consumption, as Jonathan Swift suggested in a 1729 essay satirizing British indifference to famine in Ireland. It is a proposal for Americans to go on a summer-long political diet.

In short: While we are deep into the national season for vacations, let’s take a vacation from politics. A vacation from division, a respite from critiques of how President Donald J. Trump has either saved or ruined our country, culture and civic life.

This is an age of TMI (too much information), but also of TMC (too much commentary) and TMK (too much kvetching). The civility of American politics has been shattered. The conventions of political life in the capital — horrifying enough in ordinary times but somehow rendered an object of nostalgia in our own Age of Pugilism — have been degraded.

This is, moreover, a period of unusual division. But all that may be reason to embrace my Modest Proposal and maybe to watch a magnificent Lake Michigan sunset. Or, if you really want to enjoy splendid isolation, a reason to sit at the edge of a dock on a serene lake in Maine, to stare out at the gentle hills on the other side, and to breathe both the clean air and a sense of relief that there is no cable connection nor web service within miles.

I share with Swift the despair that comes with having, as he put it, wasted “many years with offering vain, idle” thoughts, and I acknowledge the Democrats’ summertime desire to contemplate impeachment and Republicans’ desire to charge their rivals with trying to overturn a legitimate election won in the Electoral College (though not in the popular vote).

But the summer is barely two weeks old and already I am “wearied out,” as Swift would say, by spending evenings discussing whether Kamala Harris’s breakout debate moment was rehearsed in advance; or ruining a dinner examining whether Pete Buttigieg is too inexperienced to be a legitimate top-tier contender. Or being interrupted while trying to get the charcoal to light by a relative who believes that the president was being bamboozled by his dear friend in North Korea.

Enough. Time for a moratorium. (I’ll grant amnesty only to watch the second round of debates late this month.)

I tried the idea out the other day on an old source from what today seems a gentler time, Andrew W. Card, chief of staff in the George W. Bush White House — no conscientious objector to partisan battle. He was ready to enlist immediately.

“The nature of social media and the expectation that you would share your emotions the minute you have those emotions has caused all the rules of personal respect to be violated,” he told me. “Today there is no respect and there are no rules.”

So let’s cease the tweeting and throw away the remote. What precisely will we miss?

The Progress Iowa Corn Feed on July 14? We can live without it. The Dickinson County Summer Sizzler in Northern Iowa? I have written about national politics for more than a third of a century and can say with certainty that this vital event at the Expo building in Spirit Lake can be skipped without penalty. How about Londonderry Old Home Days from August 14 to 19 near Derry, NH? Ignore it, even though this is the 120^th time this event is being held and local singers are scheduled to put on quite a show at the town common bandstand.

I’ve been to scores of these kinds of things, and truly, no candidate says anything meaningful at them — not about health care, not about national security, the stuff of debates — except maybe to ask for an extra helping of pie. So I have real credibility when I say that there is no peril in skipping the September 21 Polk County, Iowa, Democrats’ Steak Fry, where candidates will trek to the Des Moines Water Works Park and demean themselves by cooking steaks on a giant barbecue and giving cornpone speeches.

Some 27 years ago, a young Bill Clinton — the high priest of the hokey, wearing a washed-out plaid shirt that he wouldn’t be caught dead in today — told the Steak Fry crowd that he was “happier than a hog in slop” and that George H.W. Bush, his 1992 rival but his great friend in their post-presidential years, “squeals like a pig under a gate.” Mr. Clinton now has a near-vegan diet and is not likely to be tending the grill or even employing pork images.

We could all use a change in our news consumption as thoroughgoing as the 42^nd president’s diet. Let’s tune in again after the Steak Fry. As Swift said in his Modest Proposal, I offer this advice with “no other motive than the public good of my country.”

Swift took refuge in satire because real life was too arduous to bear. I’m just going to take a vacation. # # #

[David M. Shribman, a former Times political writer, is now the executive editor emeritus of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for 16 years (2003-2019). He won the Pulitzer prize in 1995 for his coverage of politics in Washington; currently he writes a weekly nationally syndicated column, "My Point" and a biweekly column for the Globe and Mail in Canada. Shribman received a BA summa cum laude (history) from Dartmouth College (NH) and did graduate work in European and African history at Cambridge University (UK), as a Reynolds Scholar.]

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