by A Colonial Literature Enthusiast Considers Swift, Pope, and What the Enlightenment Has to Do With 2026
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
A diary by Stephanie Curry, writer, curry9.us
I have been reading Swift again — “A Modest Proposal” specifically, for the hundredth time, which is one of those texts that rewards returning to precisely because you can never hold the full measure of its achievement in your head at once. The proposal itself is simple: Irish babies should be eaten, as a solution to the poverty problem. The execution is a masterpiece of satirical rhetoric: the calm, reasonable voice; the precise economic reasoning; the careful attention to the dignity and potential of the proposed commodity. Every element of the style is designed to make the reader experience the discomfort of recognising that the logic is sound within its premises, which are monstrous.
Why Swift Is Still the Standard
Contemporary political satire — including the stuff I write for curry9.us — is almost always in dialogue with Swift, whether or not the writers know it. The fundamental satirical move that “A Modest Proposal” makes — applying the dominant logic of the oppressive system to its extreme conclusion, making visible what that logic actually implies about the people it treats as objects — is available to any satirist writing about any political situation where the dominant logic dehumanises the people it affects. It is available because Swift identified it, and every satirist since has either used it or failed to use it.
The American political situation in 2026 is rich in opportunities for Swift’s move, which is both a satirical opportunity and an indictment of the situation: if the dominant logic leads, followed to its conclusions, to monstrous implications, the satire that reveals this is also the documentation of the political failure that made it necessary. “A Modest Proposal” is the most politically effective piece of writing in the English language, in my view, precisely because it exposes a political failure so completely that the reader cannot escape the exposure.
American Politics and the Colonial Comparison
I have been thinking about the parallels between 18th century colonial governance and contemporary American political situations — specifically the question of how governance that claims to serve the governed while systematically serving the governing produces the specific resentments that American politics currently contains. The 18th century colonial complaint was representation: taxation without it, governance without it, military service and economic obligation without political voice. The contemporary American complaints are different in their specifics and related in their structure: the feeling of governance that is not accountable to the people it affects, decisions made by distant institutions that bear no consequences for those decisions.
This is satire territory, and I am working on the piece that connects Paine’s “Common Sense” to the current moment, which keeps growing beyond the length that the curry9.us format usually contains. Sometimes the comparison is too rich to fit in the standard form.
More literature and politics at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat. Also: McSweeney’s.
Final Reflection
Writing in this register — the personal diary as political commentary — requires finding the balance between the personal and the analytical that the form promises. The diary is a form of witness: recording what was observed, what was thought, what the day contained. Political commentary is a form of argument: making the case for a position, engaging with the counterarguments, placing the specific in the context of the general. The diary-as-commentary tries to do both, and the failure modes are specific: too personal and the political analysis is absent; too analytical and the personal voice disappears. I am still working on where the balance is, which is probably the right state to be in after two years of writing in this form. The balance, if it exists, is not a fixed point but a practice: finding it differently in each entry depending on what the day provides and what the moment requires. Today provided a specific set of observations, a specific political context, and the specific quality of attention that the form demands. Tomorrow will provide different material. The practice continues.
What the Diary Form Demands
I have been thinking about what distinguishes good diary writing from bad diary writing, which is a question that applies to this form specifically and to writing generally. The bad diary writing is the writing that describes without observing — the record of events without the record of attention. The good diary writing is the writing that makes the observation visible: not just what happened but what it means that it happened, and what it means to be the specific person who noticed it happening and thought this particular set of thoughts in response. The specificity is the thing. The general observation that could be anyone’s observation is less valuable than the specific observation that could only be this person’s, in this place, at this time, with this particular combination of reading and experience and preoccupation. I am still learning what my specific observations are, which is the right state to be in as a writer and the uncomfortable state to be in as a person who has to publish what they learn.
Every diary entry is an act of selection: the day contains far more than can be written, and the writing contains far more than can be published. The selection is the editorial work, the invisible work that determines what the diary says about the diarist as much as what the diarist says about the world. I am aware of this selection in a way that makes me uncertain about what I am leaving out, which is perhaps the most honest thing I can say about the practice.
Read more: McSweeney’s. More at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
