I just finished reading the classic, Gulliver’s Travels. I am not sure why I hadn’t ever got to this brilliant book before, but now that I have read it, better late than never definitely seems to apply. I found it as thoroughly engrossing a satire as has ever been written. Thoroughly engrossing, and equally disturbing.

This is a book written in Ireland circa the early 1700’s. In his magnificent and perhaps mischievous races, with sometimes-bovine faces, Jonathan Swift was poking his finger in the sides, in the eyes, of the arrogant and corrupt regimes and societies of his time. Swift employed the powerful weapons of sharp wit, humor, sarcasm and vivid imagination, in an attempt to wake leaders, nobility and privileged classes to realize the depths to which they had fallen in their lackadaisical, self-serving, menial, wholly unreflective and stagnant approach to leadership and their fellow human beings.

Why, you may be wondering, am I bringing this up now? Isn’t it a bit late, nearly 300 years after the first publishing, to do a book review?

Um ... yep. Sure is. But this is not meant to be a book review. It’s more of a wake-up call, ideally.

As I read Gulliver’s Travelsit occured to me that we really haven’t come very far in the last three hundred years. Here we are, starting a New Year, still very early in a brand new century and yet with just a few changes (a bit of the lingo here, some technology there) the satire, and the need for it, are still current. 1725. 2007. Same mess.

For those of you, like myself, who have never quite gotten around to reading Gulliver’s TravelsI will give you an idea of what happens in the book.

Swift created amazingly imaginative fictional countries and societies for Gulliver to encounter in his various journeys. There were lands of tiny people and one populated by giants all with very unique perspectives that actually weren’t so fundamentally unique. A flying island and the land underneath formed a country completely obsessed with music and mathematics with no practicality. One country, an island of sorcerers, was filled with conjured spirits and past wisdom while another was home to immortals whose lives illustrated conclusively that unless the aging process stops somewhere along the line, immortality just ain’t all that.

Oh, and then he went to Japan, but apparently it was all just too real compared to his imaginary countries, so Gulliver did not have much to say about his time there.

Gulliver’s final journey was a life-altering experience of role-reversal and base tendencies exposed. This country was inhabited by a controlling race of incredibly reasonable, calm, honest and honorable beings. There was also another race of uncouth, barbaric, animalistic beings apparently without any reason, morality or apparent ability to truly learn and REMEMBER their lessons. The trick was that the civilized race was made up of horses while the uncivilized race, called Yahoos, was human. (Did you ever wonder where that word came from? Yahoo? Well, here it is! No need to Google it now.) Gulliver, upon his return to England, eventually came to realize that no matter how much he learned from the horses and tried to emulate their ways, he was still a Yahoo and slowly regressed back to the bad habits of Yahoo/human nature.

Though the inhabitants of all of these places were kind and generous to Gulliver, each country had a cocktail of issues from elitist societies to deceptive governments.

The common thread in all of the communities and fantastic countries was the myopia of the inhabitants: their blindly following their leaders and their leaders selfishly making decisions with no regard for those whose very lives depended on their decisions.

[Continued…]