A Modest Proposal

"A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends; and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter."

- Jonathan Swift

Distinct from Forgeries and Invented Persona, which I deal with elsewhere, is this category of hoaxers whose bent is to pretend cleverly to advocate things they don't actually believe, in an extreme case of devil's advocacy or reducto ad absurdum.

I'm thinking here of things like the Report from Iron Mountain. In the form of a government think-tank report, this fabulous satire analyzed the "possibility and desirability of peace" and found that peace would be undesirable to the American state for many reasons. The satire was aimed at the U.S. military-industrial complex from the American left-wing during the cold-war, but it has been taken seriously by anti-government groups on the American right-wing in more recent years, some of whom take it to be actual evidence of an on-going conspiracy. (A more recent sighting was in a commentary on world politics from the Voice of Islam.)

Alan Sokal's Social Text hoax caused a few chuckles. Social Text, one of those ohsopomo academic journals, accepted and printed a paper of Sokal's that the physicist had filled with a bunch of things he thought to be utterly ridiculous, surrounded with enough deconstructive camoflage to pass as wisdom.

A gold star for valor in the face of legislature goes to Representative Tom Moore, Jr., of Waco, Texas who introduced a resolution into the Texas House of Representatives honoring Albert de Salvo. "Above all," the resolution read, "this compassionate gentleman's dedication and devotion to his work has enabled the weak and the lonely throughout our nation to achieve and maintain a new degree of concern for their future. His sincerity, diligence and cooperation has earned him warm admiration and affection of his fellow practitioners." After the resolution was approved unanimously by the House, Moore revealed that Albert de Salvo was none other than the Boston Strangler.

Time to honor the pioneers: Jonathan Swift's 1729 work "A Modest Proposal For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public" (by serving them as food to the starving in Ireland) was a wicked satire whose title has become a descriptive code-phrase for this sort of effort.

Daniel Defoe had tried a similar stunt several years previously, with his The Shortest Way with Dissenters, which got him jailed and pilloried (legend has it that the crowd pelted him with flowers as a show of respect).

Bringing things up to date, politicians these days use dirty tricks like Push Polls in which campaign workers masquerading as poll-takers use the loaded questions to plant ideas in the minds of those polled. ("Would you consider yourself to be more or less likely to vote for Lester Green if the press revealed that he molested girl scouts in his solid gold imported limousine while being chauffered by illegal immigrants working at slave wages?")

Marc Perkel and Cat Yronwode wrote a satire of the hunger of the American press for any presidential scandal, no matter how poorly supported, with their rant "Was the Press Involved in the Death of the President's Mother?"

An Italian group called the "Metropolitan Indians" parodied the sloganeering of the left-wing establishment by slapping up posters in 1972 with slogans like "LONG LIVE SACRIFICE" or "ALL POWER TO THE DROMEDARIAT."

Want to try this sort of thing out at home? Form a chapter of the activist group Arm the Homeless in your community. The press can't seem to resist biting when you throw them bait as good as this tasty blend of left-wing homeless activism and right-wing firearm advocacy.

Kingston, Ontario has been home to a number of allegedly official announcements intended to buffoon and outrage the allegedly official. Pranksters protested irresponsible logging on (and military test flights above) native land by announcing the logging of the lovely trees in front of (and giving notice of supersonic flights above) the white people's homes.

Kingston was also host to Wanted posters with the faces of Canadian death squad members on them. The death squad was not amused, and the government sued on their behalf. Read all about it at the link above.

Or urge your neighbors to join the campaign to ban that insidious solvent and acid-rain component known as dihydrogen monoxide. Or join the Christians for the Cloning of Jesus and assist in the second coming.

Not all of these things are the product of someone with a political or religious axe to grind. I shouldn't leave out Orson Welles' panic-inducing radio play, The War of the Worlds, which was taken by many listeners to be a live-at-the-scene news broadcast.

With motives of a less-specifiable nature, Californian Luther Blissett created the Mollusca Information Center to share resources and useful information about an entirely mythical sexually transmitted disease allegedly known to your average joe as "the clam." And web pages have also been created for "Americans for the Destruction of War Memorials" and an organization selling "Black Market Babies" (no questions asked).

Daniel Defoe
Daniel Defoe

Arm the Homeless
Arm the Homeless

Orson Welles
Orson Welles

See also:

  • Forgeries
  • Invented Persona
  • Guerrilla Hacks
  • News Hoaxes
  • Pages referenced here:



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