- Emma Murphy
[1] A Modest Proposal was written by Irishman Jonathan Swift in 1729. His essay, distributed as a pamphlet, proposed a satirical ‘solution’ to the ‘Irish problem’ of abject poverty. Written for (or at) the English, it suggested the Irish peasants rear children who were to be killed and sold for food thus earning the peasants money and a means of culling the exponential growth of the stereotypical Irish catholic family. This, Swift claimed with deep seethed irony, was a means of the Irish to work their way out of poverty. The story is a mimetic of a real solution, a proposal that is obviously no solution at all. It functions to highlight the perpetrators who allowed this absolute poverty to develop: a dystopian proposition indicating just how bad things had become.
Manhattan is the product of an unformulated theory, Manhattanism, whose program [is] to exist in a world totally fabricated by man, to live inside fantasy… The entire city became a factory of manmade experience, where the real and natural ceased to exist …a mythical island where the invention and testing of a metropolitan life-style, and its attendant architecture, could be pursued as a collective experiment … a Galapagos Island of new technologies, a new chapter in the survival of the fittest, this time a battle among species of machines…[1]
1980s New York was a desperate place to be poor. Ronald Regan reigned as US President for two terms, while across the water, Margaret Thatcher stood at Great Britain’s helm for eleven years. Between them, their decade long, neo-liberal policies decimated the social state and plunged the already poor into abject poverty. Between 1 and 1.4 percent of New York City’s population were homeless, or 70,000 – 100,000 people living on the streets.[2] As the 1980s wore on, homelessness became endemic in Ronald Regan’s America. At the close of the decade, the United States had the highest rate of poverty in the first world. Martha Rosler proclaimed in 1991, “The principal economic result of Reganism was that in the 1980s the extremes of wealth and poverty grew far further apart than a decade earlier, producing the widest gap between rich and poor in our history.”[3] In 1988 Regan stated in an interview, with newscaster David Brinkley, he believed people slept on the streets because they liked it.[4] The New York Times reported, on Christmas Day of the same year, “The number of deaths by freezing reported in the United States has more than doubled in a decade…In 1985, the latest year for which complete statistics are available, 1,010 people died from exposure to the cold.”[5]