Hollywood couldn't you just leave this one alone?

            Gulliver’s Travels is so much more than the shitty Jack Black movie makes it out to be. Sure, Jack Black is an excellent actor and we will never forget “School of Rock,” but this just wasn’t his best and it’s definitely disappointing, because what I noticed while reading the first book of Gulliver’s Travels was that so much of the satire still lends itself fairly well to current society. The egg situation, for example, is still a thing, as people continue to fight over the dumbest of semantics. With this satire still intact, perhaps altered a little TINY bit to feel more relevant, Gulliver’s Travels could have actually been a decent movie full of rich set pieces and a wholesome family message. Right.

            Without getting too political because that’s not my thing, I think a lot of Jonathan Swift’s message still rings true today. Though he was focused more on fighting the Whigs because they stiffed him on some financial aid, he still focused on a political group, and those groups are still very prominent, especially in America. Reading the novel for the first time, I didn’t know what to expect, and thought that Gulliver’s Travels would be more about a colonist going into a new land and basically terrorizing it, much like what we did when we founded this great nation. However, though Gulliver did do a few not-so-good things (I.E. He kind of screwed up a country’s entire fleet and went to the bathroom on a royal building, albeit with good intentions), on the whole he was an alright guest. Rather, the Lilliputians were the ones who were less organized and really just didn’t have their shit together. They elect people into power because they’re too dumb to be corrupt. That barely makes any sense. Less educated people are the ones who tend who commit more crimes. Of course, the nature of this being satirical tells us that Swift is making a point about politicians, and I certainly don’t have to tell anyone what that point is because it’s glaringly obvious. I also think that’s one of the better things about Jonathan Swift. His writing has points where it is over the top satirical and extremely obvious, yet there are a lot of subtleties to it. It’s difficult for me to find specific examples without being well versed in the history of Irish politics, but within the text there are certainly many subtle inferences about people that make it worth rereading, which was even more so the case when the book was published.