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and proceeds to tell us of "a very knowing American" who believes that infants taste good. Swift allows us to create our own trap that we sping on ourselves when we hastily dismiss the narrator as an outrageous figure of madness, a quaint figure of literature who can make us feel safe because we know that certainly we are better than him, that certainly we are not cruel and insane like him.

When we dismiss the narrator of "The Modest Proposal" by affirming our own moral hygiene and turning him into the dark, immoral "Other," which is what most readers of Swift's piece do, we have essentially become the true object of Swift's attack. In the context of "The Modest Proposal," Swift could care less about the narrator as an individual. The individual does not exist. The humble narrator is as real for Swift's purposes as a bogey-man under the bed. But when we affirm our own sense of morality, our own inherent goodness, by turning the narrator into a lunatic who has nothing whatsoever to do with us, we become a real, flesh-and-blood figure of Swift's scorn. Have we not, Swift asks, objectified human suffering in our life too, turned our neighbor into a number, treated problems in the world in terms of expediency and cost-effectiveness, and transformed holocausts and genocides into statistics? By rejecting the narrator of "A Modest Proposal" via accepting our own moral soundness, we have divided ourselves from our own moral shortcomings. We have cast the first stone. Once we divide ourselves from otherness, we are not that far from adopting the very mindset that the narrator exhibits. We have judged by objectifying when we should judge by self-scrutiny. Christ said pretty much the same. Although Swift was representative of the Age of Reason, he was also a Protestant minister who believed that the path to Reason and the knowledge of God begins with self-knowledge.

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