[I submitted this anonymously, including the fake intro (so they would understand it was satire) to the Emory Wheel. I didn’t expect them to publish the cover letter, but evidently they felt it helped identify the piece as satire. It was published Tuesday, February 6, 1973, on page 5, under my high school pen name, D. J. Swift (i.e., “Dean Jonathan Swift”).
If there was ever a satire about a national abortion lottery (I’ve no recollection of this), it does’t survive in my journals or papers. A month later they published my follow-up, Conditioning Produces Happy Utopia.]
Note to the Editor from the Publisher:
I’m supposed to introduce you to D. J. Swift in this letter. Included is Part I of an essay by him called The Idiocy of Emotion. D. J. Swift if you don’t know is really an alias for a sophomore here on campus whom I’ve known for a little over a year. He doesn’t want his real name to be known. He also doesn’t want me to sign my real name to this letter.
D. J. S. (I’ll call him) writes things that are really satirical. I like to think of him as a modern Jonathan Swift, but he says not. He writes things so seriously that a lot of people don’t even know it’s really satire. In one column that I’ve seen that he’ll send in a few weeks I think, he proposes a national abortion lottery. He seems so serious that it’s scary, even though you know he’s really being satirical.
But he wants to scare people. He doesn’t want anybody to know that it’s satirical. That way they take it seriously instead of laughing it off.
Sincerely yours,
Mary X (made up)
The Idiocy of Emotion
by D. J. Swift
What this great industrial nation really needs is less emotion and more reason. Far too often people allow their stupid, senseless emotions to control their behavior rather than common sense and reason. Emotions and feelings are not scientific and logical. When people fall victim to their feelings they are falling victim to illogical, non-sensible impulses, whereas those who listen to reason and common sense are listening to the bearers of scientific truth and objectivity. It is obvious that all who claim to be modern and intelligent should listen only to the clear light of reason and not to illogical emotions and feelings.
The fault of listening to emotions and feelings over clear reason can especially be found in today’s young people, and this accounts for some of their ridiculous political and social views. For instance, if they used their reason, they would see that our industrial wastes must go somewhere and that our skies, rivers and oceans are the most convenient places.
But instead, these idiots (for anyone who puts his feelings over his reason is an idiot) allow their baseless emotions to tell them that our skies and forests and rivers and oceans and cities are losing their “beauty”—as if such a thing actually mattered; or that we shouldn’t put up with with such inconveniences as black, choky air and grime-filled, dirty-dishwater rivers, when it is clear to all who use their reason that this is the price for progress. And a small price it is indeed, considering what we’re getting. And we’re getting an awful lot.
Let’s use our God-given reason to find out just what we’re getting. First, we’re getting all kinds of good and essential products—things like TV’s, potato chips, extra-soft toilet paper, bombs, and even cigarettes that are a silly millimeter longer (you get maybe three or four extra puffs). These are the types of things that bring comfort and satisfaction to our lives—the only things that can give us true happiness and real meaning in life.
Second, we’re getting employment—jobs and positions that have to be filled. And employment means money—money with which to buy the real and meaningful things mentioned above. And because some jobs are better than others, we can demonstrate our intellectual superiority over our friends and neighbors by competing for and obtaining the more prestigious and higher-paying jobs. We can walk with pomp and pride among people. And also with our increased pay we can buy even more of the above-mentioned meaningful goods and thereby demonstrate concretely our superiority and importance.
And all this gives us a chance to be creative—to prove our acting ability by playing out the roles of each of our positions, our occupations as society has told us those roles are supposed to be played. This also gives us a feeling of security and importance. Indeed, if we don’t play the roles of our positions correctly, we may well lose those positions and be forced to take lower ones—thereby losing importance and respectability.
This is good, for this is competition, and as everyone knows, competition is the greatest thing in the world. This is everybody striving to maintain—even increase—the separateness, importance, and identity of their position. (Certainly much better than trying to maintain or increase the separateness, importance, or identity of an “individual” which our senseless emotions tell us to do.) You see, individuals die and go away to be replaced by others throughout history, but society, its roles and positions, are much, much more permanent.
Therefore they are more important.