Why Gulliver's Travels Are Still Relevant
Gulliver's Travels is still relevant today because it presents a variety of social critiques and condemnations of branches of human activity that still exist today. I believe the goal in Swift's novel was to create something to achieve just that goal, or the goal of timelessness. It should already be a mediocre testament to this claim that students are required to read portions of Gulliver's Travels during their high school senior year. Swift makes a very relevant analogy between English society (which is very, very similar to modern day American government and two-party rule) with the Lilliputian's war with the Tramecksan, as well as the internal conflict of the Lilliputian's egg dilemma. The war with the Tramecksans is a good satire of today's wars because it is over something entirely trivial, the height of the heels of the two nation's peoples. This is easily comparable to a silly war over natural resources, which are the cause for most wars today. The internal issue with the Lilliputians raises analogies of the problems with intermingling church and state. In the beginning, the egg issue was something simply created by imperial law in Lilliputian society, but eventually it was written into their holy books. This is comparable today with so many presidential candidates having no problem with letting their religious ethics and ideologies preside over logic, but it also compares to the Vatican and English society with the Catholic Church's control of politics. Swift also has a pretty bold critique of monarchist or imperialist rule with the government and bureaucracy in general. Rather than keeping the interests of the people in mind, the ruler of the Lilliputians forges a law dictating the proper way to eat an egg (a satire of how trivial some laws are) based on an accident his son had. This is meant to show that law-makers generally have themselves and their kin in mind rather than the majority that the law will affect. This could be seen as a critique of