"My Little Grildrig, you have made a most admirable panegyric upon your country; you have clearly proved, that ignorance, idleness, and vice, are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied, by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. . . I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth."

So we see that disdain for government is an ancient custom and nothing unique to our jaded modern times.

I love this kind of satire, and I wish more people would write this way these days. And I love this kind of fantasy, in which Swift can indulge us in visits to the exotically mundane (such as Japan) and the brilliantly sterile, such as the land of the Houhynyms -- the closest those in pre-Star Trek days ever got to Vulcan.

I read this book first as a young kid--had to, one of my cousins got the book for me for Christmas. I remember then being struck by Gulliver's visits to the land of talking horses. That part still intrigued me on this more recent read-through, as he satirizes a society so intelligent yet so bereft of emotion that its intelligence is shadowed by its own disconnect from reality.