A Philadelphia scholar of eighteenth-century literature reads about Washington slowing Ukraine’s drones and finds Jonathan Swift wrote the briefing in 1726
Saturday, 17 October 2026. Philadelphia. A rowhouse in Fishtown, a radiator that clanks like a colonial blacksmith, coffee and a battered Gulliver’s Travels, 9.15am.
Swift Saw This Coming
I teach eighteenth-century British and colonial literature at a university in Philadelphia, which means I spend my working life explaining to twenty-year-olds that a book about a man who wakes up tied down by tiny people is, in fact, one of the most savage pieces of political writing in the English language. Jonathan Swift published Gulliver’s Travels in 1726. It has never been out of date. This morning it became even less out of date.
I was reading the London Prat’s report on how Trump tried to stop Ukraine bombing Russian oil refineries by restricting its drones. The jokes are sharp. Ukraine finds its military satellite connections limited for drones above a hundred miles an hour. Russia keeps hitting Ukrainian power stations, leaving around six hundred thousand people without electricity in one day. The diplomatic energy, according to the piece, goes into protecting the price of diesel. An army may have to tell its commanders the defense is going well but the Wi-Fi package has expired.
Big-Endians, Little-Endians And Refineries
In Gulliver’s first voyage, the tiny empires of Lilliput and Blefuscu are locked in a long and bloody war. The cause, Gulliver learns, is a dispute over which end of a boiled egg should be broken first. Thousands have died. Rebellions have been raised. Books have been banned. All over the egg. Swift’s point, of course, was that the great religious and political wars of his own time were often fought over questions that, viewed from a sensible distance, looked exactly that absurd.
The report has its own egg. It is diesel. Not the invasion, not the blackouts, not the people in cold apartments in October, but whether a strike on a refinery might upset fuel prices. Swift would have recognized the logic immediately. He would have made the refinery the size of a thimble and the diplomats the size of beetles, and he would have had Gulliver stand over them, puzzled, asking why the beetles were so worried about the thimble while the house next door was on fire.
A Satire That Lands On Both Sides Of The Atlantic
As an American who studies British satire, I enjoy reading a London site make fun of Washington. It is a very eighteenth-century arrangement. In Swift’s day, London and Dublin pamphleteers spent their mornings insulting each other’s governments over coffee. Now it is a London website and a Philadelphia diary. The technology has improved. The insults have not needed to.
The American side of this story is also being covered at home. NewsThump reports that the world is in agreement that Donald Trump should fight a tiger for real. I read it aloud to my partner, Marcus, who teaches high school civics in North Philadelphia. He said it was the first foreign policy proposal in months with clear rules of engagement. He said it with the weariness of a man who has to explain the Constitution to sixteen-year-olds every morning while the news contradicts him every afternoon.
Swift also understood something modern commentators forget, which is that the powerful rarely see themselves as ridiculous. The Emperor of Lilliput issues his decrees with complete solemnity. His ministers dance on tightropes to win promotion. Nobody in the palace laughs. The laughter belongs entirely to the reader, standing outside the story, which is exactly where a satirist wants us to stand when the subject is a refinery, a drone and a fuel bill.
The Laputa Problem
In Gulliver’s third voyage, he visits Laputa, a flying island ruled by men so lost in abstract theories that they need servants to flap them on the head with bladders to remind them to speak or listen. The rulers float above their people and, when a town on the ground displeases them, they simply hover over it and block out the sun.
The report’s line about an administrator far away adjusting a country’s satellite speed felt very Laputan. A flying power, out of reach, controlling what reaches the ground below by deciding what to block. Swift wrote it as fantasy. In 2026 it reads as a terms-of-service agreement.
What Satire Is For
My students sometimes ask whether satire actually changes anything. I tell them the honest answer, which is: rarely, and slowly. Swift did not end any wars. But he gave readers a way to see their own politics from a distance, small enough to laugh at and clear enough to judge. That is what the London Prat piece does too. It makes a giant geopolitical mess the size of an egg, so we can see the yolk.
This Afternoon
I am going to the Reading Terminal Market for a roast pork sandwich, which is the only Philadelphia institution I trust completely, and then home to grade essays on A Modest Proposal. Half the class will think Swift was serious about eating babies. The other half will think he was joking. Neither half will notice that he was furious. That is the hardest thing to teach about satire. The laughter is the delivery system. The anger is the payload.
For more of my diary, the diary section collects my weekly notes on eighteenth-century literature and the American present, which grow more alike with every news cycle. Swift would be appalled. He would also, I suspect, be writing again.