Here’s an excerpt of a paper I wrote as an undergraduate (had to go get it out of a box in the garage…how many of you other people have boxes with old papers, transcripts, letters, and naked photos of your college girlfriends hanging out in the garage? It’s amazing what you find when you go through this stuff):

A Modest Proposal Concerning the U.S. Internal Revenue Tax Codes
Assignment: State and defend one government policy or law change that would have a significant effect on American poverty as discussed in this class.
My proposal is simple.
I believe that we should alter the Internal Revenue codes to make it mandatory to file IRS tax returns every year, regardless of the filers’ income. And I believe that we should further make it a crime to earn less than the designated ‘poverty’ level, and make that crime punishable by death.
I believe that the causes of poverty in America are complicated and have deep roots not only in our economic structures, but in our social and political history as well. To suggest one policy change and assume that it would have a significant long-term effect on the percentages of people who live in poverty is simplistic.
Unless we strike at the root of the poverty problem: the poor.
By taking the one step of eliminating the poor, we can eliminate poverty in America!
…

Commenter Chuck Pelto triggered the thought that maybe I should pre-empt his promised Fisking by quickly explaining the use of satire, it’s identifying characteristics, and the difference between satire, a ‘joooke’, a hoax, and ‘kidding’.
Let’s take my own work, above, as a starting place.
This was for an upper-division undergraduate economics class, taught by an avowed Marxist. He focused on urban poverty in the U.S. as the base condition of advanced capitalist societies, as I recall.
My paper went on to explain the economic benefits to the surviving taxpayers, as tax-evasion would vanish, new jobs in the courts and execution systems would be created, and how we wouldn’t have to worry ourselves about those unseemly poor people cluttering up our cities.
Now my intent, as I reread it (it was too damn long ago for me to have any real recollection) was a) to make the point that there were poor people and that letting them starve probably wasn’t the desirable public policy solution; b) to satirize the simplistic thinking I was seeing from teachers and fellow students who believed that if only we would implement the single-tax, or the negative income tax, or some other simplistic policy that the problem of poverty would go away. I didn’t believe that it would.
Now I won’t try and defend the quality of satire that I was attempting. I was a sophomore in college, and it was doubtless sophomoric, regardless of my self-identification as a peer of Swift.
But the point of satire is, as defined political: The term satire commonly refers to a specific genre or simply a style or tone in literature that employs great wit to point out in a mocking or humorous manner the human frailties or maliciousness of individuals, groups, or the whole of mankind, usually in order to prompt a correction.
From Saxon, Shaun. “Definitions of Five Literary Terms.” The Official Shaun Saxon Website. 1998. 13 August 2000.
My point was both to create empathy for the poor (as opposed to the heartless Capitalists we were learning about) and to suggest that simple solutions would have to be Draconian to work.
I wasn’t making a joke (which would be the logical defense of students dressed in blackface). It wasn’t a hoax (dropping a pink-painted watermelon wrapped in a blanket off the third-floor library balcony while screaming “my baby!” would have qualified as a hoax). And I wasn’t kidding. I was deadly serious about the issue then (as I am now). I just attempted to use a time honored literary form to make my point, by radically exaggerating a position I knew would be abhorrent to the reader and which I hoped would get the reader to consider their positions on the subjects.
Now my personal experience…the professor was horrified, and scrawled “Zyklon B??” on my paper, and I had to go to the library and get him a copy of the Swift book before he’d reconsider and read the paper for credit…may be coloring my defense of Burk in this.
But there’s more.
Reproductive rights and responsibilities are, sadly, like the child King Solomon for whom was asked to judge between mothers. They are fundamentally indivisible, and yet we have to divide them if for no other reason than that men and women each bear different portions of each.
I think that contemporary feminism is no more a monolith than contemporary conservatism or contemporary gun-rights advocacy. They are not Johansen blocks, they are French pastries…Napoleons (known in France as mille-feuilles or ‘thousand sheets’) which consist of a series of distinct layers, each different from its neighbor.
And I do agonize over how to deal with abortion and parental rights. Abortion is brutal because there are three interests which must be considered…the mother’s, the father’s, and the future child’s. I think we are doing a bad job of balancing those interests today; more on this later, it will be a long discussion.
And I believe we are doing a bad job of balancing the interests of men and women and children in allocating parental rights and responsibilities. I’m a twice-divorced father of three sons, and believe me this issue cuts close to home. I have close to the ideal relationships with my ex-es and have my sons more often than not (except for Virginia Guy), and I can tell you how I had to fight the innate logic of the system to get to this point (and have to give props to the moms as well for accepting that this was the way to go). More on this too.
And agree or disagree with Burk, unlike some other layers in the feminist pastry, she’s raising a legitimate issue is suggesting that is contraception was a purely male issue, face it – we’d be all about legal abortions. So I keep feleing that people who are attacking the form of her argument are just being dishonest, and taking a page from LBJ’s political playbook (in mentioning that “his honorable opponent was a pig-fucker”, his comment was “I just want to hear him deny it in public.”)