And Jonathan Swift must be very pleased he is not alive these days. Satire is nearly impossible in an age when “eat the rich” is taken as a serious threat. (I mean, come on — there’s no meat on the women, and the men are all gross chin fat.) How would he even deal with what’s happening on farms across America? Thanks to reactionary crackdowns on illegal immigration, tomatoes are rotting in the fields of Alabama, the apple orchards in Washington State are reeking of fermentation and even the tree testicles in California are dropping for lack of avocado harvesters. But now the “authorities” have come up with a solution: Put convicts to work in the fields. So a state can conceivably contract with a private prison to lock up immigrants and then turn right around and bus them to the jobs they were doing before big money corrupted democracy. But now taxpayers will cover the housing and health care. Somewhere Anne Frank is quailing. . .