Dr. Gulliver's satire

Swiftian satire -- it's the best form of satire I've ever encountered (hey, Chip Tsao , you better read this one). I am glad to have caught the movie version of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (starring Ted Hanson). I thought, thank goodness I wont have to read through the forbidding Irish English and torment my thoughts by running them through a food processor.

Of course, imagination is no match to the concrete visual interpretation of a movie director, but the movie is beguiling, a more-than-three-hour treat of one travel vignette after another, from Lilliput, the land of tiny people, to Brobdingnag, the land of giants, to a floating island peopled by crazed Indian astrologers, to a land of the Yahoos, where horses called Houyhnhnms philosophize like Socrates and mud-covered humanoid forms act lower than animals.

Only a man who had been bitterly estranged with humanity -- and survived it all by loving it anyway -- could write this wondrous tall tale. Swift is simply unforgettable in making the impossible plausible! I must read the original source.