A Quixotic Stalemate of Their Own Devising.
Cervantes in America.
The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, is the immortal tragi-comic narrative of narratives, by Miguel de Cervantes. Often known as just Don Quixote, the story concerns a man — His name is Alonso Quexano — alone in his library, forgoing sleep and meals to read and re-read fantastic tales of knighthood, chivalry and adventure of a bygone age. His mind is, ultimately, cracked by loneliness, loss of sleep, hunger, and repeated readings of these stories. He begins to believe in the stories and, in his mad, feverish, credulity, fashions a new persona for himself: he will become Don Quixote, a knight-errant seeking to right wrongs and duel evil in the hope of become the help for the helpless, in a fallen world. Donning rusted armor and a makeshift helmet, mounting an aged horse he goes forth, imagining himself in shining armor riding a noble stallion.
It doesn’t quite go as planned. I’d say this is a spoiler alert, but you’ve had 400 years to read the book. That seems long enough. In his mad rush to sally forth, the crazed Alonso Qexano, as Don Quixote, asserts his fantastic, paranoid, narratives at others. Some tolerate him, others humor him. Still more taunt him and condescend. He is ‘knighted’ by an innkeeper who does so just to get rid of him. He briefly returns to his home. His family, and his priest, in his absence, have burned many of his books and walled up access to the library, disengenously telling him that an enchanter ‘stole it away.’
Undetered, in his febrile wit he goes forth again and tries to do battle. This time he takes a loyal servant, Sancho Panza as a squire. He gets unhorsed by a windmill and beaten by goatherds. He tells fantastic tales and meets a variety of persons who tell even wilder tales. Somebody invariably gets hurt, usually Don Quixote or Sancho Panza, others simply run for the hills, first chance they get. It is an immense — the Edith Grossman translation is over 900 pages long — and complicated novel of narratives wrapped around tall tales, woven through chronicles, machinations, contrivances, and preening deceptions. To the extent that strangers meet each other, in the novel, it is the competing natures of their worldviews, self-talk, and paranoia that confront, and clash.
But always the ouroboros of narrative paranoia, what we today would call ‘conspiracy theories,’ circles back on itself, in both destruction and creation, sustaining itself without reflection on the wider world — that is to say, upon reality. It is a propulsive narrative that cannot keep living, but never dies.
Anything seem familiar about this story? Anything at all?
GOP voters in America are Cervantes’ orphans. They seethe, in their millions, cracked by isolation and a steady diet of ever more ingenious tales, just like Don Quixote. They believe in this same fall of the world as does Don Quixote, and they meet this fall with further narrative paranoia. Tilting at windmills and, with rage that feeds upon rage, they imagine they see the secret motives and underlying disdain of all the evil enchanters in all the world. Though, not without its comedy (‘Keep Your Government Hands of Medicare,’ purple-heart bandaids) it is mostly tragic: a great heavy blanket of deception; initially warm in its comforting embrace but abrupt and malignant in its will to provoke and to destroy.
Blue America is divided. They are the others who don’t know what to do when faced with mad provocation of self appointed knight errants. Some stand at a distance, distrustful of the facile yet impenetrable credulity displayed by the right. Others yell and push back, with a disbelieving rage, into the whirlwind, in a desire to punish the credulous, the deceived, and the deceivers alike. Still others pretend it’s… well… just another day in America.
So here we stand, unable to meet each other through the impenetrable miasma of story, narrative, lies, counter-lies and rage they’ve concocted. The blue, every last one of them, would truly like nothing better than for the red to stop believing lies, forgo anger and to stop fomenting, from drastic misprisions, calumny and rage. The red just see this as further feint to outmaneuver them. It is a Quixotic stalemate of their own devising.
The comedy of Don Quixote lies in the sweet natures of both Don Quixote and his squire, and friend, Sancho Panza. They both truly want to do good, meet beauty and honor with dignity and respect, and make right in strenuous battle against wrong… all this goes abruptly sideways at each and every opportunity.
The tragedy is that they can not possibly succeed if they have to manufacture the enemy and motives, for in that they are only fighting against themselves.
In the end Don Quixote and Sancho Panza limp home, broken and defeated. After a brief spasm of sanity, and repentence, the man repudiates the name Don Quixote and calls himself Alonso Qexano the Good. He writes out a will, leaving a small amount of his small estate to Sancho Panza and the remainder to his neice — with the proviso that she shall lose it all if ever she marries a man who reads books on chivalry — confesses himself and then he dies.
© Petr Swedock 2020