The Lonely Goatherd Blog And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats - Matthew 25:32
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This article is outstanding in several directions, and Don Quixote now seems like exactly the right and perfect literary analogy for President Obama - give or take how much you think Obama believes his own supposedly idealistic BS.
The spectacle of a bombastic crackpot in medieval armor poking his lance at random objects is disquieting if you own and operate an industrial facility. It sends thrills up your legs if you share the noble
hidalgo's conviction that the perfectly functional, cereal-grinding, income-generating windmills are the embodiment of evil, spreading death and destruction.
When the first Don Quixote book was published in 1605, windmills were a major point of industry, such as it was then - the thing that people made their living on. Our modern Quixote is tilting at oil rigs and power plants among other things on which our modern lives and livelihoods depend. However, I was particularly amused as Mr Atbashian pointed out that among the modern quixotics, Ted Kennedy has famously been fighting actual windmills.
What seems to get lost about Don Quixote though is that Cervantes created him as an object of satire and ridicule. I get lost in the Spanish etymology, but the very name of the character is a play on being the ass of a horse. Quixote was from the dwindling end of the landed gentry of the feudal era. He was a blueblood who had largely blown his inheritance by laying around reading stupid romantic novels rather than taking care of business, who eventually slipped his gears and insisted on living in a noble past that never really existed where his knighthood and chivalry saves the day and earns the undying devotion of the serfs. I'm reminded of the only slightly exaggerated South Park version of Al Gore running around in a cape to save the world from Manbearpig.
It's a funny thing though how much people love even what they know to be stupid, self-aggrandizing idealism. The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha was a big hit for Cervantes, who eventually wrote a follow up book. In the end, the character loses his self-delusions, becoming again only the old fool Alonso Quixano, and basically dies of the heartbreak and disillusionment. The first novel was a big hit - and probably to this day the most seminal work of Spanish literature, and I'm to understand that there was substantial public unhappiness with this sad ending of a character who generated much affection.
Quixote is regarded as a classic literary example of the "holy fool." But really, fools are not holy - at some point they're just fools. The cheesy heroic self-aggrandizement of this one delusional old man was largely harmless, and you could take Quixote thinking that productive mills are evil giants to fight as romantic idealism.
Except that it's not nearly so cute when someone espousing that quixotic urge to destroy the modern productive machinery gets the reins of power, and the potential ability to do serious damage. Let's just hope that President Obama et al are no more successful in destroying our country than Quixote was in destroying that poor windmill.
