Don Bushote?

Posted on May 28, 2004 in Accountability Campaign 2004 Reading

It’s politics Friday!

Rereading through a book of quotes that I have compiled over the years, I came upon a few extracts from Don Quixote. It struck me that these declarations of madness sound all too much like America today. Consider, for example, this expectation of loyalty in the light of the Bush Administration’s calls to “trust us”:

The essence of the matter is that you must believe, confess, affirm, swear, and maintain it without seeing her.

Here I see a parallel to our feelings upon seeing the collapse of the two towers and the decapitation of Nick Berg:

“I didn’t fall,” said Sancho, “but I got such a shock from seeing my master tumble that my body aches all over, as if I had been beaten black and blue.”

“That may well be,” said the inkeeper’s daughter, “for very often I’ve dreamt I fell off a tower and never reached the ground. And when I’ve woken up, I’ve found myself as bruised and bumped as if I had really tumbled.”

Here Don Quixote speaks about atrocity:

Where have you ever heard or read of a knight errant being brought before a judge, however many homicides he may have committed?

Since the play Man of La Mancha put us in the head of Don Quixote and bade us to go chasing after windmills, we have forgotten the satiric character of this masterpiece. Don Quixote — especially in the first book — figures as an out of control madman who is accountable to no one. (The more humane Don Quixote appears in the second book, written 15 years after the first.) His escapades lead us to laugh: yet are they not horrific in real life? The self-imagined knight stands only a step away from the rest of us and from the world where we live. George W. Bush’s antics seem comic when we read about them in blogs but they are grimmer than satire when we remember that this is no fictional character but a fool with cruise missiles for a lance and the Middle East as a windmill.

As the Don himself observed:

For the devil’s a sly one, and things start up under a man’s feet which make him trip and fall, without his knowing how or why.

That summarizes the last four years of American politics.