Tilting at Windmills – Timshel (archive)

(archived from June 3, 2015)

by Scott Creighton

With the recent setbacks such as Obama getting his Trade Promotion Authority (fast tracking) and yesterday’s passage of the U.S. A. “Freedom” Act, one can’t help but feel we’re tilting at windmills out here in blogger land. Some would say (and have repeatedly said) that we’re fighting an enemy that doesn’t exist. One that we have created ourselves out of targets we can’t possibly understand. That we fear the future and wish to return to a simpler, more romantic period that we have idealized because we simply can’t adapt to the world as it is now.

Currently we’re looking at a countdown to the fascist TPP and TTIP, which by all rational accounts will end the sovereignty of every nation that signs onto them and decimate legal protections set forth by those countries on behalf of global business interests in terms of environmental protections,  worker’s rights, consumer’s rights, internet freedom, privacy protections, small business protections, intellectual property rights and so much more.

 

 Don Quixote, his horse Rocinante and his squire Sancho Panza after an unsuccessful attack on a windmill. By Gustave Doré.

Right now our batting average isn’t that good and with Fast Track in his hands, President Peace Prize is poised and ready to do the bidding of his real masters with the help of all his Vichy Dem friends and GOP allies.

Unemployment is way up and the more people who get laid off, the lower the unemployment rate goes.

Obama and team are poking a stick in Putin’s eye every chance they get while simultaneously staging provocative military actions in the South China Sea.

“ISIS” is everywhere we want to be and the magical terrorist organization that no one can seem to bomb while they stage massive parades on U.S. vehicles complete with ‘come bomb us” flags blowin in the wind are supposedly in Mexico and Detroit by this time.

And of course the ponzi scheme that is our trickle-down economy can’t possibly last too much longer and soon enough it’ll be cheaper for me to paper my office wall with hundreds than it will be to paint it.

But of course, our enemies are fictitious aren’t they?

We’re just tilting at windmills.

NAFTA was great, there is no “new world order” planned and things like the Freedom Act and the Patriot Act don’t need bomb threats called in on planes in the air or anthrax attacks to get them passed through congress because they’re so good for us at keeping the terrorists at bay.

They don’t want to harvest all your “tangible things”

If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.

If you see something, say something.

Snitching is patriotic.

Of course, the FBI isn’t constantly staging fake terrorist plots for them to foil.

Of course, we went into Iraq because they had weapons of mass destruction and not at all for oil and wealth and hegemony.

We don’t torture, we don’t kill kids with drones. We’re the good guys.

Cops haven’t killed 400 people this year (yet) and everyone has a choice as too whether they want to stick 16 immunizations into their kids before they learn a language with which they can ask ‘why?”

And steel framed building fall down symmetrically all the time due to office fires.

Tilting at windmills?

What if I told you, like all other things, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha may not mean what it appears to mean at first glance? What if I told you it was a bellwether, not an instruction manual? That it was a tragedy and a comedy depending entirely on where you were when you read it? When you were when you read it? Would I be alone in that interpretation?

No.

Grossman has stated: 

“The question is that Quixote has multiple interpretations… and how do I deal with that in my translation.I’m going to answer your question by avoiding it… so when I first started reading the Quixote I thought it was the most tragic book in the world, and I would read it and weep… As I grew older…my skin grew thicker… and so when I was working on the translation I was actually sitting at my computer and laughing out loud. This is done… as Cervantes did it… by never letting the reader rest. You are never certain that you truly got it. Because as soon as you think you understand something, Cervantes introduces something that contradicts your premise. Edith Grossman

Sometimes you have to venture further in to get out and sometimes you have to go back to move forward. It’s a fact of life. The trick is being able to recognize those times in spite of conventional wisdom and the slings and arrows that come with it.

Am I tilting at windmills? Am I, are we, that man lying on his back pictured above with his emaciated horse lying next to me? Or am I, are we, Don Quixote as depicted in another painting; riding tall on a stallion trying our best to explain the way the world should be to our fat, squat realist sidekick riding on his donkey?

The choice is yours. Timshel.

But yeah, I’m tilting at windmills. And proud to be doing it in honor of all those Don Quixotes who came before me. After all, they are only windmills until we prove they’re dragons.

So keep your heads up all you Dons out there. It’s always darkest…

Don Quixote de la Mancha and Sancho Panza, 1863, by Gustave Doré.