In the seventeenth century Miguel De Cervantes fictionalized the character of Don Quixote, a retired man obsessed with chivalric tales, who in a fit of madness transformed himself into a self-styled knight-errant. He saw the world through the lens of his chivalric fantasies and misinterpreted and magnified the mundane objects and events into things of goliath proportion. Despite the absurdity of his interpretations, Don Quixote remained firm in his belief in the fantastical nature of his quests.
However, to counter
the absolute madness of this maniac character, Cervantes complemented Don with
a side-kick, Sancho Panza, a man with the earthy wisdom. The
author’s purpose in writing the sequel was to expose the psychopathic libido for
grandeur in human mind with caution to one and all not to fall for it. He buried
the character after illustrating the futility of his quests and the inevitable
return to reality.
Now, Miguel de
Cervantes must be turning and twisting in his grave as the character he created
out of thin air has reincarnated in real life as Donald J. Quixote, a
disillusioned, mentally unstable man obsessed with MAGA. His total dedication
and unwavering disposition to his ridiculously misguided chivalrous fantasies
have thrown the entire world into topsy turvydom.
His Quixote like delusions
of grandeur have led him to believe he is the chosen one. Specially, after he
survived a bullet ripping through his ear, his belief in himself as of being of
divine origin and with super powers has escaped the boundaries of realism. The concerning
aspect of this real-life Quixote is, he has no side-kick like Sanzo Panza. In
contrast the people surrounding him are reinforcing his delusions of grandeur. Those
around him only feed his sense of grandiosity and they can be seen huddled into
collective prayer with Protestant pastors in the Oval Office.
Eventually he will
either move into remorse, grasping his head and regretting what he has done, or
sink into a deeper and more prolonged mania. Personally, I hope for a more poignant
ending like his 17th century fictional friend in which he renounces his
weird fantasies and unwanted bravado acknowledging the futility of his quests
and the reality of his condition. I wish he regains a sense of redemption and
acceptance, as he acknowledges the hollowness of MAGA and the reality of multilateralism.
