The Watering Hole: March 31 – Don Quixote

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza

Alonso Quijano was a retired country gentleman nearing fifty years of age, who lived in La Mancha with a niece and housekeeper. His reading of books of chivalry to an excess has caused an effect on him, leading to a distortion of his mental state. He accepted every word of the facets of chivalry to be true while chivalry was clearly fiction. Otherwise his wits were intact. He went out as a knight in search of adventure. He donned an old suit of armour, renamed himself “Don Quixote de la Mancha,” and named his skinny horse “Rocinante”. A neighboring farm girl became his lady love and he renamed her, the Dulcinea del Toboso, of which she knew nothing.

He set out ended up at an inn, which he believed to be a castle. He asked the innkeeper, whom he assumed to be the lord, to dub him a knight. He spent the night holding vigil over his armor and became involved in a fight with muleteers who tried to remove his armor from a horse trough so that they could water their mules. The innkeeper then dubbed him a knight just to be rid of him, and he went on his way. Don Quixote, next, “freed” a young boy who was tied to a tree and beaten by his master by making his master swear on the chivalric code to treat the boy fairly. The boy’s beating continued. and Don Quixote had a to-do with traders from Toledo, who denounced Dulcinea as a falsehood and severely beat him only to leave him on the road. He was later found and returned to his home by a peasant.

After recovering, Don Quixote approached a neighbor, Sancho Panza, and enlisted him as his squire, bestowing him governorship of an island. The uneducated Sancho agreed, and the pair sneaked off in the early dawn. It is here that their series of famous adventures begin, starting with Don Quixote’s attack on windmills that he believed to be giants. The two next encountered a group of friars accompanying a lady in a carriage. They were cloaked, as was the lady, as protection from the hot climate and dust. Don Quixote thought the friars to be enchanters who held the lady captive. He knocked a friar from his horse, and was subsequently challenged by an armed Basque travelling with the company. As he had no shield, the Basque used a pillow to protect himself.

In the course of their travels, the two protagonists met innkeepers, prostitutes, goatherds, soldiers, priests, escaped convicts, and scorned lovers. These encounters were intensified by Don Quixote’s imagination into chivalrous quests. fgoes.Don Quixote’s tendency to intervene violently in matters which did not concern him, and his habit of not paying his debts, resulted in many privations, injuries, and humiliations with Sancho always getting the short straw. At the end Don Quixote was persuaded to return to his home village.

Now this tale popped into my mind whilefollowing the campaign of Mitt Romney. Only falsehoods are used to fortify this modern errant knight in his drift to the Republican nomination. For the nation’s well-being, I can only hope that ‘Don’ Romney returns to his village. Otherwise, this nation is destined to enter the fray against imagined enemies!

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