And I Was Like Wow!

One of my favorite scenes in Don Quixote has the knight and Sancho Panza looking down at two clouds of dust approaching each other in the distance. Don Quixote declares that they are being raised by two great armies in a famous battle he has read about. Sancho points out that in reality they are two flocks of sheep, but his master chides him by saying, “I tell you, and it is therefore true,” that those are two armies that are about to engage in a famous battle. He charges downhill, attacks one of the flocks of sheep, and ends up having to pay for the ones he has killed.

In a previous post I characterized the overall theme of literature of the Renaissance and Baroque periods as reality and illusion. I wonder whether our generation is returning to a similar situation. “I tell you, and it is therefore true,” is very close to what a lot of our politicians are laying on us today. A woman I dated for a while criticized me for going by the dictionary definition of the word lie, which is a statement that fails to correspond to the facts. Stunned at this latest frontal attack by postmodernity on the roots of Western civilization, I asked her what her definition of the word was. She responded, “Any statement that is used against me is a lie. Any statement I make to my own advantage is not a lie.”

To say the least, reality and illusion get seriously scrambled in that sort of ideology. Earlier, in fact, she had informed me that whenever she and I got into an argument, we were not going to deal with the facts, but with feelings. Images ran through my head of her going back and sleeping with the psychotic I learned she had been living with, and then declaring that the point was that she felt good about it. How did I feel about it? Were my feelings selfish?

Obviously, the exacerbated relativism of our age comes into play in a major way in all this. I may have mentioned reading of a university student who claimed that no act of any human being could be criticized as being wrong. When questioned about Hitler and the Holocaust, he said, “Hitler probably had his reasons.” So the question that emerges is just how far this society plans to go in his direction (the student’s, not Hitler’s, although the latter’s will eventually come into play), and with what sort of consequences.

For that matter, how many people even understand the concept of consequences anymore? A profound lack of such understanding has a lot to do with the present financial crisis in this country. “Hey, it feels good to buy this McMansion, so let’s do it. We’ll figure out some way to make the payments.” Then there are the banks that sell huge numbers of mortgages without giving any thought to the fact that many of them will leave those banks with foreclosed houses on their hands. Reality and illusion.

And what’s happening to our young people in all this? I’m convinced that their maddening use of “like” sixteen times per sentence relates to the fact that they don’t even find themselves capable of stating for certain that anything is real. That’s where the all too common phrase, “I was like” comes in. I can only simulate reality, including my own existence. Some years ago, there was a rash of teenage girls cutting themselves, and a number of them stated when questioned that if they bled they knew they were real.

Our troops out there “in harm’s way,” as they state it, have less trouble determining what is real. Many of them state that a whole new phase of life begins when they realize that those bullets whizzing by, or those roadside bombs, mean a lot of people out there want to kill them. What would it take to jerk the general public into a realization of the fact that life, death, taxes and the threat of socioeconomic breakdown are real?

Don Quixote eventually goes home and finds a real identity, which is what he has really been looking for all along. Whereas at the beginning of the text the author isn’t even certain of his name, he settles down as Don Alonso Quijano the Good. The former knight is a lot less interesting but also a lot less dangerous to himself and others.