Councilperson Insults Local Citizen (AND All Those Who Can Read)

One with conscience and integrity would never have welcomed the landslide re-election of the syndicate to the city council … until now. Because after all, if these pseudo-intellectuals would not have been “elected”, we would not be so entertained by being entreated to the most inanely bizarrely vacuously sanguine musings since Hermann Göring’s rants at the Nuremberg trials.

With an unquestionable first grade understanding after having thumbed through the “Don Quixote for Idiots” version of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s tome, a councilperson seeks to impugn the motives of a local resident exercising a constitutional right – an intolerable act to these “elected” councilors – by blathering the most prostituted interpretation of El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha ("The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha") since the masterpiece was written 404 years ago.

Lest anybody takes what is “written” by the councilperson as a correct interpretation of Don Quixote’s travails, consider but just a microcosm of the reality which is the novel. This classical work is a satire of truth and convention, and through what today’s talking heads would consider cynicism, challenges certain humanistic tenets. The seeming fatalistic approach of tilling at windmills – imaginary enemies – by the Don serves to accentuate the futility through a series of spoofs of much of what we do for reasons that serve utterly no practical purpose whatsoever. At the time the work was written, chivalry was king; akin to today’s pompous power grabs founded on ignorance, ergo the novel’s staying power. Nearly everything in the work is farcical, even the names – the horse’s name Rocinante in the classical Spanish (Castilian) idiomatically translates into before a low-quality nag (now, re-read the novel and see how hysterically funny this is); and Dulcinea translates into an allusion to an illusion – namely, she never existed.

As one can see, the metaphor of using Don Quixote’s Dulcinea to denigrate the local citizen is so grotesquely inaccurate that it boggles the mind. Unlike Don Quixote, the local patriot doesn’t till at imaginary enemies – the syndicate is real, the failed and bankrupting STRP is real, the buried asbestos is real, the pulverized asbestos not a mile from two schools is real, the millions of gallons of toxic effluent dumped into the waterways is real, the spewing of noxious gas covering entire neighborhoods causing 900 residents to seek medical attention is real, a compromised FDEP is real, exposing a backroom deal to commercialize Track K is real … should one continue?

Can anyone be so obtuse that in an attempt to come across that they are literate, that they actually prove unequivocally that they are illiterate? Is this how these folks entrusted with the city study the legislation they vote on? Seems so.

By the way, Sancho Panza is Don Quixote's short, fat and utterly illiterate sidekick that is promised governorship of an island but is so uneducated that he willingly goes along with his handler believing that the promise is for some prize. Remind you of any councilperson?

For those interested in the original version in the original Castilian, please contact this blog – as we have a copy.