Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba takes you back, dear reader, to the Common Era year 1965. In which the starry-eyed idealism of Camelot and the Great Society is being taken down by flaming crosses, flaming Quakers, flaming Buddhists, and flaming babies bathed in napalmolive, as what was becoming the defining event of Baby Boomer history in these Untied States in North of America unfolded: Vietnam.
It was the year of the Beatles album Rubber Soul, and its heralding of the profound shift in the culture of the time from Peace Corps to peacenik, from changing reality for society by direct social action to changing reality for the self by direct pill, tab, jab (well OK, maybe not jab), snort, and smoke consumption. Turn on, tune in, drop out.
And it was the year that Dale Wasserman’s musical Man of La Mancha began its initial six-year run on Broadway and its 61-year-and-counting exhortation to English-speaking audiences not to drop out, not to quit on Camelot, not to give up the quest. The quest to be an agent of grace in the world, an agent of positive social change.
No matter how hopeless. No matter how far. No matter how painful, unto shame, bankruptcy, jail, exile, death.
No matter what the facts is.
The champion of fact in Man of La Mancha is one Sansón Carrasco, a physician (“doctor”) and styled, anachronistically and perhaps pointedly, a “Bachelor of Science”. Anachronistically, because Man of La Mancha, like its source, is set in early 17th century Spain, and the Bachelor of Science degree did not exist until it was first awarded by an English university in the 19th century. For pointedly, see “napalmolive”, supra; Carrasco is assigned to that class of subhumans which has maliciously created, and bestowed upon us, a planet with chemicals in it.
It falls to Carrasco the rascally task of curing Señor Alonso Quijana of his mad quest for courtesy and grace in the world, in the person of the knight errant Don Quixote de la Mancha, and returning him to the world of sanity and fact … a world in which the facts consign peasants to their stations, without recognition, without expectation, without respect; a world of maggots, morosely accepting, even grateful for, the dungheap on which they crawl.
A task at which Car-Rascal eventually succeeds … only to be undone by the pleas of a servant girl for whom Don Quixote’s lunacy is the last glimmer of hope, the final friable gossamer between herself and the life of misery, self-loathing, and despair to which the facts have consigned her.
Alas, the world is full of quests, great and ennobling in the eyes of those who envisage them, who promote them to others and get those others to buy in.
Against whom, those who plead the facts plead in vain. Because they report what people need to know, rather than what they wish to hear.
Because they don’t offer hope that what the people wish to hear can and will be, the facts be damned.
And, worst of all, because the adherence to facts (to the extent that it is given to us to know what they are) is itself a quest, ennobling in the eyes of those who envisage it, who promote it to others and get those others to buy in.
Alas.
For it is impossible for YFNA to sit in the orchestra pit for Man of La Mancha, horns in hand waiting on his cues, his back to the invisible stage, to hear Carrasco yell “These are the facts!” to Quixote, and not see him in a Fauci mask, the wreckage of the American Yankee scientific enterprise at his feet.
To hear Quixote yell back “The facts are the enemy of the truth”, and not see him in a blue suit and a red tie trailing past his diaper and onto the ground below.
To hear Aldonza plead with the dying Quijana to bring back Quixote and give her back the dream, the hope, of Dulcinea, and not see her wrapped in the Stars and Stripes, an anti-vaxx sign in her hand, and a MAGA cap on her head.
If you reach for an unreachable star, and succeed, what will you do with it?
Perhaps more importantly: what will it do with you?
Speaking of napalmolive.