CORTEZ AND QUIXOTE

My friends at the Wall Street Journal told me that Letters Editor Ned Crabb just couldn’t handle my response to the January 25 WSJ editorial “Quixotic Journey,” celebrating the 400th anniversary of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. “Let’s say it went a little bit over his head, Jack,” was how they put it.

So here it is for your enjoyment.

Dear Ned,

The 400th anniversary of the publication of Miguel de Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” is nothing to celebrate. It would be celebrating a curse.

Contrary to what we have been told all our lives, history is not written by the victors. History is made by the victors, but it is the poets who write it. Spain’s – and Mexico’s – great tragedy is that there never was a Spanish Homer who immortalized the monumental heroism of Cortez. Instead, the Spanish got a smart-aleck novelist, Cervantes, who ridiculed Spanish heroic values in Don Quixote. It has been downhill for Spain ever since.

The epic crusade of Cortez in 1519-1521 to eliminate the indescribably evil religion of the Aztecs and to replace it with Christianity should be one of the most celebrated stories in all literature. Cervantes, born in 1547 in Andalusia where over one third of Cortez’s Conquistadores came from and several retired to, had ample opportunity to personally meet those who participated in the Liberation of Mexico. He could have been inspired to write an epic about Cortez as the Spanish Ulysses. Instead he wrote a satire that inspired no one. “Tilting at windmills” is a metaphor for wasting one’s life. An apt metaphor for Spain and Mexico deprived of the genuinely heroic model of Cortez.

Cordially,

Jack Wheeler