RUTHFULLY YOURS

A VERRAY PARFIT GENTLE KNIGHT BY MALCOLM FORBES
Amid the celebratory hullaballoo marking the quadricentennial of Shakespeare’s death, it is worth remembering that 400 years ago another writer died, one whose greatest work also transformed literature and created a new way of seeing the world.

On publication in 1605, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha became an international bestseller and brought Miguel de Cervantes, an aging, crippled veteran of Spain’s wars, fame and fortune after years of moderate artistic success, financial loss, imprisonment and disillusionment. Readers delighted in the picaresque scrapes and adventures of Cervantes’ comic double-act: Don Quixote, a humble nobleman whose obsession with chivalric romances has deluded him into thinking he is a knight errant; and Sancho Panza, his dumpy, trusty squire who is “a little short of salt in the brain-pan”. The book was such a hit that Cervantes sent his characters out on fresh sallies in a sequel ten years later. Both volumes became one classic, an imperishable cornerstone of Western culture, and a source of pleasure and inspiration for generations of readers and writers.

Chiming with the anniversary of Cervantes’ death comes a book on him and his famous creation. The Man Who Invented Fiction is not a traditional biography of Cervantes. In his introduction, William Egginton, a professor of literature at Johns Hopkins University, explains that his book explores Cervantes’ life in order to demonstrate how the author achieved his “innovation”. “I hope to cast a new light on what fiction is,” Egginton writes, “and to show how it was that Miguel de Cervantes came to invent it.”

Much of Cervantes’ life consisted of encountering and surmounting hard knocks, and weathering the debilitating fug of desengaño, or disappointment, which plagued late-16th-century Spain. His father was hounded by creditors and eventually jailed, which resulted in a childhood spent largely on the move and blighted by poverty and dishonour. Egginton’s early chapters depict an adolescent Cervantes seeking solace by writing poetry.

However, the book truly takes off when he trades his native Spain and relative peace for Italy and war. He participates in great battles, makes treacherous voyages and suffers many injuries, including the permanent loss of feeling in his left hand. Egginton argues that Cervantes’ later fiction is shot through with ambivalence towards war: a deft seesawing whereby a character is seen lauding or enacting individual deeds of valour while in the same breath condemning the practice of warfare and skewering the state for its merciless treatment of soldiers.

Cervantes was held captive for five years in Algiers (during which time he made four unsuccessful escape attempts) and later wound up in jail in Seville. According to Egginton, both internments provided valuable first-hand material to draw on for Don Quixote. Cervantes’ stinking cell in Seville exposed him to the wild stories and perspectives of numerous rogues and outcasts. Algiers engendered the intercalated “Captive’s Tale”. Egginton goes on to make the convincing claim that while capitalising on the traumatic memory of his captivity to create fiction, Cervantes was in turn using fiction as a means of helping himself overcome that trauma. What’s more, in writing invented stories to deal with his personal pain, “Cervantes was inaugurating a particularly modern use of literature.”

On Memorial Day, the flowers bloom. A dozen towns in a dozen states all claim that it began there when after the long weary struggle of the Civil War, the mothers and sisters of the lost and the fallen brought fresh cut flowers to bring a touch of life to the dead men entombed in the cold, gray stone.

“From the silence of sorrowful hours, The desolate mourners go, Lovingly laden with flowers, Alike for the friend and the foe,” reads the famous Francis Miles Finch poem which helped popularize the practice.

Today the wars are no longer fraternal. The First World War is the last war that had anything brotherly in it. It was a war where soldiers from both sides could observe a Christmas truce and hurl nothing deadlier than snowballs at each other. The end of that terrible war on the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” became Armistice Day and then, when the “war to end all wars” did not end them, but instead gave way to wars fought against terrible evils, Nazism, Communism, Islam, it became Veteran’s Day to remember those who would go on sacrificing in this eternal struggle against evil.

But while wars are no longer fraternal, the flowers are laid now on the graves of foes, not friends.

The men and women who die fighting for the cause of freedom are not accorded a fraction of the tender affection from the press that it lavishes on a single imprisoned Al Qaeda terrorist. We live today in an America in which the butchers of the Jihad in Guantanamo Bay receive better medical care than veterans waiting endlessly at the VA. While Obama cut off hot meals for Marines in Afghanistan, Islamic terrorists in Guantanamo Bay were enjoying lemon baked fish, honey glazed chicken, lyonaise rice, tandouri chicken breast, okra, hummus, dates, honey and seasoned lentils.

While veterans died at the VA, the men they had fought and helped capture were gifted with a $750,000 soccer field. This treatment is an obscene echo of the days of segregation when German POWs were allowed to sit inside at eateries while the African-American soldiers who guarded them had to wait outside. This segregation no longer occurs by race, but by patriotism and creed.

Obama denies that Islamic terrorism exists and suppresses any training materials about the role of Islam in Islamic terrorism while his administration warns of domestic terror threats from veterans. Muslim migrants from Syria receive lavish social benefits while health care for veterans is slashed. The Muslim migrants, many of whom support Islamic terrorists, benefit from job programs while veterans head for the unemployment line. This hatefully discriminatory attitude has become pervasive on the left.

Hollywood bends over backward to avoid accurately portraying Muslim terrorists, but depicts returning veterans as unstable killers and ticking time bombs. The media gushes over each petty Islamophobia grievance, like Tahera Ahmad, who claimed that she didn’t receive a Diet Coke can on a plane only because she was Muslim, while sweeping the sweeping the thousand veterans who died because of the VA scandal under the progressive prayer rug. A Muslim Diet Coke matters more than a thousand dead veterans.