Beyond Quixotic Climate Change Melancholy; Or, Sancho Knows Bullshit When He Smells It

(With some help from William Egginton y Bradley Nelson)

Eric Drooker’s 15 Nov 2021 cover for The New Yorker, titled “The Impossible Dream,” exploited the melancholy figure of Don Quixote to make an ominous comment on the Glasgow Climate Change Conference. In response I wrote a letter which, revised with input from William Egginton (on early modern and current politics) and Bradley Nelson (who asked “Where is Sancho?”), I sent to the editor of The New Yorker on behalf of the Cervantes Public Project. I reproduce it here, with my own Spanish version. The New Yorker did not choose to publish it, but Steven Hessel invited Eric Drooker to discuss the cover with William Egginton and me on his podcast Pod Quixote, in the 24 Nov 2021 episode.

Dear Editor,

Eric Drooker’s latest cover depicts Don Quixote, alone, his lance lowered, gazing forlornly at wind turbines that represent “the impossible dream” of renewable energy replacing fossil fuels, while in the distance a city is engulfed by flames under an overheated sky. This powerful image inverts the mad knight’s relationship to the windmills he usually attacks, converting them instead into his allies against corporations that put their profits before the needs of all humanity. Originally, though, Cervantes’ anti-hero served to mock the illusions propagated by a failing political order as it struggled to hold its power over an increasingly alienated and suffering populace. Drooker hails from the Lower East Side, where back in the 70s a street theater spectacle, Don Quixote of Loisaida, repurposed Quixote’s chivalric-carnivalesque mission to emblematize the resistance of the downtrodden. Sadly, Man of La Mancha’s saccharin idealism watered that rebellion down to the point of unrecognizability. Where is the mirth? Where community? In a word, where is Sancho? The comic understanding of Cervantes’s masterpiece as political satire points beyond desperate utopianism. In the version of Don Quixote he would rewrite for our time, his loony egomaniac would trumpet the truisms of supply-side economics, wage righteous war against tax increases of any kind, and defend the honor of much-maligned corporations—all the while exposing by the sheer absurdity of his exploits the vacuity of the super-wealthy’s claims to self-sufficiency and the emptiness of the instant-gratification consumerism quite literally fueling the warming of our planet.

Above: My supplement to Drooker’s cover, in which Sancho is incorporated in the only way that made any sense, defecating next to his master, as he does in the fulling-mills episode, Part One, Ch. 20. Here the growing pile of excrement at Dapple’s feet represents the shit the world leaders were slinging in Glasgow.