In today's NY Times, literary theorist William Egginton unwittingly exposes the weakness of his defense of Cervantine irony in the rational battle against "a fictional world that is always in danger of being sold to us as reality":
[I]f the fictional worldview allows for ... manipulation [by politicians and the media], it also gives us the tools to fight back — tools Cervantes already developed at the dawn of the modern age....
When [Stephen] Colbert pushed his [2006 Correspondents' Dinner] act to its extreme, roasting Mr. Bush and the Washington press corps in their presence ... [he] used irony to sever his audiences’ conflated identities; the discomfort and hilarity of his act stemmed from our watching as fictions that had blurred into truths were expertly extracted and revealed for what they were.
But to what effect? -- that is, to what lasting effect?
A mere four years later a quixotic, delusionally motivated electorate installed a neo-Bushian House whose blurred untruths make the George W. Bush administration's "fictions" look like laudable exercises in High Logic, which themselves were the (seeming) culmination of 40 years of intellectually disingenuous butchery. One can understand a subsequent generation's forgetfulness, yet in this 21st-century instance many of the very same people who so deeply suffered at the incompetent hands of Bushism turned right around and re-empowered a kind of Bushism-squared.
This collective act of self-destruction tempts one to observe that the far right's evangelical partisanship, staggering ignorance and brutal subordination of disbelief are converting us into a nation of Sancho Panzas; but that would be unfair to the slyly observant squire, who, by Part II, confesses to the duchess, "I consider my master, Don Quixote, to be stark raving mad."
So, yet two years later again, there is again hope. But to what lasting effect?
Notwithstanding his piercing critiques, Cervantes' Spanish empire went the delusional way of Britain's, Russia's, and Rome's; all of their Sancho Panzas realized far too late that their masters were stark raving mad. They failed to take timely collective action against the madness, or just plain willful ignorance.