Dear reader, if you have not heard the illustrious tales of the ingenious gentleman Alonso Quixano – poor bloke that he was – allow me to introduce you: He was an avid reader of books, especially tales of old chivalry, and he lost himself so much in the language, trying to extricate the ‘wheres’ and ‘withals’ from the ‘wherewithals,’ that he went completely bonkers and became the famous Don Quixote de La Mancha.
I suspect I too will someday go mad (as literary mathematicians are, by and large, senile), but the reason will be quite different: politics instead of books. You see, I am often told I am who I am not, am affiliated with people I am not, am familiar with works I am not, and otherwise that my existence is not my own but one belonging to another person who possesses my name and (remaining) good looks. In trying to extricate myself from this not-me, I may too go mad.
Why should this have anything to do with politics? Because in politics, shortsightedness rules over all else. I have studiously avoided politics as much as possible in these columns, and even more so avoided taking one side or another. The one time I let myself dip into the shark-infested waters of abortion, I found myself assailed by praise and condemnation that had little to do with what I had written. I only wrote that I did not support a given anti-abortion law, and people assumed I was strictly pro-choice.
And so it goes: If I mention I support animal rights, people assume I am a member of PETA and vegetarian. If I mention I read conservative columnists, people assume I am conservative and pro-war. If I mention I want to be a professor, well, people stare slack-jawed at that point. It would be funny if it were not so often insulting.
Alas! The world is full of madmen. If one can be judged on what one never said or what another said instead, why should not windmills be giants and barber bowls be magicked helms?
The maddest today are the pundits. I once read punditry as Quixano read chivalry, seeking some higher understanding of human relationships, and I owe my sanity to having stopped. Pundits cannot gain any fame by critiquing or praising single persons, so they instead gloss over whole groups and ignore subtle and not-so-subtle distinctions between members. To a pundit there is no difference between a war protester and an enemy combatant, or between a soldier and a jingoistic bigot, so every liberal is claimed to be a fan of Pol Pot and every conservative of Fred Phelps.
Then, spawning from the pundits – still mad, but not so malicious – are their brainwashed followers. They take the pundit’s word as law and so devolve Internet debates into “You must not have met many” syndromes – or, more accurately, “U must not hav met mny” syndromes: A member of group X makes a sweeping generalization about group Y (heard from pundit Z), which in reality only describes a small portion of group Y and thus leads members of group Y to say “You must not have met many group-Y-ers.” Typically this is done in a snarky and derisive way toward group X, prompting, again, a YMNHMM response from a member of group X.
And so the categorization of people and the flattening of human complexity spirals down, from the pundits to their followers, to the politically curious and then to society as a whole. All would be solved in an instant if people learned to recognize others as individuals, not as a list of associated groups.
Sadly, at the end of Alonso Quixano’s life, he renounced all knight-errantry, blaming such problems on a passing insanity. Yet to me he was crazier then, crazier than he had ever been before: He stopped believing in himself and started believing what others believed about him.
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