The fearless dreams of the Spanish Empire.

The fearlessness of the Spanish conquistadors is evident in their quests for fame and fortune. These men through cunning strength and sheer grit accomplished amazing feats giving rise to the term “soldier of fortune”. An example of this is when Cortez overcame the army of Montezuma by playing along with the popular Aztec myth about the god Quetzalcoat returning among the people. In this myth as you remember from an earlier post a white man with a beard would one day return who taught them about maize, medicine, fire, a calendar and how to induce drunkenness and hallucinations in religious ceremonies. Montezuma believed that Cortez was Quetzalcoat. Cortez did little to change his mind and used this deception to his advantage. The conquistadores were certainly opportunist.

Francisco Piazarro took the knowledge of Cortez’s conquest and built on it. With a hand full of men he was able to conquer the Incan empire when he exploited the conflict between two rival Incan groups. When Francisco Piazarro ransomed Sapa Inca Atahualpa the chief offered the conquistador a room 22’ by 17’ filled with gold. The chief delivered. After the Spanish melted down the gold and brought it back to Spain, Philip the V the Last of the Hapsburg kings used the wealth to create the largest navy armada to date. This newly created wealth eventually toppled the Spanish empire. Run away inflation made it impossible for Philip to sustain his war effort.

The Spanish missionary effort of mercy turned into a ruthless tactic when they brought blankets to the American Natives. The Spanish found that the diseases of Europe could be carried in these blankets and made gifts of them to the local natives. European diseases (smallpox, influenza, measles and typhus) to which the native populations had no resistance, and cruel systems of forced labor (such as the infamous haciendas and mining industry's mita), decimated the American population. African slaves, who had already developed immunities to these diseases, were quickly brought in to replace them.

I recently had a friend stay at my house who is a missionary in Mexico who runs a private school. I asked him a rather pointed question to which he was very willing to answer. I asked him how the Native American is viewed by the educational systems of Mexico. He said they give strong lip service to honoring the heritage of these ancient Indian people. However, in recent years they have used this as an exploitative tactic to control the people. Every year they have a gigantic fiesta which all the people are required to support financially. The problem is few of the people have any money. Richer people loan the poor money at exorbitant interest rates to buy expensive liquor. In this way they control the local population. Unfortunately expensive liquor has been substituted for the blankets of the conquistadors and monks. They have become indebted and controlled and it is very difficult to break the cycle. To decline to participate in the party becomes a slap in the traditional heritage of the country. People are ostracized and boycotted when they refuse to give. This problem is as old as the Spanish invasion of Mexico. The risk and cunning that the European Spanish gave us has become a dependency trap to stop progress and maintain the status quo.

Well Mr. Parris how are you going to find any virtue in any of this? I believe the original intent of the Spanish missionary kindness was genuine. The same dream that inspired these soldiers of fortune to risk their lives was shared by the monks and monarchs to give the Christian message for eternal fortune. As the song says "To dream the impossible dream," is a truly Spanish characteristic. The book by Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha, makes light of this virtue but in the end the virtue of fearless dreams persists and motivates us to reach higher than we are capable of. Much of the progress of Western Civilization owes its success to the risk and fearlessness of the conquistadors and catholic -monks. When this virtue is used non-exploitative it can accomplish incredible progress.

The virtue of fearless dreaming is a verb in the language of virtue. It is synthesis of cunning and eternity. The risk and fearlessness of these dreams are based on the desire to transcend your own life.

Summary of Don Quixote From http://www.cliffsnotes.com/WileyCDA/LitNote/id-87,pageNum-2.html

Alonso Quixano, a less-than-affluent man of fifty, “lean bodied” and “thin faced, lives modestly in the Spanish country village of La Mancha with his niece, Antonia, and a cranky housemaid. Practical in most things, compassionate to his social peers, the local clergy, and the servant classes, Quixano is respectful toward the ruling classes, whom he unquestioningly accepts as his superiors. He is driven neither by ambition for wealth and position nor bitterness at his genteel poverty.
Well read and thoughtful, Quixano’s most prized possessions are his books. From his readings and studies, he becomes by degrees interested, then obsessed, with the codes, deeds, and tales of chivalry—of knights errant on some courtly and idealized mission. As his appetite for the lore of chivalry increases, Quixano begins selling off acres of his farmlands, using the funds to buy more books, and increasingly throwing himself into his studies. “From little sleep and too much reading his brain dried up and he lost his wits. He had a fancy… to turn his passion knight errant and travel through the world with horse and armor in search of adventures” with the purpose of “redressing all manner of wrongs.”
At length, he is galvanized into action by his passion for the chivalric code. Outfitting himself with some old rusty armor, Quixano enlists his spavined hack horse to go forth in search of knightly adventures. Hopeful of finding a proper noble to dub him, Quixano finally is licensed in his venture by an innkeeper who believes him to be a lord of a manor. Now Quixano is “Don Quixote de La Mancha”; the tired hack and dray horse becomes elevated to “Rosinante.”
All the new knight needs now in order to venture forth is a lady to whose service he is sworn and a servant or page. For the former, he chooses Dulcinea del Tobosa, named after Aldonza Lorenzo, a farm girl whom he had been taken with at one time.
After three days on the road, Quixote encounters a group of traveling salesmen whom he attacks after they refuse to acknowledge Dulcinea’s great beauty. He is badly beaten by the servant of the salesman and forced to accept the help of a neighbor, who brings him home on the back of a donkey.
While he is recovering, Quixote is forced to watch as his housekeeper, a barber, and a priest burn all his books on chivalry in an attempt to persuade him to give up his improbable quest. But this only fuels Quixote’s determination. He persuades Sancho Panza, a plump, simple-minded-but-opportunistic laborer, to serve as his page, by playing on his ambitions. Don Quixote promises Sancho his own island to govern, for surely such a splendid knight as he is sure to become will soon take many spoils.
And so this pair set forth, Quixote on his spavined old horse, Panza mounted on Dapple, his mule. Their second adventure lasts for three weeks and is comprised of a series of events that comprise the balance of Book One. Among other things, Quixote battles windmills, thinking them to be giants. At an inn, which he mistakes for a castle, Quixote is visited in bed by a maid, who causes a great uproar when she discovers she has come to the wrong room. Refusing to pay the bill and accusing the innkeeper of being inhospitable, Quixote is rousted, only to fall promptly into another misadventure with a religious procession, and yet other ironic and error-prone encounters with locals.
Interspersed among these adventures are a series of stories and moral tales, illustrating the pastoral storytelling tradition in Spain. As well, there are two long, learned disquisitions, delivered by Quixote. The first is a description of the Golden Age of mythology, told during a supper shared with some unlettered goatherds who don’t understand a word he says. Later on, Quixote addresses a company during dinner at an inn in a debate about whether the career of arms is superior to that of letters, or vice versa.
Throughout the adventures it becomes clear that Quixote, for all his seeming madness, is a mild-mannered, empathetic man, genuine in his concern for chivalric ideals. Although he has agendas of his own, Sancho Panza has come to believe in and show loyalty to his new master. But in spite of all his good intentions, Quixote’s quest leads him to be returned home, imprisoned in a cage on an ox-cart by his village priest and barber for Don Quixote's own good.
Published in a separate volume, Book Two of Don Quixote’s adventures contains a unique feature. Shortly after Book One was published and Cervantes was at work on Book Two, he got word of the appearance of a pirated Book Two in which the author, a writer named Avellaneda, presumed to write further adventures of the knight, going so far as to renounce his service to Dulcinea. Cervantes was at Chapter 59 in Book Two, having Quixote and Panza headed to a jousting tournament in Saragossa. Now, angered by the pirated version, Cervantes sets forth in revenge by having Quixote and Panza eating dinner at an inn and “overhearing” talk of the Avellaneda version. The knight and squire promptly set forth to Barcelona, home of Don Alvaro Tarfe, a character from the Avellaneda book. When they arrive in Barcelona, they kidnap the Avellaneda character.
Book Two also introduces the character of Samson Carrasco, a young man from Don Quixote’s village. A recent graduate of Salamanca University, Carrasco takes on the earlier roles of the priest and the barber in attempting to rescue and keep Don Quixote away from danger, but Don Quixote is not interested in being “rescued.” He is determined to go to Tobosa to pay his respects to Dulcinea. They encounter three peasant girls and by some deception, Sancho hopes that his master will accept one of these as being Dulcinea. When events or appearances run counter to his expectations, Don Quixote tends to believe that enchanters have worked their mischief. In this instance, he believes enchanters have made Dulcinea look like an ugly peasant girl.
Don Quixote unexpectedly wins a battle with a knight (The Knight of the Mirrors), who turns out to be none other than Samson Carrasco in disguise. Samson had hoped to get the Don back home to safety by disguising himself as a rival knight. The plan backfires. Shortly afterwards, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza meet the “Knight in the Green Topcoat,” which includes the episode of the lion with whom the Don wants to do battle.
The major portion of this section is devoted to an unnamed duke and duchess who, with their retainers, play a series of pranks—in the form of burlesque pageants—on Quixote. They also cause injury to both the knight and his squire. Another vital element is the appointment of Sancho Panza as governor of an island—another elaborate prank that ends with Panza renouncing the life of a feudal governor and showing a deep layer of loyalty to Quixote.
Once again Samson Carranzo appears, this time at the beach in Barcelona where, in the guise of The Knight of the White Moon, he challenges Don Quixote to battle. Of course, Quixote accepts the challenge and, in the presence of the viceroy and a distinguished company, is roundly defeated. A condition of Quixote’s defeat is that he abandon knight errantry for the rest of his life.
In the remaining chapters, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza return to La Mancha, but not before they experience an additional stay with the Duke and Duchess and sundry other humiliating experiences suffered by the ex-knight.
When they arrive home, Don Quixote, apparently broken in spirit, is put to bed. After a long sleep, he declares his name to be Alonso Quixano once more and appears to have regained his reason. Shortly after he denounces chivalry and knighthood, he dies among the lamentation of friends.
How Don Quixote Fell Sick, Made His Last Will, and Died
As Don Quixote languishes, the household imagined he is sick from the regret of defeat and disappointment in Dulcinea's disenchantment. The curate, the bachelor Samson Carrasco, and Sancho try to cheer up the sick man. Nothing helps; Don Quixote makes his will, gets confessed by the curate. Gathering his friends, the hidalgo tells them, "My good friends, I have happy news for you; I am no longer Don Quixote de La Mancha, but Alonso Quixano, the same who the world for his fair behavior has been pleased to call the Good. I now declare myself an enemy to Amadis de Gaul and his whole generation." Then Sancho, weeping, begs his master not to die, for there are chivalric deeds yet to accomplish. No more of that nonsense, says the Don sadly: "There are no birds in last year's nests." In his will, Don Quixote dictates that his niece, if she chooses to marry, must select a man who has no knowledge of books of chivalry. If she insists on the contrary marriage, she shall forfeit her inheritance. Don Quixote dies. Among "sagacious Cid Hamet's" words addressed to his pen, Cervantes writes: "For me alone was the great Quixote born, and I alone for him; it was for him to act, for me to write, and we two are one in spite of that Tordesillesque pretender [Avellaneda] who had, and may have, the audacity to write with a coarse and ill-trimmed ostrich quill of the deeds of my valiant knight."
Commentary
Now that Don Quixote is about to die, Sancho is at the top of his madness. Imploring his master to rise and go forth again as a knight-errant, Sancho expresses his quixotism: to deny death, deny sanity, and once more serve Dulcinea who grants immortality. But he cannot revitalize Don Quixote's disillusioned faith, and he, Sancho, is left as heir to quixotism.
The author's address to his pen underlines again Cervantes' fancy of calling his created characters his "stepchildren." The greatness of Don Quixote has been nowhere manifested in his earlier works, and it is not hard to imagine that Cervantes believed himself to be merely the incidental medium of some creative spirit that fathered the visionary knight. "I alone," writes Cervantes, was born for Don Quixote, and, he should add, his spirit transcends my art.