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Showing posts from December, 2020

Tilting at Windmills

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  National Arboretum, Ottawa. September 2019 I admit it. I’m a bit of a news junkie. It may date back to my father sitting in his rocking chair in front of the 8:00 o’clock news in the evenings, falling asleep after a few minutes, waking up when the newscast was done and asking, in Low German, “So what did they say?”                 I’m so in touch with the news from south of the 49 th parallel right now, checking every morning to see what the outgoing president has been doing overnight. This obsessive attention may have resulted from my love for comic opera, or from the misguided courage of Don Quixote in courting the lovely but uninterested Dulcinea, and his “tilting at windmills” in the delusion that he’s a chivalrous knight defending the realm. If Cervantes were still alive—or Rogers and Hammerstein—the casting of the 45 th president as central character in a major work could hardly be resisted.                 But latterly, I’ve begun to see more than the buffoon in the pre