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Monday
I perked up recently when New York Times columnist Paul Krugman compared Donald Trump to Don Quixote. Both, he points out, have an animus towards windmills. (Krugman’s article has been gifted here.)
Krugman notes that Trump’s animus toward wind power us
one of the strangest obsessions of a man with many unusual preoccupations (toilets! hair spray!). Over the years, he has asserted, falsely, that wind turbines can cause cancer, that they can cause power outages and that wind energy “kills all the birds” (cats and windows do far more harm). Now he says that if he wins in November, on “Day 1” he’ll issue an executive order putting the brakes on offshore wind farm construction.
And now for Quixote’s opposition:
At this point they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that there are on that plain, and as soon as Don Quixote saw them he said to his squire, “Fortune is arranging matters for us better than we could have shaped our desires ourselves, for look there, friend Sancho Panza, where thirty or more monstrous giants present themselves, all of whom I mean to engage in battle and slay, and with whose spoils we shall begin to make our fortunes; for this is righteous warfare, and it is God’s good service to sweep so evil a breed from off the face of the earth.”
While Trump vows to use presidential executive authority in his battle, Quixote uses an old-fashioned lance:
A slight breeze at this moment sprang up, and the great sails began to move, seeing which Don Quixote exclaimed, “Though ye flourish more arms than the giant Briareus, ye have to reckon with me.”
So saying, and commending himself with all his heart to his lady Dulcinea, imploring her to support him in such a peril, with lance in rest and covered by his buckler, he charged at Rocinante’s fullest gallop and fell upon the first mill that stood in front of him…
Interestingly, windmills in the 17th century represented cutting-edge technology, just as they do today. In Spain’s Golden Age, people harnessed the wind to pump water and grind grain whereas today we used it to generate clean electricity. Krugman points out that wind technology is one of the most exciting developments in the battle against climate change:
[T]he idea of an economy reliant on solar and wind power has gone from hippie fantasy to realistic policy goal. It’s not just that the costs of renewable electricity generation have plunged; related technologies, especially battery storage, have gone a long way toward resolving the problem that the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind always blow.
In other words, both Trump and Quixote are battling technology that is changing our relationship with nature. And while neither likes the way that windmills are suddenly dominating the landscape—or in Trump’s case, ruining the view from his Scottish golf course –the resemblances end there. Trump, after all, is in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry, having recently promised to gut environmental regulations if the oil companies will donate a billion dollars to his reelection campaign. Quixote, by contrast, sees it as his knightly duty to “defend maidens, to protect widows and to succor the orphans and the needy.”
As opposed to raping maidens, evicting widows, imprisoning orphans in cages, and gutting welfare programs for the needy.
All those who care about the health of the planet can only hope that Trump’s attacks suffer the same fate as Quixote’s:
[B]ut as he drove his lance-point into the sail the wind whirled it round with such force that it shivered the lance to pieces, sweeping with it horse and rider, who went rolling over on the plain, in a sorry condition. Sancho hastened to his assistance as fast as his ass could go, and when he came up found him unable to move, with such a shock had Rocinante fallen with him.
