So, believe it or not, I am still slowly slogging my way through Don Quixote.  With any luck, I should have a review up this year.
I was thinking this afternoon about how the central theme of Don Quixote--the temptation to immerse yourself in fantasy instead of in the real world--is more relevant than ever nowadays.  And then that made me remember something my friend linked to off of Facebook--a Twitter thread about the putsch on January 6.  And I thought it could possibly tie in very nicely to my review of Don Quixote whenever I finally get around to it (in 6 months?  in a year?).  So I thought I'd post it here on my blog so I don't forget about it.  (I know I swore off political posts, but this doesn't count.  This is bookmarking a link I might possibly use for a book review in the future.)

These are people - again, especially the men - trapped in the eternal drama of adolescence. They are creatures of a leisure society, bored by the ordinariness of life, angry that the world is not more interesting and that others refuse to pay them their heroic due. /3

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) January 15, 2021

 And actually while I'm on the subject, Whisky Prajer had a few interesting links last week.  One that's been sticking in my head is from Justin E. Smith, who talks about how the rioters on January 6 were dressed up in costume, and appeared to be playing out a fantasy of revolution.  Only "kids playing revolution" is what they called it in the 1960s (and besides, many of those on January 6 were hardly kids.)  So now the Internet calls it "Larping".
But then Justin E. Smith goes on to say:

The problem with this is that (with a gentle shout-out to René Girard) in an important sense all culture is larping — our species is Homo larpens at least as much as it is Homo narrans or ludens. The Viking who put on a bear sark was larping too. I larp every day I get up and pretend to be a competent professor of philosophy who understands anything at all about how the world works. This is all of course well-trodden ground for twentieth-century philosophy. Jean-Paul Sartre’s analysis of the waiter who was trying too hard to be a waiter —dressing up as a waiter each day and studiously imitating the bodily motions he associated with waiterdom— put to rest, if only incidentally, Heidegger’s expectation that there might be some deeper way of conducting ourselves that we can deem “authentic”. It’s just fake waiters all the way down, and fake philosophy professors, and mirror neurons spreading cultural patterns from one individual to the next. Another word for all that fakeness is, precisely, “culture”. And this is the danger of talk of larping: it reasserts willy-nilly the opposing, and dangerous, notion of authenticity.

(It should hopefully make even more sense if you read it in context in the full article). 

But before I close out this blog post, I should note that this is not only an issue on the right by any means.  At various points in history, the left has been accused of larping too.

The best example I can think of this is the 2004 documentary. Neverland: The Rise and Fall of the Symbionese Liberation Army (alternatively titled Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst) which explored the premise that the Symbionese Liberation Army was all made up of kids who had grown up watching too much Zorro, Robin Hood, and Che Guevara movies, and thought that they were living out their own revolutionary action movie.  (I saw this documentary back in 2004, before I had started regularly reviewing movies on this blog.  So I never reviewed it, but it's a fascinating little documentary.  If you don't have time to watch the whole thing, the premise is established very clearly in the first 10 minutes.)

...actually now that I'm thinking about it about, I'm beginning to realize that I'm wasting my time writing about old truisms.  The idea that these young kids attracted to revolutionary groups think they're living in some kind of novel is an idea that people have been saying for decades or centuries now.  (I myself, if I'm being completely honest, was prone to over-romanticizing these revolutionary movements in my youth, although in my case this just took the form of living vicariously through history books.)
...the point is, I may end up using this for a review of Don Quixote someday.