What Don Quixote has to say about the Tea Party

There's a little pause in the middle of book 2 of Miguel de Cervates's "Don Quixote," as DQ and Sancho Panza are invited to attend a wedding - a wedding with a bit of a back story as the bride is marrying a very rich man to the great despair of her much less wealthy beloved - we can guess how this will work out - but meanwhile SP goes to sleep and wakes to the aromas of the wedding feast, and Cervantes enjoys (or seems to enjoy) writing one of the more descriptive passages in this often action-driven novel - it's another example of mock-heroic writing, which Cervantes perfects, as the wedding-feast descriptions recall the descriptions of feasts and sacrifices in the Iliad and Aeneid, if I recall correctly. An oddly poignant moment occurs as DQ watches SP asleep and goes off in a reverie about how SP, like most peasants, has no cares in the world and is completely dependent on his master, DQ, who is the only one who has to worry about providing - an obviously ridiculous perception, but one that many of the ruling class share then - and today (that's why we can tax the billionaires - they provide for us all!). Cervantes is well aware of this, and it's one of the so-called ironic moments in the novel - though I would argue that irony is not the best mode in which to portray or think about these class relations: on one level, yes, Cervantes is wiser than his characters and as DQ articulates one position we are placed in another - cool and detached and wryly aware of his limited perceptions - but a more profound way to look at this scene is through dialectics: DQ articulates one position, SP a completely different position, and by the interaction and confrontation of the two, both are changed, transformed into a new, more creative sense of class relationships: a partnership, mutually dependent, forging ahead together.