In today’s free-market carnival, nothing seems visible unless it is scandalous and nothing is scandalous enough to be memorable. So we pay homage to Cervantes at a time when we routinely co-habit with a very different outrageousness: religious fanaticism and terrorism, political manipulation, the cacophony of perverted simplification, the belligerent marriage between a new messianism and an aggrandizing quixotic blindness.