It was on Facebook or Twitter, just today, that somebody mentioned the movie, “The Shootist.” I commented that it was a very faithful adaptation of the novel, except that the final action (altered on John Wayne’s insistence) changed the entire point of the story.

Much the same could be said about “Man of La Mancha,” the blockbuster Broadway production inspired by (not based on, as the writers insisted) Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote.

I’ve never actually seen the musical, but I heard the songs multiple times, as my college roommate (confined today to a mental institution, I kid you not) was a Broadway musical nut. He especially loved “Man of La Mancha,” which was appropriate, because he never quite found a place in the real world.

“Man of La Mancha” takes the form of a play within a play. We find Miguel de Cervantes in prison, awaiting trial before the Spanish Inquisition (I don’t think that ever actually happened to him). The other prisoners try to steal his trunk of possessions, but their leader agrees to give him a “trial.” He is permitted to present a defense of his writing, and he makes it in the form of a play based on his novel. All the prisoners then act out the story.

The play includes the song, “The Impossible Dream” (performed above by the great Richard Kiley, who created the role) which became one of the monster hits of the second half of the 20^th Century. I remember when it was new. It’s a splendid song, one of Broadway’s jewels. It’s also the precise opposite of Cervantes’ meaning.

Cervantes was delivering a warning against becoming so idealistic that you lose contact with reality. As a Christian, he understood that the body as well as the spirit must become sanctified. Don Quixote doesn’t only make a fool of himself. He injures people – and might have killed some of them if he’d been a little more accurate with his lance. He does kill a man’s sheep. He damages an innkeeper’s property and is too lofty-minded to even pay his bill.

But Broadway audiences in the mid-20^th Century were not interested in such Catholic prudence. They were all about aspiration. They’d won World War II, by golly, and were going to have this Vietnam business mopped up pretty darn quick. They’d built superhighways and skyscrapers and the atom bomb, and they were on their way to the moon. Even the sky wasn’t the limit.

When they looked at Don Quixote they saw, not a cautionary tale, but a role model. Here was the existential hero, the man who refused to adjust to the world, but demanded the world adjust to him, or else he’d die trying. Man was not fallen, he was evolving. The only thing those guys at the Tower of Babel lacked was good old American know-how.

It was rather charming at the time. Since then it has metastasized into societal delusion, to the point where we believe – as an article of faith – that we can be whatever we want to be, and that anybody talking reason to us is committing spiritual assault. The militant transexuals we see all around us, the men competing in women’s sports, the mothers with designer children, the plagiarists being elevated in academia – they’re all the children of the Man of La Mancha. But not of Cervantes.

I don’t mean to say that the musical is at fault. It’s just a symptom. A mile marker on the road to societal dissolution.

But we need to read the book again. I know nobody reads books anymore, especially 1,000-page ones. But we need to.