April Fool's Day

April Fool's Day is no longer celebrated with the spontaneity it used to be. Parents would wake up their children with a credible falsehood and the children would take revenge throughout the day. Bloodless lies were spread in the media. But how can we celebrate it today if lies are the sauce of reality, if the fake takes the place of the authentic since the manufacturers themselves began to order cheap replicas of their products in China to make money in all segments. I really like a Catalan celebration of Radio Day that consists of the announcers of a network exchanging with those of the competition. Listeners experience a good-humoured and cordial surprise. Imagine that at the beginning of the morning, the announcers at a barricade have gone to the opposite side. And later in the day, Pedro Sánchez is president of the opposition party and Núñez Feijóo occupies the Government with the same tenacity that the previous one did not let go of, including of course the pact with whoever guarantees him power. It would be less surprising if his team of spokespersons exchanged places, since they are already used to saying one thing and the opposite on a daily basis depending on the vagaries of the course of their games.

What would be good is if this exchange were extended to all sectors and for one day and the president of the employers' association went to make beds in a similar hotel. And the guild of big businessmen was run for a few hours by a maid without a contract. The border fence would also be guarded by a newcomer on a boat and a body made up of Marlaska, his predecessor, and the engineers who design the moat and concertinas of our deterrent walls would have to jump it in three attempts. A transsexual would lead the Episcopal Conference and a child abused in a school would offer an opening lecture for the founding fathers. King Felipe VI could spend the day in a 12-meter flat without heating and move around his city on the subway during rush hour, while the Zarzuela palace would hold an open day for the inhabitants of the Cañada Real, since Even the name of their settlement is a tribute to the crown. The newspaper editors would be given the day off with a walk through the mountains so that they could experience firsthand the fragility of bears, the nobility of the wolf, and the lack of danger of poisonous snakes.

On that April Fool's Day, we would send the directors of the Ministry of Equality to a family court to hear what constitutes a divorce and the president of the Community of Madrid to eat in a senior center the same infectious porridge in the that saves three euros per menu. Joking about very serious matters is the appropriate gymnastics, even for those who maintain that one can no longer talk about anything freely while they are on the cover of the Sunday supplement and appear on primetime programs. The long-awaited jokes about gangsters and sissies have not died because of fundamentalist censorship but because of the evolution of intelligence, like humiliating and making fun of the weakest in the class is no longer the lesson they teach you on the first day of school.

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