It is rare for a controversy to last more than a week because trends on social networks have less shelf life than fresh milk, but Inés Hernand has been acting as a piñata for the group of bad-tempered people for two weeks, which today is a political ideology of popularity and the significance that Christian democracy or Marxism had in their day. In fact, we could consider it a cult because, after all, conventional ideologies are forgotten for three quarters of the day, except for the paramilitants (fortunate expression by columnist Israel Merino). To do the laundry or organize the pans we don't need to remember acronyms. On the other hand, making habits is a decision that accompanies us from morning to night, even when we are asleep, and such is the performance of bad mood.
Inés Hernand, who presented the Goya red carpet, committed the cardinal sin of shouting “handsome” at the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, who, apart from other attributes about which there are conflicting opinions, is scientifically and positively handsome. And there will be multiple studies from NASA and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that confirm it. Ursula von der Leyen's northern coldness serves as proof of that incontrovertible truth.
The RTVE interactive news council resigned yesterday because the rest of the TV colleagues did not support their protests against the presenter's effusiveness when she saw the tall man arrive on the red carpet. It is sad to have to claim humor and lightness, or explain the codes that govern variety shows – and why they cannot and should not be filtered through the sieve of the equanimity of a news program – but since someone has to do it, I have here a voluntary effort: one of the disorders of the present is literalism, which we can define as a form of contemporary illiteracy that consists of not knowing how to decode any non-literal meaning of language, neither irony, nor sarcasm, nor allegories, nor the jokes, nor the synecdoches nor, of course, the figurative sense.
It is not banal, because this inability has ended up putting comedians, singers and chirigoteros on the bench, which indicates that legal language is quite incapable of modulating the meaning of what it reads or hears. If we transcend a little further, it is easy to see the beaked ears of fascism peeking out behind the literalists. We inhabitants of liberal and enlightened societies can only respond as a colossus, Miguel Gila, would: “If you can't take a joke, leave town.”
