This torrid summer that has just bid farewell to us, dotted as it was with gales and floods in the midst of a drought as prolonged as it was tenacious, has, however, been able, against all odds, to present us with news worthy of a Berlanga film, with script, of course, by the great Rafael Azcona.

The least important thing has been that Spain, with a functioning Government, held the rotating presidency of the EU or the sad fate of a Ukraine invaded by Russia. Everything took a backseat, including the more than meritorious victory of the female Red in the final of the women’s soccer world cup held in the antipodes, against the grotesque starring a certain Rubiales.

Nor has the man installed in Waterloo cut any corners when it comes to providing his Spanish compatriots with words and performances that would delight Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, who in Luces de Bohemia puts it in the mouth of the protagonist, Max Estrella , these pertinent words: “The classical heroes reflected in the concave mirrors give the Esperpento. The tragic meaning of Spanish life can only be given with a systematically deformed aesthetic.” No matter how you look at it, it is an accurate reflection on our deformed reality.

Don Filiberto, another character in the play, defines journalism in the following way: “The journalist is the parliamentary penman. Congress is a big newsroom, and each newsroom, a small Congress. Journalism is mischief, the same as politics. “They are the same circle in different spaces.”

Now perhaps I would say that each newsroom is a Vietnam, as is Congress. Among so many shouts, insults, outbursts, filfas, tweets, chirigoteesque performances and absurd statements, the grotesque lives its greatest moments of glory to date, whether or not with a earpiece or the level of gibberish reached by the aberrant prevailing political correctness.

In 1970, Luis Carandell, one of the finest parliamentary commentators this country has produced, published Celtiberia show, a book that brought together his articles that appeared over a couple of years in the Triunfo seminar. It is, even today, a true journalistic gem, a portrait with hair and signs of a Spain trapped in a grotesque and expansive grotesque, like the one that grips us today without mercy or signs of exhausting itself.

No matter how implausible and bizarre these news and anecdotes that Carandell collected may seem to today’s reader, the truth is that he, as he explains in the prologue, did not invent anything, nor did he need to, since they were “facts.” real often accompanied by supporting documents.”

Here is a letter from a student published in the ‘Are you looking for your other half?’ section of the Pueblo newspaper: “Eighteen-year-old student wants to get in touch with a girl residing in Madrid, whom he only asks that she be able to give herself to love. It doesn’t matter social class or skin color. “Let her age range between twelve and forty years.” The signature Francisco.

Carandell does not explain whether or not this “dramatic appeal” by the student had the desired effect, but it does remind us of an anonymous advertisement that Hemingway read in a Madrid newspaper from a father from the provinces who, after telling his son Paco that he forgave him, without specify why, since he had to go the next day to a well-known hotel in the capital. So many Pacos from the provinces attended the meeting, at odds with their father and eager to be forgiven (and, it is assumed, rewarded), that the hotel reception soon became the cabin of the Marx Brothers.

It is astonishing to what extent social networks and many other supposed technological advances have contributed to the triumph of a corrected, augmented and apparently limitless absurdity, especially with the invaluable contributions of artificial intelligence.