The digital skin is sensitive to spring eruptions and this weekend the war hypothesis has shaken the social networks with the bombing – a bit of bread soaked in oil – from Iran to Israel. Tehran has shown more sense of measure and more geopolitical responsibility than the main actors in the genocide of Palestine and, as if it were the theater of fencing, it announced its intentions in time and form to the opponents so that no one gets hurt. It is good, amid all that is wrong, that in a world today at the mercy of far-right nationalists like Putin and Netanyahu, the Iranian theocracy has a sense of risk.
In any case, the Iranian drone attack repelled by Israel with Washington’s concurrence has made Iran, Israel, Netanyahu, Melendi, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and, of course, World War III, trend.
The playwright Fernando Arrabal insisted thirty years ago on breaking up a TVE set because sooner or later millenarianism would arrive. And here we have it, an eventual war apocalypse as the fastest way to solve the human footprint on the planet and the sustainability of our fossil fuel consumption.
There is undisguised enjoyment in the way social networks are commenting on the escalation of war sought so hard by the Israeli Prime Minister to cover up the shame of the mountains of corpses of murdered children. The wisest Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times”, is meant for humans, not for their digital version, so it seems that what we most long for is to live an era full of interest and dramatic twists, there is nothing that bores us more than political stability and historical tedium. Because, if we look at it with perspective – and despite the fact that in this profession we live by striving to give strength to the script of human history – there have been few periods less mournful and dizzying than the one that begins in 1945 , after the Second World War, and its foams take us until this Monday. Even with two wars in the lobbies of Europe that, unless the purposes of Putin and Netanyahu succeed, should never come to us.
The involuntary resistance to being extras in a non-epic comic book is curious, and yet the Chinese are right, the best thing that could happen to us – not to mention the Russians, Israelis, Ukrainians and Palestinians – is for them to shut up the guns and go back the insults on the networks about any fashion reality show or about the minute and result of breaking up Spain, our zarzuela.
In the memorable end of the world recreated by the blessed José Luis Cuerda in Así en el cielo como en la tierra (1995), the apocalypse was a musical – when God is angry, he drowns well enough, said Gomaespuma – in which the choir sang : “Apocalypse, fin de la historia, / juicio final y carne resurrecta.” And speaking of the return of the rotten, yesterday Ferdinand VII was also a trend.
