When joy spreads, people are better. What a no-brainer, it will be said. Not so much: there are times when joys are at the expense of fellow human beings and exclusive to those who laugh. A country that laughs intransitively can afford certain luxuries. For example, abolishing military service because a Catalan politician whose support is needed asks for it. With them, the ports of the State are given as a gift because total… And the civil governments are suppressed as a symbol of Francoism although its origin was not in it by any means. They are funny things. From the laughter of the mid-90s of the 20th century, which was very different from the laughter of now, although both cavemen.
But there were other laughs. The convex smile of the people, which does exist, takes time to echo into laughter. What’s more, it almost never has an impact because the seams of suffering cry out to heaven. We are seeing it in Valencia: One month after the catastrophe, the horrifying images continue, the destroyed and piled-up cars, the muddy houses, the faces of pain and hopelessness. Can it be fixed with money? It must be alleviated with money, with a lot of money, and even by pawning the jacket, if he has one, of the uniform of the general who has been appointed politician but who will not obey or pay attention to political directives. That soldier with onomatopoeic surnames would have been an effective civil governor, in another era of course, in that of Amadeus of Savoy or in the Upper Pleistocene.
Perhaps the books by Arsuaga and Millás about our Neanderthal ancestors will clarify this for us. These three books are highly recommended.. They have an almost Ortega virtue (Ortega y Gasset depending on how you look at it): the title belies the content and vice versa. They are a huge smile, which will increase the laughter of the reader and their family, when they are read as a family.