The Madness of the Modern Left

M ost of the Left’s obsessions could be cured with the help of a good therapist. When you are unable to tell a man from a woman, you don’t need long debate sessions full of intellectual analysis but to see a specialist, perhaps an oculist, or at the very least to go back to school. The woke universe is becoming an all-encompassing madness, and the worst part is it’s contagious. What has just happened in my country feels like a dark comedy.

Several days ago, a campaign from Spain’s social-communist government sought to promote diversity on the beaches. Under the slogan “Summer is also ours,” a poster brought together five women on the sand: one overweight and white; one overweight and black; one overweight with purple hair; one, topless, who had had a mastectomy; and one who looked like a conventional young woman but with hairy armpits. The organizers forgot to check the “trans” box, but sometimes progressives forget their own identity universe; there are so many fictitiously besieged subgroups that it is impossible to keep them all in mind. The acronym for sexual identities grows ever closer to the size of the Greek alphabet.

As for the absence of men in the lineup, fat or thin, there is no doubt: Summer is not ours. I guess we’ll have to settle for a private swimming pool.

But first things first. As the bearer of a beer belly the size of a Brontosaurus egg, I can attest that nobody ever tells us we can’t lounge on our sandy beaches. The worst that happens is, if we’re spotted sunbathing close to shore and looking rather helpless, activists from the local environmental group try to help us back into the sea. It’s kind of them. But I wouldn’t say that we have a discrimination problem on Spanish beaches. To the contrary, there is such an excess of tolerance towards us — the fleshy, pasty set — that our beaches start to look like Rubens paintings. I doubt the other subgroups get hounded off their towels either.

But part of the contemporary Left’s skill set is the solving of problems that don’t exist. It’s not a bad political strategy, because the chances of success are great. I have tried it: The other day, I started to repair the lamp on my bedside table, which was working perfectly. Imagine my elation when I realized that it also worked perfectly when I was finished. On my first try!

Whatever the impetus might be for the Spanish government’s anti-discrimination campaign, it is now causing an international scandal. And not just because it is in dubious taste to place a woman’s personal choice to dye her hair or sport body hair on the same plane as having survived cancer, but also because at least three of the models allege their images were used without consent and without the payment of royalties. There’s more to their complaints: Juliet Fitzpatrick, a British woman with a double mastectomy, claimed that the creators may have fused her head with the body of someone else who still had one breast. And the young woman depicted with armpit hair, Sian Green-Lord, was shown with a real leg even though she has a prosthetic.

Green-Lord, as she was preparing to get into modeling in 2013, lost her leg when a cab driver hit her near Rockefeller Center. After a titanic struggle to overcome her loss, she managed to fulfill her dream of strutting on the catwalks, using a prosthetic leg. Now the Spanish socialist government’s campaign for inclusion has erased that part of her identity — while apparently painting in armpit hair for some reason.

The Minister of Equality herself, the communist Irene Montero, announced the famous campaign on Twitter with a message that, with all due respect, has not aged well, following the chain of allegations made by the models: “All bodies are valid and we have the right to enjoy life as we are, without guilt or shame. Summer is for everyone!”

I like this story, made in Spain, because it is a perfect metaphor for the Left of our time. Don’t be fooled into thinking that it is just an exercise in incompetence. There is ideological design in the kind of progressive clichés that are most effective for such campaigns’ indoctrination purposes. And this is where the creators revealed a truth: They do not care in the least about these individual women but about the collective entity that they represent and that can be used politically.

In any case, don’t try to understand the ideological patterns of today’s progressives. It is madness.