April Fools, Every Day
You open a newspaper website in Germany.
Front page: a stranded whale. Stranded three times in three days.
Live ticker. Updates. Movement, non-movement, speculation. Interviews. Experts openly fighting each other. The country watches. The whale gets a name.
You scroll.
A porn influencer announces she’s pregnant after sleeping with four hundred men in a single day. Then it turns out: not pregnant. A PR stunt.
A young guy shoots a police officer six times after a failed robbery. He is acquitted.
Ahmet says he was in a bad mood. Took pills that drove him mad. A neurologist provides a diagnosis. This, he says, can happen.
Responsibility dissolves into a medical term.
Next.
Fuel prices jump 23 cents overnight. No transition.
The government talks about caps. Oil companies move first.
Next.
Politicians, NGOs, celebrities argue that “digital rape” should be treated as rape. Demonstrations form.
But no one demonstrates against the daily gang rapes. Or the honor killings inside families.
Next.
Donald Trump says he wants to leave NATO.
Not as a joke. Not as a fringe remark. As a position.
You stop.
Is this real?
You check the date.
April 1st.
There was a time when this date marked a boundary.
That frame is gone.
What used to require exaggeration no longer does.
A whale becomes a national obsession.
Sleeping with 400 men becomes an achievement.
A killing becomes a diagnosis.
Fuel prices leapfrog overnight.
Digital and physical collapse into the same category.
Leaving NATO becomes a bargaining chip.
You read each headline and pause.
Not because you doubt it.
Because it doesn’t settle.
Everything feels equally possible.
The joke needed proportion.
There is none.
So it dies.
Everything flattens.
A stranded whale takes the center.
Because nothing resists.
Nothing here is invented.
That’s the problem.
The absurd doesn’t arrive dressed up.
It arrives as news.
April 1st used to be the exception.
Now it’s the baseline.