It is very difficult to explain political Brazil to a foreigner. Once, while talking to some Australians, philosophy graduates, I tried to explain to them how Brazilian liberalism was closer to moral conservatism than to modern European progressivism, the one that relies on its rainbow hope in the fluffy benevolence of the State.
It was obvious that they did not understand our ideological particularities, often, they told me, how could we sustain political mentalities typical of the Cold War even today, in the 21st century? I then observed that everything is explained if we understand that Brazil is a strange uniform mixture of progressive European agendas with melodramatic excitements of an idyllic Sovietism that has never been surpassed by academics. They still didn’t understand, but that’s ok, I only had 15 minutes to explain what many journalists spend their whole lives not understanding.
Perhaps in those “margarine family” democracies we can conceive a public debate truly guided by the ideas, concerns and social needs of individuals, of the people. If we were like that, then, who knows, the gringos would understand us. But here the public debate, more especially traceable through the resonance of the great journalistic media, is guided by the truths of the sacrosanct editors and reporters with clenched fists.
It is not very difficult to notice the grotesque gap that exists between the ideas, wills and concerns of the so-called “popular” and the gourmetized concerns and convictions of the altruistic intellectuals who sovietly wield their feathers. For a long time, Dona Ana doesn’t even know what’s on the cover of the country’s biggest newspapers, much less cares about Anitta’s political recommendations and the superanalysis of the “experts”; and this has everything to do with the social and political reality of the country, if you understand the world beyond the media glasses.
The newsrooms insisted on using repellents against popular ideas in order to build their little worlds of environmental warnings and social suffering in slow motion without any fuss; they are singularly concerned with creating narratives for their favorites in order to be the supreme heroes – or supreme Enlightenmentists – of this strange democracy that ignores the people.
Encounter with the real world
The fact is that the feeling of encounter with the real world, the one that Dylan O’Brien finds when exiting the maze in ‘Maze Runner’, or what Beatrice and Four find when passing the wall of the “city of perfections” in the thriller ‘Divergent’ ‘, is something increasingly difficult to find in public debates, as the public debate is discussing confectionery ideas proposed by artisans from the reality that suits and not the ideas and doubts of Dona Ana and Bastião.
As the biblical account of Christ’s temptations in the wilderness shows, it is far more effective to distort reality than to simply create one from scratch, which is why, after videos show what appears to be a truly anti-aircraft artillery system in the Alemão complex in Rio de Janeiro, we find materials such as the one relates the deaths in that favela to the police operation purely and simply, as if the police had entered the favelas in search of newspaper columnists, rude seamstresses and discourteous youths, not highly dangerous drug dealers and organized crime managers. The obvious fact that the Alemão complex is today a lawless space, a territory of the narco-state, that the drug traffickers who preside there boast weapons of war and fire rifles without any kind of recrimination, all this is ignored in a militant frenzy that arrives even to be curious to observe.
This is our own everyday dystopia, which makes any ‘Brave New World’ and ‘1984’ seem like silly exaggerations of pedantic writers. As we watch, through our windows, drug dealers using anti-aircraft artillery against police helicopters, when we turn our eyes to our cell phones, we find journalistic articles debating the huge problem that there is in Geraldo having bought a legal weapon to defend his family. As our police face a near-armed insurrection of organized crime in Rio de Janeiro and on the Paraguayan border, our engaged journalists are hysterical screaming how Bolsonaro dared to question the god Urna Eletrônica.
Bastião doesn’t understand how it can be so urgent and catastrophic a few kilometers of the Amazon rainforest on fire; the opinion of Germany and France on this; Bolsonaro being a “fascist” because he said something that he didn’t like — Bastião doesn’t even know what fascism is —; nor how the police should fight the trafficking of the hills with rhetoric, affectionate hugs and UN recommendations. After Bastião closes the newspaper, he finds the world the way he left it, and, on the subway to his house, he puts his backpack in front of his belly because many of those “vulnerable” can arise – as journalists say in their safe rooms. — to steal his family’s only livelihood.
Bastião, finally, in the illiterate limitation of its formation, must sincerely question itself about how the police would fight the organized crime that has mortars, grenades and rifles with mere talk and comforting support from sociologists. However, he knows that his sincere questioning would soon be dismissed as foolishness if it were vocalized in any way, that he would turn red in the face from the first insult of an “insider on the subject” when explaining to him that the police are fascists and that he’s a dumb reactionary.
Such questions are dangerous for crisis engineers, they have that uncomfortable power to open the windows of newsrooms to the outside winds that bring reality without any lubricant. It is easier, therefore, to ignore reality and lock the windows, and in the face of videos of police officers harassed by a typical world wars weapon system, close your eyes and write about how bad these policemen are and what, in fact, the police are. the real culprits for the death of the population held hostage by organized crime, not the criminals… I mean: the “vulnerable”.
It is difficult to explain all of this to a foreigner without sounding like a complete deranged person, without letting it appear – despite all the care – that we are a nation alienated and idiotized by these militant journalists. Like Orwell who wrote the ‘Animal Revolution‘ to account for exposing all the Soviet nonsense that was being perpetrated in their days under the enamored noses of Western journalists, perhaps it remains for the few remaining sensible people to treat reality as a necessary dystopia, to see if the sleepers wake up to the glaring obvious. .
