By TARSUS GENUS*
Considerations about the political forces that attack – inside and outside the State – the moral and material goods of the nation
I seek inspiration in a brilliant short story by O.Henry, “Stories of a ten dollar bill”, to talk a little about the difficult moment we are going through, in politics, economy, culture and religious issues, taking this as a set of advances of the opportunists in the religions of money over the secularity of the State, added to the complicities within the Legislative Power for the destruction of the Republic. In “Part I”, of the short story, the author warns, to explain with whom we are talking in his fictional play: it is with the coin! She, the substratum of the real politics of the ruling classes of the world, symbolic mediator of exchanges in the circulation of material goods and financial capital, says: “I am a ten dollar bill, year 1901. Perhaps you have already seen one in the hand of some friend of yours”.
It is based on two political facts, both naturalized – as usual – by the traditional media, that the crisis can be commented on with illustrations of facts and examples: the approval of the default policy on precatorios, which affects all social classes and harms, as usual, many the weakest (no savings to resist) and few the strongest; and the appointment of the “terribly evangelical” Minister to the Supreme Court, who made clear – in his testimony to the Senate – both his historical ignorance and his contempt for the French Revolution, both his ability to lie about his commitment to the secularity of the State, as his contempt for Parliament, whose majority wanted to be deceived.
Writes O.Henry: “Money talks. But you might think the talk of a small old ten dollar bill in New York would be no more than a whisper.” (…) “But don't forget that the coins can also make their comments here and there”, continues O.Henry, remembering that, when you tip the grocer for him to steal the weight of the meat in your favor, it is it is possible to read, in the words written above the effigy of the coin, the following: “We trust in God.”
The “trust in God”, the currency, the mystical celebrations of lying “cures”, the simulated attacks of faith in God (and not in money) on the Pastors’ victory deck configure, today, not the emergence of generous religiosities, capable of to erupt from any religious confession, but an exchange in currency, between political forces that assault – inside and outside the State – the moral and material goods of the Republic.
The approval of the precatorios default was not only the complete demoralization of the policy of “ceilings”, of neoliberalism gendarme currency circulation (to reassure public debt financiers next year), but it was also the political form that – through negotiations with coins much larger than 10 dollars – adjusted the budgetary complicities, between fascism and ultraliberalism, to screw the "below". Ten percent that is removed from the income of the poorest can signal the border between living and dying, but for the richest it can only symbolize the postponement of the purchase of the next imported car. In these episodes, ten-dollar bills spoke at full speed for those who pretended to trust in God.
The appointment of the “terrible evangelical” to the Supreme Court, however, announced more than the breaking of a “foot” in the dignity of the STF. It made the rape of secularism a relation of planned evil, since the appointment previously announced by the President (accepted by the majority of the Senate) worked, not only as a pressure against the weak, but above all as a preparatory act for the production of purchase receipts. of their consciences and the induction of cowards to moral suicide.
These two political events show that the effects of the political and moral destruction of liberal-representative democracy caused by the election of Bolsonaro are far from being overcome. We need to keep in mind that the majority of those who support him in society are not thugs, nor are they fascists. They are, in fact, tired of the democratic ritual that is not always linked to their material and cultural progress, which, in times of system crisis, treats them as a cog in a vast gear that eternally makes the rich richer and the poor more disinherited.
Anyone who knows how to regain common sense to win the 2022 elections will have to quickly conquer it too to govern and improve the lives of the majority, quickly, because the fatigue of waiting adds to anger. And anger is the core element of totalitarian temptation. It is against this that a broad political front must be arranged, which has at its strategic core the most elaborate thoughts of the left and center-left, to firmly direct the economic and political redemption of a Brazil made for all.
*Tarsus in law he was Governor of the State of Rio Grande do Sul, Mayor of Porto Alegre, Minister of Justice, Minister of Education and Minister of Institutional Relations in Brazil.
