Lula's tasks

El Lissitzky, New Man, 1923
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By TARSUS GENUS*

Moderation, reform and revolution are fused today in the figure of Lula

After Chile: in the New Year, electing Lula is a political and moral duty towards our fellow human beings. It is from his victory that we will remove the carcasses of evil installed, both by the naive and by the false deceived of History.

This task is concrete and present, as the Bolsonaro era leaves a comet of lies and hunger, a galaxy of hatred spread in common life and an unprecedented moral and political decomposition of the Brazilian State, in addition to revealing the character of people who seemed normal to us. and reveal the profound class hatred contained in the conscious and unconscious minds of significant portions of Brazilian society. The climax of this historic tragedy is the expansion of baseness, indifferent to the lives of children in Brazil, with the delay in their mass vaccination. Anyone who is not indignant about this does not deserve respect, nor to be named as a mere “adversary.”

“Whenever I leafed through books on aesthetics, I had the uncomfortable feeling that I was reading works by astronomers who had never contemplated the stars”. Borges’ aphorism, in his conference “The enigma of poetry”, always reminds me that many people like us, when trying to decipher political reality, to understand it and give it some meaning (when we seek comfort in the great political heads of Humanity), we are left with the feeling revealed by Borges, about the aesthetes: we look like astronomers who have never observed the stars and so we fail to see them as a present.

The great enigma of the militant interpreter of politics is always the same: what should I say to those who are forming an opinion and what words should I use. to aggregate around the main thing, not to disassociate myself from those who already agree with me, as politics should not be a “zero-sum game”? Unlike the error – in the analytical text of a poem – (or poetry as a genre) when we get stuck in a political movement, we cannot simply resolve the issue with a brilliant metaphor. Good poetic analyzes may be enhanced by metaphors, but good interpretations of politics rarely are.

Political metaphors in the great moments of history can become as infamous as some claims of later regret, on the edge of the abyss, on the brink of hell. Even if everyone has heard "he" say that he came to "kill" and "destroy", an interpreter can say - with all his sleazy dignity - that he "was deceived". He does not say that he “wanted to be deceived” and that he supposed he had some counterpart to some desire of his, which supposedly should be satisfied: the “deceived” in politics are victims of reason, in its perverse side, since it suppresses the urgency of politics from politics. passion and poetry, to bring us closer to a utopia, more (or less) possible.

I continue with Borges. He also reminds me that aesthetes evaluated poetry as if it were a “task” and “not what it really is, a passion and a pleasure!” It is thus possible to bring Borges within the tepid limits that sometimes separate poetry and politics: politics made with passion and pleasure has more possibilities of succeeding than politics carried out as a pure task of reason. The policy that has always interested me has always been one that could be both rational and based on instinct and commitment. I was never seduced by purely economistic interpretations of politics, nor those that erect immovable walls between bona fide adversaries.

I support Lula, not because he is the only one capable of changing Brazil, which has Haddad, Boulos, Dino, Marina, Requião, as it had Covas and Brizola and many other worthy names, but that for a political and moral reason I combine with the following “interpretive” route, originating from how I see my peers: it can only create motivations in the people for radical changes in production and in the way of life, who – having conditions to win the election – clearly says that he is going to save the lives of children, because he is going to fight hunger, because it will take young people and children to school and also make it possible for families to eat three times a day. And soon!

What stems from this proposal are gigantic tasks of foreign policy, security, national sovereignty, recomposition of the State's public functions, brutally tainted by fascism, social and cultural policies for the dissemination of solidarity and the search for paths to emancipation. These are tasks that do not depend only on an election, but on a complex process of technological changes, in the relations between social classes, between individuals and between them and nature. Moderation, reform and revolution are fused today in the figure of Lula, as it is from his victory that we will remove the carcasses of evil installed, both by the naive and by the falsely deceived ones of recent history.

*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.

 

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