By LUIZ ROBERTO ALVES*
None of the third way pretenders mean anything new, unexpected or brilliant.
The human gift of language deserves respect, either for inducing intelligence to explain reality, or for its unique ability to address another person, create correspondence, reciprocity and encounter. Such meanings promote and drive social life. It is not without reason that linguistic language organizes itself in life to forge the essence of existence, which is educational action, that is, it organizes norms, methodologies, strategies and feelings in favor of people who are born small, incomplete and who are humanized by steps also linguistically accompanied. Likewise, this language creates powerful ethical and aesthetic connections towards the constitution of politics.
Behold, contrary to this ethical-aesthetic place, the current campaign for the October elections triggers a process of betrayals, hoaxes, malpractices and disrespect for the discovered and revealed human gift. It degenerates, distances itself from the ethical and the aesthetic and engenders the end of politics. A denial of denials, with the complicity of sectors of the population that have not yet become aware of their humanity and even less of their humanization, incidentally the most painful theme in Paulo Freire's works.
Faced with the end of the electoral campaign in a few weeks, the third ways surfaced when almost nobody believed in them. They are already a plural reality, regardless of their quantitative results in polls and surveys. They are creating a degenerate, strictly anti-political discourse. And they have a name: Ciro Gomes, Soraya Thronicke and Simone Tebet in the federal space, Rodrigo Garcia in São Paulo. The sphere of the unspeakable clinging to the Planalto and its electoral trinkets in the various states is not discussed here.
They are what they are: they don't exercise the gift of language and they don't organize themselves by the movement of thought, but by vomiting bile. Only the so-called "evangelicals" have not yet converted to the truth and still support such outpourings of gall. However, the false prophet-pastors have limits, either in vociferation or in buying the votes of believers. They will be demoralized as much as the MEC's thieving pastors, who stole the values and rights of millions of children and adolescents, including sons and daughters of evangelical believers.
None of these third way pretenders mean anything new, unexpected, or brilliant. These people represent the old republican power schemes in the territories of family and party power, as well as in the games of command and in the expositions of positions and electoral transactions. However, the evil that they are doing in television inserts and debates of wide public expression (without any charge from communication operators or journalism) is the denial of the constituents of politics, ethics and aesthetics. They deliberately murder the meaning of politics.
They are not linguistically disjointed like the president's electoral troop. On the contrary, they organize their arguments well, but these are introduced by lines that degenerate their arguments. To the facts.
In the insertions and mediatized debates, the aspirants to the third way at the national level summarily deny the justice that freed former President Lula from the “spectacles” of Lava Jato and, more than that, demonstrated all the partiality of that justice based on the aggrandizement of Sergio Moro & Co. By denying what Brazilian justice has done (while using it in other speeches) they paint the former president as the head of corruption in previous years. They speak in unison, they are the same voice and for that they didn't need to agree. It was enough to intuit. Ciro Gomes is the most cynical, who visualizes the ex-president's phantasmagoric defeat to dispute with Jair Bolsonaro, which in a way they want to preserve for the battle in the second round.
What is factual is that the former president was not the head of corruption, as the justice system, which deserves much criticism, also deserves respect and visibility for its actions. By enforcing this leadership of corruption, he and they degenerate their own discourses, which become directed by the totality of cynical and distorted thinking. No government proposal or plan propagated by him and them escapes the direction of that thought. According to him, nothing that was done in the governments between 2003 and 2016 has any value, as the image of total corruption is set. From then on, lies, planned forgetting and non-recognition of the facts that political history already accumulated for that period, especially in culture, education, housing, health, family care and human rights policies. Nothing existed. Everything was "corruption".
Such a speech – which I call the loss of the creative gift of language by these people – while partially altering the electoral game, as it is appealing in a mediocrely politicized society, incriminates the inner thought of such speakers, causes neuronic confusion and, strictly speaking, transforms Ciro Gomes, Simone Tebet and Soraya Thronicke in electoral congestion robots, whose mantra without basis in justice and law disqualifies all their ideas and proposals. These three people are no longer candidates for the responsibility of the federative republic, but members of the Bolsonarist choir who, in the absence of articulate, comprehensive and analytical language of social experience, do nothing more than point to themselves in a multitude of gestures that have already murdered language. .
This is why it is understood that Simone Tebet passes herself off as a feminist she never was, that Ciro Gomes tramples on her training in law and asks for votes as if asking her older brother for a lollipop. As for Soraya Thronicke, suffice it to say that she is, circumstantially, outside the Bolsonarist ranks, but she is a trusted person on the bullet bench. More dramatic for such candidacies is that this robotization in which they were trapped ends up completely depersonalizing them, as they were banished from the science of thought, which requires a balanced work, capable of adequately dealing with the facts and data of history; as a result, they have just entered MMA. In fact, they become like Woody Allen's character Zellig. She ceases to be herself to mimic her relationship with others. She is sick among sick, healthy among healthy, supports whatever is asked of her, turns black, white and yellow depending on who she meets and so on. A chameleon worthy of human compassion, but not votes to lead 220 million people.
Later, Ciro Gomes, Soraya Thronicke and Simone Tebet will have to find each other on the pillow and perhaps they will be ashamed of such depersonalization. Or (common thing in colonized and neoliberal Brazil) they will prepare themselves for new positions, since perhaps they will not analyze their drama. I do not use the word tragedy, because it is a phenomenon of the nature of demigods, of the world of pantheons. Here we are in the human world, faced with the opportunity to recreate and reinvent Brazil.
As for Rodrigo Garcia, it hurts. His world is not São Paulo's. This still young figure misses all opportunities to think about the state that contains in itself the historical and profound Brazil, as it creates the “Rodrigoestado”, a simplistic place and, therefore, lacking in diversity, even because diversity and complexity are resolved in the rodrigostate . Also a place without ideology, without oppression, without challenges. Well, he already solved, even before starting the campaign, all the problems of the rodrigo-state, imagined by him as São Paulo. As? Well, reports of him show him as the builder of the subway, highways, railroads, hospitals, schools and everything else. Likewise, he is the leader of all the mayors and mayors in the state. Rodrigo wouldn't need a program, except for an expression: Rodrigogovernor: everything is solved.
In Rodrigo Garcia, the state of São Paulo, real, where pioneers and modernists, constitution and caudillhismo, complexity and political simplism confront each other, this state already well studied in the history of the republic does not exist. This spot on the southeast map is Rodrigo's work. And there's no point in him going back now to show administrative steps and setbacks, because his impetus, from the beginning, was on the total solution, everything mastered in itself.
Rodrigo Garcia is the legitimate result of the disguised dictatorship. Fruit of the alienation of thought in the face of the complexity of reality. Although I have had news of the impasses that caused Glauber Rocha, Milton Santos, Nise da Silveira, Florestan, Carolina, Paulo Freire and the persecuted and killed young people, in rodrigo-state none of that moves the pendulums of contemporary history. If he cites the phenomena, it will be to swallow them in his simplistic solutions. Rodrigo Garcia wants votes from fascists, rightists, leftists, mezzocentrists, leleists, simplists, crazy people, anything and anyone. Not because he even makes an effort to win votes, but because he is the sink of everything and everyone. The rodrigostate. L'état c'est moi. However, Rodrigo is a somewhat spoiled king disputing the vote in a society that at least affirms democratic rights.
But he is not harmless. He does what Ciro, Tebet and Thronicke do: the others do not exist, history does not exist and MMA is the king of egocentric games. For these people there is the accounting of numbers. In Rodrigo Garcia there is a state centered on him, built by him and for him, as if it were an inheritance from ancestors.
Rodrigo Garcia is not quixotic; on the contrary, he does not share the maddened beauty of the man of La Mancha. Rodrigo Garcia takes care of what is, in fact, belonging to others, at the very least shareable, as he hoards other people's creations, capitalizes on supposed works, directs a totality that was not given to him. Rodrigo Garcia would be a good character for Machado de Assis, Lima Barreto and Graciliano Ramos: a powerful and offensive bumbler, or a simplifier who ends up annulling himself. It would be better if he didn't dispute votes, but made a public will of all his works, especially imaginary ones.
Let the other candidates and candidates beware.
* Luiz Roberto Alves is a senior research professor at the School of Communication and Arts at the University of São Paulo. Author, among other books, of Administering via culture: educational-cultural revolution in ex-pauliceia desvairada, 1935-1938 (Mall).
The site the earth is round exists thanks to our readers and supporters. Help us keep this idea going.
Click here and find how
