By JEAN PIERRE CHAUVIN

Considerations about the editorial of the newspaper The State of S. Paul

“The average man will say that rational things are those which prove obviously useful” (Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason).

Greetings in this 2022, which looks like the end of the day: vegetables, legumes, fresh greens overlap, little by little, with oranges, bananas, guavas and olives in a state of putrefaction. As we well know, whenever market (mis)reason is endangered, jealous conservatives (“conservatives” of what, huh?) go public to refound the pseudo-arguments of the subscriber and, if possible, confuse the occasional reader .

Fortunately, I do not subscribe to newspapers, journals and tabloids oriented by neoliberal imbecility: I am not an accomplice of vehicles that detonated João Goulart in the name of god-property-family; who supported the dictatorship; that promote coups (including the most recent one) and, among other adventures, helped to elect non-being in 2018, co-participating in the fake news disseminated through social networks. I spare the readership from reproducing excerpts from the unfair and offensive editorial published in the newspaper. But it is necessary to understand the “reasons” of the Estadão, with pardon of the pun.

The so-called “big” press – the one trusted by sectors of the middle class – seems not to have learned much from the 2016 coup and the assault on the polls, with the right to three-oitão as proof of voting for the monster. Or rather, maybe he learned that the system we live in is self-destructive. We won't even have to wait for the meteor, a phenomenon so celebrated on social media, for us to die of heat and lack of water, surrounded by plastic and without shade from a tree.

For those from São Paulo who are phobic about anything that smells of “social well-being”, “dignity”, “occupation of vacant properties”, “defense of the SUS”, “protection of national sovereignty”, “expansion of the industrial park” , “family farming”, “fight against prejudice”, “fight against misogyny” etc., certainly the words of the editor, on the eve of the 468 years of Pauliceia – persevering toucan and cynically, to the point of ignoring the 31 thousand people in -situation-of-the-street – the fallacies conveyed in the newspaper would have sounded like a big gift. See if the editorial doesn't look like a commissioned text, financed by the most reactionary sectors of the “elite” of São Paulo.

Yes, because our middle class, save a handful of experts and proud readers of best sellers, practically does not cultivate anything other than messages that slip between the fingers on the screen of the smartphone, financed in easy installments. There is nothing better for this select audience than receiving this gift: a text full of fallacies disguised as common sense, dear to neoliberal “ethics”. In this sense, the editorial Estadão owes nothing to books that carry on their covers the magic of internalizing the damn-it-the-rest, celebrate entrepreneurship-without-a-boss (in a country without clients) and detonate public affairs (with the exception of sectors providentially well-paid by the State FEDE-ral).

Marco Aurélio de Carvalho[I] he is quite right to be indignant against the “resistance shown by certain sectors of the mainstream media”, which accuse Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of attacking democracy. What name is given to it? Cynicism? Hypocrisy? Complicity in genocide? Apology for the destruction of the State? At these times we realize that the morality of some beings is as elastic as the token they receive and as convenient as the defense of their own interests or those of their associates.

Why do pieces like this infect such readers? First, for the pragmatic encouragement of laziness. The editorial is a brief and “opinion” genre: it does not tire to read and is “instructive”, “sincere” like the current Disgovernant. Secondly, because, despite the devaluation of memory and the cultivation of immediacy, the reader of reviews and the like will be able to retain three or four key words from the text stamped in a “vehicle-that-has-credibility” and, thus, establish pub-talk or elevator-talk: energetic, despite being grounded in nothing.

Let's face it. It is a phenomenon, to say the least, curious that some of these rare newspaper readers (occasional or card-carrying) criticize the “excesses” of that ideologue victimized by the virus, olive lump, but see no similarity between certain editorials of the Estadão and the pseudo-philosophical bravado of a “thinker” who is as neoliberal as he is authoritarian; as patriotic as his home suggested, safe from this theocratic neocolony, in the States.

*Jean Pierre Chauvin He is a professor at the School of Communication and Arts at USP. Author, among other books, of Mil, uma dystopia (Luva Editora).

Note

[I] https://www.cartacapital.com.br/opiniao/a-irracional-e-absurda-a-tentativa-de-atribuir-a-lula-a-pecha-de-adversario-da-democracia/?utm_campaign=novo_layout_newsletter_-_2601_-_quarta-feira&utm_medium=email&utm_source=RD+Station