By TARSUS GENUS*

The “Borba Gato” syndrome supposes that destroying the statue of an Indian hunter is a civic sin, but supporting a genocide and his minions is a sign of the “good taste” of decadent reason

“I don't dream of success, I just wake up early and work towards it.” It's the note I get at the traffic lights, from the young black man who glides like a dancer between space-hungry cars, in the city that won't take long to retire. The formal city will defend itself from the cold stars that haunt the July night, but those who wake up early “to conquer success” will certainly sleep in a cold shack on the edge of the grimy outskirts.

I suppose that the dancer on the corner was not even aware of the burning of the statue of the brave hunter of Indians and his risky urban dance – which reproduces the risk of his ancestors to survive in the hostilities of the earth – moves in a fog between two times, today only sketched : the time of programmed barbarism of the body that explores itself and the time of success dammed up by pain.

Among the drug dealers who know how to take advantage of the Presidency's planes and the formal city is another city: the invisible outskirts, which only appears in police chronicles when small drug dealers kill and kill each other in dark alleys, free to die or to dream. The Lehmans of life and the agents of official publicity go in search of the entrepreneurs they created in neoliberal fiction, as the idea of ​​the aimless autonomous people who unconsciously transformed their movement on street corners into a pornographic failure of the politics of neoliberalism.

The note's message is the “objective irony” of the fighter for life, desperate for the job that disappeared, for the children, brothers, mothers, who disintegrated in the neoliberal tide. The tide that raised the thickest fog in republican history, which closed the landscape of rights and transformed work into the hoax that everyone can be their own business. Waking up early to conquer success, in this case, is to leave two “Torrones” on the mirror rod – for two reais – mobilizing the body among the cars that dominate the city.

On Michel Temer’s “bridge to the future” project, now managed by the Bolsonarian civic-military group, Leda Paulani wrote: “the only conclusion that can be reached is that the bridge that is built in this way is a bridge to the abyss in the which the country will precipitate, hostage to specific interests and private wealth that seeks to achieve its own objectives at any cost, even if this means throwing 200 million Brazilians into the dangerous void of social anomie, from which the previous conciliatory model tried to escape ”.

The dangerous vacuum of anomie is there, because barbarism was naturalized (with the help of the media that supported the coup), sheltered in the ethical foundations of the period. They are especially included in two episodes, starring the dark leader: one line, “I'm not a gravedigger”; and a “psychotic gasp”, when he imitates the shortness of breath of someone condemned by the disease he released.

It is tempting to contrast Leda Paulani's conclusion with the strange burning of the statue of Borba Gato, an act that I would not recommend for political reasons, but which certainly helps to strip away the fascist morality of certain right-wing sectors, who do not like to see statues burned, but who they don't mind living with collective fires caused by human extinction policies. The “compassion”, which according to Faulkner should keep human beings whole in their endless journey of affirmation and challenges, does not exist in Bolsonarism, fulminated by the amoral premises of that “speech” and that murderous “gasp”.

The final part of the text by Leda Paulani, in the excellent collective work Why do we shout Coup? (Boitempo) brings an extraordinary conclusion for historians of the future to assess the subjective dimensions of the economic crisis of the present time, at the exact moment when ENEM has its lowest enrollment rate since 2005!

Leda's observation, five years ago, shows that the material crisis has fully installed itself in the dominant morality - in certain circuits of intellectual and political opinion - quickly changing it, to put it - without moving a muscle of the cynical faces that follow it. – in the service of the naturalization of fascism.

By being outraged by the burning of the “Borba Gato” statue, at the same time refusing to see the connections of the Coup against Dilma with death and hunger (which are part of the daily lives of millions), these people have excluded women from their horizon of humanity and the most exploited men of the people, who would be – after the Coup – harassed by hunger and disease. It is the “Borba Gato” syndrome, which supposes that destroying the statue of an Indian hunter is a civic sin, but that supporting a genocide and his minions is a sign of the “good taste” of decadent reason.

The souls of the murdered Indians did not care about the burning of the statue either. Or do Indians have no soul?

*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.