By TARSUS GENUS*

We have two legitimate and different governments in Rio Grande do Sul and Brazil

The first sentence, period or imprecation, that opens a work of fiction or a history book, more or less romanticized, or introduces an autobiography, says a lot of what lies ahead for the reader. But this, which is received in the mind of whoever reads it, is not necessarily what the historian — the novelist or autobiography writer — wanted to say in the context of his work.

One of the impregnable grounds of individual freedoms is the right that we have — as readers — to take from a work only that which satisfies our drives or the predicates of our existence: to appropriate, therefore, meanings that help to reveal to ourselves our weaknesses and our eventual greatness. As subjects — within the sphere of the social world that every day transforms our view of the mutations of the universe — we voluntarily produce our “feeling of the world”, as Carlos Drummond de Andrade said.

For me, it is natural, as a political activist with some (many) years of learning, to search in my immediate memory for something that connects me to the present, in each book that passes before my eyes. It is possible that from the first period onwards — whether in the prologue of the work or directly in its course — the reader will want the text to explain some things that concern me. It is a “reader's” selfishness, whose satisfaction throughout the reading will weld or break the bond that connects him to the writer, especially in a tragic moment where all the signs of culture refer to the present.

Let’s look at some examples: “The men who waited at the station looked bored”. (Oswaldo Soriano, Winter quarters). Here, I see the annoyance of two men, in a remote city in Argentina during the military dictatorship, waiting for a “messenger”, who will certainly not bring them anything beyond what exists in their mediocre daily lives.

It's a “pair” of bums or henchmen, at the railway station lost in the pampa, neither desperate nor happy, but just guided by the repetitive inertia of ordinary life. It, however, has a “political” dimension, because in its background is the determination of the ferocity of the State — I thought when I started reading Oswaldo Soriano — because what was there in that annoyance was not the inertia of a climate catastrophe or environmental like ours.

Let us continue: “Dear Zuckerman, in the past, as you know, facts were nothing more than notes in a notebook, my apprenticeship in fiction…” (Phillip Roth, The facts). The novelist here refers to his own learning about the world and refers to important moments in his life, which were reformatted throughout his experience as a writer, decisive for his work and revalued by the passage of time.

Facts, when reviewed, modify the past and take on other dimensions for the present, which is why I link this reflection by Phillip Roth to the desperate effort that part of the press is making, so that we don't look “in the rear view mirror”: we don't find out responsibilities in our climate tragedy. What is the reason for deliberate blindness? “we” (they) really like those who governed and remained silent, in all plans, throughout their silent governments. That's why we shouldn't know about those responsible and their interests.

I continue with examples in the literature: “The morning of Bernie Pryde’s death — or it may have been the morning after, since Bernie died at his convenience…” (PD James, Unsuitable work for a woman). The opening of the great novelist (police) is inscribed in the vision of the young György Lukács of romance theory, whereby the centrality of the modern novel is irony: Bernie died according to his “convenience”, therefore the thought about life, the drama of the human experience, the conflicts and contradictions at all levels among humans — in their differences and similarities — dissolve in the idea that the author/writer has of himself/herself.

When the writer looks at the world in a more or less stylized way, with brilliant mannerisms, but without reporting the causes and effects that generated his characters, the writer can declare a central death in his story as a “fact of nature”, but which contradictorily It’s a “suspicion” in a detective novel: we don’t really know the day Bernie died, but we know that he faced death as a “convenience”.

Death, thus, ceases to be a private or epic drama, but presents itself as an objectively determined and thus “natural” irony. This opening reminds me of the treatment given by some political leaders to the Rio Grande catastrophe, as if it were an outcome of “nature”, impossible to resist, at least in part, in its effects.

“Two teenagers, both fragile, innocent and convalescent, open and close the story of a dynasty” (Simon S. Montefiore, The Romanovs, 1613-1918). Here the historian establishes an arc of relationships between two innocent children, whose uniqueness points to the great historical earthquakes, in the formation of modern Russia until the Bolshevik Revolution.

The author talks about Michael Romanov, aged 16, weak and ill in 1613, waking up one night in March to be taken to Moscow, to become Tsar, in an internal arrangement between the rich families that dominated power in Russia. And he talks about Alexei Romanov, son of Tsar Nicholas, a hemophiliac, who at the age of 13 was shot in 1918 by a Bolshevik detachment with his entire family, a murder that no revolutionary idea or moral philosophy can justify.

The universality of historical research and the great epic narratives – tragic or simply dramatic of Russian history – is not located here, in the influence that the two innocent children had on the course of that modernization, but in the tribute that the most fragile, weakest and most vulnerable humans pay. who don't even understand where they are, placed in those 200 years of the formation of the nation. In a sequence of wars, all innocence is lost and they, the wars, shape the adults who will govern and will continue to fight and kill.

Here I draw a parallel to this historical narrative, with the situation of our State in the face of the catastrophe, which I dare to call an approach to politics based on “sense with principles”. This means understanding that the differences between the left, non-fascist right, center-left and center cannot and should not be dissolved in the everyday sphere of struggle for survival, which are part of any democratic society. What matters is how these differences will appear in the medium to long term, a period in which at least two questions will be answered.

This is the need for a strategic project that improves our situation of irrelevance before the Federation, on the one hand, and that must converge to respond to a “historical commitment” that in practice needs to answer the following: within what framework will they take place? future disputes, between classes and class fractions — and between the various corporate interests that exist in any modern society — so that Rio Grande can better emerge from the tragedy, beyond the immediate relief to which both the State and the Union?

We have two legitimate and different governments in Rio Grande do Sul and Brazil. We have in Brazil a President who is a world leader and was the head of government and State who had the epic courage to promote and transpose the São Francisco River; and we have a governor fully legitimized by the polls, who received the support of the vast majority of those who elected the president, so that Rio Grande would not return to the dark ages. And he didn't return, as would have happened if the other candidate had been at Piratini today.

Shouldn't both of them talk even more closely, so that Rio Grande can assume another role in the Federation and emerge stronger, after the brutality of the climate crisis? It will return and it can be avoided in its harshest effects on the State's population, as I think about the poorest and innocent children: betting that yes, that they can speak more closely, is a virtue and omitting it is just more a political move that assumes that the future does not speak to the present.

It was a serious mistake that important statesmen, in other times and in situations of natural or political tragedies, have already committed. Think of Chamberlain who believed in Hitler and Petain who served him. And think of all those who, as ordinary people, maintained that climate tragedies were an invention of “imperialism” or “communists”. And they ended up guiding people to put cell phones on their heads to talk to the ETs that came from beyond. The reserve army of barbarism was already being called up.

*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. Author, among other books, of possible utopia (arts & crafts). [https://amzn.to/3ReRb6I]

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