By VICTOR MORAIS*

Each one in their own square, following the role assigned to them by a God who casts spells on the merchandise tribe

I have been waiting for some time for May 28, 2024 to carry out the reckoning that follows here. Reckoning because I was the one who invited me to do the historical update, the assessment of an era, of the time bomb set to strafe a country that Nuno Ramos released, like someone who wants nothing more than verbiage, on page three from the Folha de S. Paul on May 28, 2014. It was less than a month before Brazil's debut against Croatia in Itaquera, opening the gate to the World Cup. Since then, Brazil beat Germany 7-1, which won our 2014 World Cup, and Croatia's upset ended up in the 2018 World Cup final, in Russia.

But I didn't come for the World Cup, which now changes dates depending on the climactic dance of money. This is because it has been ten years since Nuno Ramos suspected. Officially he didn't feel prepared to say anything, and so he said everything, using this stupid resource of suspicion. What it might seem like mezzo ironic, mezzo courtesan, but it worked, as her “I suspect we are” was a landmark of the time. This text is less pretentious in its desire for repercussion. First, I want to tell you what I know. After all, ten years ago there was not just football to win, but an election to lead to victory, swaying the social emotions of a country in a strident eruption. Perhaps this explains why Nuno Ramos was suspicious, knowing, with a bow that was strange to those from São Paulo. Today, suspicion has become something alienated, not to say sold. Everything is open. Are we going to be truthful?

So I'm going to talk about what I know – and what Nuno already knew ten years ago. I know I found out about Nuno Ramos in May 2020, when I saw one of Paula Lavigne's unbearable videos exposing Caetano Veloso's confinement. I know that the uncool cheesiness of the videos was part of a strategy to marketing intellectual to Caetano's liking. He said in the video that he read Nuno Ramos. It was “The Fiscal Island Ball”. Caetano already caught my attention at the time, in addition to frenzy of your divineland. There, in Nuno's text, I came across a kind of post-requiem. I later discovered that he had already rendered Brazil (Moebius) dead in his 2019 book, check if the same. “It is likely, in short, that I wrote about something that I say goodbye to.” So we sang so that everything would become Odara, a rare jewel, dancing while the ship sank. Yes, scene from “Titanic”, the titanic.

I prefer “Valalhacouto” by Douglas Germano and Aldir Blanc. “I want dances on the ruins / From the kingdoms of darkness / Laugh, laugh, the circus started licking / I want to drink on the street corners, pray, rhyme / But I will need you”. The funny thing is that Nuno also sang to make everything Odara, at his own 60th birthday party. Who didn't sing? The blow is not small. Somehow, there is a Jim Jones exit and a Caetano Veloso exit. And I'm a believer that Jim Jones, Paulo Martins and, why not, Glauber Rocha, share the same entity kamikaze. The singularity of Moebius' Brazil is that, if Hitler committed suicide out of cowardice, Getúlio Vargas did it out of heroism. He was a hero. Which is another story. Today we are all kamikazes to the sky, distilling a sound that upsets the stomach and causes endless diarrhea.

I know that Francisco Alambert wasn't throwing ideas around when he claimed, in his “Brazil diarrhea 2020”, Helio Oiticica's “Brazil diarrhea”. We no longer aspire. We are in a great labyrinth, turning around falsely, deciding whether we are going to die of heroism in the country where people die in Brazil; or if in the name of a lack of terminal care, we will choose for the agonizing tropicalist reason (the term is Alambert's), dancing for everything to become Odara when Odaraebius no longer exists. It never existed. The recent revisionist intellectual agendas of Brasil Modernoebius, which make a point of exposing its eugenicist and disciplinary policies, prove this. They are part of a larger context, “one same and final privatization – that of infinity”. Dreams that do not age are ended in the world of the same. I'm also afraid of the same. His violent and virile authority says more about any devirilizing sensitivity of Caetano. I even miss the sentimental torturer sung in prose and verse by Chico Buarque and Ruy Guerra.

In ten years, Patrícia Poeta copied Fátima Bernardes and wrote poetry about reverse racism in Jardim Botânico, on national, social, digital networks, whatever. Luciano Huck, with this misleading surname, looking like a superhero, superman, super super, became a pre-candidate for President of the Republic. The prince of Higienópolis loved it, talking from his ruined principality about someone who was never really king. It turns out that the green man on television is half Datena, half Silvio Santos; he jokes, but he won't. Coward. Loose. Too serious stuff. And look there; yes, Portuguesa went bankrupt, and Galvão Bueno was retired in 2022. Too obsolete in the “time saturated with nows”, a bit folkloric, he was talking more than he should.

And so in this steamroller of throwing away everything that gets old in the trash – and it gets old in a second – I know very well what Cacaso was thinking when he wrote in “Jogos florales” (by Grupo Escolar, 1974), the following: “It was Brazil is modern / the miracle has become modern: / water no longer turns into wine, / it turns straight into vinegar.” It is an unbearable and omnipresent bitterness in which we live. Jesus too (he was a hero), when asking for water on the cross, received vinegar. The author of the root miracle receives the Nutella® miracle. The same post-modern delicacy that today's purists refuse to eat due to the exploitation of palm oil in Southeast Asia. The same ones who make lists of banned words. There are times when I think everyone deserves each other in this 2024. The same deserves the same.

But then I remember that I know something. Here's the thing: there's something in the algae that permeates something. Rationality, the abstraction of capital, which changes day and night in the comings and goings of the world's penguins, in its neoliberal turn, has placed everyone as everyone's enemy. This makes me believe that Domingão do Faustão’s “Se vira nos 30” was not a mere misfortune. Now, our side also fulfills this role in the age of intellectuals influencers. The peripheral subjects, from the so-called identitarian left, go there and attack class and neighborhood allies, who find community zeal (of poverty and faith) in evangelical churches, which in turn instrumentalize faith and take the subjectivation that the enemy lives right next door. And they politicize, and they don't just want positions and vacancies in selection processes with quotas. They want more, much more. It's a short circuit, and it's meant to be that way. There is nothing surprising or new about this, if not frightening. Each one in their own square, following the role assigned to them by a God who casts spells on the merchandise tribe (the expression is from Paulo Arantes).

And there are us, puppets of ourselves, who know that there was a past and so we miss it. Oh, how good it was. This hangover of a frustrated revolution, a tropical utopia, a Brazilian civilization that will take off and save the world from itself. Poor Brazil, it was eaten by what was supposed to save it. Enough of the longing. Come on, let's go, guys.

*Vitor Morais He graduated in History at USP.

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