First of all, I would like to to thank the crowd that, last week, accepted my invitation for a coffee/beer/whiskey and a good conversation in the text “If millions of Brazilians even consider voting for Lula, where did we go wrong?”. In the midst of so many good and beautiful people there was one or another rude and ugly, but it doesn’t matter. For them I left the broom strategically and superstitiously behind the door.
Among the comments, I was struck by one that spoke about “the difficult task of choosing who will lead our lives”. Wow. I am immensely grateful to the author or author (I don’t remember and I’m quoting off the top of my head) because this sentence has been bouncing around in my head for a long time. It expresses an old doubt about the real power of the president of Brazil.
Philosophically and spiritually, so to speak, I approach this issue supported by Jordan Peterson’s words: we are the ones who give power to others, especially our political-ideological adversaries. And precisely because we imagine them to be much more powerful than they are. We imagine them, you see!, capable of “ruling our lives”. Always remembering that there’s beer in the fridge and salami on the table (yes, you can open the rollmops pot), I propose to the reader the question: what power
does the president exercise in his life? I imagine that the answers vary according to the degree of dependence of the person in relation to the State. A civil servant and a poor person who receives Bolsa Família tend to attribute greater direct power to the president. A privileged journalist like myself, on the other hand, tends to attribute little or no direct power to the president. I’m here looking in all the drawers of memory and I’m not able to find a single moment when I made a personal decision under the influence or coercion of Jair Bolsonaro. Ah yes. The decisions of the economic team affect investments. The president’s often blunt words influence the dollar, which in turn influences the inflation that forces me to switch from Perrier to San Pelegrino. Other than that, I’m free as I’ve always been to make my decisions, some right and most wrong. Which leads me to (hey Jones, get another question mark for me there in the last drawer, please) ask: are there not people using ideological disagreements with the president to justify wrong personal decisions????? ?? (Didn’t need that many, Jones. One was enough. Now go anyway). Recently, the president of the Republic, supposedly “the most powerful man in Brazil”, was forbidden to mention the word “leprosy”. The lawsuit against the already dilapidated presidential lexicon was brought by an association of people with leprosy that, by all indications, intends to eliminate the word as it considers it discriminatory and offensive. Which, for me, just proves that leprosy is curable, but leprosy from victimism is not. If any judge can forbid a president to use a perfectly normal word that is even in the Gospels (by the way, the president was referring to biblical times when he mentioned the forbidden word), what will be the real dimension of that presidential power? And more: who is really in charge in this country of so many abuses? (The question marks are gone, but I already asked for more. The motoboy must be arriving with them). Think about all the decisions of the STF so far. They have already prevented Bolsonaro from appointing the director of the Federal Police of his choice – presidential prerogative. They have already prevented him from deciding what would be the best way to deal with the pandemic. They have already interfered in various ministries and municipalities, using as an excuse, for example, the “dismantling of cultural policies”. Now, if a president (and his government) cannot dismantle something that he considers to have been mistakenly put together by PT administrations, then what is he good for? On the one hand, this is good. Under normal conditions, that is, if the state were not so equipped by the left, this limitation of presidential power should be celebrated. After all, no one would want to live in a country where presidents have super powers. Maybe the despot wakes up especially creative and, I don’t know, makes bread with condensed milk mandatory! But I think we can agree on two things here. First of all, this beer is really cold! Stupidly icy, as they said in the days when advertisers were creative. Second, we can agree that we do not live under normal conditions. On the one hand, presidential power has been limited and that means we don’t run the risk of having to obey any nonsense. Hey! On the other hand, in countries without a democratic culture, such as Brazil, despotic power rarely goes unowned. Not for nothing, in the last three years, while part of the intellectual and artistic elite hid under the bed, scared to death of an imaginary fascism, institutions (and their corresponding authorities) such as the STF had its power increased – which means we are at the mercy of ideological whims like the judge who banned the president from speaking “leprosy” and nonsense like the judge who suggested that parents who do not vaccinate their children should lose custody of their children.
Leprosy
