I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but on Tuesday (
) I published a text entitled “What will become of us if Lula wins the elections”. The text was based only on the question that I was insistently asked a few weeks ago and on my attempt to answer this question that, before being electoral, is existential.
What was my surprise when, Two days later, I received an email from the Superior Electoral Court demanding that I write “a text of equal content about the ills that will befall the Brazilian people in the event of a victory for the fascist president Jair Bolsonaro”? Lie, of course. I didn’t receive any email. But just the fact that for a second you believed in me shows how much confidence in institutions has reached.
The truth is that I had never stopped to think about what will become of me/us if Bolsonaro wins the elections because I have the privilege (one more, besides being Christian, male, white, middle class, husband of Dani, father of D., owner of Catota and on top of that handsome!) of living surrounded by people who either they do not share psychotic antibolsonarism or they disguise it very well. I’m here trying to recall, but I don’t even think of any friend who has any fear of facing four more years of Bolsonaro.
“Neither among journalists?!” you ask me in disbelief. This, by the way, is the “disguise well” group I was referring to. But no, not among them. Even the most PT journalists around me know that Bolsonaro’s fascism is imaginary, while Lula’s resentment is very real. PT members, journalists or not, believe they will surf on this resentment. But only because they missed the history class in which revolutions are taught to devour their children. And I’m too old to teach you that.
Anyway, here I go to do the imagination exercise. I sit in the Indian position, keep my spine straight, take a deep breath, feel the calm invading me and, with some effort, I even hear the sound of a zither in the distance. Ready. Now I can predict a future second term of Bolsonaro e. But what is this I’m seeing, my God?!
Answer
Calm down! What frightens me in this fantasy is not the massacre of trans people or modern dictatorship basements. What scares me about the possibility of having Bolsonaro for another four years in power is the perpetuation of imaginary fascism, with its daily promise of a coup; the fake cheat-paste scandals; the Nothing and Nothing CPIs; the artists’ cries; adversative conjunctions; aesthetic rejection, etc. Honestly, I don’t know if I have the health to endure more versions of the “Hymn to the Unnameable”.
Without mincing words: if Bolsonaro wins the election, I don’t believe that everyone’s cross will necessarily be lighter. Because Brazil will continue to be. Despite Bolsonaro’s re-election, the progressive spirit will insist on questioning the values of this Judeo-Christian culture. Gasoline may become cheaper for a while, to go back up according to the international price of oil – and people will continue to not understand how the commodity market works. Great artists of the 20th century will die and we will regret not having a good replacement. Not to mention that the mayor of Curitiba will insist on the installation of radars throughout the city.
But, similar to the answer I gave to the question “What will become of us if Lula wins?”, I feel obliged saying that: we will fight and survive. We’ll listen to Anitta’s latest mega-success and write a chronicle. We will participate in the course Tecnoturbomachofascism 2 – Now the Enemy is the Same, by Márcia Tiburi. We will read any other book that passes through the caatinga, with children’s characters weaving high ideological considerations against capitalism. We’ll watch movies that sanctify left-wing terrorists who killed you for your own good. And so on. In other words, we will fight.
(I know it didn’t make much sense to keep the first person plural after “surviving”, but I thought the change to the singular would be too sudden and sound bad. But you You know I’m saying that I will listen to Anitta, take the course, read the thesis novel and watch the intellectually dishonest film, right? Not you. You’ll only have the pleasure of continuing reading my forays into these weird parties with weird people).
And we will survive, dear reader. Oh, if we will survive! We will laugh one day and cry another. We will complain about the excess or lack of work. We will scold the younger generations. If there continues to be persecution and judicial activism in the STF, we will denounce and write satires and compose parodies. Of the plans that we will continue to make, some will come to fruition and others will not. Our love will be returned here and rejected there. We will survive – until we don’t survive anymore, because that’s the natural course of things.
