A Disguse to Nothing

Prelude to nothing.

Ok, so this is my first serious post, if you can consider anything I put here serious. This is also something I would like to become a short series about how the heck someone like Bolsonaro became the president of Brazil, and how he lost it. Although I present it as a series, who am I kidding. I’m to lazy to write and the more I dive down this rabbit hole the more confused and crazy I get. Anyway, if you’ve been sent a link, this is your last warning to just turn away and waste your time more wisely – maybe throwing rocks at the moon, I don’t know what rocks your boat.

In this series a pretend to explore a few things. How could someone like Bolsonaro rise to power. Before 2013, the guy sure had some following, but he was mostly a lowly member of Brazilian congress known for his controversial – albeit controversial only to libtards – takes. As I’m an orderly guy, contrary to what uncommon knowledge would tell you, I intend to go at it like a butcher – in parts. In the current piece, I plan to expound, although superficially, what has lead to his election. I may forget a bit, for my memory is not that good, but I’ll paint a general picture.

In the next installments, and who am I kidding for there probably are going to be none, I intend to dive deeper into what happened and how Brazil came to be where it is now. This is not to be a definite history. This is an account from memory, although I will do some research and hope to, at least, give some useful information. For those of you, no matter how few, that have gotten a link to it, I beg for your patience. Or maybe I don’t and, as I have said before, you should waste your precious time elsewhere.

My initial plans go this way, though I will probably fail to abide by it: in this first post, I’ll paint a general picture of what was happening in the 2013 to 2017 Brazilian political scene. In the second part, I want to present you Bolsonaro, as he was back then. In the third one, I’ll try to introduce one of the most important character of Brazilian political philosophy, Professor Olavo de Carvalho, whose books I’ve read none. I then plan to Look at the build up of the 2018 elections and what got Bolsonaro to reach the status of a pop symbol for Brazilian anti status quo. Lastly, I will try to explore what happened during his term and why he lost his reelection bid. The only thing I can promise you is I’ll fail miserably at delivering what I am promising, so don’t stay tuned.

Before I continue, though, I’d like to put all the blame for this verbiage onto

Mark Bisone

, of The Cat Was Never Found fame. He’s the one who prodded me to write this, unaware that I’d actually do it and that he’d get a link to it. Poor guy. His writing, unlike mine, are very much worth a read and you should do it. In fact, if you’ve come this far, I’d recommend you give up reading the rest of this idiocy and going straight to his substack, which is actually very useful and full of information.

To understand how we, monkeys from Banania, got to where we are right now, and more precisely, how we got to 2018, takes a little bit of traveling back in time. Although this time machine could go back to the 1500’s and our colonization, or even to the closer ides of march, or the 1^st of April if you’re lefty inclined, I’ll stick to the 90s and early 2000’s. After our military regime officially ended in the mid 80’s Brazil basically became divided by two very strong political forces: the social democrats, which became the Brazilian Social Democrat Party – PSDB and the unionists/communists, lead by the Workers Party – PT. This dialectic, to use Marxists terms, dominated Brazilian politics from the 90’s. Of course, there were other parties, the majors of which were the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party – PMDB and the Liberal Front Party – PFL. Some other parties were around, but for now I’ll not go into those.

The PSDB, although initially strong only in Sao Paulo, got a big head start with it’s neoliberal plan to stop Brazilian hyperinflation. That meant it managed to get the presidency in 1994. The winner was a guy named Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a known figure at ECLAC, a UN sub-organization, who used to be a communist but, in his own words, had modernized his thought. This is not all that important for now. And no, I’ll not delve in his plans or ideas, but I might into his government and what it did. Maybe if there is some demand – as if more than one person will read this, although I’ll send the link to two. After his two terms comes Luiz Inacio “Nine fingered thieving squid” Lula da Silva. Beating one of the most dislikable candidates possible to be put forth and with some alliances with our wall street, he got the seat.

With good luck and without being too much of an imbecile, he managed to coast by the commodity boom of the early 2000s. Come the 2008/2009 crisis, which he called a little wave, he does the unthinkable. Now, the unthinkable part and what I describe next is purely conjecture based on fumes coming out of my white behind. He nominates his mostly incompetent and unknown Minister of the Civil House, some bureaucracy position supposedly responsible for political arrangements, as his successor. But, you see, that is unacceptable.

To give you sense of proportion, this person is so incompetent she managed to bankrupt a 99c store. She’s as good at political articulation as she is at giving speeches, and believe you me, she is not very good at that. Imagine you’re choosing your successor. Now imagine that you have a lot of the dimmest bulbs in the shed to pick from, and yet you go for a birthday candle. That’s her. But things don’t stop there. The squid, in his megalomania, also had decided that Brazil should host not only the World Cup but the Olympics. Brazil is not a rich country, and holding two such evens two years apart is not a good thing. Well, it is good if you’re into civil construction, but not if you’re trying to build a country.

Her first term is a mess, as expected. Although there is some growth, the country is clearly not well. Come 2013, and people start going to the streets against the World Cup. Granted, there were lots of leftist agitation, but most people are against it. We have not enough hospitals for people and they are spending billions building useless stadiums in the middle of nowhere. At the same time a figure, you could say the dog behind the child, starts making its way into the mainstream. Was that Bolsonaro? No. It was Olavo de Carvalho. But I’ll leave this for another, probably nonexistent, installment.

Come 2015, fumes of an operation start to make it’s way into the media, or should I say, insert it’s way into it, for anyone who knows how our Federal prosecutors and police work is wont to know. Some businessman from Parana sees something weird and decided to go to Federal prosecutors (this actually happened a little while before). It turns out that, after some investigation, it was found that a car wash – hence the name of the operation – was actually into the laundry business. And not the laundromat that does your dry cleaning. The cleaning they did was all about money. But all this I’ve been giving you is more like an appetizer. There are much deeper dives that could be taken there, but when it comes to levers of power, there are much more important things to look at. Well, from now on it’s all pure speculation and rambling from someone who has gone crazy a long time ago.

The thing is, between those two parties, the PSDB and the PT, there seemed to have been a sort of tacit agreement. Professor Olavo calls it the theater of the scissors. Both are prongs of the same devilish movement. What seemed to have been the tacit agreement was that there should be an alternation of thievery, I mean, power. The PSDB had its eight years, the PT had its eight years, and in 2009 it was time for power to come back to the more “moderate” prong. But the PT, being a true communist party, did not see so. They don’t see the social democrats with good eyes. In every revolution, Mensheviks are the first to be culled.

As the PT was not willing to let go of the bone, the PSDB, which still held a strong force in other sectors, namely the federal prosecutors and federal judges and financial sectors, decided that they would change the game. Here is where operation car wash came in. The operation, which I, as an imbecile, liked at the time, seemed aimed at the PT. It actually, from the very beginning, seemed like a cruise missile locked on a single target: the squid. But not hard enough so that he would be doomed but just hard enough so that he would agree to play ball and go back to the agreed game.

This is the funny part that to me, and from a long distance apart, seems quite obvious. Although they were aiming at him, they made everything possible so that he’d get decisions against him overturned. They hesitated doing anything that went directly at him. They seemed to have made sure that the operation served as a mere didactic lesson. Play ball, or else. The apex of the operation came after Dilma got her second term, and it was all going well and according to plan. The thing that they didn’t foresee was that an outsider, if we can call him that, would come in and sweep the stakes. No sir, that was the PSDB’s turn, and someone had ruined that for them.

What happened next is the subject for another, probably non-existing, installment. If you were unfortunate enough to have received a link to this, I am sorry. Again, don’t subscribe, for I probably won’t write anything else.