Michel Temer receives notification of his inauguration as interim president sent by the Senate. Marcos Corrêa / Flickr. Creative Commons.
In today’s Brazil, everything is as it seems. The belly of politics has been turned inside out, its ghastly lining exposed, weeping fetid and corrosive juices into society’s sickly bloodstream. Conspiracy is a palpable practice, not a theory. Social and news media are primary battlegrounds. Stealth loses its currency, and political advantage is determined by speed of action. Adversaries from multiple factions race to pre-empt each other’s offensives, which seem to outpace and splinter time’s arrow. The present shrinks. Tomorrow is here. Plutarch’s ‘man of today’ is already dead.
Hindsight is selective; it rationalises and sequences past events, ascribing to them a logic they rarely manifest in the moment. But mere reflection on the complexity of Brazilian politics in recent years discredits any linear narrative. Each mazy sub-plot forms part of history’s infinite labyrinth. Contingency and absurdity are more accurate descriptors than ‘order and progress’. And yet, hiatuses between frenzied accusation and counter-accusation are filled with talk of modernisation – as justification for the current government’s agenda or as proposed correction to it – reflecting the materialism and rationalism that have guided the aberrant construction of the Brazilian republic.
