Lula between will and the best possible – 01/06/2023 – Reinaldo Azevedo

I understand, reading this and that, that the Lula government is over, sunk in irresolutions. And all the setbacks would derive from the president’s wrong attitudes. I just read a section that suggests there are traces of senility in his attitudes. Astounding, but not surprising. I disagree, yes, and I hope I’m right, not out of intellectual vanity. It’s just that, otherwise, I don’t envision a very auspicious future for the country. Even because, agree, as in a poem by Jacques Prévert, “the ass, the king and I / We’ll be dead tomorrow”.

“Men make their own history precisely as they please, under circumstances of their choosing. The past is irrelevant. The traditions of all dead generations wither with them, and, once also dead, free the brains of the living.” Any artificial intelligence tool, doing justice to the natural stupidity of these times, could thus rewrite an excerpt from “The 18 Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”, by Karl Marx. In this first June column of mine, on the 10th anniversary of that 2013 of the flourishing of the fuckers, I can hardly contain the temptation to praise pure will against the boundaries of reality. Hard times. Do I sound the irony alert?

Well, I am, in these things, a conservative. Every day its agony, as they say, and it will always be necessary to “cultivate our garden”. And it is a fact that “everything goes for the best, in the best of all possible worlds”. Is that really a motto of foolish optimism? The answer comes in the form of a question: what’s in the impossible? Everything that goes beyond that line is in the territory of dreams, utopias, desires. These are legitimate prefigurations, but at the end of the journey, you deal with what you have. Such is the policy. A considerable part of the circumstances that define our existence do not derive from our will. Seeking to make the best of what they made of us, then yes, it seems to me a moral and ethical primacy.

“So much ‘philosophy’ why?” Let’s go back to the beginning. What does Lula want and what is conditioned by circumstances that were and are alien to him? You have to separate the baskets. Salaaming the dictator Nicolás Maduro, for example, is an unacceptable choice, in addition to being useless and counterproductive. They do not even express the respect that he himself always maintained for the rules of the democratic game. There’s a difference between reestablishing relations with Venezuela, and that’s right, and lending your prestige to a truculent tyrant. With regard to the war between Russia and Ukraine, the president’s positions differ from those of the USA and Europe (not so much from what Emmanuel Macron is saying, it is true), but not from those of India and China, which also exist. And, in the end, either a deal will be made there, or everything will go for the worst, in the worst of all possible worlds. Luckily, Lula made unconditional choices.

At the end of the five months in office, a fiscal framework has practically been approved, applauded, in its own way, even by Roberto Campos Neto; essential social programs were rescued, and the economy did not break down, as implacable crystal balls had foreseen. The country grew 1.9% in the first quarter, “well above expectations” — this “if” is the subject’s indetermination index. “It will get worse”, they assure. Who knows if you expect it wrong again… The Dinah mothers of the economy are owing us corrections.

The struggle for the approval of the MP for the restructuring of the government showed what has been given for some time: today, in practice, we live in a particularly perverse semi-presidential regime because Congress, in part, governs without having to answer for the result. The government will have to make appointments and release more amendments, which always gives some of our moralists goosebumps.

I note, additionally, that, after these five months, there is no minimally organized opposition, which has a clear axis of resistance to the government. It boils down to producing delinquencies in the depositions of ministers and in the commissions of inquiry of the coup and the MST, still germinations of the fascist spirit that was defeated at the polls. I am not mistaken: the risk that these people represent, lulled by the sewage of social networks, has not yet passed — a hypothesis in which we will all die: the donkey, the king and me.

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