Lula defends Maduro with cliché that is a brand of the new right – 05/31/2023 – Sérgio Rodrigues

In addition to all the political criticism he has been receiving, Lula’s use of the word “narrative” to defend Nicolás Maduro marks a definite saturation point for this contemporary cliché.

“It is up to Venezuela to show its narrative so that it can effectively make people change their minds”, said the Brazilian, assuring the neighboring autocrat in advance that “your narrative will be infinitely better than what they have against you”.

From the point of view of language, what draws attention is the use of a rhetorical device that has been a hallmark of the new world right – even employed against Lula.

Fashion did not start with the right. Starting from academic bubbles more associated with progressivism, “narrative” overflowed from literary studies to soak the world in a supra-ideological way.

Yet there’s no question which side has benefited most when voters buy into the idea that there are no facts, no yardsticks of reality—only competing versions.

It is a pillar of the post-truth era, which usually has its starting point located in the election of Donald Trump, in 2016, but which the philosopher Hannah Arendt already predicted in 1967 in the essay “Truth and politics”.

This cynical relativism did and still does great services to the Brazilian extreme right, with its factory of lies about Covid-19, electronic voting machines and, to mention a cascade in full production, the 8th of January – among other topics.

After the first round of last year’s elections, Jair Bolsonaro warned against “narratives that try to pit us against our brothers in the Northeast”.

As the appeal did not work and he was beaten in the Northeastern polls also in the second round, it was left to his eldest son, Senator Flávio, to attribute the blame to “narratives (…) created by the Lula media”.

With its proven record of human rights violations, it is not true that the Venezuelan regime is not considered a full democracy only because of the lack of a convenient version of its history.

Not everything is narrative. There is a thing called reality – without which Lula would hardly have been able to get elected.

Last week’s column on virunduns inadvertently contributed to the spread of a widespread –but unsubstantiated “narrative” in reality– about the origin of the word that Brazilian Portuguese has adopted to designate comic misunderstandings in song lyrics.

The term has an older use and a nebulous origin as a proper name, Virundum, a playful synonym of the National Anthem, but it would have had its new meaning spread by Paulo Francis in the Rio de Janeiro weekly “O Pasquim”, created in 1969. Wrong.

Alerted by researcher Sérgio B. Ximenes, I went to check the archives of the National Library and, potato, Francis has nothing to do with the fish.

The only two occurrences of the word in the newspaper’s archive, both authored by the cartoonist Jaguar, are the word with the same old meaning of National Anthem.

The question remains open: when did virundum gain the extended meaning that lines like “Throw your hands to the sky / and your head if you have one” (“Na Rua, na Chuva, na Fazenda”, by Hyldon)?

As far as I could ascertain, a blog that became successful in 2003, called Virunduns and dedicated to collecting riches of this type, is the oldest suspect. New narratives are welcome, as long as they are based on facts.

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