Prison climate for Bolsonaro – 03/20/2024 – Sérgio Rodrigues

“There is no climate to arrest Bolsonaro.” Having exhausted the legal paths – at least the non-laughable ones – to defend the former president, the phrase began to circulate in recent days like a dog without an owner, sniffing behinds in search of fits. Go ahead: isn’t the Brazilian elite’s vocation for squatting undeniable?

But what do you mean – “there is no climate”? Since when has compliance with the law been subject to atmospheric conditions? And how does this figurative climate relate to the climate itself, the one that made the summer that has now ended hellish and that, on the verge of collapse, threatens the continuity of human civilization as we know it?

To better understand what the climatological attempt to free the most lame criminal in Brazilian political history from jail, caught with his hand in all the caves, it is worth going back to ancient Greece in order to follow the trajectory of the word “klíma”, a word with vast progeny.

The ancient Greeks were not great climatologists – not even small ones, as climatology would still take centuries to be born. However, his term “klíma”, which originally meant “slope, slope”, would become a powerful etymological key.

What slope was it? According to what was believed at the time, the Earth’s surface described a slope from the equator to the poles, progressively moving away from the Sun, and all the variations in atmospheric conditions found in the world were explained in this way. Which was obviously wrong, but only half so.

In the division of the planet into parallel bands that those first geographers created, corresponding to our latitudes, each band was a “klíma”, a step. It was with this meaning that the word came to Latin and from there, in the Middle Ages, to the French “climat”, from where it spread to other Romance languages ​​and English.

According to the etymological Merriam-Webster, Shakespeare – in the play “Henry V”, from the end of the 16th century – was one of the first recorded uses of the word (in this case, “climate”) in its modern sense, no longer that of latitude but that of “set of meteorological conditions”.

Interestingly, the term appears in the mouth of a French character who deplores England’s climate, calling it “foggy, cold and dull”.

Only in the 19th century would the metaphorical use of climate as a psychosocial environment, a moral atmosphere, begin to appear in several languages ​​at the same time: “After the economic crisis, the climate in the country was optimistic.”

The meaning of “favorable environment” also emerged, in greater specialization, as in the phrase above: “There is no climate to arrest Bolsonaro”. And why not? Why would he have millions of votes if he were eligible? Lula had that too.

Great weather, huh. Of course, in this case the word has nothing to do with meteorology and is reminiscent of another highly successful use in Brazil, the one in which it means “favorable environment for a romantic encounter” (Houaiss’s definition).

Exactly what Bolsonaro used when he said, in the last electoral campaign, that he “created a climate” between himself and some “beautiful, tidy” Venezuelan teenagers that he had met in Brasília when he was riding his motorbike, believing that they were sex workers.

If climate is something that can paint like this, even in swamps of latent illegality and explicit immorality, it would be a crime if the law did not intervene in the climate when Justice needs it most.

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