The President and the Golden Shower

Why was Brazil’s conservative leader tweeting out kink?

 

"By all accounts, Mr. Bolsonaro did not have a great Carnival. He was recovering from major abdominal surgery — the latest phase in a long, delicate recovery from a stabbing last September. But he was able to follow the events from his smartphone. And it soon became clear that the anti-Bolsonaro demonstrations had gotten under his skin.

Mr. Bolsonaro is not the first politician in Brazil’s current conservative moment to chafe against the libertine spirit of Carnival. Mayor Marcelo Crivella of Rio de Janeiro, who is a Pentecostal Christian and a bishop (and a popular target of mockery at many a Carnival block party), in recent years slashed government funding for the city’s street parties. “Carnival is a portly baby that needs to be weaned,” he told the news site G1 ahead of this year’s celebrations, adding, for good measure, that women would understand the metaphor. 

But Mr. Bolsonaro should heed the lessons of history: Brazilian politicians who take on Carnival rarely triumph. As a journalist noted on Twitter, in 1961 President Janio Quadros “tried to regulate behavior” at Carnival, under the slogan “‘Janio is the certainty of a moralized Brazil.’” Mr. Quadros may have been morally certain; he also resigned after eight months."

MORE IN THE ARTICLE By Cleuci de Oliveira