NEY MATOGROSSO - CACHORRO VIRALATA (Alberto Ribeiro)

 

E até mesmo entre os caninos
Diferentes os destinos
Costumam ser
Uns têm jantar e almoço
E outros nem sequer um osso
De lambuja pra roer
E quando pinta a carrocinha
A gente logo adivinha
A conclusão
O vira-lata, coitado
Que não foi matriculado
Desta vez "virou"... sabão

 

Christopher Nolan Has Rebuked the Spirit of the Age

 

 

 

 David French

  What really happens when you “defy the gods”? Or put another way: Do you believe moral laws exist?

By that I don’t simply mean that some things are right or wrong. Instead, do you believe that the transgression of a moral law carries a consequence? We’re familiar with the consequences of physical laws. If you step off the roof of a building, the law of gravity takes over.

But what if you violate the Golden Rule? Is there a consequence for failing to love thy neighbor as thyself?

At this moment in American history it seems as if a substantial portion of America’s ruling class is putting all its chips on the answer being no, rules are for suckers. In fact, as far as they are concerned, morality causes problems. In American politics and commerce, complying with something as lame as “norms” — even uttering the word in a positive fashion — is like fighting with one hand tied behind your back.

A president enriches himself at a scale never seen before in the United States. An Epstein class of abusive libertines always seems to evade accountability for its crimes. Government officials break the law with impunity, banking on presidential pardons to excuse their crimes — all while truth is buried under an avalanche of lies, lies that are shared with gusto by cadres of grifters and fools.

Without saying one word about modern politics, Christopher Nolan has rebuked the spirit of the age. His retelling of the “Odyssey” is an admonition: Moral transgressions always carry a consequence.

His version of Odysseus is a haunted man. After 10 years of war and 10 long years of suffering on the journey home, he seems broken. He can be ruthless. He can be vicious. But he is also suffering from a profound moral injury; only confession and penance provide pathways to peace.

One of the most vivid promotional posters for Nolan’s film features the broken, severed head from a statue of Athena and the exact quote I began with: “Defy the Gods.”

Combine that quote and that image, and it looks like an exhortation. Go ahead, Odysseus, defy the gods. Tear down their statues. Break their laws. Based on that alone, you’d expect a movie about a proud man standing up to irrational and capricious divine authority.

But that’s the opposite of what transpires. Yes, the severed head of Athena matters to the story, as does Odysseus’ defiance, but there is nothing good or laudatory about it.

The film seems agnostic as to whether the gods themselves are real, and at the start, the text on the screen says it’s taking place at a time of “apparent magic.” Is Athena actually appearing to Odysseus or is she a manifestation of a guilty conscience?

Instead, the movie centers on a moral code, specifically “Zeus’ law,” the obligation to treat strangers with hospitality and kindness. The law is rooted in the mythical idea that the gods sometimes travel among people while disguised as mortals. It is in this disguise that they can judge the true worth of a person. Or, as Odysseus says in the film, “the clearest view of men is from below.”

The first act of the movie features two very different scenes. In Ithaca, Odysseus’ home, a man starts to tell the story of the Trojan War — and Odysseus’ great victory — to a raucous and decadent room of suitors for Penelope, Odysseus’ wife. They’ve taken up residence in Odysseus’ palace, waiting for Penelope to give up hope that Odysseus will ever return.

But the movie soon flashes back to a moment of triumph. You see the victorious Greek forces departing the shores of Troy after the Trojan War. Agamemnon, the commander in chief, sails away in an immense ship. Odysseus decides to follow a different path, and the rest is the stuff of myth and legend.

The film flashes back and forth between the present, when the suitors are swarming Penelope’s palace, and all the years of Odysseus’s journey. Throughout the movie, there are references to the mysterious “sea peoples,” a brutal band of raiders who seem reminiscent of a Mediterranean version of the Vikings.

A sense of doom and decline pervades the scene. At each new destination, it seems as if Odysseus loses more of his crew, until they are all gone — murdered, drowned, eaten and God knows what else. In Nolan’s retelling, which differs from Homer’s and is more like Aeschylus’, Agamemnon comes home in triumph and is almost immediately killed by his vengeful wife. He’d sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia as an offering to the gods before the Trojan War.

Ultimately, it’s revealed that the dreaded “sea peoples” may have been the Greeks themselves, the veterans of the Trojan War who looted their way back home.

In the movie’s powerful third act (spoiler alert, for those who care about spoiling a modern take on an almost 3,000-year-old epic poem), Odysseus connects all the dots. The Trojan War wasn’t a great victory conducted in service of a righteous cause. It was a war fought for greed and power under the pretext of fighting to bring Helen of Troy home.

And the Trojan horse? Odysseus’s strategic masterstroke? In Nolan’s depiction, it is essentially a war crime — an act of subterfuge that takes advantage of ancient customs to unleash the horrifying sack of the city after Troy’s army is defeated. Odysseus is determined to get home, but he is also wracked with guilt.

During his extended stay with Calypso, he voraciously consumes lotus flowers that help him forget. He forgets his wife. He forgets his men. And he forgets his own crimes — until the memories return.

Ultimately, he doesn’t come home to Ithaca to sit on his throne, but to confess, to rescue his wife from the clutches of evil men and to choose exile.

Redemption, for Odysseus, comes from confession and penance, not defiance. And the broken head of Athena is a symbol of his own sin, not a sign of his triumph over the divine.

It’s a reminder of how stupid and petty much of the right has become that anyone would think this movie was “woke.” Yes, a Black actor — Lupita Nyong’o — plays Helen of Troy, and a trans actor — Elliot Page — plays Sinon, the Greek warrior who unwittingly tricks the Trojans into accepting the Trojan horse as a gift. But to label a movie woke simply because of the identity of the actors is to indulge in a caricatured version of the same identity politics that the right claims to loathe.

In reality, Nolan’s “Odyssey” is one of the most small-c conservative movies I’ve ever seen. I can easily imagine a natural law theorist watching the movie, nodding his head and saying, “Yes, there are universal moral laws, and this is exactly what happens when prideful men believe they know more than God.”

But the consequences of violating moral laws are different and more pernicious than, say, defying the laws of gravity. If I step off a roof, as I said earlier, the consequences are immediate and permanent, for me at least. But I can violate moral laws and prosper, if only for a time. The consequences often radiate out to others.

That is why transgression is so seductive. Terrible men get to sack Troy, and some of them might even get to carry the gold away with them. They can live in a palace, for a while, as the rest of the world turns to rubble and ruin.

Earlier this month, I spoke at the third annual “Liberalism for the 21st Century” conference, hosted by the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism. After a panel on presidential power, a young man asked us a version of the question I’ve been asked for more than a decade.

“What’s the utility of following norms if only one side is, and second, can you make rules for rule breakers?”

I responded with a bit of a pat answer, to be honest. “Norm-busting makes our lives worse,” I said. “Repairing norms makes our lives better.”

This feels self-evidently true. Americans are bitter, divided and uncertain. We lack confidence in the future. We dislike one another. We distrust the government. I want to repair that damage, not accelerate our decline.

But that’s an intellectual answer. Nolan has given us the artistic answer.

Defy the gods? Deny the dignity of your neighbor?

You certainly can, if you so choose. And you may prosper for a time. But the narrative arc of the movie tells us our destiny if that’s the path we choose. It turns out that there are rules for rule breakers, just as there are for everyone else, and those rules have persisted throughout human history.

Here’s one, arguably the central truth of the film: Heedless people, you will pay for what you destroy.

NEW YORK TIMES

‘We’re Trapped in Hell’: Iranians Say Life Is Put On Hold by Months of War

 

 

  "Gone are the pep talks from relatives about finding a job, he said, as unemployment continues to soar. Many Iranians have shelved plans to repair buildings or rebuild lives battered by the war. Planning for the future seems an absurd luxury when impoverished friends can afford to buy rice only by the cup and when the United States and Iran are trading strikes on military sites, ports and water desalination plants around the region." 

read report by  Leily Nikounazar and Erika Solomon 

 

Alberto Bomilcar Besouchet

 

 

 

Flavio Pinheiro >

A Guerra Civil espanhola eclodiu em julho de 1936, há 90 anos. Alberto Bomilcar Besouchet, tenente do Exército e militante do Partido Comunista do Brasil (PCB), desembarcou na Espanha em fevereiro de 1937 para lutar nas Brigadas Internacionais que defendiam os Republicanos contra as tropas de Francisco Franco, depois longevo ditador fascista. Lá foi morto, possivelmente em maio de 1938, em circunstâncias obscurecidas por silêncios e cumplicidades, e seu corpo jamais foi encontrado. Marco Antônio Machado Lima Pereira, Doutor em História Social e Professor da Universidade Federal do Maranhão, relatou em artigos de exemplar rigor e abundante informação as “tensões e conflitos” que cercaram a trajetória de um revolucionário antifascista brasileiro esquecido na efeméride do conflito e que foi abatido por pelotões estalinistas que o tratavam como perigoso trotskista.

Alberto nasceu em 1910 em Santa Catarina. Era o filho caçula de Júlia Bomílcar e Helvécio Renato Besouchet, oficial do Exército. Muito cedo três de seus irmãos mais velhos – Augusto, Marino e Lídia – filiaram-se ao PCB. Aos 23 anos ele aderiu ao partido. Como tenente, foi um dos líderes da insurreição do 29º Batalhão dos Caçadores em Recife, sufocada por militares que a batizaram de Intentona Comunista. Alberto levou um tiro na perna. Conseguiu fugir. Com sentença de 8 anos de prisão perambulou por esconderijos e usava codinomes como “Jack”. Quando a guerra civil espanhola estourou quis ir para lá. Com falso passaporte cubano e o nome de Ernesto Torres chegou a Buenos Aires e de lá partiu para Espanha. Já em combate, um estilhaço de bomba feriu sua perna - não se sabe se a mesma perfurada a bala em Recife. De alguma forma recuperou-se.

O fiasco da Intentona provocou divisões no partido. Em nome dos irmãos Marino e Lídia, Augusto escreveu um manifesto para Luís Carlos Prestes, secretário-geral do PCB, condenando o “golpismo”, tática fracassada para desatar uma revolução. Ainda em 1935, os Besouchet foram expulsos do partido com estardalhaço acusados de trotskistas (adeptos da revolução permanente pregada por Leon Trotsky, dissidente perseguido e, mais tarde, morto por ordem de Josef Stalin). Entre as suspeitas arroladas mencionava-se que eram amigos de Mario Pedrosa, crítico de arte, trotskista.

A pecha do trotskismo dos irmãos viajou até a Espanha, onde eram vistos como espiões traidores da causa. Por consanguinidade, Alberto passou a ser um alvo. Tina Modotti, extraordinária fotógrafa italiana, provavelmente não o conheceu, mas denunciou-o a Vittorio Vidali, seu superior imediato, como elemento perigoso e nocivo. Mais tarde arrependeu-se do que fez em nome do sectarismo político. Pouco depois da denúncia, Alberto foi assassinado por estalinistas em data e local nunca esclarecidos. Dinarco Reis, comunista brasileiro, também combatente na Espanha, espalhou a versão de que Alberto fora preso e fuzilado pelos fascistas numa prisão em Barcelona. Hipótese errada. Augusto, funcionário do Banco do Brasil, mortificou-se de culpa por ter estimulado o irmão a ir para a Espanha. Lídia, escritora e historiadora, fez o que pôde para esclarecer sua morte e buscar seu corpo. Alberto é um mártir pouco conhecido de uma aventura política arriscada, mas que valia um sonho

mais flavio pinheiro no PASMADO
https://pasmado.substack.com/p/pasmado-20-alberto-besouche 

After Nagasaki: Against the Politics of Psychic Numbing

 

 

"We have not simply become accustomed to living amid unprecedented violence, we have been educated to accommodate it. Cruelty no longer confronts us as an ethical rupture demanding judgment and action. It has been absorbed into the rhythms of everyday life, stripped of its capacity to shock, and transformed into yet another spectacle competing for our distracted attention.

Under such conditions, the dehumanization of others is inseparable from the transformation of the machinery of death into a spectacle consumed with fascination rather than horror. The deepest victory of authoritarian politics in the twenty-first century lies not only in its capacity to produce immense suffering, pain, and death, but in its ability to cultivate moral indifference while making violence appear seductive, entertaining, or inevitable. When people cease to feel the pain of others, violence no longer requires widespread consent; it needs only widespread indifference."

 read article by HENRY GIROUX 

After Nagasaki: Against the Politics of Psychic Numbing - CounterPunch.org

Mãe Preta (Caco Velho - Piratini) : Conjunto Tocantins (1943)

 

Pele encarquilhada carapinha branca
Gandola de renda caindo na anca
Embalando o berço do filho do sinhô
Que há pouco tempo a sinhá ganhou

Era assim que mãe preta fazia
Criava todo branco com muita alegria
Enquanto na senzala Pai João apanhava
Mãe preta mais uma lágrima enxugava

 

Amorim e o lançamento dos candidatos

 AMORIM

The Rivingtons Papa Oom Mow Mow

 

Funniest sound I ever heard
And I can't understand a single word
Now, if he's serious or is he playin'
Oom-mow-mow is all he say

 

Final de 'Cem Anos de Solidão' acerta ao reforçar vínculo político com América Latina

 

 

 "À medida que Macondo envelhece, o verdadeiro protagonista da narrativa deixa de ser qualquer personagem. Passa a ser o próprio tempo. E poucos romances fizeram do tempo um personagem com tanta força quanto "Cem Anos de Solidão".

Talvez seja esse o maior desafio da adaptação: deixar de lado o realismo mágico —convertido, ao longo das décadas, quase numa caricatura pelas inúmeras imitações que inspirou— e transmitir essa estranha sensação de que tudo já aconteceu antes e, ainda assim, continua acontecendo diante de nossos olhos."

 LEIA RESENHA DE SYLVIA COLOMBO  

 

 

Dry Cleaning - Scratchcard Lanyard

 

It's a Tokyo bouncy ball
It's an Oslo bouncy ball
It's a Rio de Janeiro bouncy ball
Filter, I love these mighty oaks, don't you?

Tarcizilla

 

CRIS VECTOR 

Prove que você é humano

  

"A própria Minotaur Books decidiu repentinamente cancelar o contrato de Jerry Falade, e não demoraram a divulgar publicamente a razão dessa medida tão drástica. De acordo com seus agentes, apesar do manuscrito do romance parecer “extraordinário”, eles não podiam mais autenticar a evolução da escrita, garantindo que não houve uso de Inteligência Artificial no processo.

contecimentos dessa natureza acabam por fazer emergir muitas questões pertinentes. Especialmente envolvendo a tal literariedade que teóricos como Terry Eagleton tentaram definir. Por exemplo, qual seria o elemento preponderante que convenceria a comunidade de leitores sobre o quão literário um texto é? A voz? A originalidade? A irregularidade? A experiência vivida? Já era difícil antes refletir sobre as características supostamente únicas de uma obra estética: para piorar, precisaremos a partir de agora definir sua humanidade.

 

Será então que, daqui em diante, todos os autores precisarão provar que escreveram seus próprios livros? Assim como precisamos compilar (ou escanear) uma pá de documentos para abrir conta no banco, os escritores terão que submeter seus arquivos e computadores a uma perícia? E caberá às editoras realizar uma triagem por meio de rascunhos, arquivos de Word, históricos do Google Docs, e-mails, sites de pesquisa, metadados?

 

Escritores que precisam apresentar os vestígios de sua humanidade à cada livro submetido aos editores: não parece uma situação kafkaniana?"

 

mais no stack de RAFAEL SENRA

Prove que você é humano - by Rafael Senra Coelho

Christopher Nolan’s Trojan Horse

  

"And here we find Nolan’s central trick: Nolan has smuggled the core of Judeo-Christian ethics into “The Odyssey.” Zeus’ law, in Nolan’s “Odyssey,” echoes Leviticus 19:34: “The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” It echoes Rabbi Hillel, who said: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary.” It echoes Matthew 7:12, when Jesus says, “In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the law and the prophets.”

Such an ethic is demanding. Few of us live up to it. But the problem with adherents of the modern right is not just that they don’t live up to it; the issue is that they detest it. To treat the foreigner residing among us as well as we treat our native-born is derided as suicidal empathy. The Trump administration glorifies cruelty toward the immigrant, the stranger, the weak and the poor. It takes money from Medicaid to cut taxes for the rich. It threatens the destruction of whole civilizations.

The modern right is built on the logic of tribute and dominance."

read aNalysis by EZRA KLEIN

 

" 

Abdul El-Sayed offers a template for Democrats to defeat Trumpism

 

 

"In a recent interview, the New Yorker editor, David Remnick, asked El-Sayed whether he supports one or two states in Israel-Palestine. El-Sayed did not take the bait. He replied that his focus was less on “what’s happening there rather than what’s happening here”. His primary concern, he explained, was that the US was allocating money for Israeli weapons that it could be spending on schools in Michigan. While acknowledging: “I believe in equal rights to peace, dignity, and self-determination, for Palestinians and Jewish Israelis alike,” he said: “It is not my job as an American policymaker to decide what the ultimate peace should be. But it is my job to make sure that our resources are stewarded correctly for the people I’m responsible for: those kids going to those broken schools.”

In relentlessly linking US military aid to Israel to unmet needs in the United States, El-Sayed is crafting a progressive version of America First"

read article by PETER BEINART 

Abdul El-Sayed offers a template for Democrats to defeat Trumpism | Peter Beinart | The Guardian

Ethel Wters - Suppertime

 

Suppertime
I must set the table
'Cause it's suppertime
Somehow I ain't able
'Cause that man of mine
Ain't coming home no more

VAZANTE

 

 

Flavio achado vagando na rua

 

QUINHO

 

 

 

MIGUEL PAIVA

 

 

 

NANDO MOTTA

 

Despoiler of Cadaver - Ty Segall

 

Now I'm dead
Bullet in the head
But I'll pick up my aching bones
I'm gonna find him

So I can shoot
The despoiler of cadaver

HOJE \ TODAY

 

Mundo Fantasmo: O segundo tiro

 

 

 

 

 

 

" No romance O Estrangeiro (1942), de Albert Camus, o protagonista, Meursault, comete um crime pelo qual é preso, julgado e condenado à morte.

Há um detalhe que sempre me intrigou, desde quando o li pela primeira vez, com menos de vinte anos. "

leia cronica de Braulio Tavares 

Mundo Fantasmo: 5240) O segundo tiro (25.6.2026)

Ventania

 

NANDO MOTTA

 

The real meaning of Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan

 

 

"The Democratic party isn’t being taken over by “the left” or by democratic socialists. There’s no civil war between progressives and moderates. We aren’t witnessing an ideological battle between the “left” and the “center”. 

 

We’re seeing the US wake up to the tyranny that’s engulfed us, and to a crisis of affordability that’s causing most Americans to struggle financially while fueling the biggest stock market rally in history."

 

READ ARTICLE BY ROBERT REICH

The real meaning of Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan | Robert Reich | The Guardian

Infantino is getting his karmic kicking, but why did football take so long to rebel against Fifa?

 

 

"It is often said that Infantino is the symptom and Fifa is the disease. In fact Fifa too is the symptom; the disease is capitalistic fascism, a simple disdain for humanity, a belief that some are born to rule and others are bound to follow. And this is a cancer that will remain embedded in so many of our institutions long after Infantino has taken his last celebrity selfie, long after “45/47” has chowed down his last Oval Office Big Mac, long after the new Fifa regime has swept in through the door wearing the pageant sash of reform."

read article by JONATHAN LIEW  

Infantino is getting his karmic kicking, but why did football take so long to rebel against Fifa? | Fifa | The Guardian

An Odyssey Deserving of the Biggest Screen Possible

 

by David Sim

Emily Wilson’s celebrated translation of Homer’s The Odyssey sets aside the classic description of the epic poem’s hero, Odysseus, as a “man of twists and turns.” Instead, she goes for something more introspective: “Tell me about a complicated man,” it begins. That tweak perfectly reflects Christopher Nolan’s approach with The Odyssey, which is somehow Hollywood’s first proper adaptation of one of human history’s most enduring stories. His latest film contains many of the tale’s intricacies, its Greek gods and monsters, and its brutal, tragic sweep. But at its center is a person wondering whether he even deserves to return to the civilization that he fought so many years for.

As he has become fond of doing, Nolan delivers that rarest breed of blockbuster with The Odyssey—a visual extravaganza shot entirely in IMAX and best seen projected onto a mountain-size screen. Yet the movie manages to be a challenging, personal work, too, contending with the same anxieties about family and the crumbling edifices of modern society that power so much of Nolan’s filmography. He somehow finds idiosyncratic angles on well-trodden material, underlining Odysseus’s (played by Matt Damon) ache of yearning and loss without sacrificing the poem’s core sense of adventure. The result is a genuine pleasure to behold.

When Nolan first announced The Odyssey as his next project, I worried that the filmmaker’s love of practical effects and gritty in-camera realism might be his undoing. The story is, after all, reliant on walk-on appearances by mythological figures and heavy on fantastical creatures; even with his most outlandish films (such as his Batman trilogy and the dreamworld thriller Inception), Nolan has tried hard to stay grounded. The Odyssey certainly has the type of visual immediacy that he favors: The ship Odysseus navigates through the seas is battered by real waves, and the most fanciful moments are conjured with just the barest hint of CGI. The director imagines a land of antiquity that seems more inspired by UNESCO World Heritage Sites than by the director Ray Harryhausen’s colorful, special effects–laden Greek epics of yore; his vision is all simple stone temples and rough-hewn leather armor.

The film is also infused with magic of a grim, earthy sort. The Cyclops Polyphemus (Bill Irwin) looms over Odysseus and his soldiers through what feels like old-fashioned camera trickery; the pale, humanoid giant snatches them up and gobbles them whole. The witch Circe (Samantha Morton) somehow fluidly grabs people’s faces and stretches them, molding them into porcine snouts—a mechanical on-screen transformation unlike any I’ve seen in contemporary filmmaking. When Odysseus visits the land of the dead, undead shades crawl out of the volcanic soil, covered in mud and soot; perhaps that visual is the simplest way to render the moment, but Nolan knows how to make it blunt and spookily effective.

Odysseus’s journey unfurls in a similarly painstaking manner. Damon plays him as a taciturn yet commanding figure, respected rather than feared by his men. This Odysseus is less of a trickster and more of a thinker, however; he plots his moves quietly and is haunted by mistakes of the past. In typical fashion, Nolan dribbles out pieces of his protagonist’s story in flashback, saving the full retelling of Odysseus and the Ithacans’ sack of Troy for late in the film after teasing it in the beginning. Odysseus himself fills in many of the intervening gaps as memories that he shares with Calypso (Charlize Theron), the mysterious figure whose island he ends up stranded on.

Nolan, however, always has a reason for his temporal muddling. The writer-director is depicting Odysseus’s journey home not just as a travelogue riddled with grand setbacks, but also as a way for the hero to remember his sense of purpose after a decade of fighting dashed it to pieces. Odysseus and his army repeatedly cite “Zeus’s Law,” the ancient-Greek notion of hospitality, as they find themselves greeted by hostility and danger wherever they go. Are these men cursed by the gods, or is the world they had sought to conquer disintegrating around them?

That latter notion bubbles away in Ithaca, where Odysseus’s wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), guards his throne from a mob of greedy suitors seeking her hand in marriage; their goal is to wed Odysseus’s wife before his son, Telemachus (Tom Holland), comes of age. Hathaway plays Penelope as a proud, if wounded, bird, baffled at her husband’s absence even as many of his compatriots return; Holland, tamping down his Spider-Man chirpiness to tolerable levels, conveys how Telemachus’s essential goodness is still tinged with the arrogance of youth. The best characters on the Ithacan shores, though, are Eumaeus (John Leguizamo), Odysseus’s nearly blind swineherd who symbolizes the fading of honorable traditions, and the chief suitor, Antinous (Robert Pattinson), embodying the arrogance and greed eating away at the survivors after their victory.

Pattinson’s preening villainy is a crucial part of deepening the stakes. Nolan is emphasizing a loss of self and idealism in the shadow of war, giving The Odyssey some contemporary heft without any jarring didacticism. His previous movie, Oppenheimer, questioned whether the start of a new postwar world order had hastened the end for society; The Odyssey, meanwhile, is set in the aftermath of a great triumph and consumed by the notion of the dark ages that may well follow. Odysseus is flawed, sometimes impulsively proud, and haunted by his past failures—as well as generous and loving in a way that Nolan seems to want to celebrate. The filmmaker created a movie that does exactly that, keeping the necessary mythic scale but preserving the humanity at the center.

ATLANTIC  

  

Chorando pelos Dedos - Hamilton de Holanda e Diogo Nogueira (Joao Nogueira \ Claudio Jorge)

 

Olhe o homem como ele está chorando
Chorando pelos dedos lágrimas do som de um bandolim
Chore homem para espantar seus medos
Que lá vem um tempo bom de ir
Ir a caminhar sobre o luar de violões
Ir a cantar, a dedilhar, pra festejar os tempos bons

PAQUETAENSES

 

The Chantels - Maybe (1958)

 

Maybe if I pray every night

You'll come back to me And maybe if I cry every day You'll come back to stay

Oh, maybe

IN MEMORIAM ARLENE SHAW

3 IMAGENS

 

A Trojan Horse Is Supposed to Have Humans Inside It

 

 

"Nolan’s horse is light as air. In comparison with other blockbusters—such as, say, the Die Hard films, also action-packed tales of one man’s dangerous journey back to his wife—The Odyssey contains far more pontificating about values and civilizational decline, but much less coherence and less heart. It gestures at a critique of xenophobia and violence, but it focuses primarily on the perspective of the guilty, traumatized warrior rather than that of his victims. Moreover, the movie’s devoted attention to mechanics, and its heedless willingness to give us massacres as spectacle, undermines its moralizing claims of caring about man’s inhumanity to man. Verbally, we are told that people matter; visually, we are shown that they do not." 

READ REVIEW BY EMILY WILSON

 

 

 

 

 

Mar de gente em Ceuta

AROEIRA

 

C.I.A. Sets Up Secret Cuba Task Force as Trump Pressures Havana

 

 

 "The C.I.A. has secretly established a Cuba task force, setting in motion plans for a more concerted campaign to pressure the Cuban government to make the economic, political and leadership changes demanded by President Trump, according to people briefed on the action.

The creation of the task force will allow the agency to quickly direct more financial, human and technical resources at Cuba, they said.

The task force has begun adding case officers who recruit and manage spies, intelligence analysts, officers who conduct cyberoperations and officers who specialize in covert influence operations, the people said."

READ REPORT BY ADAM ENTOUS 

Do You Think if I Had a Job I Would Have Gone?’

 

 

" On a back street in Fnideq, Mohammed Said, 36, said he had come to the coast with those headed for Ceuta. He had quit school after seventh grade and worked in construction but had not found stable employment.

By the time he reached the border, he said, chaos reigned, with cars on fire and migrants clashing with the security forces. So he had hung back.

He had tried to swim to the territory twice last year, he said, but the Moroccan authorities stopped him. This time, he had come prepared, with a can of tuna, some crackers, a phone charger, comb, two extra T-shirts and a plastic sleeve for his cellphone, all in a plastic bag.

“I’ll try again,” he said. “It’s in God’s hands.”

 read report by Ben Hubbard and Aida Alami 

Hoje | Today

 

Vice Maria !!!

 

MIGUEL PAIVA

FRAGA

AROEIRA

FRAGA

4 IMAGENS

 

Carta ao Leitor — Darcy Ribeiro, Um Brasileiro

 

 

 

Paulo César Teixeira 

 

Ao longo do ano de 1999, editei para a revista ISTOÉ uma coleção de fascículos mensais intitulada “Brasileiros do Século”. A cada mês, os leitores escolhiam dez brasileiros de destaque do século que se despedia em diferentes áreas – política, economia, esportes, cultura, educação etc. Na época, embora o mundo já estivesse conectado, a web não era ainda onipresente na vida cotidiana como é hoje. Os votos, em sua maioria esmagadora, chegavam até a redação por carta e eram contados um a um. Sim, havia uma parcela de indicações registradas no site da revista, mas ela não era significativa.

Na categoria Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia, um dos escolhidos foi Darcy Ribeiro. Nascido em Montes Claros (MG), em 1922, ele mudou-se para o Pantanal, aos 24 anos, para trabalhar como antropólogo. Fazia pesquisas de campo junto a grupos indígenas, além de ocupar o posto de etnólogo no antigo Serviço de Proteção ao Índio (SPI). “Eu fiz uma coisa pelos índios, que foi criar o Parque do Xingu {no Mato Grosso}. Mas eles fizeram mais por mim. Eles me deram dignidade, e hoje posso ir a qualquer país do mundo falar de índio”, contou depois.

Mas foi, principalmente, na área da educação que se sobressaiu. Darcy criou a Universidade de Brasília (UnB), projeto que convenceu Juscelino Kubitschek a dar início e que foi inaugurado já no governo de João Goulart. Ele foi, aliás, ministro da Educação e chefe da Casa Civil de Jango.

Exilado após o golpe militar de 1964, soube, em Paris, que precisava extirpar o pulmão esquerdo, a essa altura, tomado pelo câncer. “Câncer para montes-clarense é verruga e se cura com benzeção. O meu é dos bons, uma bolinha maligna que, extirpada com o pulmão, dispensável, me deixará bom”, escreveu em correspondência aos amigos que estavam no Brasil. Na verdade, tinha 5% de chances de sobreviver. E sobreviveu (morreria só em 1997, finalmente derrotado pela doença, não sem antes fugir da UTI para acabar de escrever o livro O Povo Brasileiro – a Formação e o Sentido do Brasil). Retornou ao país com a anistia, em 1979, a tempo de se eleger vice-governador de Leonel Brizola no Rio de Janeiro, no começo dos anos 1980. Foi quando idealizou os Cieps para oferecer educação de turno integral às crianças pobres.

A trajetória de Darcy Ribeiro me veio à lembrança graças ao artigo Sem salário digno para professores, promessas de candidatos não passam de propaganda vazia, de Valter Mattos da Costa, publicado nesta edição da Liberta. A leitura também me conduziu a uma das frases mais lúcidas desse pensador, que – apaixonado pela gente brasileira – falava como se tivesse uma metralhadora giratória na voz para acompanhar a velocidade do raciocínio. “A crise da educação no Brasil não é uma crise; é um projeto”, dizia ele. A falta de investimentos e valorização dos professores é parte desse projeto deliberado para manter o status de um país profundamente desigual e injusto.

Se há algo que consola, é outra constatação emblemática de Darcy: “Fracassei em tudo o que tentei na vida. Tentei alfabetizar as crianças brasileiras, não consegui. Tentei salvar os índios, não consegui. Tentei fazer uma universidade séria e fracassei. Tentei fazer o Brasil desenvolver-se autonomamente e fracassei. Mas os fracassos são minhas vitórias. Eu detestaria estar no lugar de quem me venceu”.

LIBERTA  

 

 

 

An Odyssey for Our Own Time

 

 

Peter Wehner 

 “A war. A man. A trick. A trick to break the walls of Troy. And burn it—screaming—to the ground.” Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opens in the great hall of Ithaca, with a bard singing a hymn about the cunning of Odysseus, the hero of the tale, to the men who have overrun his house—courting his wife, menacing his son—while he is absent. A feast has been turned into a desecration.

The law these men broke was the most sacred in the ancient world: “xenia,” the law of hospitality. The stranger at the door stood under the personal protection of Zeus, the greatest of the gods and the protector of strangers. The bond between guest and host was not mere courtesy; it was the covenant that made trust between strangers possible.

In the Bronze Age, that covenant was foundational. Greece was not a nation; it was a scattering of city-states and island kingdoms with no common law and no shared authority. Travelers had no rights. Xenia was the guarantee that allowed strangers—hosts and guests, both with reciprocal obligations—to trust one another. It was the thread that held a fractured world together.

“Break Zeus’s law and see what they do to you if you give them that excuse,” Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, says to her son Telemachus. And in the movie, Telemachus says that one must always be generous to travelers, because they might secretly be gods in disguise. To mistreat strangers is to risk incurring the wrath of the gods.

The Trojan War began with a breach of hospitality. Paris, a son of the Trojan king, was welcomed as a guest into the Spartan home of King Menelaus—and repaid that welcome by running off with Menelaus’s wife, Helen, said to be the most beautiful woman in the world. Menelaus’s brother, Agamemnon, led a Greek expedition to bring her back. The war lasted 10 years, ending when the Greeks at last sacked Troy by the ruse of the Trojan horse.

The ruse was Odysseus’s idea, a stroke of military genius for which he was celebrated. But in Nolan’s telling, it is not a triumph but a moral failure, one that fills him with such guilt and shame that for a decade he cannot go home. He had turned something sacred into a weapon. The horse was disguised as a holy offering to Athena; the Trojans, afraid to offend the goddess, wheeled it inside their own walls. Once the gates were open, the Greeks spilled out and slaughtered the city.

In the film, unlike the poem, that massacre shadows Odysseus, though we do not understand just how much so until the end. Throughout his journey he is accompanied by Athena, the goddess of wisdom. Only when the film returns to the night Troy fell do we realize she wears the features of a priestess of Athena, beheaded at the goddess’s own altar as the city burned. Odysseus’s divine mentor, the guide who has walked beside him all along, bears the features of a woman he watched die. Whether a goddess ever accompanied him, or whether she is only the ghost of his greatest sin, the film leaves uncertain. What is certain is that until Odysseus can face what he has done, until he tells the truth about himself to himself, and to others, no homecoming is possible.

In the film’s closing stretch, Odysseus returns to Ithaca disguised as a beggar and sees what his world has become. Law and order are collapsing; trust is nonexistent; scheming is rife. The man who once commanded armies discovers how men behave toward someone who can do nothing for them. The only kindness he receives comes from his son and a few loyal servants. Then, near the end of the film, Odysseus says to Penelope, “We are the people from the sea,” by which he means the dreaded outsiders, raiders, and marauders. But they were not the threat after all. The “people from the sea” are the victors of the Trojan War, stripped of their humanity, their civility, their xenia.

Telemachus was not alone in his intuition about gods in disguise. The conviction that the stranger at your door may be more than he appears runs through the Hebrew and Christian scriptures too. When, in Genesis, Abraham looks up at Mamre and sees three travelers, he runs to meet them, washes their feet, and sets a meal before them—not knowing, as the reader does, that he is entertaining the Lord. The letter to the Hebrews tells us to show hospitality to strangers, for some have “entertained angels unawares.” And in Matthew 25, the stranger is Christ himself. “I was a stranger and you welcomed me,” Jesus says. What he is revealing is that the stranger is where God has chosen to be found, and that every person will be judged by how they treat the outcast, the hungry, the sick, the beggar at our door.

Homer’s poem, like the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament, is an ancient text. But as Nolan told The New York Times, the greatness of the poem is that you approach it as something foreign and remote, and then find it “stunningly relevant.” On the treatment of the stranger, he added, nothing has changed—it remains essential to “holding civilization together, or even defining civilization.”

Part of what makes The Odyssey so appealing to a modern audience is that it takes civilizing aspects of Greek culture—hospitality and magnanimity—and adds later concepts, some of them influenced by Jewish and Christian ethics that were, to varying degrees, alien to ancient Greek culture: deep introspection, even confession; humility and empathy; sorrow and guilt for the harm one has done, even in victory; the conviction that the conquered count and have worth; and vengeance tempered with mercy. In the film, Odysseus emerges as a figure haunted by his victory in a way that no ancient Greek would have been.

The Odyssey presents a very human hero to a culture that desperately needs one. Nolan could have told this story several different ways, but he trusted his instinct: A summer audience would embrace an epic story and its complicated hero, brave but broken, fierce but tender toward the weak, a person we admire not so much for his battlefield victories as for his conscience.

Much of life in the ancient Greek world was harsh, even barbarous—mass executions in conquered cities, torture, the weak discarded at birth, chattel slavery—which is precisely why the Greek commitment to honor and hospitality was remarkable then and still resonates today. So, too, do the later, more humane virtues the film weaves in.

Those virtues are now under assault. Movements and voices in our own country hold them in open contempt, treat mercy as weakness, and feed on vengeance and grievance. Theirs is a Nietzschean ethic, a “master morality,” the code of the strong that Christianity overthrew when it took the side of the slave, the stranger, and the destitute.

But Nietzsche was at least honest about the cost of the revolution he heralded. With God dead, he warned, the morality built on God might collapse as well, and into the gap meaninglessness, fanaticism, and substitute faiths could rush in. Nietzsche declared, with some sorrow, the death of God. Many of his heirs gleefully practice their cruelty in God’s name.

The world that this ethic is creating is harsh and barren, raw and uninviting. It exists in the daily coarseness, in the anger and the ugliness, and in the isolation. There is a weariness in us, and a sadness, at what we have become. Robert F. Kennedy, citing the classicist Edith Hamilton, once issued this call: “Let us dedicate ourselves to what the ancient Greeks wrote so many years ago: ‘to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.’” What Christopher Nolan and his cast have tapped into is our longing for a gentler world. We want to go home.

ATLANTIC