“The illiteracy of the enlightened and the powerful”
Today is Jair Bolsonaro’s birthday. Since the current Brazilian president has provided so much fodder for translations in this space, this seems like an appropriate day to wrap up a thread about ignorance among the powerful. In September of last year, I translated some parts of a Twitter spat between Senator Romário and Education Minister Ribeiro. The quotes headlining those posts and this one come from the August 18, 2021, episode of a podcast (and radio program on BandNews FM) called “O É da Coisa” (literally, “The Is of the Thing,” meaning the kernel, the nugget, the core of the, somewhat echoing the common English expression “The thing is…”). During the introduction of that episode, the host, journalist Reinaldo Azevedo said:
There is an illiteracy that is a social problem that must be overcome. And those people cannot be discriminated against despite the need to impose certain limitations where reading would be important in order not to cause harm to others. ... An illiterate person in Brazil can vote and that’s right. They are citizens. They are citizens who unfortunately suffer from a problem that is historic, that is social, that has to be corrected. So this illiteracy is a difficulty that has to be overcome and people can’t be discriminated against because of that. Now they can’t be voted into office and I think that’s correct because you can imagine someone who is incapable of reading a document putting their stamp of approval on it. Often that involves intervening in public policy. They could even be a target of people acting in bad faith.
But there’s another illiteracy. There’s an illiteracy of the enlightened. There’s an illiteracy of the powerful. There’s an illiteracy of the highly educated. Those who move up the social ladder, those who rise in a political career. Those who move up in public life and are formally literate and who however have a precarious command of language, of understanding, of logic, of everything. We are living under the aegis of enlightened illiteracy.
Azevedo then goes on to refer to the items posted by Minister Ribeiro in response to Romário, especially the spelling error by the Minister of Education. Then he circles back to tie all this in to today’s birthday boy through statements that pro-Bolsonaro federal prosecutor Lindora Araújo sent to the Brazilian Supreme Court supposedly defending the president, statements that Azevedo says “are evidence of a deficit in writing skills that even demonstrate an inability to think.” Araújo’s message to the Brazilian high court were in response to charges brought against Bolsonaro for misuse of public funds and for failure to use a mask while directly causing a large gathering. During that gathering, which was part of Bolsonaro’s motorcycle motorcade rally, he removed one child’s mask while talking to him, told another child to remove their mask while reading a poem, and more.
Purportedly speaking on behalf of the Attorney-General of Brazil, Araújo (a leading name for a future seat on the Brazilian Supreme Court) told the Court that they could not open an investigation because there was nothing wrong with Bolsonaro’s use of funds (to promote his motorcycle rally) or his mask-less (and demasking) behavior, arguing, in part, that
Essa conduta, o não uso de máscara, nao se reveste da gravidade própria de um crime por nao ser possível afirmar que por si só deixe realmente de impedir introdução da propagação da Covid-19.
This behavior, the failure to use a mask, does not rise to the level of seriousness inherent to a crime as it is not possible to state that in and of itself it really fails to impede introduction of propagation of Covid-19.
After a rant about Araújo’s apparent misuse of “fails to impede” since it means the opposite of what she was clearly trying to say, the broadcaster concluded by lambasting Araújo’s obtuseness about how the virus spreads, as well as her (incorrect) assertation that the justices could not conduct an investigation without the public prosecutor’s approval, by saying:
I turn 60 tomorrow ... almost 40 years in journalism. I may never have read two things as disgusting as that coming from public office. ... From the Public Prosecutor’s Office then, I really can’t even imagine. The highest voltage of intellectual crime.
Happy Birthday, mister president.