Gringo View: Escaping the Tyranny of the `Ism` (Opinion)

SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL – (Opinion) On the political far left we have communism. On the far right we have authoritarianism and fascism. We live in a world of capitalism and commercialism and belong to a wide spectrum of religious `isms` or, for non-believers, secularism or atheism.

Without necessarily knowing or intending it, we find ourselves grouped into ‘ism’ cohorts, used by demographers, marketers and politicians to dice and splice us for whatever recipe is their flavor of the month.

What they ignore is our increasing need to escape from these facile labels, to be individuals, not bunched together under the banner of individualism. It is not the ‘isms’ which have powered the creativity and progress in our societies. It has been the collective strength of individuals with common values and ideas. Not anymore.

Because it is much easier to think about large cohorts than tiny individuals like us, government policies are naturally designed for the largest ‘isms’ and our individual desires and needs are increasingly submerged into what passes for ‘the greater good’. The essence of each individual – who each of us really is – our ‘isness’ so to speak, easily gets lost in the mix.

We should view this loss with alarm as both our Brazilian and US leaders, before and during the current outbreak of demonstrations, have been noisily making increasingly bizarre statements and issuing executive orders about the Covid-19 pandemic and public order, presumably for ‘the greater good’.

But in both our nations of devastating inequality, the ‘greater good’ largely ignores ‘the greater bad’ of pauperism, the ‘wretched’ at the bottom of the economic and social pyramid, which is, sadly, a very large segment of both populations.

Despite the rising infection and death rates, especially among the Brazilian poor packed closely into favelas, and the estimated 800,000 indigenous population, Jair Bolsonaro calls worrying over the pandemic a “neurosis.”

He’s holding large, crowded political rallies and has waged a “war” on local governors who have tried to lock down their states. He fired his health minister for disagreeing about social distancing. He is pushing unproven drugs, even importing 2 million doses of hydroxychloroquine, a drug touted by Trump but found ineffective and sometimes dangerous in medical trials.

“Another sad similarity [with the US] is the government’s indifference to those populations. Brazil has the highest inequality in the world. The wealthy fly in helicopters and have guards. They are not at risk. At the end of April some cities had run out of coffins,” writes Andy Slavitt in ‘Medium.

There must be a common playbook of sorts, as Bolsonaro’s behavior is identical to the indifference to the needs of the poor shown by Donald Trump.

The “war” on local governors in Brazil who are on the ground in their states and have to deal with the fallout of central government incompetence, is identical to Trump’s battles with, among others, the governors of Michigan, California, and New York, as well as the mayor of Washington DC.

According to Alternet, “The Trump administration and its Radical Republican Senate allies are taking care of those who need help the least while declaring enough already for the unemployed. One in five families didn’t ”

“…A single mom juggling two jobs gets a maximum $1,200 stimulus check — and then pays taxes so that a real estate mogul can receive $1.6 million” wrote the ‘NY Times’. “This is dog-eat-dog capitalism for struggling workers, and socialism for the rich. They are part of our national equation: Power creates money creates more power creates more money.”

George Packer wrote in the ‘Atlantic’ magazine: “Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state… Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power—a beggar nation in utter chaos.” And that is Trump’s ‘America First’, the world’s capital of capitalism. Is it any surprise that the disenfranchised part of the population is now rioting in the streets, demanding change?

Perhaps the most pervasive ‘ism’ which confronts us today is the ‘sensationalism’ which appears to rule our media-driven culture. While our populations are sequestered, information, ‘news’, is mostly supplied by 24/7 TV and the internet news cycle.

Any fair appraisal of the talking heads and ‘experts’ on Globo, SBT, CNN, Fox News and the others, renders them boringly repetitious with presenters and guests droning on to fill the allotted airtime rather than delivering useful and interesting information. Why do we hesitate to press the ‘off’ button?

The web seems better simply because the choice is so much greater. “Trump can’t count on uncritical New York Times headlines to carry all his lies to the public—he needs Twitter. That platform, and the rest of social media, are at the heart of the right-wing propaganda engine.”

For the digital platform owners, says John Cassidy in the ‘New Yorker’, “politics is a revenue stream, and the stream flows fullest when the politics is bitter and divisive—or, in a word, Trumpian”. The demonstrations provide a field day for reality-show-addicted digital moguls. Is it any surprise that ‘devisivism’ is everywhere?

Despite all the understandable noise in the streets, perhaps this pandemic and our forced seclusion can be seen as a rare opportunity.

Imagine for a wonderful moment, if all the pundits on TV and in the press (this one included) went dark. Each of us could then use this time to escape from the tyranny of the ‘isms’ and reconnect with our own ‘isness’. Wouldn’t that be liberating?