Wanderlino
Arruda
On returning from Salvador, my daughter Wladenia,
anxiously delivers me, as a gift from my dear
friend, Ângelo Soares Neto, a large, bulky
bundle of newspapers from old Bahia state, with
which I hopefully could catch up on a varied
number of interests that were currently spinning
within the orbit of my attention. Knowing me
well enough, Angelo knew how to locate in the
northeastern and “Baiano” press,
much news of topics that fall under our common
interests and which, of course, pleased me immensely.
A treasure of rich reading that would fill in
the few tight moments of leisure left to me
during my endless days of study. I reminisced
about those fascinating days during the decade
of the fifties, when the short story writer
Haroldo Livio and I would meet every afternoon
at the public county library, to read…in
the fleeting moments of our modest coffee breaks.
But, however few and quick they were, we learned
much during those short magical intervals, especially
about literature.
Well
then, dear reader, I won´t allow myself
to stray too far from the main theme. Now, Angelo
and Haroldo had a fascinating common interest;
their great passion for the Middle Ages, a subject
that I chose for today´s topic. I really
only brought it up to start conversation going
but it was just great, because when you stop
to think about it, both of them, Angelo and
Harold, have a lot of the medieval in their
different ways of being and acting…And
why the middle ages? Well, are we, or are we
not citizens of the twenty-first century? Do
we not live in the breathtaking new age, when
modernity invades our everyday lives, when the
young want at any price, to shake off the heavy
dust, manacles of the past? It is the “to
be or not to be”. That is the question
that we found in the newspapers that Angelo
sent me: The world is really receding back to
the middle ages!
Who
affirms that the world is once again approaching
the middle ages, crawling back sideways, like
a crab, is the professor Cid Teixeira, in an
interview to the “Jornal da Bahia”.
He says that the state in its cabinet can no
longer protect the citizen on the street, and
basically for this reason alone, we are living
in an age almost feudal, when the basic, physical
protection of individuals hardly exists. In
truth, the individual either protects himself,
by himself, or faces the consequences, modernly
putting up bars and walls around himself as
substitutes for castle, armor, shield and moat…Myriad
laws, unending legal red tape, too many statistics,
an enormous universe of initials, with all essential
planning planned backwards and a gigantic non-functional
security system network which provokes an insecurity
even greater. The individual then commences
building sturdy, high walls with shards of glass
cemented in on top, electric fences and closed
condominiums, hiding themselves behind electronic
shields, hiring private, security guards, putting
up closed circuit cameras everywhere, always
putting more and more locks on doors and windows,
rarely going out in the evening and nevermore
strolling about casually, in the relaxed and
unworried fashion as in yesteryear. Rich or
plebian, miserable or middle class, the individual
no longer trusts government protection, coming
to the point of it appearing to be that the
government has just simply disencumbered itself
from this sticky and difficult obligation.
To
the contrary of what we have always visualized
about the modernizing of the world, with real
protection for the rights of every person, with
liberty of thought and speech, the institution
of good, respect and security, the opposite
is seen. The state impersonally creates a caste
of insensitive technocrats, living robots whose
greatest desire, it seems to me, is to become
powerful, sort of like latter-day Egyptian pharaohs.
At the very bottom of this, says Sid Teixeira
is the secret wish of every technocrat to be
a high-priest of the Egyptian god Amom, a keeper
of hermetic sciences and retainer of divine
right and the power that it accompanies. Having
the necessary commands, programs and pawns of
potent computers at their disposal, speaking
the steely coded language of the economist,
accessible only to themselves, they permanently
enclose themselves in carpeted air conditioned
cabinets, in plush first class seats on gleaming
streamlined jets and in lush hotel suites. In
truth, what the technocrats have actually been
able to do is to dissolve the individual identity
of each and every person, creating a faceless
crowd of formless and impotent vassals!
If
we continue regressing in this manner toward
the darkness of past medieval times, patiently
losing our God-given power of decision day by
day, we will soon become slaves and not full
partners of the having and doing of our existence.
Besides all this, private companies lose sixty
percent of their earnings in the form of taxes
demanded by our government. Technology has transformed
itself into the walls of stone that isolate
us, as if we were on a deserted island of castles
in centuries of darkness.
