Só a reeleição adia o encontro marcado do clã Bolsonaro com a Justiça

 

Sem a proteção do mandato presidencial, os Bolsonaro dificilmente escapam de condenações pós-eleições

Por Maurício Thuswohl

Rompido com o bolsonarismo desde o segundo mês de governo, o empresário Paulo Marinho, um dos coordenadores da campanha de Jair Bolsonaro à Presidência e primeiro suplente do filho Zero Um no Senado, afirmou em post publicado no domingo 23 que seu “consolo” é que em janeiro do ano que vem “a família presidencial vai para a cadeia”. Mais do que uma praga rogada ao clã, o comentário de Marinho, hoje presidente do PSDB no Rio de Janeiro, reflete a possibilidade de que os vários processos que investigarão o presidente, seus filhos e ex-mulher ao longo de 2022 tenham seus andamentos acelerados em caso de derrota nas urnas em outubro. Com a Justiça em seus calcanhares, os Bolsonaro têm na reeleição do chefe a única esperança de impedir – ou ao menos retardar – o temido encontro com os tribunais.

Advogado criminalista que defendeu quatro presidentes e 80 governadores, Antônio Carlos de Almeida Castro, o Kakay, afirma que, embora Bolsonaro tenha conseguido se manter no cargo, a situação do presidente e sua família é “extremamente grave” perante a Justiça: “Bolsonaro é um serial killer em matéria de crime de responsabilidade e só não sofreu ­impeachment porque entregou o governo ao PP. O partido, ao comandar a Câmara dos Deputados com mão de ferro, deu a estabilidade necessária para que isso não acontecesse. Conseguiram contornar a situação graças ao controle político, mas a responsabilização criminal certamente será levada a ferro e fogo tão logo termine o governo. A coisa é diferente em matéria criminal”.

Advogado criminalista que defendeu

quatro presidentes e 80 governadores,

Antônio Carlos de Almeida Castro, o

Kakay, afirma que, embora Bolsonaro

tenha conseguido se manter no cargo,

a situação do presidente e sua família é

“extremamente grave” perante a Justi-

ça: “Bolsonaro é um serial killer em maté-

ria de crime de responsabilidade e só não

sofreu impeachment porque entregou o

governo ao PP. O partido, ao comandar a

Câmara dos Deputados com mão de fer-

ro, deu a estabilidade necessária para que

isso não acontecesse. Conseguiram con-

tornar a situação graças ao controle po-

lítico, mas a responsabilização criminal

certamente será levada a ferro e fogo tão

logo termine o governo. A coisa é diferen-

te em matéria criminal”.

O EX-CAPITÃO É

UM “CRIMINOSO

EM SÉRIE“ E SÓ

CONTINUA DE PÉ

PELO CARGO QUE

OCUPA, AVALIA O

ADVOGADO KAKAY

Segundo Kakay, com base nas evidên-

cias de cada processo, nada impedirá que

Bolsonaro, fora da Presidência, respon-

da pelos crimes cometidos: “Terminando

o governo – e, ao que tudo indica, Bolso-

naro não será reeleito – teremos um re-

crudescimento das investigações con-

tra o presidente, seus filhos e auxiliares

mais próximos”, avalia. “Não só em rela-

ção aos inúmeros crimes comuns come-

tidos durante a pandemia, o negacionis-

mo e a evidente falta de uma política qu

tivesse qualquer preocupação com a saú-

de pública. Várias outras questões serão

novamente colocadas em pauta, a exem-

plo das ‘rachadinhas’ ou das espúrias re-

lações com algumas empresas.”

No que depender do Supremo

Tribunal Federal, as próximas semanas

serão agitadas para o ex-capitão. Por

determinação do ministro Alexandre de

Moraes, Bolsonaro tem até a sexta-feira

28 para prestar depoimento no inquérito

que apura se ele foi responsável pelo

crime de vazamento de dados sigilosos

relativos à investigação sobre um ataque

hacker ao Tribunal Superior Eleitoral.

Na tentativa de desacreditar a seguran-

ça das urnas eletrônicas, Bolsonaro citou,

em uma live em agosto, uma investigação

realizada pela Polícia Federal, embora a

mesma tenha concluído que o ataque foi

malsucedido. Essa investigação, uma das

várias sob a batuta de Moraes, também

tem como alvo o deputado federal Filipe

Barros, do PSL, que estava ao lado do pre-

sidente na transmissão, e o delegado da

PF Victor Feitosa Campos, responsável

pelo inquérito sobre o ataque cibernéti-

co e afastado do cargo por ordem do STF.

Novas investigações sobre Bolsonaro

continuam a surgir. Na segunda-feira 24, a

ministra Rosa Weber, do STF, encaminhou

à Procuradoria-Geral da República uma

notícia-crime contra o presidente e o mi-

nistro da Saúde, Marcelo Queiroga, pela

demora de ambos em incluir as crianças

de 5 a 11 anos no programa de vacinação

contra a Covid-19. Em seu despacho, que

atendeu a um pedido de investigação fei-

to em conjunto pelo senador Alessandro

Vieira, do Cidadania, pela deputada fede-

ral Tabata Amaral, do PSB, e pelo secretá-

rio de Educação do Rio de Janeiro, Renan

Ferreirinha, Weber cita o presidente e o

ministro pelo “provável cometimento de

crime de prevaricação”. Os autores da de-

núncia lembram que 2,5 mil crianças e

adolescentes brasileiros morreram em de-

corrência da doença e acusam Bolsonaro e

Queiroga de promover “ações deliberadas

para retardar a inclusão desse público no

Plano Nacional de Imunização”.

O maior pesadelo para Bolsonaro

neste ano eleitoral pode,

porém, ganhar forma com

um enredo conhecido dos

brasileiros: as rachadinhas.

Amigo da família há pelo me-

nos três décadas, o ex-assessor Waldir

Ferraz concedeu uma recente entrevis-

ta à revista Veja, na qual afirma que a ad-

vogada Ana Cristina Valle, ex-mulher do

presidente e mãe do filho Zero Quatro,

Jair Renan, foi a grande arquiteta de um

esquema de divisão dos salários de ser-

vidores do Legislativo. O esquema, re-

lata Jacaré, como Ferraz é chamado pe-

lo clã, existiu também no gabinete do en-

tão deputado federal e hoje presidente da

República. A revelação vem se somar às

denunciadas rachadinhas nos gabinetes

de Flávio, então deputado estadual, e do

vereador Carlos Bolsonaro, o Zero Dois,

e certamente redundará em novas ações

da oposição contra o presidente no STF.

O ressurgimento de Ferraz pode,

contudo, ser enxergado de duas formas,

uma vez que suas palavras colocam Valle

no centro do picadeiro e, em certa medida,

aliviam Bolsonaro. Segundo Jacaré, assim

como em uma obra de Nelson Rodrigues,

o presidente foi o último a saber o que a

mulher fazia, somente em 2018: “Ele,

quando soube, ficou desesperado. Ela fez

nos três gabinetes. O Bolsonaro deixou

tudo na mão dela, para ela resolver. Ela

fez a festa”, disse à Veja. O amigo do pre-

sidente se contradiz, porém, ao deixar

no ar uma pergunta: “Quem assinava era

ele. Ele vai dizer que não sabe? É batom na

cueca. Como é que vai explicar?” Ferraz

afirmou que Valle, uma mulher “muito

perigosa”, era responsável também por

selecionar e contratar funcionários dis-

postos a devolver a maior parte do salá-

rio recebido aos parlamentares.

Decisões publicadas por Moraes em 5

e 7 de janeiro prorrogaram por 90 dias

dois inquéritos que perturbam a paz

de Bolsonaro. Um deles, aberto pelo

então ministro Celso de Mello a pedido

do ex-ministro da Justiça Sergio Moro,

hoje presidenciável pelo Podemos, foi

prorrogado pela quinta vez e investiga a

suposta interferência do presidente na

PF. O outro trata da atuação das milícias

digitais na prática de “atentados contra a

democracia e ao Estado Democrático de

Direito” e, além do ex-capitão, envolve o

blogueiro bolsonarista Allan dos Santos,

foragido nos EUA, o ex-deputado Rober-

to Jefferson, preso desde agosto, e o gu-

ru Olavo de Carvalho, negacionista que

não resistiu à Covid-19 e morreu na se-

gunda-feira 24.

Outro inquérito que cita Bolsonaro

no STF foi aberto por Moraes no ano

passado a pedido do então corregedor

do TSE, ministro Luís Felipe Salomão, e

trata da disseminação de fake news a res-

peito das urnas eletrônicas. Segundo o

relatório da PF que embasou a denúncia,

o presidente divulgou fraudes que nunca

existiram e agiu “para promover desin-

formação, aderindo a um padrão de atua-

ção já empregado por governos de outros

países”. Neste caso, até a dócil PGR con-

trariou o presidente. Dias antes do Na-

tal, após um pedido de encerramento do

inquérito feito pela Advocacia-Geral da

União, a subprocuradora-geral Lindôra

Araújo defendeu no STF a continuidade

das investigações sobre a participação de

Bolsonaro na disseminação de notícias

falsas. Já Moraes diz querer dar celeri-

dade ao inquérito ainda no primeiro tri-

mestre: “Com a democracia não se brin-

ca. Com a democracia não se joga”.

“Bolsonaro só escapa da prisão se

conseguir se reeleger. Por mais que se

comporte como alguém que não está

nem aí, ele sabe que pode passar uma boa

temporada no sistema prisional, se per-

der as eleições”, avalia Wadih Damous,

ex-deputado federal e ex-presidente da

OAB no Rio de Janeiro. Para o advogado,

o presidente e seus filhos cometeram cri-

mes das mais diversas naturezas e estes

estão demonstrados nos diversos inqué-

ritos em andamento: “Só não são proces-

sados e julgados por conta do exercício do

mandato presidencial do chefe do clã. E

deixaram claro que, no processo eleitoral,

pretendem esticar a corda ao máximo”.

Na Justiça, o ano se anuncia mais

suave para o filho Zero Um do que

para o Zero Dois. No caso de Carlos, a

expectativa é de que novos elementos

venham a surgir em diversas frentes e

provoquem desde pedidos de impeach-

ment na Câmara Municipal do Rio até a

abertura de um inquérito específico no

STF sobre sua participação na constru-

ção da máquina de propaganda bolsona-

rista nas redes sociais e na disseminação

de fake news nos últimos três anos. Mas

a maior preocupação de Carluxo, como é

conhecido, é mesmo a investigação que

apura a prática de rachadinha em seu ga-

binete. O inquérito, a cargo da 3ª Promo-

toria de Justiça de Investigação Penal Es-

pecializada, anda a passos lentos desde

maio, quando o Tribunal de Justiça do

Rio determinou a quebra dos seus sigi-

los bancário e fiscal.

A oposição quer afastar o

promotor Alexandre Murilo

Graça, responsável pelo

inquérito, por sua aparente

proximidade com a família

do investigado. No sábado 22,

Graça compareceu à festa de aniversário

de Luciana Pires, advogada de Flávio

Bolsonaro, em noite de gala no Iate Clube

do Rio, na qual se deixou fotografar ao

lado de diversos amigos do clã. Candidato

a uma vaga de desembargador no TJ,

Graça teria segredado a amigos que

só pretende retomar o caso após esta

eleição e fontes do Ministério Público

dizem que os dados das quebras de sigilo

de Carluxo nem sequer foram examina-

dos. Questionado por CartaCapital, Graça

disse “não ter qualquer relação com a fa-

mília Bolsonaro” e que “não há impedi-

mento previsto na lei para a sua atua-

ção”. Ele também negou que o inquérito

esteja emperrado: “A investigação aguar-

da a realização de laudo do Laboratório

da Coordenadoria de Segurança e

Inteligência que analisa os dados recebi-

dos até agora. Também aguarda respos-

tas de algumas instituições bancárias,

haja vista a grande quantidade de contas

com pedido de quebra de sigilo deferido”.

A quebra dos sigilos determinada pelo

MP inclui outros 27 suspeitos, além de

sete empresas ligadas a Carluxo. Segun-

do a denúncia, o vereador teria praticado

a rachadinha durante seus seis mandatos

consecutivos na Câmara do Rio, além de

realizar “movimentações atípicas de di-

nheiro em espécie” ao longo do período.

Em 2003, por exemplo, o parlamentar pa-

gou 150 mil reais à vista e em espécie na

compra de um apartamento no bairro ca-

rioca da Tijuca. O pedido de quebra dos

sigilos de Carluxo cita ainda um relató-

rio do Coaf que aponta operações suspei-

tas. Uma delas movimentou 1,7 milhão de

reais, com a participação da mãe de Car-

luxo, a ex-vereadora Rogéria Bolsonaro.

Mas é a outra ex-mulher de Bolsonaro

que chama atenção por sua participação

no esquema das rachadinhas. Chefe de

gabinete de Carluxo de 2001 até 2008,

ano em que se separou de Jair, Ana Cris-

tina Valle “recebeu com frequência em

sua conta bancária depósitos de eleva-

das quantias em espécie”, revela o inqué-

rito. A peça destaca ainda que, em 2011,

quando Valle não trabalhava mais no ga-

binete, sua conta recebeu um depósito em

espécie de 341 mil reais, movimentação

incompatível com a sua renda. A quebra

dos sigilos bancários e fiscais incluiu se-

te parentes de Ana Cristina: André Val-

le e Andréa Valle (irmãos), Marta Valle e

Gilmar Marques (cunhados) e Guilherme

Hudson (primo), além de Ananda Hud-

son e Monique Hudson, respectivamente,

mulher e cunhada de Guilherme. Segun-

do o inquérito, os três últimos teriam sido

contratados por Ana Cristina como fun-

cionários fantasmas do gabinete de Car-

luxo. Já Andréa Valle, em áudio vazado,

diz que Bolsonaro sabia do esquema e que,

ainda deputado federal, teria atuado pa-

ra que André fosse demitido do gabinete

do filho, uma vez que “não estava devol-

vendo parte do salário como combinado”.

Em dezembro, um ex-funcionário

da família revelou que Ana

Cristina teria montado um

esquema de fraudes no seguro

DPVAT, recebido por vítimas

de acidentes de trânsito, para

lavar o dinheiro das rachadinhas. Ao

Jornal Nacional, da TV Globo, Marcelo

dos Santos disse ter sido empregado no

gabinete do então deputado estadual

Flávio Bolsonaro entre 2003 e 2007, mas

ter trabalhado de fato como “secretário

doméstico” de Ana Cristina. As inves-

tigações em curso mostram que a ex de

Bolsonaro foi simultaneamente sócia do

escritório Valle Ana Advogados e de du-

as empresas que atuavam na área de se-

guros. Segundo o Coaf, entre 2008 e 2015,

mais da metade dos saques em uma des-

sas operadoras – a Valle Ana Consultoria

e Serviços de Seguros – se deu em espécie,

totalizando cerca de 1,2 milhão de reais.

A novidade promete esquentar nas próxi-

mas semanas as investigações sobre as ra-

chadinhas no gabinete de Carluxo.

Jogar os holofotes sobre Ana Cristina

pode, de fato, servir para livrar Bolsonaro

e seus filhos da prisão? Para Kakay, essa

hipótese não existe: “É pueril a ideia de jo-

gar a responsabilidade na ex-mulher. Juri-

dicamente falando, a leitura correta é que

ela era apenas uma operadora. É impossí-

vel que você fique isento de qualquer res-

ponsabilidade tendo recebido dinheiro,

sabendo que aquilo estava acontecendo”.

Com teor menos explosivo, os filhos

Zero Três e Zero Quatro também terão

contas a acertar com a Justiça. Único

sem mandato parlamentar, Jair Renan

foi intimado pela PF a depor no inquérito

que apura o recebimento de vantagens

indevidas de empresários por sua

companhia de eventos. Os mimos foram

feitos pela Gramazini Granitos, empresa

do setor de mineração, cujos proprietários,

segundo o Ministério Público, estariam

interessados em “se valer da proximida-

de com Jair Renan para estabelecer pon-

tes com o Palácio do Planalto”. O deputado

federal Eduardo Bolsonaro, por sua vez, é

investigado pela PGR por conta de diver-

sos pagamentos feitos em espécie na aqui-

sição de imóveis na Zona Sul do Rio. Che-

gado a um bate-boca nas redes sociais, o

deputado enfrenta processos movidos por

celebridades, como o youtuber Felipe Ne-

to e o deputado Kim Kataguiri, do DEM.

No caso das rachadinhas no gabinete

de Flávio, o inquérito voltou à estaca ze-

ro em dezembro, depois que o STF enten-

deu que os dados do Coaf utilizados como

base da denúncia foram obtidos de forma

ilegal. Um mês antes, o Superior Tribunal

de Justiça havia anulado todas as provas

obtidas no inquérito aberto no TJ flumi-

nense. Com isso, o Zero Um terá tranqui-

lidade para se dedicar – ao lado do pre-

sidente do PL, Valdemar Costa Neto – à

coordenação da campanha do pai à re-

eleição. O Ministério Público prepara-

-se, porém, para reencaminhar uma no-

va denúncia ainda neste primeiro trimes-

tre, desta vez sem usar os dados do Coaf:

“Praticamente nenhum elemento do in-

quérito anterior resta como válido. Mas,

como as evidências de prática criminosa

por parte de Flávio são muitas, resta aos

promotores reunir todo o material nova-

mente. O fato é que ele ganhou tempo”,

comenta uma fonte do MP fluminense.

No momento, Flávio parece temer

mais a sombra de Fabrício Queiroz.

Segundo as investigações, o folclórico

personagem substituiu Ana Cristina na

operação do esquema, mas a anulação do

processo o deixou animado até mesmo

para anunciar uma provável candidatura

a deputado federal pelo PTB. “Se tiver o

apoio de Bolsonaro, serei o deputado

mais votado do Rio”, costuma dizer em

suas cada vez mais frequentes aparições

públicas. Nas redes sociais, Queiroz tem

recebido o apoio de bolsonaristas ilustres,

como Roberto Jefferson e os deputados

Bia Kicis e Carlos Jordy, do PSL.

Uma das pontas soltas são os depósitos

de 89 mil reais efetuados por Queiroz

na conta da primeira-dama Michelle

Bolsonaro entre 2011 e 2016. Sem resposta

há três anos, a pergunta que virou meme

na internet tira o presidente do sério a

ponto de ele já ter ameaçado “encher de

porrada” um jornalista. No que depender

de Queiroz, nada será esclarecido. O ex-

-assessor diz que operou o esquema sem

o conhecimento da família, estratégia que

poderá ser repetida por Ana Cristina, se

Bolsonaro perder as eleições.

“Tentar concentrar a culpa em um

subalterno não vai colar, e isso vale

para o Queiroz ou para qualquer outra

pessoa”, diz Kakay. A responsabilidade

é direta da família, acrescenta o advoga-

do: “Nesse tipo de crime é impossível ale-

gar que não se sabia de nada, porque o di-

nheiro é dividido. Há imóveis comprados

em espécie e uma série de ações que dão

a materialidade inquestionável do cri-

me”. Wadih Damous pede atenção para

a possível destruição de provas ao longo

de 2022: “Bolsonaro sabe que sua derrota

neste processo eleitoral é uma hipótese

concreta e provável. Dessa maneira, ele,

assim como qualquer delinquente, tem

de ser monitorado”.

O STF PRORROGOU

POR MAIS 90 DIAS

OS INQUÉRITOS

SOBRE AS MILÍCIAS

DIGITAIS E SOBRE A

INTERFERÊNCIA DE

BOLSONARO NA PF

Desde que veio à tona o esque-

ma das rachadinhas, a defesa

de Flávio alega que o senador

“desconhece supostas irregu-

laridades que possam ter si-

do praticadas por ex-servido-

res da Assembleia Legislativa do Rio ou

possíveis acordos financeiros que even-

tualmente tenham sido firmados entre

esses profissionais”. Quando teve os seus

sigilos quebrados, Carluxo classificou a

denúncia como “requentada” em suas

redes sociais. Em nota, seus advogados

negaram a participação do cliente

em qualquer esquema e disseram

que os valores citados para a compra

do apartamento “são absolutamente

compatíveis” com os rendimentos do

filho Zero Dois do presidente.

Para Fredrerick Wassef, advogado de

Jair Renan, seu cliente “não cometeu

qualquer irregularidade”. Embora não

comente o inquérito, sob a justificativa de

tratar-se de uma investigação sigilosa, ele

credita a sua abertura a uma “perseguição

política da esquerda”. Ana Cristina Valle,

por sua vez, nega ser a mentora do esquema

das rachadinhas. Ela também classificou

como “fantasiosas” as declarações de

Waldir Ferraz à revista Veja. Já sobre o

caso envolvendo o DPVAT, a defesa da ex-

mulher preferiu não se manifestar. •

CARTA CAPITAL 

Bitcoin pyramid schemes wreak havoc on Brazil's 'New Egypt' | The Independent

 

 

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Bolsonaro surge de pilha de fezes no gibi 'Depois que o Brasil Acabou'

 

Talvez no futuro seja necessário ler o gibi "Depois que o Brasil Acabou" com um livro de história ao lado para entender todas as referências do autor João Pinheiro. Hoje, porém, o leitor não carece de ajuda. A memória dos eventos e personagens dos últimos anos segue fresca e viva.

Num dos capítulos, por exemplo, Pinheiro conta a história de um funcionário de boteco chamado Kim. O rapaz está absorto na leitura de um livro de um tal de Olavão de Carvalho. Tropeça, leva um choque e vomita em cima de um estoque de carne adulterada. Kim serve esse prato para o cliente, um jacaré irritadiço. Mais tarde, o animal tem uma dor de barriga daquelas no meio da rua. O resultado é uma pilha de fezes que grita "vai pra Cuba, feminazi!". O cocô acaba eleito presidente.

Fica claro, ao longo da leitura, que o recém-lançado "Depois que o Brasil Acabou" é uma espécie de manifesto político em HQ. Pinheiro se apossa de personagens da história recente do país e, com nanquim, desenha suas facetas menos lisonjeiras.

Como bem afirma no prefácio o premiado quadrinista Marcello Quintanilha, autor de "Tungstênio", Pinheiro bebe de uma tradição nacional. Segue a linha do ítalo-brasileiro Angelo Agostini, um dos pais dos gibis brasileiros, que registrou o declínio do Império no fim do século 19. Trilha também o caminho das histórias em quadrinhos populares dos anos 1950.

Pinheiro é um dos grandes nomes das HQs nacionais. Fez fama em 2011 com "Kerouac,", sobre o escritor do movimento beat Jack Kerouac —a vírgula no título é proposital. Em 2015, publicou "Burroughs", sobre William Burroughs, outro beat. Em 2016, lançou "Carolina", sobre a escritora Carolina de Jesus. Mais recentemente, tem produzido quadrinhos digitais sobre a pandemia da Covid-19 e seu impacto nas periferias —um cenário recorrente na sua obra. Entre suas influências estão artistas nacionais como Flavio Colin, Júlio Shimamoto e Jayme Cortez.

O volume "Depois que o Brasil Acabou" é uma coletânea de histórias que Pinheiro publicou desde o impeachment da presidente Dilma Rousseff, em 2016. Os capítulos tratam de narrativas diferentes, todas elas amarradas a essa ideia de que a transição para o governo de Michel Temer —que Pinheiro claramente chama de golpe— empurrou o país ladeira abaixo, rumo à catástrofe.

As histórias, como o título deixa claro, acontecem após o fim do país. Têm um ar apocalíptico não difícil de imaginar, num presente marcado pela violência do debate público. Num trecho, Pinheiro menciona um dilúvio supostamente ocorrido neste ano, quando o prefeito decidiu inundar partes da cidade para "eliminar" o excedente populacional e otimizar os recursos. O quadrinista também fala da transformação da sociedade em zumbis pelo flúor e pelo capitalismo.

Alguns dos personagens são claramente inspirados na realidade. Há alguém com uma máscara do ex-juiz Sergio Moro, por exemplo. O ex-presidente Michel Temer aparece dizendo que "a guerra contra a pobreza acabou, e os pobres perderam". Mas há também pessoas imaginadas, como a Preta Maravilha, que luta contra uma conspiração chamada de União Golpista nessa história.

A crítica social é afiada e atual na maior parte do gibi. Em outras, elementos mais gastos do vocabulário de protesto se infiltram na trama —como alusões ao FBI, à TV Globo e ao mercado financeiro. Pinheiro ilustra também alguns personagens da Disney, como o Pato Donald e o Mickey, na constelação de metáforas sobre o capitalismo.

O estilo das ilustrações depende de cada capítulo. A variação no traço e no material é proposital e parece partir da convicção de Pinheiro de que a forma tem de refletir e priorizar o conteúdo. Isto é, que cada história exige a sua própria estética.

hama bastante a atenção o uso constante —e sofisticado— que Pinheiro faz do nanquim no papel, criando cenas detalhadas de uma profundidade excepcional. Outra técnica que aparece em boa parte do gibi são as retículas, nome dado aos padrões quadriculados tradicionalmente usados em quadrinhos para dar a sensação de sombreamento.

Numa das cenas da HQ, Pinheiro copia propositalmente o estilo do quadrinista John Romita Jr., famoso por ter desenhado super-heróis estrangeiros como o Homem-Aranha. Um personagem questiona a escolha dessa referência e ouve a seguinte resposta "quadrinho bom mesmo é o americano". Pinheiro, é claro, está ironizando. Seu trabalho é, afinal, clara evidência da qualidade da produção nacional.

 

FOLHA

 

 

 

 

The Prosecution of Julian Assange Absolutely Threatens Freedom of the Press

 

by John Nichols 

The Constitution does not prohibit assaults on freedom of the press because the notoriously vain founders were fond of the printers, who in the first years of the Republic produced what President George Washington decried as “diabolical…outrages on common decency.”

Washington’s thin-skinned successor, John Adams, had one printer arrested for allegedly libeling the president “in a manner tending to excite sedition and opposition to the laws.” Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime to “write, print, utter or publish…malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress of the United States, or the President of the United States.” He then had one of his leading critics, Matthew Lyon, tried and jailed after the representative from Vermont derided the second president’s “ridiculous pomp.” Lyon, it was charged, was “a malicious and seditious person, and of a depraved mind and a wicked and diabolical disposition.” Thomas Jefferson, no stranger to scandal, was similarly uncharitable. He deplored “the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed and the malignity, the vulgarity, and mendacious spirit of those who write for them.”

In other words, the founders rebuked the print publishers of their day with language every bit as venomous as that employed by contemporary US officials when they speak of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks publisher whom the Biden administration proposes to try on espionage charges stemming from the 2010 publication of evidence of “Collateral Murder” atrocities committed by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Assange attracts bipartisan acrimony. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell has labeled him “a high-tech terrorist.” Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, whose 2016 campaign was the target of WikiLeaks data dumps, has said, “The bottom line is [Assange] has to answer for what he has done, at least as it’s been charged.”

Last week, a court in the United Kingdom determined that Assange could be extradited to the United States to face prosecution by the Department of Justice for allegedly engaging in a hacking conspiracy with former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to reveal classified information.

To hear Assange’s prosecutors and critics tell it, his actions are indefensible. They would afford him no protection under the standards that are applied to preserve the ability of journalists to do their work—and publishers to distribute that work. Why? Because, we are told, even though WikiLeaks has been widely awarded and honored for producing journalism, Assange is “not a journalist.”

But, of course, the Bill of Rights makes no specific mention of journalists. The First Amendment speaks of “the press.” It was crafted in a time when printers distributed controversial, often incendiary screeds against the governing class. The publishers of the post-colonial era were rogues and rabble-rousers who spoke—or, to be more precise, printed—unwelcome truths to power. They knew full well that their publications provoked outrage. Benjamin Franklin, a printer who turned out to be one of the better of the founders, freely admitted as much when he concluded, “If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.”

The point of protecting press freedom has never been to privilege inoffensive speech, nor to establish a priestly class of journalists who are somehow deemed by the governing and economic elites to be acceptably employed. The point is to defend the free flow of information that the powerful would prefer to keep secret but that the people have a right to know. This is why Jefferson, on the eve of the 1800 election in which he upended Adams’s assault on press freedom, explained to Elbridge Gerry, “I am…for freedom of the press, and against all violations of the Constitution to silence by force and not by reason the complaints or criticisms, just or unjust, of our citizens against the conduct of their agents.”

If we are serious about protecting the right of those who are widely acknowledged as journalists to track down and publish classified information about what governments do in our name but without our informed consent, then we must defend the right of more controversial printers and web publishers to obtain and distribute the same.

That understanding is supposed to infuse the public discourse about press freedom in the United States. But it only rarely does. Too frequently, prominent political and media voices go silent—or, at least, soft—when real fights over the First Amendment are being fought. It’s particularly concerning that there isn’t a louder outcry now, from across the political spectrum, regarding the prosecution of Assange. One notable exception is US Representative Ro Khanna, the California Democrat who has worked with US Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) to address at least some of the abuses associated with the Espionage Act.

“I oppose the criminal prosecution of Assange,” said Khanna, who explained that “the prosecution of Assange will have a chilling impact on any journalist who publishes information and is a violation of the First Amendment.”

Rejecting the arguments by successive administrations for going after the WikiLeaks cofounder, Khanna told me last week, “Assange did many morally suspect things, by failing to redact the personal information of civilians and putting them in harm’s way, and also coordinating the timing of his releases to wreck havoc in the 2016 election. But one can condemn Assange’s actions while not setting a precedent of criminalizing the publication of material that challenges state power.”

That’s a proper balance that every defender of a free press should be able to strike. It is not necessary to make Assange a hero in order to oppose his prosecution. But it is necessary to reject a project of successive presidential administrations that will—if seen through to its conclusion—set a precedent for prosecuting journalists and publishers.

As a writer who has authored and coauthored a number of books on media and democracy, an active supporter of journalism unions and media reform groups, and a keynoter at world congresses of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), I’ve thought a good deal about the threats faced by journalism in the 21st century. They are many. But few are so serious as the criminalization of the work of speaking truth to power.

I share the view of Ben Wizner, the director of the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, who recently explained:

The prosecution of Julian Assange poses a grave threat to press freedom. Bringing criminal charges against a publisher for the publication of truthful information establishes a dangerous precedent that can be used to target all news organizations that hold the government accountable by publishing its secrets. Any prosecution by the United States of Mr. Assange would be unprecedented and unconstitutional, and would open the door to criminal investigations of other news organizations. The government needs to immediately drop its charges against him.

Those of us who believe in the need for a robust and genuinely free press must recognize that IFJ General Secretary Anthony Bellanger was right when he declared: “President Joe Biden must end the years of politically motivated prosecution of Julian Assange by finally dropping the charges against him. The criminalization of whistleblowers and investigative journalists has no place in a democracy.”

THE NATION 

APOTHEOSIS NOW: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine

 

FARA DABHALWALA

Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine by Anna Della Subin

When he stepped ashore in October 1492, in what he understood to be part of India or Japan, Christopher Columbus's first act was to claim possession of the land for the Spanish crown. After that, he distributed cloth caps, glass beads, bits of broken crockery, “and many other things of little value”to its inhabitants, recording in his diary that they were a “very simple”people, who could easily “be kept as captives…[and] all be subjugated and made to do what is required of them.”They reminded him of the aboriginals of the Canary Islands, the most recent victims of Castilian conquest, Christianization, and enslavement. “They are the colour of the Canarians, neither black nor white,”he observed.

 Columbus also believed that the “Indians”regarded him and his crew as celestial beings. His earliest description of this, two days after landfall, was unsure: “We understood that they asked us if we had come from heaven.”But speculation soon hardened into certainty. Though the natives “were very sorry that they could not understand me, nor I them,”Columbus nonetheless confidently surmised that they were “convinced that we come from the heavens.”Every tribe he met seemed to think the same: it explained why they were all so friendly.

 Over the decades that followed, this notion became a staple of Europeans’accounts of their reception in the New World. According to the sixteenth-century Universal History of the Things of New Spain , compiled by a Franciscan friar in Mexico, Hernán Cortés's lightning capture of Moctezuma's empire in 1519 was made possible by the Aztecs’misapprehension that he was “the god Quetzalcoatl who was returning, whom they had been and are expecting.”The following year, while rounding the tip of South America, Ferdinand Magellan's crew encountered a giant native, “and when he was before us he began to be astonished, and to be afraid, and he raised one finger on high, thinking that we came from heaven.”The Incas of Peru initially received Francisco Pizarro as an incarnation of the god Viracocha, so one of his companions later wrote, and venerated the conquistadors because “they believed that some deity was enclosed within them.”

It was a popular, endlessly elaborated trope. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, white men colonizing other parts of the world were hardly surprised anymore to encounter similar instances of mistaken deification. After all, the error seemed to encapsulate the innocence, intellectual inferiority, and instinctive submissiveness of the peoples they were born to rule. What's more, as Anna Della Subin explores in her bracingly original Accidental Gods , unsought divinity was a remarkably widespread phenomenon that spanned centuries and continents. 

In Guiana, the long-lived prophecy of “Walterali”commemorated Sir Walter Raleigh's supposedly providential exploits against the Spaniards. In Hawaii, the death of Captain James Cook came to be regarded as the tragic apotheosis of a man mistaken for a god. Across British India, shrines sprang up around the graves and statues of colonists who were worshiped as deities with supernatural powers. The tomb of Sir Thomas Beckwith in Mahabaleshwar acquired a clay doll in his image, which received offerings of plates of warm rice. In Bombay, the effigy of Lord Cornwallis, the former governor-general, came to be permanently festooned with garlands and beset by pilgrims performing darshan , the auspicious ritual of seeing and being seen by a god who was present inside his likenesses. 

Even as they battled to convert the local heathens from their misguided ways, Christian missionaries met the same fate. Long after he'd returned to Scotland, a portrait of the first chaplain of St. Andrew's Church in Bombay, the Presbyterian James Clow, became the object of pagan veneration. In the church vestry, the congregation's “native servants”offered up ritual homage to it and tried to carry off pieces of the canvas as personal talismans. 

An especially celebrated cult grew up around the ferocious soldier John Nicholson, a staunchly Protestant Northern Irishman who'd begun his career in the disastrous British invasion of Afghanistan in 1839, then rose to become deputy commissioner successively of Peshawar and Rawalpindi. He was an unspeakably brutal man, who kept a severed human head on his desk, frequently expressed his immense hatred for the entire subcontinent, and begged his superiors to allow him to flay alive and impale suspected rebels—so instinctively violent were his proclivities that “the idea of merely hanging”insubordinate Indians was “maddening”to him. Yet before he died, while leading the pitiless British invasion, slaughter, and looting of Delhi in 1857, he had inspired a cult of hundreds of indigenous “Nikalsaini”followers, army sepoys and ascetic faqirs alike, who surrounded his unwilling figure at all hours, solemnly chanting prayers and rendering obeisance to their idol. 

Something similar befell General Douglas MacArthur, the conquering hero of World War II. From Panama to Japan, Korea to Melanesia, his persona was made to take on divine properties of different kinds, in the form of wooden ritual statues, shamanistic shrines, and spirit persons, and as an avatar of the Papuan god Manarmakeri, whose return will herald the age of heaven. Even Western anthropologists not infrequently became enmeshed as involuntary deities in the very value systems they were trying, as neutral, external observers, to describe.

 Resistance was always futile: disclaiming one's divinity never seemed to dispel it. Nicholson was deeply revolted at being worshiped. He raged against the Nikalsainis who followed him around, kicked them into the dirt, beat and whipped them savagely, and imprisoned them in chains, yet they interpreted all this as “their god's righteous chastisement.”“I am not God,”Gandhi repeatedly yet fruitlessly declared from the early 1920s on, as ever more elaborate tales began to spread about his supernatural powers, and he was pestered incessantly by people wishing to touch his feet. “The word ‘Mahatma’stinks in my nostrils”—“I am not God; I am a human being.”

In 1961 a group of Jamaican Rastafarians traveled to Addis Ababa to meet for the first time with their living god, Haile Selassie. They were unfazed by the aging Ethiopian emperor's own stance on the matter: “If He does not believe He is god, we know that He is god,”his apostles maintained. In despair, the Jamaican government invited Selassie for a state visit, hoping that his public disavowal of their delusions would sap the movement's growing strength and political clout. “Do not worship me: I am not God,”the diminutive septuagenarian politely beseeched his dazzled followers when he arrived in the Caribbean. But this only had the opposite effect, for Rastafarian theologians knew full well what the Bible taught: “He that hum-bleth himself shall be exalted, and he that exalteth himself shall be abased.”

What are we to make of such episodes? As Accidental Gods brilliantly lays out, European observers were quick to jump to obvious-seeming conclusions. Accidental divinity bespoke the natives’recognition of the personal greatness of their overlords: Nicholson was adored because he epitomized “the finest, manliest, and noblest of men,”as a typical Victorian paean put it. The question of why such worship sometimes alighted on arbitrary, obscure, and unheroic figures (violent sadists, deserters, anonymous memsahibs) was submerged beneath the general idea of effeminate natives in thrall to their masculine conquerors.

 It was also believed to testify to their intellectual inferiority. As the academic study of religious beliefs developed over the course of the nineteenth century, European scholars defined “religion”in ways that classified the practices of “uncivilized races”as superstitious, backward, or “degenerate”—thereby further justifying colonialism. Compared to “real”religions with fixed temples, scriptures, and “rational,”monotheistic worship, above all Christianity, the beliefs of “the lower races,”they theorized, were stuck in an earlier stage of development. The worship of deified men was a primitive category error, “the irrational, misfired devotions of locals left to their own devices,”in one of Subin's many luminous turns of phrase: proof of their inability to rule themselves. 

In reality, from Columbus onward, Europeans repeatedly blundered into situations they didn't properly understand and whose meaning they then invariably recast as vindicating their own actions. Across the Americas, the Pacific, and Asia, the indigenous terms and rituals applied to them were in fact commonly used of rulers and other powerful figures, not just of deities, and signified only awe, not some separate, nonhuman, “godlike”status. Likewise, because sudden death precluded reincarnation, people in India had for millennia been accustomed to appeasing the powerful spirits of those who were therefore eternally trapped in the afterlife—that, not reverence for white superpower, was why they singled out many random, prematurely deceased Britons for the same treatment. Nor was the apotheosis of living colonists usually intended to honor them, let alone to reflect some personal virtue: it was simply a way of mediating and appropriating their power, one way of creating collective meaning in the midst of imperial precarity and violence. 

Above all, the very idea of a binary division between humanity and divinity was itself a peculiarly Christian dogma. In most other belief systems, the two were not strictly separated but overlapped. Reincarnations, communications with the spirit world, living gods, avatars, demigods, ancestor deities, and the powers of kings and lords—all were part of an interwoven spectrum of natural and supernatural authority. Much the same had been true in European antiquity. The ancient Greeks thought it normal for men to become gods. Among the Romans, apotheosis became a tool of statecraft, the ultimate form of memorialization. Cicero wanted to deify his daughter, Tullia; Hadrian arranged it for his wife and his mother-in-law, as well as for his young lover, Antinous. For emperors, it became a routine accolade—“Oh dear, I think I'm becoming a god,”Vespasian is said to have joked on his deathbed in 79 CE. 

Similar ideas circulated among Jesus’early followers. It was only from the Middle Ages on that the notion of humans being treated as gods came to be regarded by Christians as absurd, despite the fact that their own prophet, saints, and holy persons embodied similar principles. And so it happened that modern Europeans ventured abroad and began to impose their own category errors on the views of others. As Subin tartly observes, “correct knowledge about divinity is never a matter of the best doctrine, but of who possesses the more powerful army.”

Though Accidental Gods wears its learning lightly and is tremendous fun to read, it also includes a series of lyrical and thought-provoking meditations on the largest of themes. How should we think of identity? What is it to be human? How do stories work, grow, and stay alive? Belief itself, Subin suggests, is as much a set of relationships among people as it is an absolute, on-or-off state of mind. European myths about the primitive mentalities of others served to justify colonization and theories of white supremacy, and still do. Regarding indigenous practices as antithetical to the “reasoned”presumptions of “developed”cultures has always allowed Western observers to overlook their complicity in creating them—to see them only as the errors of “superstitious minds, the tendencies of isolated atolls, rather than a product of the violence of empire and the shackling of peoples to new capitalist machineries of profit.”

It also serves to mask the extent to which Western attitudes depend on their own forms of magical thinking. Our culture, for example, fetishizes goods, money, and material consumption, holding them up as indices of personal and social well-being. Moreover, as Subin points out, none of us can truly escape this fixation: 

Though we may demystify other people's gods and deface their idols, our critical capacity to demystify the commodity fetish still cannot break the spell it wields over us, for its power is rooted in deep structures of social practice rather than simple belief. While fetishes made by African priests were denigrated as irrational, the fetish of the capitalist marketplace has long been viewed as the epitome of rationalism. 

To see a myth is one thing; to grasp it fully, quite another. It turns over, changes its shape, slips away, fades out of view. The further back in time Subin ventures, the more fragmentary her sources become, the larger the gaps in what they choose to notice. But more than once she is able to illustrate, almost in real time, how indigenous and Western mythmaking can be intertwined, codependent, and mutually reinforcing. 

Following its “discovery”by Captain Cook in 1774, the Melanesian island of Tanna was devastated by centuries of colonial exploitation: its population kidnapped to provide cheap labor, its landscape stripped bare for short-term profit, its culture destroyed by missionary indoctrination. By the early twentieth century this treatment had provoked a series of indigenous messianic movements that looked forward to the expelling of the colonizers and the return of a golden age of plenty. The messiah would incarnate a local volcano god, it was believed, though the exact human form he would take was not clear. 

One perennially popular idea was that the savior would appear as an American (perhaps Franklin D. Roosevelt, perhaps a black GI). This was because the island was under British and French control—movements of deification provoked by colonial injustice often sought to access the power of their tormentors’rivals or enemies. In 1964 the Lavongai people of the occupied Papua and New Guinea territory sabotaged the elections organized by their colonial masters by writing in the name of President Lyndon B. Johnson, electing him as their king and then refusing to pay taxes to their Australian oppressors. On similar grounds, midcentury Indian and African religious sects sometimes deployed avatars of Britain's enemies—in India, Hitler was seen as the final coming of Vishnu, while Nigerians worshiped “Germany, Destroyer of Land”: My enemy's enemy is my friend.

 During World War I, indigenous populations in far-flung Allied colonies independently developed cults of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who, it was said, would shortly sweep away the English-speaking whites who had stolen their land and were exploiting their people. High above the Bay of Bengal, on the plateau of Chota Nagpur, tens of thousands of Oraon tea plantation workers gathered at clandestine midnight services and swore blood oaths to exterminate the British. They spoke of the Germans as “Suraj Baba”(Father Sun), passed around the emperor-god's portrait, and sang hymns to his casting out of the British and establishing an independent Oraon raj: 

German Baba is coming, Is slowly slowly coming; 

Drive away the devils: 

Cast them adrift in the sea. 

Suraj Baba is coming…

The salient point is not that such hopes were untethered from reality, but what they expressed. For what can the powerless do? To what can they appeal to restore the rightful order of things, in the face of endless loss? “Do you know that America kills all Negroes?”a Papuan skeptic challenged one of LBJ's apostles in 1964. “You're clever,”the apostle replied. “But you haven't got a good way to save us.”

Around this time, the British colonizers of Tanna were indoctrinating its inhabitants in the goodness of their young queen Elizabeth II and her handsome consort—a man, they learned, who was not actually from Britain, or Greece, or anywhere in particular. As it happened, the legend of the volcano god told that one of his sons had taken on human form, traveled far, and married a powerful foreign woman. Prince Philip vacationed in the archipelago and participated in a pig-killing ritual to consecrate a local chief. He was the Duke of Edinburgh, and Tanna's island group had once been called the New Hebrides. In 1974 one of the many local messianic factions realized that he must be their messiah. 

It proved to be a match made in heaven, for the British monarchy itself, in the twilight of its authority, was ever more reliant on invented ritual and mythmaking. Once Buckingham Palace learned of the prince's deification, it began to celebrate and publicize the story for its own purposes, deftly positioning it as evidence of the affection in which the royal family (and by inference the British) were supposedly held all across the former empire, and as a counterweight to the prince's well-deserved domestic reputation as an unregenerate racist. This Western interest in turn produced an unceasing stream of international attention and visitors to Tanna, to investigate and report on the islanders’strange “cult,”which not only helped to strengthen the myth's local appeal but even influenced its shape. 

In 2005 a BBC journalist arrived on the island to report the story, bringing with him a sheaf of documents compiled by the prince's former private secretary, including official correspondence from the 1970s, press clippings, and other English descriptions of the islanders’beliefs. His sharing of these papers, and his lengthy discussions with the locals, inadvertently seeded new myths, many of which, as Subin dryly notes, sounded “much like palace PR describing philanthropic activities in an underdeveloped land.”Myths stay alive by constantly adapting, encompassing, and feeding off one another. This was a classic case of mutual mythmaking: the deification of Prince Philip was produced in Buckingham Palace and Fleet Street, as well as in the South Pacific. To this day, white men from Europe and America keep turning up on Tanna, claiming to be fulfilling the prophecy of the returning god.*

In Subin's irresistible medley of history, anthropology, and exhilaratingly good writing, the most powerful stories are those of indigenous mythmaking as outright political revolt. For in many instances in which white men were turned into gods, the purpose was wholly subversive: not just to channel the strength of the colonial imperium for one's own ends, but to grasp the colonizers’power and turn it against them. In 1864 a Maori uprising led by the prophet Te Ua Hau-mene killed several British soldiers. The head of their captain, speared on a pole, became the rebels’protective talisman against other white invaders and their divine conduit to the angel Gabriel. Just as they reinterpreted the Bible to mean that Maori land should be restored and the British driven out, so too they appropriated a colonist's actual mouth and made it speak their truth. 

Even more unsettlingly, across their newly conquered African territories, from the 1920s onward British, French, and Belgian administrators found themselves faced with a strange contagion of spirit possession, in which the locals took on the colonists’identities. People would fall into a trance and then claim to be channeling the governor of the Red Sea or a white soldier, secretary, judge, or imperial administrator. They demanded pith helmets and libations of gin, marched around in undead formations, issued commands, and refused to obey imperial edicts, calling themselves Hauka , or “madness,”in the Sahel, and Zar in Ethiopia and the Sudan.

 One version in the Congo claimed to have created deified duplicates of every single colonial Belgian. Each time an African adept joined the movement, he'd adopt the name of a particular colonist, and his wife that of the spouse. In this way, Hauka captured the entire colonial population, from the governor-general down to the lowliest clerk. On entering their trance state, the locals usurped the colonists’power: the wives went around with chalked faces and wearing special dresses, screeching in shrill voices, demanding bananas and hens, clutching bunches of feathers under their arms in representation of handbags. 

Precisely because spirit possession was unwilled and painful, this was a means of resistance that mechanisms of imperial power could not easily counter. Early on, a district commissioner in Niger named Major Horace Crocicchia decided to suppress it by force. He rounded up sixty of the leading Hauka mediums, brought them in chains to the capital, Niamey, and imprisoned them for three days and nights without food. Then he forced them to acknowledge that their spirits could not match his own power, taunting them that he was stronger and that the Hauka had disappeared. “Where are the Hauka ?”he jeered repeatedly, beating one of them until she acknowledged that the spirits were gone. 

It only made things worse. Almost immediately a new, extremely powerful specter joined the spirit pantheon. All across Niger, villagers were now possessed by the vengeful, violent avatar of Crocicchia himself—also known as Krosisya, Kommandan, Major Mugu, or the Wicked Major. Deification of this kind was a form of ritualized revolt, a defiance of imperialist power that not only mocked but appropriated its authority. 

All this also explains why, toward the middle of the twentieth century, the rise of a powerful, proud, antiimperialist black ruler at the heart of Africa was so intoxicating to people on the other side of the globe who had been dehumanized for centuries because of the color of their skin. For black people in the Babylonian captivity of the New World, Ethiopia had long been held up as Zion, the land of their future return. Even before its dashing new emperor was crowned in 1930, American and Jamaican prophecies had begun to foretell the coming of a black messiah. Rastafarianism became a religion for all who opposed white hegemony: to worship Haile Selassie as a living god was to reject colonial Christianity, racial hierarchy, and subordination, and to celebrate black power. No wonder its tenets have spread across the globe and attracted nearly a million followers. As Subin's rich, captivating book shows, religion is a symbolic act: though we cannot control the circumstances, we all make our own gods, for our own reasons, all the time. 

*This is evocatively documented in the photographs, images, and text of Jon Tonks and Christopher Lord, The Men Who Would Be King (Dewi Lewis, 2021).

 Illustration by Masha Krasnova-Shabaeva ■

Mommy Is Going Away for a While

 

The antiheroine of the moment, in movies like “The Lost Daughter” and novels like “I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness,” commits the mother’s ultimate sin: abandoning her children.

 

By Amanda Hess

Illustrations by Liana Finck

There are so many ways to do motherhood wrong, or so a mother is told. She can be overbearing or remote. She can smother or neglect. She can mother in such a specifically bad way that she is assigned a bad-mom archetype: stage mother, refrigerator mother, “cool mom.” She can hover like a helicopter mom or bully like a bulldozer mom. But the thing she cannot do — the thing that is so taboo it rivals actually murdering her offspring — is leave.

The mother who abandons her children haunts our family narratives. She is made into a lurid tabloid figure, an exotic exception to the common deadbeat father. Or she is sketched into the background of a plot, her absence lending a protagonist a propulsive origin story. This figure arouses our ridicule (consider Meryl Streep’s daffy American president in “Don’t Look Up,” who forgets to save her son as she flees the apocalypse) or our pity (see “Parallel Mothers,” where an actress has ditched her daughter for lousy television parts). But lately the vanishing mother has provoked a fresh response: respect.

In Maggie Gyllenhaal’s film “The Lost Daughter,” she is Leda (played, across two decades, by Jessie Buckley and Olivia Colman), a promising translator who deserts her young daughters for several years to pursue her career (and a dalliance with an Auden scholar). In HBO’s “Scenes From a Marriage,” a gender-scrambled remake of Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 mini-series, she is Mira (Jessica Chastain), a Boston tech executive who jets to Tel Aviv for an affair disguised as a work project. And in Claire Vaye Watkins’s autofictional novel “I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness,” she is also Claire Vaye Watkins, a novelist who leaves her infant to smoke a ton of weed, sleep with a guy who lives in a van and confront her own troubled upbringing.

 In each case, her children are not abandoned outright; they are left in the care of fathers and other relatives. When a man leaves in this way, he is unexceptional. When a woman does it, she becomes a monster, or perhaps an antiheroine riding out a dark maternal fantasy. Feminism has supplied women with options, but a choice also represents a foreclosure, and women, because they are people, do not always know what they want. As these protagonists thrash against their own decisions, they also bump up against the limits of that freedom, revealing how women’s choices are rarely socially supported but always thoroughly judged.

A mother losing her children is a nightmare. The title of “The Lost Daughter” refers in part to such an incident, when a child disappears at the beach. But a mother leaving her children — that’s a daydream, an imagined but repressed alternate life. In the “Sex and the City” reboot “And Just Like That…,” Miranda — now the mother to a teenager — counsels a professor who is considering having children. “There are so many nights when I would love to be a judge and go home to an empty house,” she says. And on Instagram, the airbrushed mirage of mothering is being challenged by displays of raw desperation. The Not Safe for Mom Group, which surfaces confessions of anonymous mothers, pulses with idle threats of role refusal, like: “I want to be alone!!! I don’t want to make your lunch!!”

Being alone: that is the mother’s reasonable and functionally impossible dream. Especially recently, when avenues of escape have been sealed off: schools closed, day care centers suspended, offices shuttered, jobs lost or abandoned in crisis. Now the house is never empty, and also you can never leave. During a pandemic, a plucky middle-class gal can still “have it all,” as long as she can manage job and children simultaneously, from the floor of a lawless living room.

Cards on the table: I am struggling to draft this essay on my phone as my pantsless toddler — banished from day care for 10 days because someone got Covid — wages a tireless campaign to commandeer my device, hold it to his ear and say hewwo. I feel charmed, annoyed and implicated, as I wonder whether his neediness is attributable to some parental defect, perhaps related to my own constant phone use.

Do I want to abandon my child? No, but I am newly attuned to the psychological head space of a woman who does. The Auden scholar of “The Lost Daughter” (played, in an inspired bit of casting, by Gyllenhaal’s husband, Peter Sarsgaard) entices Leda by quoting Simone Weil: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Attention is a loaded word: It can mean caring for another person, but also a powerful mental focus, and a parent can seldom execute both definitions at once.

Leda wants to attend to her translation work, but she also wants someone to pay attention to her. To be blunt, she wants to work and to have sex. Often in these stories, the two are bound together in a hyper-individualistic fusion of romantic careerism. In “Scenes From a Marriage,” Mira plans to tell her daughter, “I have to go away for work, which is true” — only because she has arranged a professional obligation to facilitate her affair with an Israeli start-up bro. Her gateway drug to abandonment is, as is often the case, a business trip. Mira first strays at a company boat party; Leda tastes freedom at a translation conference; Claire embarks on a reading tour from which she never returns.

The work trip is the Rumspringa of motherhood. Like the mama bird in “Are You My Mother?,” a woman is allowed to leave the nest to retrieve a worm, though someone, somewhere may be noting her absence with schoolmarmish disapproval. In Caitlin Flanagan’s 2012 indictment of Joan Didion, recirculated after Didion’s death, Flanagan dings Didion for taking a film job across the country, leaving her 3-year-old daughter over Christmas.

Still, there is something absurd about the fashioning of work as the ultimate escape. It is only remotely plausible if our desperate mother enjoys a high-status creative position (translator, novelist, thought leader). When other mothers of fiction leave, their fantasies are quickly revealed as delusions. In Nicole Dennis-Benn’s novel “Patsy,” a Jamaican secretary abandons her daughter to pursue an American dream in New York, only to become a nanny caring for someone else’s children. And in Jessamine Chan’s dystopian novel “The School for Good Mothers,” Frida is sleep deprived and drowning in work when she leaves her toddler at home alone for two hours. Though Frida feels “a sudden pleasure” when she shuts the door behind her, her fantasy life is short and bleak: She escapes as far as her office, where she sends emails. For that, she is conscripted into a re-education camp for bad moms.

Each of our absent mothers has her reasons. Leda’s academic husband has prioritized his career over hers, and this makes her decisions legible, even sympathetic. But in “I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness,” Watkins lends her doppelgänger no exculpatory circumstances. Claire has a doula, day care, Obamacare breast pump, tenure-track job, several therapists and the world’s most understanding husband. When she starts sleeping in a hammock on campus, her husband says: “I think it’s cool you’re following your … heart, or … whatever … is happening … out there.” Nothing obvious impedes her from capable mothering, but ​​like Bartleby, the Child-bearer, she would simply prefer not to.

In heaping privileges upon Claire, Watkins suggests that there are burdens of motherhood that cannot be solved with money, lifted by a co-parent or cured by a mental health professional. The trouble is motherhood itself, and its ideal of total selfless devotion. Motherhood had turned Claire into a “blank,” a figure who “didn’t seem to think much” and “had trouble completing her sentences.” As these women discover, their menu of life choices is not so expansive after all. They long to be offered a different position: dad. Claire wants to “behave like a man, a slightly bad one.” As Mira abruptly exits, she assures her husband, “Men do it all the time.”

These women may leave, but they don’t quite get away with it. Mira eventually loses both job and boyfriend and begs for her old life back. Leda’s abandonment becomes a dark secret in a thriller that builds to a violent end. Only Claire is curiously impervious to consequence. She follows her selfish impulses all the way to the desert, where she spends her days crying and masturbating alone in a tent. Then she calls her husband, who flies out to her, happy tot in tow; eventually Claire claims a life where she can “read and write and nap and teach and soak and smoke” and see her daughter on breaks. By exacting no cosmic punishment on Claire, Watkins refuses to facilitate the reader’s judgment. But she also makes it harder to care.

When I was pregnant, I had a fantasy, too. In it I was single, childless, still very young somehow and living out an alternate life in a van in Wyoming. Reading “I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness” broke the spell. As Claire ripped bongs and circled new sexual partners, she struck me not as a monster or a hero but something perhaps worse — boring. Even as these stories work to uncover motherhood’s complex emotional truths, they indulge their own little fiction: that a mother only becomes interesting when she stops being one.

NEW YORK TIMES

 

 

The Sublime Spectacle of Yoko Ono Disrupting the Beatles

 In Peter Jackson’s “The Beatles: Get Back,” Ono is a performance artist at the height of her powers.

By Amanda Hess

 

From the beginning, Ono’s presence feels intentional. Her gauzy black outfit and flowing, center-parted hair lend her a tent-like appearance; it is as if she is setting up camp, carving out space in the band’s environment. A “mundane” task becomes peculiar when you choose to perform it in front of Paul McCartney’s face as he tries to write “Let It Be.” When you repeat this for 21 days, it becomes astonishing. The documentary’s shaggy run-time reveals Ono’s provocation in all its intensity. It’s as if she is staging a marathon performance piece, and in a way, she is.

The Beatles play their final public performance as Yoko Ono looks on.Credit...Apple Corps/Disney+

Jackson has called his series “a documentary about a documentary,” and we are constantly reminded that we are watching the band produce its image for the camera. Ono was, of course, already an accomplished performance artist when she encountered Lennon, seven years her junior, at a gallery show in 1966. She was a pioneer of participatory artwork, a collaborator of experimental musicians like John Cage and a master at coyly appearing in spaces where she was not supposed to belong. In 1971, she would stage an imaginary exhibition of ephemeral works at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the catalog, she is photographed in front of the museum holding a sign that says “F,” recasting it as the “Museum of Modern [F]art.”

The idea that Ono doomed the band was always a canard that smacked of misogyny and racism. She was cast as the groupie from hell, a sexually domineering “dragon lady” and a witch who hypnotized Lennon into spurning the lads for some woman. (In 1970, Esquire published an article titled “John Rennon’s Excrusive Gloupie” that promised to reveal “the Yoko nobody Onos,” featuring an illustration of Ono looming over Lennon, who is rendered as a cockroach on her leash.) These slurs would spiral into an indefatigable pop-culture meme that has haunted generations of women accused of intruding on male genius.

Ono did not “break up the Beatles.” (If Lennon’s distancing from the band was influenced by his desire to explore other pursuits, including his personal and creative relationship with Ono, that was his call.) But she did intrude. In the documentary, McCartney politely complains that his songwriting with Lennon is disrupted by Ono’s omnipresence. For her part, she was vigilant about escaping the typical role of the artist’s wife. In a 1997 interview, she commented on the status of women in rock in the 1960s: “My first impression was that they were all wives, kind of sitting in the next room while the guys were talking,” she said. “I was afraid of being something like that.” Later, she would dedicate her barbed 1973 song, “Potbelly Rocker,” to the “wives of rockers who are nameless.”

The Beatles record the album that will become “Let It Be.” Yoko Ono is also there.Credit...Apple Corps

In her 1964 text project “Grapefruit,” a kind of recipe book for staging art experiences, she instructs her audience “not to look at Rock Hudson but only Doris Day,” and in “The Beatles: Get Back,” she skillfully redirects the eye away from the band and toward herself. Her image stands in contrast to that of other Beatles partners — modelesque white women in chic outfits who occasionally swoop in with kisses, nod encouragingly and slip unobtrusively away. Linda Eastman, McCartney’s future wife, lingers a little longer, occasionally circulating and photographing the band. Eastman was a rock portraitist, and one of the film’s most fascinating moments shows her in deep conversation with Ono — as if to prove Ono’s point, it is a rare on-set interaction with no recovered audio.

Ono simply never leaves. She refuses to decamp to the sidelines, but she also resists acting out stereotypes; she appears as neither a doting naïf nor a needling busybody. Instead she seems engaged in a kind of passive resistance, defying all expectations of women who enter the realm of rock genius.

The Barenaked Ladies song “Be My Yoko Ono” compares Ono to a ball and chain (for the record, Ono said of the song, “I liked it”), but as the sessions go on, she assumes a weightless quality. She seems to orbit Lennon, eclipsing his bandmates and becoming a physical manifestation of his psychological distance from his old artistic center of gravity. Later, her performance would grow in intensity. The “Let It Be” sessions were followed by the recording of “Abbey Road,” and according to the studio’s engineer, when Ono was injured in a car accident, Lennon arranged for a bed to be delivered to the studio; Ono tucked herself in, commandeered a microphone and invited friends to visit her bedside. This is a lot of things: grotesquely codependent, terribly rude and iconic. The more Ono’s presence is challenged, the more her performance escalates.

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Ono wailing inchoately into Harrison’s microphone during his absence from the recording sessions.Credit...Apple Corps

All of this was used to crudely fashion Ono into a cultural villain, but it would also later establish her as a kind of folk hero. “It all comes down to YOKO ONO,” the drummer Tobi Vail wrote in a zine connected to her riot grrrl band Bikini Kill in 1991. “Part of what your boyfriend teaches you is that Yoko Ono broke up the Beatles,” she writes. That story “makes you into the opposite of his band.” It relegates women to the audience and ridicules them for attempting to make their own music. In Hole’s 1997 song “20 Years in the Dakota,” Courtney Love summons Ono’s powers against a new generation of whining fanboys, and says that riot grrrl is “forever in her debt.” Vail called Ono “the first punk rock girl singer ever.”

In Jackson’s film, you can see the seeds of this generational shift. One day, Eastman’s young daughter, Heather, a bob-haired munchkin, whirls aimlessly about the studio. Then she spies Ono singing. Heather observes her with scrunch-faced intensity, steps up to the microphone and wails.

THE NEW YORK TIMES