May 31, 2018

O mordomo de câmera na mão



Cacá Diegues


É preciso que se entenda de uma vez que o cinema brasileiro não vive de dinheiro público como, com toda a justiça, as outras artes em geral 

 

Quando fiz meu primeiro longa-metragem, o Brasil produzia seis ou sete filmes por ano. Hoje, são 160 títulos, com alguns sucessos comerciais de respeito e outros repercutindo nos festivais internacionais por sua qualidade. Tenho autoridade para dizer que o Brasil vive o melhor momento da história de seu cinema, com a diversidade que um país do nosso tamanho merece e precisa ter. Mas há sempre os que não querem que ele exista.

Será que agora a bomba vem do Tribunal de Contas da União? O TCU quer interromper a produção de cinema no Brasil por, no mínimo, dois anos, a fim de passar a limpo as contas de uma agência pública, a Ancine, que nós nunca administramos, que nunca foi responsabilidade nossa.

É preciso que se entenda de uma vez que o cinema brasileiro não vive de dinheiro público como, com toda a justiça, as outras artes em geral. O mecanismo que beneficia nossa economia cinematográfica é uma contribuição devida pelas atividades audiovisuais no país, a Condecine. Não só o cinema não está no orçamento do Estado, como também os recursos de que dispomos vêm de nossa própria atividade. E, para cada real que uma produção usa da Condecine, de 3 a 4 reais vão para o Estado, na forma de impostos e outros compromissos cidadãos. Sem contar o grande número de empregos que cada produção cria, do operário que carrega a grua e prepara o travelling aos profissionais especializados em administração, finanças e tecnologias variadas.

O relator do caso no TCU afirma que é um absurdo o cinema ter tanto dinheiro à sua disposição, diante da crise fiscal do país, da falta de recursos para educação, saúde e segurança pública, sobretudo num ano eleitoral. Segundo ele, dá até para desconfiar. Desculpe, doutor, com todo o respeito por seus títulos, se o cinema acabar, acaba também a Condecine e seus recursos desaparecem, não vão legalmente para lugar nenhum, nem mesmo para as atividades citadas que realmente precisam de socorro. Por falar em ano eleitoral, que tal procurar no bolso de certos políticos o dinheiro que falta para os serviços do Estado?

O que complica a nossa vida é que cabe a uma agência pública, a Ancine, a regulação e fiscalização dessa atividade privada.

Toda produção de cinema presta contas à Ancine. Conforme o filme vai sendo feito, os recursos usados vão sendo contabilizados, e suas contas são entregues à Ancine. Quando o filme está pronto, sua prestação de contas já estará encerrada. Mas, como são mais de cem produções anuais, a Ancine não tem gente, nem meios para conferir essas contas em tempo hábil e legal. Com a ajuda da AGU, inventaram então um sistema de algoritmos que, através de sorteio, indica as produções que serão examinadas. Até agora, tiveram poucos problemas no assunto.

Um desses “problemas” é o caso de “O som ao redor”, filme de Kleber Mendonça, o cineasta de “Aquarius”, hoje consagrado em todo o mundo. “O som ao redor” era para ser um filme de baixo orçamento, que não custaria mais que 1,7 milhão de reais. Mas, por contingências naturais do cinema, acabou custando cerca de 300 mil reais a mais. Pois essa diferença está gerando uma multa absurda, mesmo que o cineasta já tenha prestado contas de onde seu filme gastou esse suplemento orçamentário. Os carrascos do cinema se divertem com a multa gigantesca que inclui uma máxima correção monetária e as outras maldades financeiras criadas para acabar com a pessoa.

O Estado nos cobra o que supõe estarmos devendo; mas não se manifesta, muito menos comemora as glórias que um cineasta como Kleber Mendonça traz para o país. Num momento de crise como a que vivemos, em vez de coagir nossos artistas, o Estado devia valorizá-los, numa tentativa de mostrar ao mundo, nesse momento rindo de nós, que também temos do que nos orgulharmos.

Agora mesmo, no Festival de Cannes, o Brasil esteve representado na Quinzena dos Realizadores pelo sucesso do filme “Los silencios”, de Beatriz Seigner; enquanto “Diamantino”, filme de estreia de Daniel Schmidt e Gabriel Abrantes, ganhava o prêmio de melhor filme na Semana da Crítica. Na seleção oficial, “O grande circo místico”, além da repercussão de público e crítica, ainda ganhou uma elogiosa menção do ministro da Cultura de Portugal, o professor Luís Castro Mendes, em nota oficial de seu ministério sobre o festival.

No Brasil, quando as coisas vão mal, o cinema é sempre o primeiro suspeito. O mordomo está sempre com a câmera na mão. O país gasta fortunas com incentivos fiscais para indústrias poluentes, destruidoras da economia e do ar do país, e nunca vi um anúncio em painel de automóvel agradecendo qualquer ministério pela colaboração. Já em nossos filmes, temos a obrigação de citar, mais de uma vez, todos os instrumentos do Estado, como se aquilo tudo fosse dinheiro e serviço dele. Um favor do Estado.

Essa onda contra o cinema brasileiro surge exatamente no momento em que a Ancine e o MinC anunciam novos recursos para o programa Audiovisual Gera Futuro. A ação pode não ter sido hábil, mas isso não tem nada a ver com os filmes que fazemos e ainda queremos fazer. Se o cinema brasileiro for vítima do desatino em curso, nossos projetos serão interrompidos, ninguém sabe por quanto tempo. E o Brasil arrastará por aí a sua miséria, sem uma voz e uma alma que o representem. A escuridão será definitiva.

ilustração ANDRÉ MELLO 

May 29, 2018

Truckers’ Strike Paralyzes Brazil as President Courts Investors



By Shasta Darlington and Manuela Andreoni

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — Brazil is roaring back, at least according to President Michel Temer.
That was the message Mr. Temer’s government sought to convey in a series of upbeat statements issued over the past couple of weeks leading up to a foreign investment forum that begins Tuesday in São Paulo.
Yet a weeklong standoff between striking truck drivers and the government has provided a stark counternarrative, illustrating the shaky recovery of Brazil’s economy, Latin America’s largest, and the widespread disdain Brazilians have toward their ruling class.
Hundreds of trucker roadblocks sealed off highways across the country as a protest against rising fuel prices ground Brazil’s economy to a halt in recent days. Gas stations from São Paulo, the financial capital, to Manaus, in the heart of the Amazon, have run out of fuel.
Dozens of flights have been canceled, fresh food supplies in supermarkets have dwindled and millions of chickens and pigs have been culled because of a lack of animal feed. On Monday, many schools and universities suspended classes.
An announcement by Mr. Temer on Thursday that he had struck a deal with the strike leaders proved premature. Roadblocks were maintained through the weekend and oil workers announced that they intended to go on strike this week, raising the prospect of a deepening crisis that has laid bare the weakness of Mr. Temer’s lame-duck government ahead of a presidential election in October.
Over the weekend, Mr. Temer issued an order authorizing the military to clear roads using force, if necessary, a move that drew condemnation from human rights groups.
But after that threat failed to bring the strike to an end, Mr. Temer appeared weary as he announced in a televised statement on Sunday that the government would subsidize the cost of diesel to drop the price at the pump by 12 percent. He also said truck drivers would pay less in tolls and get more government contracts. The measures were striking concessions by a government that has sought to rein in spending as Brazil emerges from a long, crippling recession.
“Our fundamental and correct concern is with the truckers and I understand their difficulties,” said Mr. Temer, the most unpopular president in modern Brazilian history, according to polls. “We all understand the natural difficulties of truckers in their work.”
Fuel costs have soared in Brazil as oil prices have risen globally, and the real, Brazil’s currency, has depreciated. Under the current policy, the price of diesel fuel has fluctuated on an almost daily basis. As part of the latest agreement, diesel price adjustments will occur on a monthly basis.
Image
Members of Brazil’s security forces gathered outside a fuel distribution center near Rio de Janeiro on Sunday as truckers took part in a protest against high diesel fuel prices.CreditRicardo Moraes/Reuters
Union leaders have urged drivers to accept the latest deal. But on Monday, as fuel tankers escorted by police officers and soldiers began to restock some gas stations, many protesters held firm.
“The government has now met all of the demands in relation to diesel prices, and at a very high cost to public coffers,” said Laura Barbosa de Carvalho, a professor of economics at the University of São Paulo, who pointed out that taxpayers would ultimately pick up the tab. “But the big question is: Is this movement still focused on the price of diesel or does it have a bigger component that wants to destabilize the country?”
Mr. Temer’s speech on Sunday night prompted Brazilians frustrated by what they see as a failed government to honk their horns and bang pots from their windows in protest in many cities across the country. It was a sign of the mistrust and outright hostility many Brazilians feel toward the president.
A poll published by the Globo website on Monday showed that 55 percent of Brazilians disapproved of the strike, but a full 95 percent disapproved of the way Mr. Temer has handled it.
The strike has been the most disruptive period of unrest since Mr. Temer helped lead an effort to impeach his predecessor, Dilma Rousseff, in 2016. Since then, Mr. Temer has spent much of his political capital fending off accusations of corruption and obstruction of justice stemming from the wide-ranging graft scandal known as Lava Jato, or Car Wash.
On Monday morning, roughly one hundred protesters gathered at an oil refinery on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, which has been one of the focal points of the strike. Truckers were a minority at the demonstration. But scores of unemployed oil workers, motorcycle couriers and public transportation workers said they wanted their grievances addressed as well.
“This started with the truckers, but it reached millions,” said Alexsandro Faria, 39, an unemployed scaffold builder who worked at the refinery for seven years before being laid off in 2016. “This is the best moment to call attention to our demands. If we only stay on our sofas, complaining about corruption, it won’t work.”
Several strikers have voiced support for a military intervention, arguing that the country was safer and more orderly during the dictatorship that lasted from 1964 to 1985. While support for a step that drastic is by no means widespread among strikers, calls for the military to step in have riled up crowds at protest sites over the past week.
“It isn’t just about the truckers anymore,” said Antonio Marcos Rocha, a proponent of a military intervention who was wearing a Brazilian flag around his waist as he distributed free sandwiches to a crowd outside the refinery. “It’s against corruption.”
As the protests have struck a chord with many Brazilians, politicians across the political spectrum have taken aim at the increasingly isolated and weakened president.
Leftist leaders, who have traditionally championed workers’ rights, and right-wing politicians both sought to portray themselves as champions of the truck drivers as the government threatened to prosecute business leaders who have backed the strike.
Image
People lined up for fuel in Rio de Janeiro on Monday, the eighth day of the truckers’ strike.CreditCarl De Souza/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The far-right presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro, a federal lawmaker, declared on Twitter that any fines or imprisonment of truckers “would be revoked by a future honest president/patriot.”
Marina Silva, a center-left presidential contender and a former environment minister, criticized the government’s response.
“Once more, the Temer administration uses the military to hide its incompetence,” she wrote on Twitter. “With the increase in fuel prices, society is paying prices that are too high for the mistakes of a government that does everything to save its own skin and keep itself in power.”
The timing could hardly be worse for Mr. Temer as he sets out to promote Brazil’s economic recovery before would-be foreign investors while defending the legacy of his two years in office.
Mr. Temer was recently mocked for unveiling a slogan that suggested that Brazil had advanced 20 years in the span of two. Critics were quick to point out that a slight variation in punctuation made the slogan convey that Brazil had in fact regressed two decades in two years.
But Mr. Temer sought to strike a bullish tone on Monday as investors arrived in São Paulo, where fuel trucks have needed police escorts to resupply airports.
“Brazil is opening to the world and the world is reconnecting with Brazil,” he said in a statement prepared for the event. He noted that on his watch, inflation has dropped and interest rates have fallen to 6.5 percent from 14.25 percent, and investor confidence has begun to grow in his market-friendly policies.
The economy has pulled out of recession, but the recovery has been tenuous. The value of the currency has slumped to a two-year low, in large part because of uncertainty over Brazil’s political future. Voters have turned their backs on the traditional parties mired in the corruption investigation.
Mr. Temer is set to leave office having failed to pass critical structural changes he pushed for, including an overhaul of the bloated pension system.
While truck drivers weigh their options, oil workers unions have announced a three-day strike starting on Wednesday to demand, among other things, a reduction of fuel prices and the firing of Pedro Parente, the president of the state-run oil company, Petrobras.
“The government has tried to sell this idea that it solved the country’s economic problems,” Ms. Carvalho, the economics professor, said. “This crisis is evidence that it was never true.”

Bolsonaro é autor de projeto que pune com até 4 anos de cadeia quem obstrui vias públicas

Ranier Bragon 

 Presidenciável Jair Bolsonaro (PSL), autor de projeto que pune com prisão quem interditar vias públicas

Autor de um mensagem nas redes sociais prometendo revogar qualquer multa aplicada a caminhoneiros pelo governo de Michel Temer, Jair Bolsonaro (PSL) é autor de projeto que, em sentido contrário, pune com até quatro anos de cadeia aqueles que impedirem ou dificultarem o trânsito de veículos e pedestres nas vias públicas.
O projeto foi apresentado em agosto de 2016 na Câmara dos Deputados.
"A proposição é pautada na necessária preservação dos direitos individuais e coletivos dos cidadãos, vítimas de ações irresponsáveis daqueles que desprezam as liberdades do outro quando da busca de suas demandas sociais", escreveu Bolsonaro na justificativa do projeto.

Pré-candidato à Presidência, o deputado se apressou em ir às redes sociais apoiar a atual greve dos caminhoneiros, mas nas manifestações iniciais criticou a obstrução de vias.

"Caminhoneiros, parabéns, vocês estão fazendo algo muito mais importante até do que uma eleição. Só peço uma coisa, não bloqueiem a estrada. Com toda a certeza, onde por ventura esteja havendo bloqueio tem algum infiltrado do PT, do MST, da CUT", afirmou em vídeo divulgado na sexta (25).
Bolsonaro é crítico recorrente de manifestações em vias públicas promovidas por grupos de esquerda.
Neste domingo, porém, o presidenciável publicou em sua conta no Twitter: "Qualquer multa, confisco ou prisão imposta aos caminhoneiros por Temer/Jungmann será revogada por um futuro presidente honesto/patriota."

A Folha encaminhou perguntas para sua assessoria de imprensa e para o presidente interino
do PSL e advogado de Bolsonaro, Gustavo Bebianno, mas ainda não houve resposta.

CAMINHONEIROS E PREÇO DOS COMBUSTÍVEIS: O MERCADO QUE SE LIXE

de MARINGONI

1. Há um inexplicável clima de pânico em alguns setores democráticos, neste final de semana. O mote: vivemos uma escalada fascista de massas, vai haver um golpe jurídico-militar e as eleições serão canceladas;

2. A análise contém um pequeno problema: não há comprovação segura para nenhuma dessas assertivas. Há um movimento nacional de massas, de dimensões inéditas e sem centro de comando claro, que está - oh, céus! - sendo encarniçadamente disputado por uma miríade de nuances políticas que vão da extrema direita à extrema esquerda. É do jogo;

3. Nesse quadro, há sim caminhoneiros em profusão - acompanhados por "vivandeiras alvoroçadas" - que bradam "intervenção militar já!" a plenos pulmões. Como demonstrou Maria Caramez Carlotto, em sensato post que reproduzi, não se pode exigir de atores extremamente diversos a leitura da realidade com as mesmas lentes da esquerda. "Intervenção militar já!" tem peso numa sociedade polarizada, mas nem todos parecem ter na cabeça o que isso significa. É muito mais um mantra catártico - como "Fora Temer!" - que busca uma saída mágica para o imbróglio atual. Em uma frase: mesmo quem usa de todos os decibéis de suas cordas vocais para vociferar tal impropério pode ser disputado politicamente;

4. O governo está com grandes dificuldades para fechar uma proposta, dado seu nível de comprometimento com o financismo. Um dos tentos dos caminhoneiros foi - talvez involuntariamente - atingir não apenas o centro do mecanismo garantidor de lucros estratosféricos para os acionistas da Petrobrás, mas a própria razão de ser do golpe;

5. A intentona deflagrada por Michel Temer e sua quadrilha há dois anos tem como base maior de sustentação o aprofundamento do papel do país como entreposto privilegiado da reprodução ampliada do capital em escala global. Leva ao extremo a percepção de Caio Prado Jr., o Brasil é um negócio.
Daí a transformação do Estado de ente público a alavanca impulsionadora de ganhos especulativos. Isso se dá pela política monetária - juros estratosféricos -, pela liquidação de patrimônio estratégico - público e privado - na bacia das almas do rentismo, pela inserção pretendida para o país no mercado mundial e pela entrega de riquezas naturais em penca;

6. A metamorfose da Petrobrás de empresa pública estratégica - não apenas na área energética, mas como ferramenta do desenvolvimento - em guichê do mercado mobiliário planetário é pilar estratégico desse projeto. Para isso foi dado o golpe de 2016;

7. Na tarde deste domingo, Temer já avisou não ser possível garantir o congelamento do preço do diesel por 60 dias, como aventado no dia anterior. A promessa, como se sabe, não se dá pela redução do preço do derivado, mas por isenções tributárias. Ou seja, penalizando-se ainda mais o poder público. Igual posição é tomada em relação aos pedágios das estradas privatizadas. A margem de manobra oficial para cumprir os acordos é baixa;

8. A direita - essa vasta nuvem de diversos ramos do grande capital - hesita nos rumos a tomar. O inigualável Rodrigo Maia já bate pesado no governo, de olho na cadeira mais importante do 3o. andar do Palácio. Aprova-se às pressas medida facultando a eleição indireta de um mandatário. Na bolsa de boatos, volta a correr a ideia de um semipresidencialismo ou outra forma de tapetão parlamentarista. Gorilas de pijama assanham-se. Barata-voa é pouco para classificar cientificamente a situação das forças políticas de sustentação do governo;

9. Por isso, o alarmismo não pode colar. Há os engenheiros de obra pronta a trombetear que "a esquerda não percebeu isso, não viu aquilo", ou que chegamos a uma situação de derrota popular total. Puro impressionismo. Se vingarem tais avaliações, qual a saída? A tática lemingue: suicidemo-nos todos?

10. O nível de adesão popular à greve - levando-se em conta a dramaticidade de incômodos que ela provoca - é algo surpreendente. Essa característica deve merecer mais estudo. Por que a simpatia cresce, com todo o bombardeio midiático contrário?;

11. Já escrevi aqui que, dada a multiplicidade de vínculos e regimes de trabalho dos caminhoneiros, não é de se surpreender a inexistência de porta-vozes unificados ou que sintetizem suas bandeiras. Desse ponto de vista, a categoria - com toda a elasticidade que o termo envolve - forma o contingente dos sonhos dos formuladores da reforma trabalhista, que entrou em vigor ano passado. O resultado é que o governo não tem com quem negociar. Entramos no admirável mundo novo criado pelo mostrengo que destruiu a CLT. Se as categorias se enfraquecem organizativamente, o outro lado passa a não ter segurança alguma nos acordos - acima do legislado - fechados daqui para a frente. Uma parte dos motoristas pode aceitar um pacto e outra não, gerando negociações cada vez mais intrincadas. Liberalismo total vale para os dois lados e tem um pé na anarquia pura e simples;

12. A única saída para as forças progressistas - do centro à esquerda - é buscar uma aliança com os setores democráticos do movimento e disputá-lo. Isso está sendo feito. Mais uma vez, a saída é a formação de uma frente pela queda dos preços e pela defesa da Petrobrás e do Estado como entes públicos;

13. Quanto aos acionistas da Petrobrás, liberalismo neles! O mercado acionário é de alto risco. Por que uma empresa pública tem de dar à malta rentista a garantia de ganhos constantes? Devem valer as regras: no risco, ganha-se ou perde-se, sem choro e nem rastejar de governos sabujos;

14. Por fim, a palavra de ordem "Fora Temer!" não parece ser a mais adequada para o momento. Por pior que seja, o golpista dá alguma previsibilidade ao processo eleitoral daqui até outubro. O foco poderia ser "Fora Parente" e a volta do papel da Petrobrás como motor do desenvolvimento nacional. Isso atinge a engrenagem central do golpe. Ou sua "raison d'être", como dizem os elegantes.

P. S. - Uma hora depois de terminar este texto, Michel Temer apareceu em rede nacional, anunciando o atendimento da pauta referente ao preço dos combustíveis e pedágios. Baixou o preço final e aceitou o congelamento do diesel por 60 dias. É a única diferença com o que escrevi. O caminho anunciado foi o de mercado: garante-se a manutenção da política de preços da Petrobrás - que favorece os acionistas minoritários - através de isenções tributárias que penalizam o Estado e a população. Ou seja, para o golpismo mais valem os interesses dos rentistas da bolsa de Nova York do que os da maioria dos brasileiros.

(A partir de uma conversa com o sempre irrequieto Artur Araújo)

May 28, 2018

QUEM SÃO OS CAMINHONEIROS?



Texto postado por Glaucia Campregher:

A carroceria sobre as costas
(perfil social dos caminhoneiros)
[por G. Lessa]

De acordo com o Departamento Nacional de Trânsito (DENATRAN), há 2,7 milhões de caminhões no Brasil . Os caminhoneiros autônomos são proprietários de cerca de 70% desses veículos e os 30% restantes estão no patrimônio das empresas de logística e das firmas de outros setores. Nas transportadoras trabalham 360 mil motoristas de carga (fonte: Caged) e os autônomos são 1,8 milhão de indivíduos. Portanto, a maioria dos caminhoneiros não é composta de assalariados. Esse fato aproxima em alguma medida as reivindicações dos autônomos das reivindicações das empresas do setor, contudo isso não significa que exista uma identidade fundamental de interesses entre os dois polos e menos ainda que os caminhoneiros sejam sempre manipulados pelos empresários, apesar de ambos agirem em alianças pontuais por diversas razões.

Em 2016, segundo uma pesquisa sobre as condições de trabalho dos caminhoneiros contratada pela Confederação Nacional da Indústria (CNI), cada caminhão no país tinha em média 13,9 anos de uso: os veículos dos autônomos tinham 16,9 anos e aqueles das transportadoras apenas 7,5 anos. Os primeiros são obrigados a usar seus veículos para além do tempo máximo recomendável e isso implica piores condições de trabalho e menor produtividade. Entre os autônomos, 62% pagaram empréstimos durante 5 anos para comprarem seu principal meio de trabalho. A renda líquida média desses trabalhadores era de 4.100 mil reais, a jornada de trabalho era de 11 horas, no estilo da Revolução Industrial na Inglaterra, e eles possuíam em média 3 dependentes. A média de idade era de 45,7 anos, apenas 32,6% tinham completado o ensino médio e só 1,2% havia concluído o curso superior. Geograficamente, a frota estava concentrada nos estados de Minas, SP, Paraná e Rio Grande do Sul.

Os motoristas de carga assalariados tinham, em 2014, segundo o Caged, uma renda média de 1.800 reais, mas aqueles contratados pelas transportadoras e não por firmas de outros setores possuíam, em 2016, renda média (3.800 reais) e condições de trabalho parecidas com aquelas dos autônomos, o que se explica pelas especificidades das jornadas nas empresas especializadas em transporte. Entretanto, a proximidade do tipo de jornada e do nível de renda dos autônomos e assalariados não elimina as profundas diferenças objetivas entre os dois regimes laborais e as especificidades das psicologias derivadas deles. Os primeiros não possuem uma renda fixa e segura, como possuem os assalariados, precisam fazer um cálculo econômico análogo ao de uma pequena empresa, focado no preço dos insumos, no amortecimento rápido do capital, nas taxas de juros, nos pedágios e nos impostos. Os segundos, possuem uma psicologia operária, focada na manutenção do poder de compra do salário, na solidariedade com os outros trabalhadores da mesma empresa e na conquista das melhores condições laborais possíveis.

O caminhoneiro autônomo é um empresário sui generis, pois não manda em ninguém, é patrão e capataz de si mesmo em benefício de bancos e distribuidoras de combustível. Vive sob excessiva e estressante carga de trabalho diária sem a alegria do convívio familiar, situação que lhe acarreta doenças laborais e falta de tempo para se instruir e fazer exercícios físicos. Ele tem consciência dos preconceitos a partir dos quais sua forma de vida é vista pelas outras pessoas, o que provoca impacto negativo na sua autoestima. Na citada pesquisa da CNI, os caminhoneiros afirmaram saber que são percebidos a partir das seguintes características: irresponsabilidade, imprudência no trânsito, uso de drogas e baixa escolaridade. O preço do diesel é decisivo para o seu equilíbrio financeiro, sendo o foco de suas reivindicações econômicas. A remuneração do frete também é essencial, mas não oscila tanto quanto o preço do combustível e depende menos do estado. Isso explica porque esses caminhoneiros se insurgem principalmente contra os aumentos do preço do diesel e miram no governo e no Congresso Nacional, mesmo não denunciando o problema da baixa remuneração dos fretes.

O fenômeno da terceirização de parte do processo produtivo das empresa e a metodologia do “estoque zero” ampliaram o papel estratégico do transporte rodoviário, aumentado o peso dos trabalhadores do setor de transporte terrestre de cargas no funcionamento da economia. Mas a dispersão objetiva das relações econômicas nas quais estão inseridos os autônomos os transforma em quase dois milhões de "empreendedores" convivendo lado a lado, mas com dificuldade de se unificarem em um coletivo coeso por lhes faltarem a alavanca unificadora da oposição a um mesmo setor patronal. Isso parece explicar a maior parte de suas dificuldades de efetivação de ações coletivas exitosas e de desenvolverem lideranças unificadoras. Essas dificuldades de coesão parecem estar sendo minimizadas pelos meios de comunicação digitais portáteis, como o celular com grupos de WhatsApp e de e-mail, mas sua persistência é estrutural e está na base da influência das empresas transportadoras em suas mobilizações, pois estas acabam funcionando como um Bonaparte influenciando as ações e a consciência de uma categoria estruturalmente fragmentada, um problema que poderia ser minimizado com uma maior aproximação entre os autônomos e os caminhoneiros assalariados, os quais têm potencialidade sociológica de funcionarem como vanguarda sindical e política da categoria como um todo.

May 27, 2018

NA PRÁTICA, UMA GREVE GERAL. E DE ALTO TEOR EXPLOSIVO



DE MARINGONI

Vivenciamos na prática, há uma semana, os efeitos de uma greve geral em todo o país. O movimento dos caminhoneiros teve o condão de travar quase toda a atividade produtiva, ao bloquear a circulação de mercadorias, em especial ao cortar o abastecimento de combustíveis de norte a sul. É difícil localizar um setor que não tenha sido por ele afetado, seja por falta de suprimentos, seja pela dificuldade de seus trabalhadores se deslocarem.

A capilarização da greve se dá pelo papel estratégico que tem o transporte rodoviário nestas terras. Em situações anteriores, nas quais outras modalidades de deslocamentos eram centrais para a economia, as características eram semelhantes.

BONDES, TRENS E NAVIOS

A histórica greve de 1917, em São Paulo, só se torna geral quando, duas semanas após sua deflagração nas fábricas, os condutores de bonde cruzam os braços. Ao longo das décadas seguintes, a ferrovia e o sistema de portos se tornaram nevrálgicos em uma economia agroexportadora. Não à toa, o PCB - Partido Comunista Brasileiro - sempre teve numerosas bases nas categorias ligadas a tais setores.

Em uma economia regida pelo fordismo e por contratos de trabalho mais definidos - em especial após o advento da CLT, entre 1943 e 1964 - era muito mais simples verificar quando existia greve e quando havia locaute nas mobilizações.

A categoria dos caminhoneiros não é exatamente uma "categoria", no sentido usual do termo. Ela é múltipla e variada em sua composição. Há autônomos (cerca de 70%), funcionários de empresas e empresários, num universo de mais de um milhão de trabalhadores mal remunerados. Pelas características de trabalho solitário com vínculos precários, não há organização sindical convergente ou definida. Há contratos intermitentes, com e sem carteira assinada, jornadas indefinidas, metas informais, riscos de toda ordem (a começar pelo de vida), submissão variada a chantagem e corrupção por parte dos serviços de segurança rodoviários, longos períodos fora do lar e forte tendência ao individualismo.

Em outras palavras, parece ser a categoria dos sonhos dos formuladores da reforma trabalhista do governo Temer. Que este contingente de homens e mulheres (minoria) consiga coordenar e deflagar um movimento como este, é um tento admirável
.
O DELÍRIO DA GREVE "PURA"

Nessas condições, é puro delírio alguém imaginar ser possível a realização de uma greve "pura", apenas de trabalhadores, com pautas muito definidas e articuladas. É justamente aqui que as características de greve e locaute se superpõem num mesmo movimento e se estabelece - através de inúmeros dirigentes - uma disputa encarniçada pela direção das reivindicações.

Esse enfrentamento interno ficou claro na quinta-feira, quando representantes do governo federal se reuniram com delegações dos caminhoneiros. Oito entidades levaram a Brasília suas pautas. Eram elas:

1. Redução a zero da Cide e do PIS/Cofins sobre o óleo diesel
2. Extinção da política de reajuste diário dos preços do combustível
3. Suspensão da cobrança de pedágio sobre o eixo suspenso de caminhões vazios
4. Criação de um piso mínimo para o frete.

É curioso que não haja nenhuma demanda trabalhista entre esses pontos e outros fechados com os golpistas de Brasília. Nada de salário, condições de jornada etc. Como era de se esperar, algo deu errado. O portal da Globo informou o seguinte, naquela tarde:

"O presidente da Associação Brasileira dos Caminhoneiros (Abcam), José da Fonseca Lopes, deixou a reunião no Planalto por volta das 15h30. Na saída, ele afirmou que a entidade não aceitava a proposta do governo. A Abcam diz representar 650 mil caminhoneiros".

O movimento continuou firme.

EMPRESÁRIOS E TRABALHADORES

Ao que parece, o setor patronal - com sua pauta liberal de isenção tributária - se acertou com o Planalto, deixando os trabalhadores de fora. É possível que isso explique - é apenas uma especulação - o fato de a mídia e a administração federal não terem, nos dois primeiros dias, investido contra os paredistas. Imaginavam se acertar com os patrões e ponto final. Havia um fator adicional para isso: a demanda pela redução dos preços dos combustíveis tornou o movimento simpático à maioria da população. Não é pouca coisa.

Firmado o acordo com a turma do locaute - que nada garante, além de uma trégua de trinta dias, suficiente para desmobilizar as ações nas estradas -, os meios de comunicação e o governo mostraram suas garras. Teve início a demonização dos caminhoneiros pelo Jornal Nacional e pelos programas policialescos e noticiosos (não há fronteira nítida entre eles) de outras emissoras.

Do lado oficial, as feras foram soltas na tarde de sexta. Primeiro, o governo valeu-se de seu contínuo no STF, o prestativo Alexandre de Moraes, para decretar a ilegalidade do movimento, com a adoção de multas pesadíssimas de R$ 100 mil por hora, caso as estradas não fossem imediatamente
desobstruídas. Em segundo, veio o espetáculo: Garantia de Lei e da Ordem (GLO), em todo o Brasil. Em português claro, uma virtual intervenção militar com poder de polícia para retirar os caminhões do meio das pistas.

HÁ LADO NESSA HISTÓRIA

Apesar do caráter confuso das manifestações caminhoneiras, não pode haver a menor dúvida por parte da esquerda sobre o lado a se perfilar. É possível que, dado o grau de repressão e do bombardeio midiático, haja descontentamento popular com a falta de produtos e serviços e o movimento reflua.
Mas o desgaste governamental pela manutenção da política de preços da Petrobrás - que vincula valores internos à variação cambial - começa a ficar escancarado. Ou seja, para contentar algumas centenas de acionistas, o governo golpista - encabeçado pela figura luminar de Pedro Parente - não titubeia em submeter a maioria da população brasileira a grossa chantagem.

A tensão social se acumula, sem muita chance de se reduzir, dada as decepcionantes previsões para o futuro da economia brasileira. Professores do ensino privado entram em greve em São Paulo e Minas, petroleiros ameaçam parar e outras categorias se articulam.

Estagnação econômica com crise social é coisa - a História já provou - de altíssima octanagem.
(P. S. - Algumas das ideias expressas neste artigo vêm de uma conversa com Artur Araújo)

May 23, 2018

Philip Roth, Towering Novelist Who Explored Lust, Jewish Life and America, Dies at 85



  • By Charles Mcgrath, www.nytimes.com
  •  
  • Philip Roth, the prolific, protean, and often blackly comic novelist who was a pre-eminent figure in 20th-century literature, died on Tuesday night at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 85.
    The writer Judith Thurman, a close friend, said the cause was congestive heart failure. Mr. Roth had homes in Manhattan and Connecticut.

    In the course of a very long career, Mr. Roth took on many guises — mainly versions of himself — in the exploration of what it means to be an American, a Jew, a writer, a man. He was a champion of Eastern European novelists like Ivan Klima and Bruno Schulz, and also a passionate student of American history and the American vernacular. And more than just about any other writer of his time, he was tireless in his exploration of male sexuality.

    His creations include Alexander Portnoy, a teenager so libidinous, he has sex with both his baseball mitt and the family dinner, and David Kepesh, a professor who turns into an exquisitely sensitive 155-pound female breast.

    Mr. Roth was the last of the great white males: the triumvirate of writers — Saul Bellow and John Updike were the others — who towered over American letters in the second half of the 20th century. Outliving both and borne aloft by an extraordinary second wind, Mr. Roth wrote more novels than either of them. In 2005 he became only the third living writer (after Bellow and Eudora Welty) to have his books enshrined in the Library of America.


    “Updike and Bellow hold their flashlights out into the world, reveal the world as it is now,” Mr. Roth once said. “I dig a hole and shine my flashlight into the hole.”
    Image
    Philip Roth in January. Mr. Roth, Saul Bellow and John Updike formed the triumvirate that towered over American letters in the second half of the 20th century.CreditPhilip Montgomery for The New York Times
    The Nobel Prize eluded Mr. Roth, but he won most of the other top honors: two National Book Awards, two National Book Critics Circle awards, three PEN/Faulkner Awards, a Pulitzer Prize and the Man Booker International Prize.

    In his 60s, a time of life when many writers are winding down, he produced an exceptional sequence of historical novels — “American Pastoral,” “The Human Stain” and “I Married a Communist” — products of his personal re-engagement with America and American themes.
    And starting with “Everyman” in 2006, when he was 73, he kept up a relentless book-a-year pace, publishing works that while not necessarily major were nevertheless fiercely intelligent and sharply observed. Their theme in one way or another was the ravages of age and mortality itself, and in publishing them he seemed to be defiantly staving off his own decline.

    Mr. Roth was often lumped together with Bellow and Bernard Malamud as part of the “Hart, Schaffner & Marx of American letters,” but he resisted the label. “The epithet American-Jewish writer has no meaning for me,” he said. “If I’m not an American, I’m nothing.”

    And yet, almost against his will sometimes, he was drawn again and again to writing about themes of Jewish identity, anti-Semitism and the Jewish experience in America. He returned often, especially in his later work, to the Weequahic neighborhood of Newark, where he had grown up and which became in his writing a kind of vanished Eden: a place of middle-class pride, frugality, diligence and aspiration.


    It was a place where no one was unaware “of the power to intimidate that emanated from the highest and lowest reaches of gentile America,” he wrote, and yet where being Jewish and being American were practically indistinguishable. Speaking of his father in “The Facts,” an autobiography, Mr. Roth said: “His repertoire has never been large: family, family, family, Newark, Newark, Newark, Jew, Jew, Jew. Somewhat like mine.”
    Image

    Reality and Fiction Blur

    Mr. Roth’s favorite vehicle for exploring this repertoire was himself, or rather one of several fictional alter egos he deployed as a go-between, negotiating the tricky boundary between autobiography and invention and deliberately blurring the boundaries between real life and fiction. Nine of Mr. Roth’s novels are narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, a novelist whose career closely parallels that of his creator. Three more are narrated by David Kepesh, a writerly academic who shares some of Mr. Roth’s preoccupations, women especially. And sometimes Mr. Roth dispensed with the disguise altogether — or seemed to.
    The protagonist of “Operation Shylock” is a character named Philip Roth, who is being impersonated by another character, who stole Roth’s identity. At the center of “The Plot Against America,” a book that invents an America where Charles Lindbergh wins the 1940 presidential election and initiates a secret pogrom against Jews, is a New Jersey family named Roth that resembles the author’s in every particular.
    “Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life,” Mr. Roth told Hermione Lee in a 1984 interview in The Paris Review. “There has to be some pleasure in this life, and that’s it.”
    Occasionally, as in “Deception,” a slender 1990 novel about a writer named Philip who is writing about a writer having an affair with one of his made-up characters, this sleight of hand feels stuntlike and a little dizzying. More often, and especially in “The Counterlife” (1986), Mr. Roth’s masterpiece in this vein, what results is a profound investigation into the competing and overlapping claims of fiction and reality, in which each aspires to the condition of the other and the very idea of a self becomes a fabrication at once heroic and treacherous.
    Mr. Roth’s other great theme was sex, or male lust, which in his books is both a life force and a principle of rage and disorder. It is sex, the uncontrollable need to have it, that torments poor, guilt-ridden Portnoy, almost certainly Mr. Roth’s most famous character, who desperately wants to “be bad — and to enjoy it.” And Mickey Sabbath, the protagonist of “Sabbath’s Theater,” one of Mr. Roth’s major late-career novels, is in many ways Portnoy grown old but still in the grip of lust and longing, raging against the indignity of old age and yet saved from suicidal impulses by the realization that there are too many people he loves to hate.
    In public Mr. Roth, tall and good-looking, was gracious and charming but with little use for small talk. In private he was a gifted mimic and comedian. Friends used to say that if his writing career had ever fizzled he could have made a nice living doing stand-up. But there was about his person, as about his writing, a kind of simmering intensity, an impatience with art that didn’t take itself seriously.
    Some writers “pretend to be more lovable than they are and some pretend to be less,” he told Ms. Lee. “Beside the point. Literature isn’t a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts.”
    Philip Milton Roth was born in Newark on March 19, 1933, the younger of two sons. (His brother, Sanford, a commercial artist known as Sandy, died in 2009.) His father, Herman, was an insurance manager for Metropolitan Life who felt that his career had been thwarted by the gentile executives who ran the company. Mr. Roth once described him as a cross between Captain Ahab and Willy Loman. His mother, the former Bess Finkel, was a secretary before she married and then became a housekeeper of the heroic old school — the kind, he once suggested, who raised cleaning to an art form.
    The family lived in a five-room apartment on Summit Avenue within which were only three books when he was growing up — given as presents when someone was ill, Mr. Roth said. He went to Weequahic High, where he was a good student but not good enough to win a scholarship to Rutgers, as he had hoped. In 1951 he enrolled as a pre-law student at the Newark branch of Rutgers, with vague notions of becoming “a lawyer for the underdog.”
    But he yearned to live away from home, and the following year he transferred to Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa., a place about which he knew almost nothing except that a Newark neighbor seemed to have thrived there. Inspired by one of his professors, Mildred Martin, with whom he remained a lasting friend, Mr. Roth switched his interests from law to literature. He helped found a campus literary magazine, where in an early burst of his satirical power he published a parody of the college newspaper so devastating that it earned him an admonition from the dean.
    Mr. Roth graduated from Bucknell, magna cum laude, in 1954 and won a scholarship to the University of Chicago, where he was awarded an M.A. in 1955. That same year, rather than wait for the draft, he enlisted in the Army but suffered a back injury during basic training and received a medical discharge. He returned to Chicago in 1956 to study for a Ph.D. in English but dropped out after one term.

    Irritating the Rabbis

    Mr. Roth had begun to write and publish short stories by then, and in 1959 he won a Houghton Mifflin Fellowship to publish what became his first collection, “Goodbye, Columbus.” It won the National Book Award in 1960 but was denounced — in an inkling of trouble to come — by some influential rabbis, who objected to the portrayal of the worldly, assimilated Patimkin family in the title novella, and even more to the story “Defender of the Faith,” about a Jewish Army sergeant plagued by goldbricking draftees of his own faith.
    Image
    Mr. Roth at Princeton in 1964. He wrote more than 30 books, often exploring male sexuality and Jewish American life.CreditSam Falk/The New York Times
    In 1962, while appearing on a panel at Yeshiva University, Mr. Roth was so denounced, for that story especially, that he resolved never to write about Jews again. He quickly changed his mind.
    “My humiliation before the Yeshiva belligerents — indeed, the angry Jewish resistance that I aroused virtually from the start — was the luckiest break I could have had,” he wrote. “I was branded.”
    Mr. Roth later called his first two novels “apprentice work.” “Letting Go,” published in 1962, was derived in about equal parts from Bellow and Henry James. “When She Was Good,” which came out in 1967, is the most un-Rothian of his books, a Theodore Dreiser- or Sherwood Anderson-like story set in the WASP Midwest in the 1940s.
    “When She Was Good” was based in part on the life and family of Margaret Martinson Williams, with whom Mr. Roth had entered a calamitous relationship in 1959. Ms. Williams, who was divorced and had a son and a daughter, met Mr. Roth while she was waiting tables in Chicago, and she tricked him into marriage by pretending to be pregnant. He was “enslaved” to her own sense of victimization, he wrote. They separated in 1963, but Ms. Williams refused to divorce, and she remained a vexatious presence in his life until she died in a car crash in 1968. (She appears as Josie Jensen in “The Facts” and, more or less undisguised, as the exasperating Maureen Tarnopol in Mr. Roth’s novel “My Life as a Man.”)
    After the separation, Mr. Roth moved back East and began work on “Portnoy’s Complaint,” which surely set a record for most masturbation scenes per page. It was a breakthrough not just for Mr. Roth but for American letters, which had never known anything like it: an extended, unhinged monologue, at once filthy and hilarious, by a neurotic young Jewish man trying to break free of his suffocating parents and tormented by a longing to have sex with gentile women, shiksas.
    The book was “an experiment in verbal exuberance,” Mr. Roth said, and it deliberately broke all the rules.
    Image
    Mr. Roth published “Portnoy’s Complaint” in 1969. It was an extended, unhinged monologue, at once filthy and hilarious, by a neurotic young Jewish man trying to break free of his suffocating parents.
    The novel, published in 1969, became a best seller but received mixed reviews. Josh Greenfeld, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called it “the very novel that every American-Jewish writer has been trying to write in one guise or another since the end of World War II.”
    On the other hand, Irving Howe (on whom Mr. Roth later modeled the pompous, stuffy critic Milton Appel in “The Anatomy Lesson”) wrote in a lengthy takedown in 1972, “The cruelest thing anyone can do with ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ is read it twice.”
    And once again the rabbis complained. Gershom Scholem, the great kabbalah scholar, declared that the book was more harmful to Jews than “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
    Mr. Roth’s autobiographical phase began in 1974 with “My Life as a Man,” which he said was probably the least factually altered of his books, and continued with the Zuckerman trilogy — “The Ghost Writer” (1979), “Zuckerman Unbound” (1981) and “The Anatomy Lesson” (1983) — which examined the authorial vocation and even the nature of writing itself.
    Zuckerman reappeared in “The Counterlife” (1986), where he seems to die of a heart attack and is then resurrected. “Operation Shylock” (1993), which Mr. Roth pretended was a “confession,” not a novel (though in the very last sentence he says, “This confession is false”), involved two Roths, one real and one phony, and the real one claims to have been a spy for the Mossad. The book, with its sense of shifting reality and unstable identity, partly stemmed from a near-breakdown Mr. Roth experienced when he became addicted to the sleeping pill Halcion after knee surgery in 1987 and from severe depression he suffered after emergency bypass surgery in 1989.
    For much of this time Mr. Roth had been spending half the year in London with the actress Claire Bloom, with whom he began living in 1976. They married in 1990 but divorced four years later. In 1996, Ms. Bloom published a memoir, “Leaving the Doll’s House,” in which she depicted him as a misogynist and control freak, so self-involved that he refused to let her daughter, from her marriage to the actor Rod Steiger, live with them because she bored him.
    Image
    Mr. Roth in Newark with his parents and his older brother. In his writing, the Weequahic neighborhood became a kind of vanished Eden: a place of middle-class pride, frugality, diligence and aspiration.
    Never fond of attention, Mr. Roth became even more reclusive after this accusation and never publicly replied to it, though he privately denied it. Some critics found unflattering parallels to Ms. Bloom and her daughter in the characters Eve Frame and her daughter, Sylphid, in “I Married a Communist.”

    An American Trilogy

    The marriage over, Mr. Roth moved permanently back to the United States and began what proved to be the third major phase of his career. He returned, he said, because he felt out of touch: “It was really my rediscovering America as a writer.”
    “Sabbath’s Theater,” which came out in 1995 and won the National Book Award, is about neither Roth nor Zuckerman but rather Morris Sabbath, known as Mickey, an ex-puppeteer in his 60s. His voice is nothing if not American: an angry, comic, lustful harangue.
    “In this new book life is represented as anarchic horniness on the rampage against death and its harbingers, old age and impotence,” Frank Kermode wrote in The New York Review of Books, adding, “There is really only one way for him to tell the story — defiantly with outraged phallic energy.”
    Like “Portnoy’s Complaint,” “Sabbath’s Theater” seemed to liberate its author, and yet the work that followed — what Mr. Roth called his American trilogy: “American Pastoral,” “I Married a Communist” and “The Human Stain” — is less about sex than about history or traumatic moments in American culture. Zuckerman returns as the narrator of all three novels, but he is in his 60s now, impotent and suffering from prostate cancer. His prose is plainer, crisper, less show-offy, and he is less an actor than an observer and interpreter.
    The books are full of dense reportorial detail — about such seemingly un-Rothian subjects as glove making and ice fishing — as they tell Job-like stories. There is Swede Levov (“American Pastoral”), a seemingly gilded Newark businessman, a gifted athlete married to Miss New Jersey of 1949, whose life is destroyed in the 1960s when his teenage daughter becomes an antiwar terrorist and plants a bomb that kills an innocent bystander. Ira Ringold (“I Married a Communist”) is a star of a radio serial during the McCarthy era who is blacklisted and becomes the subject of an exposé published by his own wife. And Coleman Silk (“The Human Stain), a black classics professor passing as white, commits an innocent classroom gaffe while the Clinton impeachment is taking place and finds himself mercilessly hounded by the politically correct.
    Image
    Mr. Roth received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2011. When he retired the next year, a Post-it note on his computer read, “The struggle with writing is done.”CreditJim Watson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
    These books are not without their comic moments, but history here is no joke; it is more nearly a tragedy. In 2007, Mr. Roth killed Zuckerman off in the sad and affecting “Exit Ghost,” a novel that cleverly echoes and inverts the themes of “The Ghost Writer,” the first of the Zuckerman novels. Meanwhile he had begun writing a series of shorter novels that, after the publication of “Nemesis” in 2010, he began calling “Nemeses.” The sequence began with “Everyman,” which starts in a graveyard and ends on an operating table.
    That work set the tone for the rest: “Indignation” (2008), a ghost story of sorts about a young student unfairly expelled from college and sent off to fight in the Korean War; “The Humbling” (2009), about an actor who has lost his powers; and “Nemesis,” about the polio epidemic of the 1950s. The prose became even sparer and, in the case of “Nemesis,” deliberately matter-of-fact and unliterary, and though the books have plenty of sexual moments, they are haunted by something darker and bleaker.
    Yet the very existence of these books, coming reliably almost one every year, seemed to belie their message. “Time doesn’t prey on my mind. It should, but it doesn’t,” Mr. Roth told David Remnick in The New Yorker in 2000. He added: “I don’t know yet what this will all add up to, and it no longer matters, because there’s no stopping. All you want to do is the obvious. Just get it right.”
    Some of his novels were adapted for the movies: “Goodbye, Columbus” in 1969, “The Human Stain” in 2003 and “American Pastoral” and “Indignation” in 2016.
    Increasingly in his later years, Mr. Roth spent most of his time alone in his 18th-century farmhouse in northwest Connecticut, returning to New York mostly in the winter, when he grew so stir-crazy, he found himself talking to woodchucks. He worked, read in the evenings and occasionally listened to a ballgame. In some ways he came to resemble his own creation, Nathan Zuckerman, who asks at the end of a chapter in “Exit Ghost,” “Isn’t one’s pain quotient shocking enough without fictional amplification, without giving things an intensity that is ephemeral in life and sometimes even unseen?”
    “Not for some,” he goes on. “For some very, very few that amplification, evolving uncertainly out of nothing, constitutes their only assurance, and the unlived, the surmise, fully drawn in print on paper, is the life whose meaning comes to matter most.”
    In 2010, right after “Nemesis,” Mr. Roth decided to quit writing. He didn’t tell anyone at first, because, as he said, he didn’t want to be like Frank Sinatra, announcing his retirement one minute and making a comeback the next. But he stuck with his plan, and, in 2012, he officially announced that he was done. A Post-it note on his computer said, “The struggle with writing is done.”
    He had been famous for putting in endless days at his stand-up desk, throwing out more pages than he kept, and in a 2018 interview he said he was worn out. “I was by this time no longer in possession of the mental vitality or the physical fitness needed to mount and sustain a large creative attack of any duration,” he said.
    He settled into the contented life of an Upper West Side retiree, seeing friends, going to concerts. He was in frequent communication with his appointed biographer, Blake Bailey, whom he sometimes flooded with notes, and he was also at pains to straighten out an erroneous Wikipedia account of his life. Mostly, he read — nonfiction by preference, but he made exception for the occasional novel. One of the last he read was “Asymmetry,” by Lisa Halliday, a book about a young woman who has a romance with an aging novelist who bears an unmistakable resemblance to Mr. Roth — funny, kind, acerbic, passionate, immensely well-read, a devotee of Zabar’s and old movies.
    In an interview, Mr. Roth acknowledged that he and Ms. Halliday had been friends, and added: “She got me.

May 21, 2018

'Deus te ama assim', diz Papa Francisco a um homem gay

Papa Francisco teve uma conversa particular com Juan Carlos Cruz na semana passada, para falar sobre os abusos que sofreu de um padre durante sua infância Foto: FILIPPO MONTEFORTE / AFP

 Um chileno que foi abusado sexualmente por um padre pedófilo afirmou que o Papa Francisco lhe disse que Deus o fez gay e o ama assim — o comentário sobre homossexualidade mais progressista já proferido pelo lider da Igreja Católica Romana. O relato foi publicado no portal do jornal espanhol "El País".


Juan Carlos Cruz, que falou em particular com o Papa na semana passada sobre o abuso que sofreu nas mãos de um dos pedófilos mais notórios do Chile, disse que a questão em torno de sua sexualidade surgiu porque alguns bispos do país tentaram descrevê-lo como um pervertido, alegando que ele estaria mentindo sobre o abuso.

— O Papa me disse: "Juan Carlos, que você é gay não importa. Deus te fez assim e te ama assim, e eu não me importo. O Papa te ama assim. Você precisa estar feliz com quem você é — contou Cruz ao "El País".
Juan Carlos Cruz, chileno que foi abusado sexualmente por um padre quando era criança - Andres Kudacki / AP
Agora com 87 anos, Fernando Karadima, o padre que abusou de Cruz, foi considerado culpado pelo Vaticano.

Greg Burke, principal porta-voz do Vaticano, não respondeu ainda às perguntas sobre se a declaração de Cruz reflete com precisão sua conversa com o Papa.

Não é a primeira vez que se sugere que Francisco tenha uma atitude aberta e tolerante em relação à homossexualidade, apesar do ensinamento da Igreja Católica de que a relação sexual entre pessoas do mesmo sexo — e, na verdade, todo sexo fora do casamento heterossexual — é um pecado. Em julho de 2013, em resposta à pergunta de um repórter sobre a existência de um suposto "lobby gay" dentro do Vaticano, Francisco disse: "Quem sou eu para julgar?".

NOVOS COMENTÁRIOS SURPREENDEM

As novas observações que o Pontífice teria feito parecem ir muito além ao abraçar a homossexualidade como uma orientação sexual concebida e concedida por Deus. Isso sugere que Francisco não acredita que os indivíduos escolham ser gays ou lésbicas, como argumentam alguns conservadores religiosos.

Austen Ivereigh, autor de uma biografia do Papa, disse que Francisco fez comentários semelhantes em conversas particulares no passado, quando ele serviu como diretor espiritual de gays em Buenos Aires, na Argentina. No entanto, o relato público de Cruz sobre sua conversa com o Papa traz os comentários mais “vigorosos” sobre o assunto desde 2013.

Porém, isso não representa uma mudança nos ensinamentos da Igreja, disse Ivereigh, uma vez que o catolicismo nunca se pronunciou formalmente sobre o porquê de os indivíduos serem gays.

Christopher Lamb, que é correspondente do Vaticano para o portal "Tablet", considera os comentários um sinal de que há uma mudança de atitudes ocorrendo:

— (Esses comentários) Vão além de "quem sou eu para julgar?". Passa a ser um "você é amado por Deus" — afirma Lamb. — Eu não acho que ele tenha mudado o ensino da Igreja, mas ele está demonstrando uma afirmação de católicos gays, algo que tem faltado ao longo dos anos em Roma.

MOMENTO DE MAIOR INCLUSÃO DE CATÓLICOS LGBT

As declarações surgem num momento em que vários membros de alto escalão do clero têm procurado publicamente incluir os católicos gays dentro da Igreja. Muitos desses fiéis se sentem evitados e mal recebidos na Igreja, e alguns foram até mesmo condenados ao ostracismo.

Padre James Martin, um padre jesuíta em Nova York que tem quase 200 mil seguidores no Twitter, liderou o esforço de divulgação da inclusão de diversas sexualidades e foi escolhido no mês passado para servir como consultor do secretariado do Vaticano para as comunicações.

Martin argumentou em seu livro "Construindo uma ponte" que o ônus da Igreja é fazer com que os católicos LGBT se sintam bem-vindos dentro dela e que se pare de discriminar as pessoas com base em sua “moralidade sexual”.

May 20, 2018

8 of the Worst Moms in Literature



Think your mother was harsh? These books will convince you that she deserves a Mother of the Year Award.

By Tina Jordan and Susan Ellingwood

 
It’s Mother’s Day. You’ve sent the flowers, the card and even the box of chocolates. You’ve also just paid another therapist’s bill. But c’mon she wasn’t that bad a mother. If you want to see bad, take a look at these eight books, rife with screamers, abusers and not-so-benign neglecters. Of course, they are all creatures of fiction, but you get the point.




Margaret White

‘Carrie,’ by Stephen King

“Her mother is a horror: a religious fanatic eager to beat the goodness of Christ into sinners with a powerful right hand.”




Mrs. Lisbon

‘The Virgin Suicides,’ by Jeffrey Eugenides

The five Lisbon daughters live “under the thumb of their domineering mother,” a woman “who never allows them to date, and who insists they wear baggy, ridiculous clothes. Though their ineffectual father seems vaguely sympathetic to their plight, he never stands up to their tyrannical mother.” When one of them breaks curfew, “the girls are permanently grounded. They are pulled out of school and locked in the house.”




Helen

‘Housekeeping,’ by Marilynne Robinson

Ruth and Lucille, raised by a succession of indifferent relatives, “were quite small when their mother left them, with a box of graham crackers, on the porch in Fingerbone. ‘At last,’ Ruth says, ‘we slid from her lap like one of those magazines full of responsible opinion about discipline and balanced meals.’”




Mary

‘Push,’ by Sapphire

“At the age of 16, Claireece, or ‘Precious’ as she calls herself, has already had two children by the man she knows as her father. Her mother has not only allowed these rapes to occur, but also beats Precious for stealing her man. She, too, sexually abuses Precious, and treats her as a maidservant around the house.”




Ingrid

‘White Oleander,’ by Janet Fitch

Astrid’s mother is in prison — she’s murdered her boyfriend — but Astrid “will continually measure herself against the standards of her mother’s beauty and fearlessness (and find herself lacking) while at the same time learning to hate her mother for her selfishness, her cruelty and her ability to manipulate and charm.”




Adele August

‘Anywhere but Here,’ by Mona Simpson

“‘We fought’ are the first words of Simpson’s challenging first novel about a mother-daughter road-trip. “‘Fought’ is an understated reference for the war of words, wills and fists that rages between them from the first to last page.”




Janice Angstrom

‘Rabbit, Run,’ by John Updike

“Rabbit” Angstrom’s wife, Janice — often found “highball in hand, glued to the television set” — drunkenly allows their infant daughter to drown in the tub.



Sophie Portnoy

‘Portnoy’s Complaint,’ by Philip Roth

“His mother, Sophie, cleans up after the maid, worries endlessly about what goes into Alex and what comes out of him, and exists to protect him from gentiles and manhood.”


© 2018 The New York Times Company.

In Brian De Palma's 1976 thriller "Carrie" — the first of Stephen King's novels to be made into a movie — Carrie's mother, played by Piper Laurie, certainly had her hands full with her daughter, played by Sissy Spacek. But she could have been a bit more understanding of Carrie's supernatural powers. Don't you think?CreditUnited Artists

May 15, 2018

Tom Wolfe, Pyrotechnic ‘New Journalist’ and Novelist, Dies at 88





Tom Wolfe, an innovative journalist and novelist whose technicolor, wildly punctuated prose brought to life the worlds of California surfers, car customizers, astronauts and Manhattan’s moneyed status-seekers in works like “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” “The Right Stuff” and “Bonfire of the Vanities,” died on Monday in a Manhattan hospital. He was 88.
His death was confirmed by his agent, Lynn Nesbit, who said Mr. Wolfe had been hospitalized with an infection. He had lived in New York since joining The New York Herald Tribune as a reporter in 1962.
In his use of novelistic techniques in his nonfiction, Mr. Wolfe, beginning in the 1960s, helped create the enormously influential hybrid known as the New Journalism.
But as an unabashed contrarian, he was almost as well known for his attire as his satire. He was instantly recognizable as he strolled down Madison Avenue — a tall, slender, blue-eyed, still boyish-looking man in his spotless three-piece vanilla bespoke suit, pinstriped silk shirt with a starched white high collar, bright handkerchief peeking from his breast pocket, watch on a fob, faux spats and white shoes. Once asked to describe his get-up, Mr. Wolfe replied brightly, “Neo-pretentious.”

It was a typically wry response from a writer who found delight in lacerating the pretentiousness of others. He had a pitiless eye and a penchant for spotting trends and then giving them names, some of which — like “Radical Chic” and “the Me Decade” — became American idioms.
His talent as a writer and caricaturist was evident from the start in his verbal pyrotechnics and perfect mimicry of speech patterns, his meticulous reporting, and his creative use of pop language and explosive punctuation.
“As a titlist of flamboyance he is without peer in the Western world,” Joseph Epstein wrote in the The New Republic. “His prose style is normally shotgun baroque, sometimes edging over into machine-gun rococo, as in his article on Las Vegas which begins by repeating the word ‘hernia’ 57 times.”
William F. Buckley Jr., writing in National Review, put it more simply: “He is probably the most skillful writer in America — I mean by that he can do more things with words than anyone else.”

From 1965 to 1981 Mr. Wolfe produced nine nonfiction books. “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” an account of his reportorial travels in California with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters as they spread the gospel of LSD, remains a classic chronicle of the counterculture, “still the best account — fictional or non, in print or on film — of the genesis of the ’60s hipster subculture,” the media critic Jack Shafer wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review on the book’s 40th anniversary.



Mr. Wolfe, second from left, at New York magazine in 1967 with, from left, George Hirsch, Gloria Steinem, Clay Felker, Peter Maas, Jimmy Breslin and Milton Glaser.Credit

Even more impressive, to many critics, was “The Right Stuff,” his exhaustively reported narrative about the first American astronauts and the Mercury space program. The book, adapted into a film in 1983 with a cast that included Sam Shepard, Dennis Quaid and Ed Harris, made the test pilot Chuck Yeager a cultural hero and added yet another phrase to the English language. It won the National Book Award.
At the same time, Mr. Wolfe continued to turn out a stream of essays and magazine pieces for New York, Harper’s and Esquire. His theory of literature, which he preached in print and in person and to anyone who would listen, was that journalism and nonfiction had “wiped out the novel as American literature’s main event.”
After “The Right Stuff,” published in 1979, he confronted what he called “the question that rebuked every writer who had made a point of experimenting with nonfiction over the preceding 10 or 15 years: Are you merely ducking the big challenge — The Novel?”

‘The Bonfire of the Vanities’

The answer came with “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” Published initially as a serial in Rolling Stone magazine and in book form in 1987 after extensive revisions, it offered a sweeping, bitingly satirical picture of money, power, greed and vanity in New York during the shameless excesses of the 1980s.
The action jumps back and forth from Park Avenue to Wall Street to the terrifying holding pens in Bronx Criminal Court, after the Yale-educated bond trader Sherman McCoy (a self-proclaimed “Master of the Universe”) becomes lost in the Bronx at night in his Mercedes with his foxy young mistress, Maria. After the car, with Maria at the wheel, runs over a black man and nearly ignites a race riot, Sherman enters the nightmare world of the criminal justice system.
Although a runaway best seller, “Bonfire” divided critics into two camps: those who praised its author as a worthy heir of his fictional idols Balzac, Zola, Dickens and Dreiser, and those who dismissed the book as clever journalism, a charge that would dog him throughout his fictional career.
Mr. Wolfe responded with a manifesto in Harper’s, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” in which he lambasted American fiction for failing to perform the time-honored sociological duty of reporting on the facts of contemporary life, in all their complexity and variety.

His second novel, “A Man in Full” (1998), also a whopping commercial success, was another sprawling social panorama. Set in Atlanta, it charted the rise and fall of Charlie Croker, a 60-year-old former Georgia Tech football star turned millionaire real estate developer.
Mr. Wolfe’s fictional ambitions and commercial success earned him enemies — big ones.
“Extraordinarily good writing forces one to contemplate the uncomfortable possibility that Tom Wolfe might yet be seen as our best writer,” Norman Mailer wrote in The New York Review of Books. “How grateful one can feel then for his failures and his final inability to be great — his absence of truly large compass. There may even be an endemic inability to look into the depth of his characters with more than a consummate journalist’s eye.”
“Tom may be the hardest-working show-off the literary world has ever owned,” Mr. Mailer continued. “But now he will no longer belong to us. (If indeed he ever did!) He lives in the King Kong Kingdom of the Mega-bestsellers — he is already a Media Immortal. He has married his large talent to real money and very few can do that or allow themselves to do that.”



Mr. Mailer’s sentiments were echoed by John Updike and John Irving.
Two years later, Mr. Wolfe took revenge. In an essay titled “My Three Stooges,” included in his 2001 collection, “Hooking Up,” he wrote that his eminent critics had clearly been “shaken” by “A Man in Full” because it was an “intensely realistic novel, based upon reporting, that plunges wholeheartedly into the social reality of America today, right now,” and it signaled the new direction in late-20th- and early-21st-century literature and would soon make many prestigious artists, “such as our three old novelists, appear effete and irrelevant.”
And, he added, “It must gall them a bit that everyone — even them — is talking about me, and nobody is talking about them.”
Cocky words from a man best known for his gentle manner and unfailing courtesy in person. For many years Mr. Wolfe lived a relatively private life in his 12-room apartment on the Upper East Side with his wife, Sheila (Berger) Wolfe, a graphic designer and former art director of Harper’s Magazine, whom he married when he was 48 years old. She and their two children, Alexandra Wolfe, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, and Tommy Wolfe, a sculptor and furniture designer, survive him.
Every morning he dressed in one of his signature outfits — a silk jacket, say, and double-breasted white vest, shirt, tie, pleated pants, red-and-white socks and white shoes — and sat down at his typewriter. Every day he set himself a quota of 10 pages, triple-spaced. If he finished in three hours, he was done for the day.

“If it takes me 12 hours, that’s too bad, I’ve got to do it,” he told George Plimpton in a 1991 interview for The Paris Review.
For many summers the Wolfes rented a house in Southampton, N.Y., where Mr. Wolfe continued to observe his daily writing routine as well as the fitness regimen from which he rarely faltered. In 1996 he suffered a heart attack at his gym and underwent quintuple bypass surgery. A period of severe depression followed, which Charlie Croker relived, in fictional form, in “A Man in Full.”
As for his remarkable attire, he called it “a harmless form of aggression.”
“I found early in the game that for me there’s no use trying to blend in,” he told The Paris Review. “I might as well be the village information-gatherer, the man from Mars who simply wants to know. Fortunately the world is full of people with information-compulsion who want to tell you their stories. They want to tell you things that you don’t know.”
The eccentricities of his adult life were a far cry from the normalcy of his childhood, which by all accounts was a happy one.

A Professor’s Son

Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr. was born on March 2, 1930, in Richmond, Va. His father was a professor of agronomy at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, editor of The Southern Planter, an agricultural journal, and director of distribution for the Southern States Cooperative, which later became a Fortune 500 Company. His mother, Helen Perkins Hughes Wolfe, a garden designer, encouraged him to become an artist and gave him a love of reading.
Young Tom was educated at a private boys’ school in Richmond. He graduated cum laude from Washington and Lee University in 1951 with a bachelor’s degree in English and enough skill as a pitcher to earn a tryout with the New York Giants. He did not make the cut.



He enrolled at Yale University in the American studies program and received his Ph.D. in 1957. After sending out job applications to more than 100 newspapers and receiving three responses, two of them “no,” he went to work as a general-assignment reporter at The Springfield Union in Springfield, Mass., and later joined the staff of The Washington Post. He was assigned to cover Latin America and in 1961 won an award for a series on Cuba.

In 1962, Mr. Wolfe joined The Herald Tribune as a reporter on the city desk, where he found his voice as a social chronicler. Fascinated by the status wars and shifting power bases of the city, he poured his energy and insatiable curiosity into his reporting and soon became one of the stars on the staff. The next year he began writing for New York, the newspaper’s newly revamped Sunday supplement, edited by Clay Felker.
“Together they attacked what each regarded as the greatest untold and uncovered story of the age: the vanities, extravagances, pretensions and artifice of America two decades after World War II, the wealthiest society the world had ever known,” Richard Kluger wrote in “The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune” (1986).
Those were heady days for journalists. Mr. Wolfe became one of the standard-bearers of the New Journalism, along with Jimmy Breslin, Gay Talese, Hunter Thompson, Joan Didion and others. Most were represented in “The New Journalism” (1973), an anthology he edited with E. W. Johnson.
In an author’s statement for the reference work World Authors, Mr. Wolfe wrote that to him the term “meant writing nonfiction, from newspaper stories to books, using basic reporting to gather the material but techniques ordinarily associated with fiction, such as scene-by-scene construction, to narrate it.”
He added, “In nonfiction I could combine two loves: reporting and the sociological concepts American Studies had introduced me to, especially status theory as first developed by the German sociologist Max Weber.”
It was the perfect showcase for his own extravagant and inventive style, increasingly on display in Esquire, for which he began writing during the 1963 New York City newspaper strike.
One of his most dazzling essays for Esquire, about the subculture of car customizers in Los Angeles, started out as a 49-page memo to Byron Dobell, his editor there, who simply deleted the words “Dear Byron” at the top of the page and ran it as is. It became the title essay in Mr. Wolfe’s first collection, “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby,” published in 1968.

“Girl of the Year,” his 1964 portrait of the Manhattan “it” girl Baby Jane Holzer, opened with the literary equivalent of a cinematic pan shot at a Rolling Stones concert:
“Bangs manes bouffants beehive Beatle caps butter faces brush-on lashes decal eyes puffy sweaters French thrust bras flailing leather blue jeans stretch pants stretch jeans honey dew bottoms éclair shanks elf boots ballerinas Knight slippers, hundreds of them these flaming little buds, bobbing and screaming, rocketing around inside the Academy of Music Theater underneath that vast old moldering cherub dome up there — aren’t they super-marvelous?”

‘Radical Chic’ Skewered

In June 1970, New York magazine devoted an entire issue to “These Radical Chic Evenings,” Mr. Wolfe’s 20,000-word sendup of a fund-raiser given for the Black Panthers by Leonard Bernstein, the conductor of the New York Philharmonic, and his wife, the Chilean actress Felicia Montealegre, in their 13-room Park Avenue penthouse duplex — an affair attended by scores of the Bernsteins’ liberal, rich and mostly famous friends.
“Do Panthers like little Roquefort cheese morsels rolled on crushed nuts this way, and asparagus tips in mayonnaise dabs, and meatballs petites au Coq Hardi, all of which are at the very moment being offered to them on gadrooned silver platters by maids in black uniforms with hand-ironed white aprons?,” Mr. Wolfe wrote, outraging liberals and Panthers alike.
When a Time reporter asked a minister for the Black Panthers to comment on the accuracy of Mr. Wolfe’s account, he said, “You mean that dirty, blatant, lying, racist dog who wrote that fascist disgusting thing in New York magazine?”
The article was included in Mr. Wolfe’s essay collection “Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers,” published in 1970.
Storms did not seem to bother Mr. Wolfe, as his forays into the art world demonstrated. He had always had an interest in art and was indeed an artist himself, sometimes illustrating his work with pen-and-ink drawings. He was a contributing artist at Harper’s from 1978 to 1981 and exhibited his work on occasion at Manhattan galleries. Many of his illustrations were collected in “In Our Time” (1980).
Earlier, in “The Painted Word” (1975), he produced a gleeful screed denouncing contemporary art as a con job perpetrated by cultural high priests, notably the critics Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg and Leo Steinberg — “the kings of cultureburg,” as he called them.

The art world, en masse, rejected the argument, and the book, with disdain.
“If someone who is tone-deaf goes to Carnegie Hall every night of the year, he is, of course, entitled to his opinion of what he has listened to, just as a eunuch is entitled to his opinion of sex,” the art critic John Russell wrote in The New York Times Book Review.
Undeterred, in “From Bauhaus to Our House,” Mr. Wolfe attacked modern architecture and what he saw as its determination to put dogma before buildings. Published in 1981, it met with the same derisive response from critics. “The problem, I think,” Paul Goldberger wrote in The Times Book Review, “is that Tom Wolfe has no eye.”
Mr. Wolfe’s later novels earned mixed reviews. Many critics found “I Am Charlotte Simmons” (2004), about a naïve freshman’s disillusioning experiences at a liberal arts college fueled by sex and alcohol, unconvincing and out of touch. In “Back to Blood” (2012), Mr. Wolfe created one of his most sympathetic, multidimensional characters in Nestor Camacho, a young Cuban-American police officer trying to navigate the treacherous waters of multiethnic Miami.
In the end it was his ear — acute and finely tuned — that served him best and enabled him to write with perfect pitch. And then there was his considerable writing talent.
“There is this about Tom,” Mr. Dobell, Mr. Wolfe’s editor at Esquire, told the London newspaper The Independent in 1998. “He has this unique gift of language that sets him apart as Tom Wolfe. It is full of hyperbole; it is brilliant; it is funny, and he has a wonderful ear for how people look and feel.
“He has a gift of fluency that pours out of him the way Balzac had it.”