Throughout Internet debates, I have received messages from young people that are proud of their precarious hold on the Portuguese language and slam me as an elitist. Given my considerations regarding the Supreme Ignoramus (reference to President Lula), is the reader to believe I envy Him?

After all, despite his illiteracy, he enjoys more prestige than I. Such responses prove, once and for all, that the Lula effect is spreading rapidly. Surely we will not come to the kind of a Pol Pot regime, where even those wearing glasses were shot, as suspects of reading. But a shortage of educated men exists, men seen as an affront to this administration.

Proof of this are the barbarities proffered during the World Social Forum, echoed through the press as if they were the purest form of expression of the truth. Opening the Forum, the Supreme Ignoramus said: “some comrades who never had a tough time in life and already have their places secured at good federal public universities are against the Prouni scholarships (Program University for All) because, in truth, they are against the poor studying, against the poor having access to university.”

It’s the classical Stalinist technique of arguing, so admired by the Workers Party, that of placing factitious arguments in the mouth of the adversary to better punch them back. Who in this Brazil is against the access by the poor to universities? I don’t know anyone and doubt the reader knows.

Worse yet: in his stunning difficulty to think logically, the President attributes this wish to “some comrades”. What comrades? Supposedly from his party, or they would not be comrades. Well, I doubt any Workers Party member, no matter how polpotist he/she may be, is opposed to access to university to the poor.

Shortly after, he claims: “When my term in office comes to the end, I am not going to France or the United States to get my graduate degree. I’ll go back to São Bernardo do Campo to live among my fellow comrade steelworkers.” Isn’t there a single compassionate advisor to explain to the uncultivated man that without a college degree you cannot go to graduate school? Not one journalist to denounce such nonsense?

To the contrary, a theory has already emerged to explain the structure of the reasoning process at the foundation of the Supreme’s impromptus. This argumentation process, Professor Lucian Veiga, from the Rio de Janeiro University Research Institute, calls “near-logic”, as if logic allowed for gradation. 

According to the researcher, “Lula is successful in establishing unspoken agreements with the public when it comes to premises and presumptions within his speeches because he shares the same beliefs and values of those involved in the exchange.”

Translated to plain words: the presidential gibberish is justified due to the comparable illiteracy level of his audience. For an illiterate, Lula is genial. Perhaps the reader hasn’t noticed yet, but we are approaching that society envisioned by Orwell, in 1984, where ignorance is wisdom.

“When he improvises – goes on the bearer of praises on duty – Lula has no intention to be precise, seeking only to resonate with the public, just like the behavior of any John Doe at a corner bar joint or Jane Doe on the front porch with the neighbor.”

In other words, the nation’s President cannot go beyond Mr. and Mrs. Doe’s handle on grammar, meaning that he has no intention to be precise. To his rescue, the professor cites an English scholar, Stephen Toulmin, to whom common language does not obey tenets of formal logic.

The day-to-day “near-logic” of the great majority would be based on assumptions and deductions similar to logical operations, but without formal value, since its logic is not founded on established premises, “but on personal reasoning elevated to the condition of premise”. That is what journalist Dora Kramer tells us, in her column in the newspaper Estado de São Paulo.

Words can do miracles. What previously we called sophism has now become near-logic. Which reminds us a little of the expression near-pregnant, as if pregnancy had room for near. In truth, not even knowing what sophism is, the Near-Logical employs sophism continuously, by intuition.

His “personal reasoning elevated to the condition of premise” often doesn’t come near sophisms, but plain gross lies, such as the facts he spoke of in order to gloat about his administration at the World Social Forum.

When a university researcher demeans herself to brown-nose and defend stupidity, we must conclude that even the country’s intelligentsia – or should we say the academic ignorantsia – has definitely surrendered itself to the uncultivated man’s power.

Just as the press surrendered to the power of the other analogous near-logical, who attended such forum to enrich the nonsense already at full capacity with remnants from the left meeting in Porto Alegre, Venezuelan Colonel Hugo Chavez.

“There’s no solution for poverty and misery in the capitalist world, because it’s capitalism that causes misery.” Applauses from the youthful audience, ignorant as all the young love to inebriate themselves in untruths.

It even seems that this gentleman has not read the newspapers in the last decade. Perhaps he hasn’t heard of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which truly exposed misery – in fact, already well-known – of the socialist world and brought on the massive exodus of people from the socialist paradise to the capitalist inferno so abominated by Chavez.

Were the colonel to look up north, he would see happy citizens of the Cuban paradise, risking their lives in make-shift boats or another rudimentary floating device, heading north to the Yankee inferno.

Were he to extend his glance yet a bit farther to the north, he would see Mexicans, Latinos and even Brazilians, risking drowning in rivers or dehydration in the desert, also attempting to reach the capitalist inferno.

And were he capable of seeing a little farther, he would see Arabs, Africans, Chinese, Romanians, and Albanians, starving to death in precarious vessels or dying from asphyxiation in containers, trying to find a place in the sun of the capitalist European inferno.

For an insane to utter insanities is normal, it is part of his nature. What isn’t normal – and simply disturbing – is for fanatic youths to applaud and enthrone him as an icon to be worshipped. Yet more disturbing is to see the press that, afraid to be stigmatized by the left, reverberates without any commentary such “near-logic” premises.

But the biggest trophy of this tournament of pearls SAT style was attained by neither the Supreme Ignoramus nor the unfinished work-of-art of a colonel, but by a scholar - Professor Emir Sader.  Which at least demonstrates what we already know: that stupidity is universal and does not respect the boundaries of campuses.

“We are at the fifth edition of the event and we were not able to prevent the war in Iraq”, said the university “near-logical”. Meaning that the World Social Forum, this jamboree of pot smokers and insane idealists, intended to prevent the war in Iraq no less?

They seem to have forgotten to send an official invitation to Bush. However, as in the case of all the insane, Sader has sudden flashes of lucidity:  “it seems we don’t even exist.”

Finally, a drop of good logic.

Janer Cristaldo—he holds a PhD from University of Paris, Sorbonne—is an author, translator, lawyer, philosopher and journalist and lives in São Paulo. His e-mail address is janercr@terra.com.br.

Translated from the Portuguese by Eduardo Assumpção de Queiroz. He is a freelance translator, with a degree in Business and almost 20 years of experience working in the fields of economics, communications, social and political sciences, and sports. He lives in São Paulo, Brazil. His email: eaqus@terra.com.br.

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