Opinion – Sérgio Rodrigues: The bull from the stock exchange makes ‘mooo’

The Stock Exchange bull is a golden vexation. And with horns. In the debacle of this last quarter of Bolsonaro government, with bovine metaphors multiplying across dry fields where thin, suspicious cattle graze, probing the smoky sky in search of a new garish to call a myth, the bull of the stock exchange is a powerful symbol. But from what?

Of cultural subservience in the first place. Something that is a consequence –but also a cause, one thing feeding the other– of economic servility. When aping the bull on the New York Stock Exchange, the horn on 15 de Novembro Street confesses, in addition to being a sweetheart, powerless to create a mythology of its own. Instead of power, as its creators would wish, it becomes an emblem of weakness.

Not just weakness, of course. Also cheesy, cheesy, cheesy, provincialism, snobbery, nouveau riches, bullshit, dysmorphic disorder and whatever else you might want to call the indiscreet indiscretion of someone who, incapable of relating to their own image, begins to call a mirror shopping window -and you never see again. Yes, I’m talking about Brazil.

Although in some ways unique and incomparable, the Bolsa bull has a family. His negative score on the sense of ridicule scale leaves him in numerous company on the landscape. The Havan Statues of Liberty are just as naughty as he is, but they have the advantage of being more overtly comic.

And since when is this an advantage? Since the value of laughter as a moral regulator was proven. The Havan Statues of Liberty are classic examples of the artistic and architectural style known as kitsch.

Among other things, kitsch is characterized by the naive use –in the sense of naïf, which does not exclude possible bad faith– of symbols consecrated out of context, emptied of history.

Like the replicas of the Eiffel Tower that spread across the world and the Christ the Redeemers dotted across the interior of Brazil, the Havan statues are far from innocent. However, this displacement of universally recognizable images lends itself immediately to the spectator’s pleasure – a naive pleasure, if he embarks on manipulation; or ironic, if you unmask the game.

The Bolsa bull is also part of kitsch, but laughing at him is not so easy. First, it is a copy of a much less widespread symbol, which denotes a deliberation to mimic that complicates the game.

Mimicking and, say, perfecting with the addition of a gold coat, which draws even more attention to what cloning is all about. Hell, those guys crossed the sidewalk to slip on the banana peel on the other side, didn’t they? They even insisted on paying for this embarrassment.

Furthermore, the bull on the stock exchange is a symbol that stands, proud of its servility, in the nerve center of Brazilian subordination: the temple of financial capital.

There is no doubt: that animal is the child of our pretend education. He shits on a soil of ancestral segregation and naturalized misery. It has the heart of a spreadsheet and the soul of a Hollywood zombie.

Its fake meat makes a pendant with the bones that Paulo Guedes’ economic policy has placed on the plates of millions of Brazilians. Their gold came from illegal mines that kill indigenous people.

If the animal spoke, it would moo: “That’s about it! Let’s address the problem! At the end of the day, just hire a coach, set the goal and follow-up! Moooo, I mean, mooooo!”