Collateral

I just watched Collateral, with Tom Cruise. A movie that has nothing more, unless senseless violence and sadness. However, there is at least one deeply philosophical scene. The close death of people hatches, and we feel bad in front of a corpse. This past week I had the misfortune to see in person a corpse wrapped in a blanket on a street in the path between my house and my service. One man died of cardiac arrest at around nine in the morning, sweltering by the heat of Goiânia, Brazil, by the fat in the blood, the blood pressure, by age, by a set of factors. Nothing could be done and the body was there, in the street, when I go to the service. This is not common. Death is not pleasant. But Vincent, the assassin played by Tom Cruise, reminds the shocked taxi driver that in Rwanda thousands of people died in a very few days, a human massacre only surpassed in quantity and speed for the massacres of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the taxi driver felt nothing against Rwandan catastrophe. Vincent also claims that we are nothing  in a meaningless cosmos, and that to kill or die means nothing,  pessimistic like Schopenhauer.

At the end of the movie, after watched the Beslan massacre,  there is impression that it's a sad time. Since September 11, exact three years we have witnessed massacres continuosly. New York, Washington, Pennsylvania, Madrid, Beslan, Moscow, Baghdad, Fallujah, Najaf, Stambul, Abu Grabi, Guantanamo, Tel Aviv, Gaza, just to name the most famous. In fact, we need not even refer to our cosmic insignificance to minimize the death of a single human being. Just take it in comparison to the atrocities that we are almost getting used to seeing every day in the international news.

We live in a new crusade? Maybe, but either way, we are going through difficult times.

And what about Brazil? I do not know which is worse: terrorism militancy with political and religious and even economic background, or cultural terrorism that silently plagues our country. In fact, this kind of terrorism makes me appalled and outraged that massacres of tens of innocent civilians. No, I am not indifferent to the death of anyone, but I am especially outraged by the culture massacre that are submitted, we, Brazilians, by the media of our poor country.

I felt that we are on a dangerous course when I watched for a few seconds, by chance, a "Gugu Liberato" tv show, one Sunday, seven in the evening, at the height of the weekly general audience, when millions of citizens from all social strata are glued to front of the TV. It is not difficult for someone who does not see the  open and free television programs to realize that what the media does, or tries to do with all of us is much more cruel than what they do in groups of suicide bombers fighting for their causes, whether are. I believe that is not Gugu himself  who is behind something so low, so horrifying, as the program that has the job of presenting. Brazilian television as a disservice to the nation that actually we, brazilians, do not need enemies, our own media is our enemy more powerful than any other form of threat, internal or external. Subtle, it condemns generations of millions of citizens to ignorance, pettiness, superficiality, banality on such a scale that does not surprise me to see Brazil go through a process of stupefaction of the population such that it will eventually lead the country to a state of barbarism in which we never in our entire history. We will be, or already are, a stupid country whose range of values ​​was turned upside down under a subtly brainwashed filed by a lot of Gugu and Faustão (Big Faust, a plumper and horrible guy, showmaker)  by "Big Brother" and "Artist' s Home", by ridiculous soap operas in afternoons and nights, by pornographic musical groups, the culture of malice and double entender, the apology of trickery, stuck in the queue and the bad check, the deification of Nelson Rodrigues, a pornographic writer, and its popular and cheap movies, therefore, a pseudo-culture of a country that has never produced anything has cultural value and timeless character globally recognized. Yes, we have culture, but not in quality and in sufficient quantity to make our people better citizens. And if the television as a means unquestionable technological efficiency, can not contribute, should not therefore harm. The ruling elite of Brazil and the media's  businessmen will prove the own poison. The monster that Gugu and Faustão feed one day will eventually eat all of the elite first, and yourself, then, in his eagerness to ignorance.

But ignorance is just a collateral effect in the search for one more point in television audience measurement.