Duas coisas são infinitas: o universo e a estupidez humana. Mas, em relação ao universo, ainda não tenho a certeza absoluta.
(Einstein)
But the tune ends too soon for us all (Ian Anderson)
‘Despite the strange takeover of culture by tasteless scolds, I still believe there’s nothing better than a story that grabs you and won’t let go.’ Kat Rosenfield joins The Free Press.
Television is terrible and there’s nothing good at the movie theater. What happened to culture? (Photo by Branex/Getty Images)
The great Kat Rosenfield has been appearing in our pages since Common Sense days, but you might have noticed her name popping upmorefrequently in recent weeks. That’s because she’s joined The Free Press as our columnist on all things culture. And just in time. America is in crisis, and we’re not just talking about the election. We’re talking about the state of our culture.
We’ve long been interested in how identitarian politics has transformed businesses like publishingand Hollywood. But there are so many other questions. Like when was the last time you read an unforgettable new novel? When was the last time you saw a phenomenal movie? (For that matter, when was the last time you went to the movie theater?)
There’s so much “content.” But so little of it is any good. Meantime, there’s a strange gap between what’s popular and what’s praised. The most beloved shows and stand-ups are often the ones most viciously panned by critics and vice versa.
Below, Kat argues that culture got bland because criticism got dumb. As our Free Press culture critic, Kat won’t celebrate anything just because it has the right politics. And she’ll never, ever tell you what to like. I’m so excited to have Kat on board, and to present her always sharp, usually funny, and never preachy take on all things culture. —BW
Like a lot of ’90s kids, I had strict rules growing up about what I was allowed to watch on TV—but with a twist. Unlike my friends, whose viewing restrictions were based on things like sex or violence, my mom had a single, esoteric standard: I was not allowed to watch anything “stupid.”
At first I found this bewildering, mostly because the definition of “stupid” seemed impossible to pin down. The thrills, chills, and winking conspiracy theories ofThe X-Fileswere totally acceptable; the soapy teen drama of shows likeBeverly Hills,90210, a hard no.
Eventually, though, I began to recognize what the shows my mom approved of had in common: snappy writing, weird humor, complex characters who defied the binary of good and evil. It wasn’t just that the shows themselves were smart. It was that they assumed the audience was too.
What strikes me now is that my mother’s standards weren’t really about stupidity; they were about taste and teaching me to develop it. As an adult, I rarely turn on the TV in search of mindless entertainment—because in the house I grew up in, the point of watching television wasn’t to veg out, but to pay attention, the way you would to anyone who wanted to tell you a story.
It’s no surprise, in hindsight, that I was drawn not just to telling my own stories but writing about other people’s for a living. In 2010, as a young journalist, I became an entertainment reporter atMTV News. Unfortunately, you’ll have to take my word for this: a few weeks ago, the MTV archives wereabruptly wiped from existence—and with them, every byline from my early years.
I doubt historians will someday lament the loss of my 2015 magnum opus listicle: “TenWalking DeadZombies with Surprising Shapely Butts.” But if the work I produced as a baby entertainment journalist was not crucially important, man, it was fun—and weird, and freewheeling, and alive with the sense that art was meant to speak to and through us all, without shame or apology.
Do you remember what it was like, in those heady golden years? The Marvel Cinematic Universe was still in its audacious early stages. Publishing was riding high on book-to-film franchises likeTwilight,The Hunger Games, and of course,Harry Potter. Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan and Alfonso Cuarón were becoming household names. Television was full of prestige offerings, from the drama ofMad Mento the high fantasy ofGame of Thrones—shows we gathered in our living rooms to watch in real time, then rushed to social media to discuss as soon as the credits rolled.
Best of all was the way we watched—not with the distance of a sanctimonious overseer, but immersively, obsessively. Did you see that book on a table in the background during the pivotal scene? Did you notice the composition of that shot? Did you read this multi-thousand-word fan theory about who Jon Snow’s parents are, about why Tony Sopranodefinitelygot whacked?
I am amazed, looking back, by the richness not just of the storytelling but of the discourse surrounding it.
In Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novelGone Girl, a man ponders the nature of his relationship with his sociopathic wife: “What are you thinking? How are you feeling? Who are you? What have we done to each other? What will we do?” I thought about these questions often in the era of Peak TV, and still think about them—as a novelist, a reader, a writer, a critic. I believe my job is to be curious about the answers, even if those answers are monstrous. We are not here to condemn; we are here, toborrow from Joan Didion, to understand what we see and what it means.
Critics used to agree that the purpose of art is to explore what is true, not to model what is proper. But around the time Flynn’s breakout novel was breathing new life into the domestic thriller genre, a new breed of cultural commentator was gestating—one for whom art was understood less as a truth-seeking enterprise than as a vehicle for moral instruction.
In the early 2010s, Tumblr gave birth to an accusatory and highly influential blog titledYour Fave Is Problematic, which studiously cataloged the offenses that artists, authors, and celebrities had committed against social justice. A hallmark ofYFIPwas its utter collapse of the distinction between art and artist: onerepresentative postfrom 2013, about YA author John Green, lists allegedly offensive comments made by Green next to quotes uttered by his fictional characters, as though they were one and the same.
Years later, in 2021, the author ofYFIPrevealedherself in the pages ofTheNew York Times, admitting she was an angsty teenager when she started the blog, and had canceled people to feel better about herself. But by then, the notion that cultural criticism should be first and foremost an exercise in taking offense had taken gangrenous root—not just on social media but in the legacy press, propagated by a new generation of young, hungry, underpaid opinion writers who survived by making you hate-click.
The tenets of the new cultural criticism were as follows:
All art was political, and always had been;
Art with the wrong politics caused harm, especially to women and people of color;
And all art must be analyzed through the lens of power, privilege, and progressive pieties.
The whole thing had a frantically performative vibe that bordered on the evangelical—with journalists in the role of the youth pastor palpably desperate to keep you going to church. “It’s fun to think about this stuff,” pleaded onerepresentative essayat the viral trend siteUproxx, begging readers to devote themselves to woke critique with the same enthusiasm with which they once debated the bloodlines of the Targaryen dynasty. “Are you telling me that it’s cool to argue for hours about who Azor Ahai is, but a ten-minute discussion of race, gender, and shifting sensibilities before rewatching an ’80s classic is somehow wasted time? Get out of here.”
It was inevitable that a rift would emerge between the enlightened critics and the unwashed masses who, as it turned out, would rather not undergo mandatory DEI training every time they turn on the television. The one-two punches of #MeToo followed by BLM only widened it.
Today, there’s often a hilarious mismatch between how normie audiences receive a film versus how it’s reviewed by critics, one most clearly visible on the siteRotten Tomatoes. “Problematic” comedians like Dave Chappelle are denounced by the culturati while ordinary people laugh their asses off. Chappelle’s 2021 Netflix specialThe Closer, for instance, getsan audience rating of 95 percent, with one of the top reviews calling it an “Absolute Masterpiece!!” The critics, meanwhile, rate it a dismal 36 percent, led by a review titled “Why Netflix Deserves Some of the Heat for Dave Chapelle’s Transphobic Comments.”
Unfortunately, like their Tumblr predecessor, the media’s offense-takers enjoy outsize influence—so Hollywood, always a liberal bastion, has increasingly come to see itself as a moral authority. The result is observable, as the complex and provocative stories of the peak TV era have given way to something far more pious, dutiful, dull, and shrill.
Ted Lasso, the infectiously cheerful comedy that debuted as a smash hit in 2020, last year devolved into a dour final season ofvery special episodespushing progressive narratives about everything from immigration and LGBT awareness to proper digital hygiene when it comes to your ex’s nudes. It’s seen a15 percent dropin its audience rating onRotten Tomatoes.
AfterYou, a dishy drama about a serial-killing Casanova, moved from Lifetime to Netflix in 2019, the show immediately started trying to compensate for its fundamental political incorrectness. Characters start acknowledging their privilege. An anti-vaxxer is murdered, and it’s presented as a net positive. A black love interest lectures the lead on “missing white woman syndrome.” (On IMDb,a slew of userscite season four as the reason they stopped watching the show.)
What is lost in this sea of feel-bad content isn’t just a sense of fun, but oftaste. These “non-problematic” shows are not just irritating, they’re bland and forgettable—except in those rare moments when they pass through the looking glass into the world of self-parody, as in the 2018 NBC dramaNew Amsterdamwhen a doctor delivers thissomber diagnosiswithout even a hint of irony: “I think your son’s tumor was caused by racism.”
Which brings us to our current moment of cultural desolation: anotherGarfieldmovie; anotherMariomovie; a sixth—or is it seventh?—film featuring those googly-eyed yellow things called minions; copies of copies of things we’ve seen before, everything studiously inoffensive. The most anticipated show of the summer is aGame of Thronesspin-off, whose chief innovation has been to replace the original’s notoriously debauched sex scenes with either CGI dragons or unmedicated medieval childbirth.
But even in this artless wasteland, we’re still watching; we stillwantto watch.Inside Out 2has netted upward of$1.25 billionat the box office despite a rare, near-unanimousconsensusamong critics and normies alike that the film isn’t anywhere near as fun as the original.Hit Man, a movie so tonally and narratively confused that not even the charming Glen Powell can salvage it, has topped the charts in Netflix’s most-watched category for weeks. The best thing that can be said about it is that its sensibilities feel rooted in the era when Hollywood was less interested in social justice than in blowing things up. The film isn’t good, but it’s refreshingly apolitical.
But don’t we want more? To laugh, to cry, to be thrilled, to be moved? To lose ourselves in a story we haven’t heard before, and to decide for ourselves what it means? There are still good stories out there, in the sea of content: the historical drama ofShōgun, the dark amusements ofSaltburn, the savage satire ofAmerican Fiction. I was entertained byBarbieand elated byOppenheimer.Society of the Snowglued me to my television for two and a half hours on a winter afternoon;Ricky Stanickyconvinced me that any comedy starring John Cena should instantly go on my watchlist.
Despite the strange takeover of my chosen field by tasteless scolds, I still believe there’s nothing better than a story that grabs you and won’t let go. So from now on, you’ll find me writing about all things culture regularly here atThe Free Press. I may not have another zombie butt manifesto in me, but I promise I’ll never stop asking the questions that animate the stories we tell and the way we talk about them. Who are we? What have we done to each other? What will we do?
And most importantly, I want to ask you, the readers: What are you thinking? What are you watching? Tell me; I’m dying to know.
Kat Rosenfield is a brand-new columnist at The Free Press. Read her previous work for ushereand follow her on X@katrosenfield.
Have you watched, read, or listened to something you’d like to recommend to Kat and other Free Pressers? Write to us:letters@thefp.com.
And if you want to follow Kat’s thoughts on the culture, subscribe today:
Of all the places to witness the circus parade of modern French history, you can do a lot worse than the tiny town of Espalion, in the beautiful department of L’Aveyron, in the south of France. Because there are few destinations more unchanged than L’Aveyron, and this extremely French place is where I saw the opening of the French Olympic Games, in an al fresco brasserie. And this is where I sensed a weird unease. No one booed, no one catcalled, no one mocked.They sat there, sipping cold bière, and at times they vehemently cheered and laughed. Yet they also appeared a touch confused, and, I suspect, this is because they thought – like the rest of the world – ‘this is quite often a load of bollocks’. Not least because of that bizarre mockery of Da Vinci’s famous fresco of the last supper, probably the most revered Christian painting in history.
Whether the residents of Espalion were right or not, I concur with their sceptical views, and for very French reasons. Earlier this year I went to see the fine 150th ‘anniversary’ of the French Impressionist exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. It left me with several pressing thoughts. The first was: what a great country France is, what a magnificent civilisation it is, how dare anyone tear it down. France is wonderful. Moreover, it is a pivotal part of British culture, as Britain is necessarily part of Italy, as Italy is crucially part of Spain, as Spain is irreparably part of the USA, and so on. We are all in this together. We are western Christendom. And that is no small thing. It is, indeed, a noble thing. Perhaps the most noble thing that humanity has ever done.
Secondly, as I left the exhibition and wandered the boulevards, I felt a weird echo. Because the Impressionists in their time were genuine rebels. They were so revolutionary they had to establish galleries and exhibitions of their own, because the ‘accepted art’ was reserved for the ‘salon’. That is to say, if you wanted your painting to be received, observed and honoured by the elite, and to be put up on the correct walls to be bought by wealthy customers, then it had to pass certain tests. Those tests, back then, consisted of things like: rightful if not overt patriotism, perhaps a dash of nationalism, maybe a load of classicism, also sensibleness, nothing ‘upsetting’, not too much gratuitous nudity. Meanwhile, you should probably show fishermen looking brave, handsome and Gallic. And so on. This was called ‘salon art’: this was the art approved by the establishment. And it was rightly despised by imaginative people of the time (even if it produced some excellent paintings) because it was an aesthetic cul de sac: it led to evermore deadening dreck, the ultimate swerve to impressionism, and beyond.
That, I suggest, is where today’s ‘approved’ modern art – from the French Olympics opening ceremony to the latest shortlist for the Turner Prize – has ended up now. It is all ‘salon art’. It is sterile, meaningless, repetitive, embarrassing, and – even worse than salon art of the 19th century, which was at least picturesque and craftsmanlike – it is ugly.
Let’s look at the shortlist for the UK 2024 Turner Prize. Eg Jasleen Kaur. She offered an actual car draped with a massive ‘paper doily’. That’s it. A real car draped with an oversized doily. It is so risible it is slightly beyond comprehension. Presumably it is some meta-commentary on Kaur’s Sikh background, but equally it could be a commentary on slavery, racism, the Holocaust, the Spanish armada, the winter fuel allowance, the decline of ITV sitcoms, or the forgotten world of antimacassars.
As for the other Turner Prize nominees, I feel a need to restrain myself so I won’t be mean. Pio Abad offers drawings which are importantly inscribed with the word ‘parapolitics’. If scrawling buzzwords on doodles is art, my shopping list with ‘LATE CAPITALISM’ angrily written across it should be in the Louvre. Meanwhile, another shortlistee, Delaine Le Bas, offers us ‘Incipit Vita Nova. Here Begins The New Life/A New Life Is Beginning’, which seems to comprise a sequence of washed clothes suspended where a pretend horse might see them, thus offering an incisive commentary on, God knows, royalty? Dressage? Chinese laundries? Horses that secretly desire string vests?
The fact is, no one cares about this new salon art, and, worse, no one really notices. All it does – like the French Olympic Opening Ceremony – is make a feeble attempt to shock us with its alleged avant-garde-ness, but it is the opposite of avant garde, or shocking, because we have all been tediously ‘shocked’ by 100 years of this relentless conceptual silliness, ever since Duchamp put his urinal in a gallery in 1917. In truth, it would be far more shocking if someone produced the modern-day equivalent of Da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’. A work of tangible human genius, a work of art that embodies the skills, brains, and dedication of a complicated and supremely gifted artist approaching a fundamental subject that speaks to the human condition. I mean no disrespect to Jasleen Kaur, and I am sure Kaur is dextrous and clever, but I don’t believe a massive doily on a car should be called ‘art’.Not in the same way we call Da Vinci ‘art’. Indeed it is time we plainly said ‘this is not art, it is boring’.
Meanwhile, back in Espalion, having spent several glorious days picnicking in the hills with my family, I returned to the same brasserie to watch the French win the gold in the rugby Sevens. As a British patriot, I felt a twinge of envy. But I also joined in the joy of the locals, because good rugby is good rugby, and Antoine Dupont is genuinely brilliant. If only modern art could be as honest. Instead, we’re stuck in an endless cultural scrum where a doily on a Peugeot passes for genius.
A Plateias D'Arte - Associação Cultural tem o prazer de vos apresentar o seu mais recente espetáculo MÚSICA NO CORAÇÃO.
O palco do Auditório Fernando Lopes-Graça, no Fórum Romeu Correia em Almada, transformar-se-ánas lindíssimas paisagens dos Alpes e serápossível assistir a verdadeiros momentos de encanto com esta história intemporal.
“Música no Coração”éum musical de Richard Rodgers (música) e Oscar Hammerstein II (letras) com libreto de Howard Lindsay e Russel Crouse.
O musicalélivremente baseado no filme alemão ocidental de 1956 Die Trapp-Familie e no livro de memórias The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, escrito por Maria von Trapp (no qual também o filme alemão foi baseado).
Em 1965 o musical transformou-se num filme dirigido por Robert Wise e protagonizado por Julie Andrews e Christopher Plummer, que acabou por vencer cincoÓscares, incluindo o de melhor filme.
O musical veio pela primeira vez a Portugal durante o ano de 2006, no Teatro Politeama, pela mão de Filipe La Féria.
Mariaéuma noviça feliz num convento perto de Salzburgo, numaÁustriaàbeira do nazismo. Desconfiando que a sua vocaçãoéoutra, a Madre Superiora envia-a como preceptora para a casa do capitão Von Trapp. Aí, Maria teráde tomar conta de sete crianças terríveis afugentadoras de preceptoras e habituadas a um pai frio e autoritário.
Mariaédoce, mas firme, e rapidamente as crianças se lhe afeiçoam. JáVon Trappéoutra história.
Com o correr do tempo, acabam por cair nos braços um do outro, mas a sombra do nazismo paira sobre toda a família, e para os Von Trapp sóexiste uma solução… a fuga! Baseada na autobiografia dos Von Trapp, a Música no Coraçãoéjáum clássico.
A Plateias D’Arte traz novamente para Portugal o espetáculo que emocionou várias gerações em todo o mundo.
Com um elenco de luxo, com nomes com Ana Paula Russo; Lucina Morais; João Prior e Filipa Abreu, esta produção conta ainda com a participação da Classe de Teatro Musical e Classe de Teatro +40 da Plateias D’Arte.
O espetáculo subiráàcena nos dias 27 de Setembro pelas 21h00 e ainda no dia 28 de Setembro pelas 16h00 e 21h00.
Para efetuar a vossa reserva, basta enviar um email para reservas@plateiasdarte-ac.pt, indicando o número de bilhetes que pretendem e o nome da reserva e a sessão pretendida. Tambémépossível reservar através dos contatos 917 376 931 ou 212 724 927, de terça a sábado das 10.30hàs 13.00h e novamente das 14.30hàs 18.00h. O bilhete tem o valor de 15,00€(quinze euros), sendo que hádesconto para sócios da Plateias D'Arte e grupos de número igual ou superior a 10 pessoas.
As reservas devem ser levantadas até uma semana antes da data da sessão pretendida, na bilheteira do Fórum Romeu Correia, dentro do horário acima descrito.
Não percam esta oportunidade.
Gostaríamos de contar com a vossa participação enquanto espectadores, para nos aplaudir e embarcar nesta bonita e emocionante viagem ao mundo do Teatro Musical.
Atélá!
--
Rua Dom Álvaro Abranches da Câmara Nº 28 | 2800 015 Almada
During the Covid lockdowns of spring 2020, the pollution usually seen in India’s cities like Mumbai (above) suddenly cleared, leading to a negative side effect: some of the hottest temperatures ever recorded. (Photo by Mohd Zakir via Getty Images)
During the first months of the pandemic, in the spring of 2020, India’s government imposed one of the most draconian lockdowns anywhere in the democratic world. I happened to be in Mumbai at that time, where you couldn’t go more than half a mile from your home except for essential purposes. Unpleasant as this was, there was one positive side effect: the notoriously polluted skies of Mumbai—like those of other big Indian cities, from Delhi to Bangalore—suddenly became much clearer. With far fewer cars on the road, factories shut, and flights grounded, the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere fell to their lowest rate in 20 years.
Then came the negative side effect. That summer, India experienced some of the hottest temperatures ever recorded. Globally, the year 2020 was one of the warmest on record; the average temperature in India that year was 0.29 Celsius degrees hotter (roughly 0.52 degrees Fahrenheit) than during 1981–2010.
This is no coincidence. It is well known that aerosols make clouds bigger, brighter, and more reflective; when they decrease, more sunlight reaches the earth, which leads to higher temperatures. And a 2023 study showed how, during the pandemic, clearer skies across South Asia increased climate warming.
As we clean up the environment, we must be conscious of this trade-off. I was reminded of my lockdown in India a few weeks ago, when it was reported that an attempt to cleanse one of the world’s most polluting industries has, unfortunately, exacerbated global warming.
In January 2020, new shipping regulations were put in place by the International Maritime Organization, to reduce the permissible sulfur content of shipping fuel from 3.5 percent to 0.5. The intended effect was to reduce the sulfur dioxide emitted by maritime vessels by about 80 percent; the actual reduction was about 70 percent. The IMO’s expectation was that this would lead to “reductions in stroke, asthma, lung cancer, cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases.”
“Cutting sulphur emissions from ships will also help prevent acid rain and ocean acidification, benefitting crops, forests, and aquatic species.”
But according to a study released last month, the “abrupt reduction in shipping emission” had an unintended consequence. Sulfur dioxide has a powerful cooling effect on the planet, because it reacts with water vapor to produce aerosols, which help block the sun.
Led by Tianle Yuan, a scientist at the University of Maryland and NASA, this latest study therefore found that cutting emissions from shipping could warm the atmosphere by 0.16 degrees Celsius within a decade. (Aerosols vanish quickly from the atmosphere.) The 2020s are expected to be “anomalously warm”—and we already know that the year 2023 was the hottest on record.
“There is a trade-off between reducing aerosol pollution and additional warming,” Yuan told me. The well-known climate scientist James Hansen refers to this trade-off as a “Faustian bargain.”
“In terms of policy,” Yuan added, “we need a better understanding of the pros and cons of the impact on human health and climate/environment.” It is far more difficult to quantify the health benefits from the reduction of aerosols than it is to measure the additional global warming.
Yuan’s findings have been challenged, notably by Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute. “Yuan and colleagues are not too far off on the ultimate amount of warming that will result from the regulations,” he told me. “They just assume it will happen nearly immediately rather than over the course of decades as the ocean heats up.”
Importantly, he isn’t challenging the magnitude of warming that Yuan predicts as a result of these shipping regulations, but rather how quickly the warming will come about.
“More sophisticated models give a much smaller effect (0.05° C to 0.07° C or so) in 2023 than the 0.16° C they suggest in the paper,” he said.
There are other effects of reducing aerosols in the atmosphere. If you live in North America, you’ve probably noticed an uptick in wildfires in recent years. A recent study from the University of California, Riverside finds that reducing aerosols may increase wildfires—even more than a rise in greenhouse gases—because, it is thought, aerosol mitigation dries out plants more than greenhouse gases do, making them more flammable.
So, does all this mean we shouldn’t stop polluting? Is there some sense in which pollution is “good”? Should we actually inject aerosols into the atmosphere to slow down global warming—as some have suggested?
No, we shouldn’t go that far. Yangyang Xu, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, told me: “The health benefits of cutting air pollution outweigh the negative impact of accelerating global warming.
“There is no basis for continuing polluting the air for the sake of ‘masking’ some global warming.”
This is especially true, he added, in heavily polluted countries such as China and India, where there is considerable loss of life every year due to respiratory illnesses.
The general consensus in the scientific community is that if we focus on reducing aerosols without also reducing greenhouse gases, global warming will only accelerate, so we need to channel our resources into eliminating both simultaneously. But when it comes to environmental concerns, aerosols may be a lesser evil—one that might even buy us time until we work out how to get other emissions under control.
Sou romeno. Nasci na Roménia em 2001 e desde 2007 resido em Portugal. Adoro este país maravilhoso que me acolheu e que tantas portas me abriu. Passaria aqui o resto da minha vida.
Há, porém, algo que ainda me faz muita confusão, nomeadamente a adoração que existe face à sangrenta ideologia comunista. Como romeno sei que o comunismo destrói vidas e famílias, apregoa o medo e vende a ilusão de uma igualdade assente na opressão e omissão do bem mais precioso, a liberdade.
Sei isto porque os meus antepassados viveram numa sociedade comunista onde a fé não podia ser livremente exclamada, e um pequeno empresário não podia sonhar em gerar mais postos de trabalho e mais capital, que posteriormente seria investido para que ele e a sua família vivessem melhor. Tão simples quanto isto. Sabem porquê? Porque o comunismo não passa de um sofisma.
Entendo o papel que os comunistas tiveram antes do 25 de Abril de 1974, porém não entendo o fechar dos olhos às atrocidades que os mesmos comunistas, que se consideram democráticos e solidários, têm perante os países onde a fome, o frio e as fugas em massa das respectivas populações para fora das fronteiras nacionais estão na ordem do dia. E, que fique bem claro, falta de informação não há. Não há porque, ao contrário do que acontece nos regimes comunistas onde a liberdade de imprensa é reduzida ou até mesmo “despedida”, nos países democráticos, liberais ou até capitalistas o ser humano tem acesso às fontes de informação que deseja.
A Festa do Avante decorreu nos passados dias 6, 7 e 8 de Setembro. Num país livre, onde o jovem pode optar por fazer o que a consciência lhe dita, sem medos de ser encarcerado num gulag por achar que o Primeiro-Ministro (ou secretário-geral de uma organização comunista, para ser mais apropriado a certas realidades), não é bem aquilo que o país precisa. E, mesmo assim, foram muitos os jovens que compraram as suas EP’s e sorridentes tiraram selfies ao lado da foice e do martelo.
Agora entre nós.. passa pela cabeça de alguém que uma foice e um martelo, juntos ou separados, exprimam paz, liberdade ou progresso? Não! Mais depressa um campo de trabalho forçado como existe num verdadeiro país comunista e como, infelizmente, já existiu na minha querida Roménia.
E se até agora vos disseram que nos países em que o comunismo fez-se sentir não foi de facto implementado um verdadeiro comunismo, meus amigos, não se enganem, foi do mais autêntico que já existiu.
