2014 Elections - Wardy Sets Forth
“Wardy, you’ve been living in the land of the thong and the
endlessly smouldering barbecue for over ten years now, so enlighten us, what’s
your take on the current state of Brazilian politics, in light of the
forthcoming presidential elections?” I imagine people would ask, if only I’d
grant them an audience. I shall reply using an analogy.
As I may have mentioned herein several years ago, I once had
a spluttering career in the Human Resources department of a local metallurgical
factory, during which I limped along gamely for just over two years before I
was rooted out and banished. Our department had no dedicated manager, so we
reported directly to the Director of Administration. There were six of us in
the department at the outset, a Psychologist, three HR Analysts (of which I was
one), and two HR Assistants.
One of my fellow Analysts was a short, stocky individual
who peered earnestly out from behind a pair of narrow, rectangular spectacles, always
giving the impression that he was addressing you through a letterbox, which
nine times out of ten I would have preferred. He’d started working in the
department six months before I arrived, but you would have been hard pressed to
disbelieve him if he’d claimed to have been brought up there since infancy,
such was his air of superiority towards his bumbling colleagues and sense of
injustice that his talents had not as yet been fully recognised. He was the
department spy, it later transpired, silently observing us co-workers and
giving secret, no-holds-barred accounts of our collective ineptitude to our
mace-wielding boss. This contributed in no small part to the brevity of my
employment.
He could certainly set forth about HR – when he wasn’t
making misty-eyed proclamations about shifting paradigms, or constructing
competencies (“Why don’t bridge crane drivers have basic first-aid training?”), he was marching around with a package of documents as thick as a phone book,
which never seemed to diminish in size. When I moved desks to work opposite
him, I realised why. He’d arrive in the morning, grab the package, rummage
through it, occasionally swap the order of the papers contained therein,
apparently lose the will to live and make an urgent phone call to arrange a largely
pointless meeting with the supervisors of the training units situated around
the factory. In a nutshell, he saw himself as an executive (he was doing an MBA
after all, despite having finished his undergraduate degree only months
earlier), but in fact, he executed absolutely nothing.
It is hard not to see him as the personification of the
ruling Workers’ Party, the PT. Endless meetings, congresses, grand discussions
about great left ideas, calling each other comrade, but absolute atrophy in
terms of actually making things happen to improve the country. Hence the protests
witnessed last year during the Confederations Cup. FIFA-standard stadiums,
Scandinavian tax rates and sub-Saharan public services an average Rotary Club
could probably administrate more efficiently.
Indeed, it seems to me that this failure to offer a viable
alternative is a major weakness of the left in general. Russell Brand’s recent call for revolution was all very entertaining, but when Jeremy Paxman asked him what he
envisaged would replace the current system, Brand replied without pausing for
breath, “Others are far more qualified than me to answer that question.”
Sadly, I suspect what masquerades as humility and a lack of presumptuousness is actually an inability to provide an intelligible answer.