Thousands of words

Comment threads are strange beasts. Like with message boards, spam emails, and obnoxious application requests on certain social networking sites, they become a sort of nebulous din.

Static.

And yet like an informational black hole they suck you in.

I offer this example. A picture of an indigenous woman and child in Brazil being pushed by a swathe of riot police, and the ensuing comments.

I suppose there is plenty to chew on here. A number of points struck me.

The first was the ubiquitous demand for a context for this photo. Which is fair enough since the photo is deserving of factual circumstances.

Second, the din of claims that everything is now photoshopped. There is – gasp – no objectivity anymore. As if there ever really was.

Third is the manipulation of said demand for ‘context’ by certain of the thread’s contributors. Namely the protests by Brazilians espousing the right of property and flailing about the threat of indigenous and landless peasants as sinister terrorists and communists.

I don’t suppose North Americans realize the facts of living in what is essentially a caste system, in which the realities of extreme classism coupled with brutal racist ideologies play out like this. Certainly that extreme of classist thought is not immediately evident or as pervasive in the suburbs of El Norte. It is there, most certainly (and tellingly so – most obviously in indigenous communities). Having grown up in North America, with fleeting glimpses of the class divisions in South America, I can say there is a distinct disconnect of perceptions.

The propagandists of private property up here at least pay lip service to the notion of ‘pulling yourself up by your bootstraps’ (offensive and dishonest as that is). The institutions of economic power in Latin America don’t even care about that notion. To them, the poor are at best incapable of such upward mobility, often times viewed as ‘racially’ backwards.

But something stinks in the Brazilian responses here. And what stinks is the desperation of a ruling class (with obvious access to the Internet and hence the ability to spin and propagandize at length about ‘context’), who is feeling the push of those who have been screwed over for centuries.

While one may certainly criticize the caudillo stylings of someone like Chavez, he has been enormously popular not because of his rhetoric but because of concrete improvements to the standard of living for the masses of the poor. Concrete improvements that the colonial past could not ever deliver because of it’s very racist and classist nature. At all costs, the nobility, the moneyed interests must be protected.

At the very least, the thread contains apt and eloquent responses to these interests.

One Erik Davis (apparently not the same as the author of Techgnosis) comments:

“Wow. The picture is indeed moving, though what’s fascinating is less how moving the photo than how rarely news journalists concentrate on the problems of the indigenous, the impoverished, and the landless.

Even more distressing is the astonishing number of hateful, angry comments here on this board, some of which are undoubtedly from members of Brazil’s hateful, racist ruling class. Are you seriously accusing this woman and her child of terrorism? Are you seriously accusing her of child endangerment?

If you have no clue about the MST or the Landless Peasants Movement, perhaps you imagine she is ‘choosing’ to fight these thugs for her pleasure, and she went home to a bourgeois house like yours and relaxed in front of her television?

People have a right to food, shelter, healthcare, and security. That’s not a political broadside, but a statement of fact under international law (heard of the U.N.?) This woman clearly has none of those things, and the right wingers here are taking the side of guns, shields, jackboots, and power over the side of unarmed women, starving children, and impoverished men, all of whom are far braver than the thugs in the picture, or ANY OF US commenting here.”

Hear hear. That includes yours truly sitting at this laptop.