By: KENNETH MAXWELL

Folha de São Paulo - Op-ed section - page A2     

A week is a lifetime in politics. Churchill said this. The mountains and the valleys in political life can be very close as he well knew. His political career was one of vast failures as well as vast achievement, of public adulation as well as public repudiation. Sometimes that moment of transition is recorded in an image that captures the mood, or gives a face to a deeper shift of public opinion; these images take hold instantly and remain permanently and indelibly fixed in the public consciousness.

These paradigmatic images can be good and happy images: The young sailor's embrace of his pretty companion on New York City's Times Square at the end of World War Two. Or they can be bad and shocking images: The young naked Vietnamese girl running towards us her frail body engulfed in flames from napalm. Once seen these images are not forgotten. Photography has dominated this particular market for the past century and a half. But the internet and U-Tube has added an important refinement to this menu. Moving images that can be defused instantaneously and repeatedly over infinite virtual networks that require no gatekeepers and have thousands of eager enablers and forwarders; all of which is very bad news for politicians caught in private reactions to public events. So it is no surprise that by early this week there were more web pages on Google devoted to Marco Aurelio Garcia and his now infamous gesture than there were for the newly released Harry Potter.

Hand signs are especially open to misinterpretation. This was also something the willy Churchill well knew. His famous V sign had a strong double entendre. It conveyed the assertion in the darkest hours that victory would eventually be achieved, but also conveyed an obscene defiance much like that conveyed by Professor Garcia's gesture last week; it all depends on the direction of the hand and the two fingers.

But of course it is not Professor Garcia's gesture that is the real issue here. It is its timing and its juxtaposition with the still smouldering crash site at Congonhas; a combination of political calculation and human tragedy that captures instantaneously the deepest preoccupations of the people about the motivations and competence of their rulers.

It was not, therefore, a good week for the Planalto. This is a gesture that will stick. As Napoleon Bonaparte said after his retreat from Moscow "From the sublime to the ridiculous there is only one step."

KENNETH MAXWELL is a weekly op-ed columnist (every Thursday) for Folha de São Paulo, Brazil's leading newspaper