Post by kj on Sept 29, 2020 13:05:25 GMT
An FB friend based in Portugal posted this in regard to a national scandal involving a video circulating of a woman having sex on a train with two men. The reflections on Portugal's traditional values put me in mind of Ireland and its current 'metamorphosis'.
"The fact that a video in which a Portugeuse woman is shown having sex with two men on a Lisbon train has been dominating the national headlines - displacing coronavirus, Ronaldo and political corruption in the process - tells us something about the nature of Portugal itself. Back in England, where people have been having sex on public transport for several decades, this story would seem as commonplace as a lost umbrella, but in a country that is so far 'behind' the rest of Europe it has become a sensation.
Whilst the overwhelming majority of people are denouncing these individuals for having exceeded the boundaries of common decency, the incident itself has clearly been spoon-fed to the population in the way that a university lecturer might pepper an exam paper with the word 'discuss'. Portugal is 'backward,' there is no doubt about it, but for me this is by far the best compliment that one can make about this country and if anything positive can be said about the Salazar dictatorship that ended some forty-five years ago it is that whilst Americanisation was infecting most of Europe the trajectory of the entire country was temporarily frozen in the way that communism halted the advance of Western capitalism in Eastern Europe. 'Progress,' of course, being a convenient byword for the debilitating values that transform countries like England, France, Germany and Italy and turn them into unrecognisable cesspools of social dislocation.
I am not suggesting that one must yearn for a return to the kind of conscious deceleration that was offered by Salazarism, but at least this country is now at the stage where seemingly everyday news stories are reported with the kind of excitable fervour which, elsewhere, might greet the arrival of an alien spaceship. I often say to people that the media in Portugal, complete with folk music on morning television and endless celebrations of traditional cookery, is like a nationwide version of the Village Pond News. Indeed, regardless of the more sinister elements which deliberately try to shock the population into accepting the social 'progress' that is bringing so much death and destruction elsewhere, all is not lost.
The solution, at least for those Portuguese who still care about this beautiful and unique country, is to constantly remind one another that being so 'backward' in the twenty-first century is something of an attribute. Real progress, after all, lies in not being 'progressive' and especially on somebody else's terms. I am not suggesting that we should seek to perpetuate or maintain the bourgeois conservatism that prevents people from expressing themselves in their own distinct way, but the Portuguese should never lose sight of the fact that this country's cultural and familial roots still prevail. As America continues to spread its disturbing psychological baggage across the Atlantic like a radioactive cloud, it should be remembered that Portugal has an advantage over many of its neighbours. This, providing the correct juxtaposition is made between indigenous values and the internationalist threat from abroad, can become a springboard for her defence."