COMMENTARY
Has the State Department informed President Trump that his best Brazilian buddy was just ordered to be um banana?
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That’s a potassium-rich insult in Portuguese that means “a wimp.”
A federal judge in Brazil this week told Brazilian President and commander-in-corona-denial Jair Bolsonaro that he has to wear a mask in public like every other brasileiro in the country’s federal district. He’s making bolsonarismo surrender to bananismo.
The U.S. and Brazil, the two largest countries in the Americas, are now home to the world’s two highest tallies of new coronavirus cases and deaths. Those infections and fatalities, from Arizona to Amazonas, keep exploding in no small part because Trump and Bolsonaro champion a defiant, science-contemptuous mindset.
And a big part of that is a belief that anyone who wears a corona-preventive mask is the weakest, wimpiest of bananas.
Especially some federal bench banana who wants to make a tough guy like Bolsonaro look like a banana.
READ MORE: COVID Roulette: Brazilians Didn't Vote for a President Who'd Gamble With Their Lives
Here's what that Brazilian judge doesn’t get, and what so many banana Americans don’t understand:
If you force free and rugged machos like Trump and Bolsonaro to cover their free and rugged macho faces with one of those powder-blue flags of snowflake hysteria, you’re choking the free and rugged machismo that made the U.S. and Brazil the hemisphere’s two titans.
Yes, Trump and Bolsonaro are scared stiff that the economic tailspin from the COVID-19 pandemic threatens them politically.
But their dogged determination to keep a microscopic invader from tripping their swagger speaks to a larger syndrome in both their countries. It's one that says a lot about why the U.S. and Brazil — which should have managed COVID-19 by now — are surpassing the pandemic tragedies seen earlier in Asia and Europe.
Trump and Bolsonaro consider themselves vessels of the free and rugged defiance that made the U.S. and Brazil strong – but which is now making it easier for COVID-19 to kill Americans and Brazilians.
In effect, the New World is making a bigger mess of the pandemic than the Old World has because, ironically, it's too busy worshiping the tough, independent spirit that’s historically defined the New World.
The virus is attacking the U.S. and Brazil amid national identity crises, a moment ripe for populist demagogues like Trump and Bolsonaro.
Frustrated Americans and Brazilians want to recapture the countries’ mythical auras. And so hiding from COVID-19 — cowering in our homes, shuttering our businesses, wearing wimpy masks — mocks who they think they should be.
They want to be cowboys and bandeirantes, the American and Brazilian archetypes of unshackled pioneer strength.
The cowboy of course is the antithesis of effete elitists in Washington. The bandeirante — the “flag carrier” who conquered Brazil’s frontier — came to be the antithesis of the chi-chi coast-huggers in Rio de Janeiro.
Trump and Bolsonaro consider themselves vessels of that ancestral testosterone.
So do their acolytes, like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. His photo op last month with Vice President Mike Pence in an Orlando burger joint, sans masks, declared his state a no-wimp zone.
Never mind that on Wednesday, Florida reported its highest single-day number of new COVID-19 cases.
LEMMING PARADE
It's one thing if Trump and Bolsonaro personally don't want to wear masks. But their public mask-maligning undermines public-minded pandemic practices.
Before last weekend I considered Bolsonaro the worst of the two in that regard. He’s a leader who takes sneering delight in being out in public, especially the crowded and maskless street rallies he calls his supporters to join, violating every doctor’s social distancing guidelines.
It’s what the bandeirantes would have done.
But then, last Saturday, Trump called his supporters to act out the same, maskless lemming parade in Tulsa. I gotta say cowboy Donald is neck-and-neck with Jair again in the race to see which head of state will have the most to answer for once the pandemic subsides.
Meanwhile, local authorities — like those in Palm Beach County and Brasília, which enforces the mask-wearing law Bolsonaro’s violating — have stepped up during the worst global health crisis in a century.
They're reminding Americans and Brazilians that real patriots actually put selfless medical safeguarding ahead of self-absorbed political grandstanding.
And any guy who spits at that fact is the real banana.
The rugged pioneer motto was always, What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.
But Trump and Bolsonaro, and too many Americans and Brazilians, don’t understand that what we thought made us stronger is now helping to kill us.
