A ENTREVISTA... COMÍCIO

Há uns anos, eu deixava habitualmente o carro no parque subterrâneo de um prédio com acesso pela Av. da Liberdade e cujas traseiras davam para a Rua Duque de Palmela.
João Vale e Azevedo, na altura presidente do Benfica, tinha escritório nesse prédio, o que era uma festa: quase todos os dias, à saída dos elevadores, havia uma bateria de jornalistas à sua espera.

Às vezes, eu e ele cruzávamo-nos de manhã ou ao fim da tarde, e fazíamos conversa de circunstância. Um dia apanhou-me à saída e propôs-se acompanhar-me a pé até ao meu emprego. Na véspera tinha havido um debate televisivo entre os candidatos à presidência do Benfica, que ele vencera claramente, e queria falar sobre o assunto. Fomos então pela Rua Duque de Palmela fora, com ele a debitar as suas impressões da noite anterior. A certa altura, procurando ser simpático, eu disse-lhe:
-- Tenho de lhe dar os parabéns pelo debate! Você, mesmo quando não tem razão, consegue ser convincente.
Ele olhou para mim espantado, e acabou por dizer:
– Arq.º Saraiva, está enganado! Eu tinha razão em tudo o que disse!
Percebi que não valia a pena contra-argumentar. O homem estava absolutamente convencido da sua verdade e nada o demoveria. Foi esta a ideia que me veio à cabeça no fim da entrevista com Sócrates na quarta-feira da semana passada.
Sócrates e Vale e Azevedo são almas gémeas. Têm personalidades muito próximas. São ambos megalómanos, perseverantes, combativos e portadores de uma energia inesgotável, acham que não fizeram nada de errado mas levam instituições à falência, têm um enorme desplante, mentem com toda a convicção (porque parecem não saber distinguir entre a verdade e a mentira) e tudo aquilo em que se metem é nebuloso.
No princípio da entrevista, Sócrates garantiu que não seria candidato a Belém. Lembrei-me de que, dois ou três meses antes de assumir a liderança do PS, ele me disse que ia abandonar a política. Perante a minha insistência, respondeu-me que era uma decisão inabalável, pois Guterres tinha saído muito mal do poder e ele não queria passar pelo mesmo. Isto, repito, passava-se poucos meses antes de ganhar a presidência do PS. Como poderemos saber o que ele fará dentro de três anos? Mas houve quem aceitasse essa garantia como boa…
Depois deste intróito, Sócrates atacou os que criticaram o seu regresso à TV, dizendo que o queriam calar, que pretendiam impedi-lo de se defender, que tal era antidemocrático e mostrava «o carácter dessa gente». Ele seria incapaz de fazer o mesmo a alguém.
Neste ponto da entrevista, senti um sobressalto: mas, afinal, quem pressionou a TVI para afastar Manuela Moura Guedes? Quem manobrou para pôr José Manuel Fernandes fora do Público? E Mário Crespo fora da SIC? Quem enviou Rui Pedro Soares a Madrid para comprar a TVI, em nome da PT, com vista a mudar-lhe a orientação? Quem deu instruções a Armando Vara, então administrador do BCP, para fechar o SOL?
Sócrates desencadeou uma ofensiva sem precedentes contra vários órgãos de comunicação social, e agora tem o desplante de se queixar de que não queriam deixá-lo falar? Ainda por cima, ele sabe perfeitamente que, em cima da sua secretária em Paris, há pedidos de entrevista de toda a imprensa portuguesa. Queriam amordaçá-lo? Não brinquemos com coisas sérias.
A entrevista prosseguiu com Sócrates a rebater os «embustes» de que foi vítima e a corrigir a «narrativa» que se escreveu a seu respeito. Garantiu que o Memorando que assinou com a troika não previa cortes do 13.º e 14.º meses, aumento do IVA, reduções dos salários e pensões, etc. Um dos entrevistadores, Paulo Ferreira lembrou que o Memorando não estabelecia medidas concretas «mas apenas metas». Sócrates fingiu, porém, que não ouviu. Continuou na sua. E para condicionar os entrevistadores, usou várias vezes um truque a que Chávez também recorria: acusou-os de repetirem as «mentiras da direita» a seu respeito.
Sócrates levava outro alvo na mira, o Presidente da República. Disse que Cavaco não tinha «autoridade moral» para lhe dar lições, e citou o caso das escutas. Afirmou que foi uma «invenção da Casa Civil do Presidente para derrubar o Governo». Não sei se foi uma invenção nem sei qual era a intenção. O que sei é que o caso foi aproveitado à exaustão pelo Governo de Sócrates e pelo Partido Socialista para atacar Cavaco. Se houve aproveitamento político do caso das escutas, foi do PS para atacar Cavaco e não o inverso. Aliás, ao contrário do que Sócrates também afirmou, a ‘personagem central’ do caso, Fernando Lima, não foi promovido mas sim destituído da chefia do gabinete de imprensa, e afastado do espaço público.
Mas, no ataque a Cavaco, Sócrates não se ficou por aqui. Adiantou que o Presidente tinha uma atitude em relação ao seu Governo, e tem outra relativamente a este. Mas Sócrates estará bem informado do que se passa em Portugal? Onde estaria quando Cavaco pronunciou o célebre discurso de Ano Novo em que falou da «espiral recessiva»? Ou quando enviou o Orçamento para o TC com observações assassinas para o Governo de Passos Coelho sobre os cortes nas pensões?
Será a ‘narrativa’ que está errada – ou Sócrates que quer escrever uma História que não existe?
Porém – hélas! –, depois de negar todas as acusações que lhe têm sido feitas, esgrimindo números que ‘provam’ que ele nem governou nada mal, Sócrates reconheceu ter cometido um erro. Fez-se suspense. Ficámos todos à espera que ele fosse apontar uma medida mal pensada, algo que explicasse o facto de o país estar à beira da bancarrota quando ele saiu. Então, disse:
– Sim, cometi um erro. Se voltasse atrás, não o tinha feito. O erro foi formar um Governo minoritário. Tive de enfrentar permanentemente um Parlamento hostil.
Afinal, o erro de Sócrates não foi bem um erro – foi um acto de coragem. Do qual ele acabou sendo a vítima. Um herói incompreendido. Quase um mártir.
Este tom perpassou por toda a entrevista. Sócrates nunca foi um carrasco – foi sempre uma vítima. Uma vítima da oposição, que chumbou o PEC IV. Uma vítima do Presidente da República, que conspirou contra ele. Uma vítima dos mercados, que agiram com ganância e foram responsáveis pelo aumento da dívida. Uma vítima ‘dessa gente’ que o queria agora calar.
A meio da entrevista, tive uma sensação de déjà vu, de cansaço. Aquele era um filme já visto, num estilo conhecido.
No fim do programa, porém, todos os canais se lançaram com louca excitação para escalpelizar as palavras de Sócrates, mobilizando para o efeito baterias de comentadores que proporcionaram uma verdadeira maratona que durou todo o serão.
Mesmo assim, houve grandes momentos. Na SIC Notícias, Sousa Tavares começou a esboçar uma defesa de Sócrates, sendo energicamente rebatido por Gomes Ferreira, que explicou que inúmeros prejuízos, como os das empresas públicas, das empresas municipais ou da Madeira tinham sido atirados para baixo do tapete e não contabilizados. Por isso, as contas de Sócrates eram «uma mentira».
Sousa Tavares ainda proporcionaria um momento hilariante ao dizer que, na era socrática, ninguém se tinha oposto às grandes obras públicas. Ricardo Costa emendou:
– Miguel, a Manuela Ferreira Leite foi sempre contra!
Mas Miguel não se lembrava. Não se lembrava de Manuela Ferreira Leite ter sido contra o TGV, contra o Aeroporto, etc., e até ter feito uma campanha eleitoral inteira a falar contra os grandes projectos, que – segundo ela – «iam lançar encargos brutais sobre as gerações futuras». Enfim, os defensores de Sócrates revelam em alguns temas uma memória tão boa como a do seu patrono.
O momento mais extraordinário daquela noite guardei-o, porém, para o fim. A certa altura da entrevista, José Sócrates disse, mostrando que não tinha nada a esconder:
– Nunca tive acções, nem dinheiro em offshores. Sempre tive a mesma conta bancária.
– Na Caixa Geral de Depósitos – anotou o jornalista Paulo Ferreira.
– Na Caixa Geral de Depósitos – confirmou Sócrates, humilde.
Ora aí, veio-me uma coisa à cabeça: ‘Mas eu vi uns cheques de Sócrates doutro banco. Estarei a fazer confusão?’. Fui confirmar. Não estava a fazer confusão: os cheques eram mesmo de outro banco, o Totta, tinham escarrapachado o nome completo do cliente – «José Sócrates Carvalho Pinto de Sousa» – e eram às centenas! Para que precisaria Sócrates de tantos cheques? Não faço a menor ideia.
A verdade é que há demasiadas interrogações no percurso de José Sócrates. Foi a coincineração da Cova da Beira, os mamarrachos da Câmara da Guarda, o diploma da Universidade Independente, o Freeport, o Face Oculta, o Tagus Parque… A propósito: de nada disto se falou na entrevista.

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NÃO ESQUECEU NADA. NÃO APRENDEU NADA

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O espectáculo de Sócrates é mais próprio de um circo do que de uma ágora, e a sua mensagem política falha o essencial.

O mundo não é um estúdio de televisão. Portugal também não. Felizmente. Mas José Sócrates parece não o ter ainda descoberto. Por isso quarta-feira, o dia do seu anunciado regresso, foi também um dia revelador. Porque, para quem tivesse dúvidas, ficou claro que ao antigo primeiro-ministro se aplica como uma luva o comentário que Napoleão fez sobre os Bourbons: "Não esqueceram nada e não aprenderam nada."

Talvez não fosse preciso dizer mais nada. O político combativo, o "animal feroz", voltou para nos recordar como nunca é capaz de admitir que errou ou de perdoar. Também nos recordou como se pode ser malcriado e arrogante, como se constrói todo um discurso baseado num permanente extremar de posições, na constante instrumentalização dos números e na redução da realidade a um retrato a preto e branco em que o próprio é a única referência e a única preocupação.

Habilidoso neste tipo de exercício, eficaz a impor os seus temas e a sua agenda, alimenta a convicção de que pode bater todos aos pontos quando, na verdade, o que faz é criar um deserto à sua volta, um deserto onde só sobrevivem os seus fiéis. Como espectáculo é mais próprio de um circo do que de uma ágora, mas há quem goste. Agora como mensagem política falha o essencial.

Ancorado no passado, sem nada de novo para dizer, centrado na sua "narrativa" e nas suas obsessões com "embustes" e ajustes de contas, apenas ofereceu como alternativa, ou como visão, um sonoro "parem com a austeridade". Não foi apenas pouco, foi patético: por muito que nos custe a austeridade, ou que Gaspar nos faça pele de galinha, sabemos que recusá-la é uma ilusão. Só Sócrates parece ainda achar que o mundo era perfeito, e o seu Governo excelso, até um banco falir. Já ninguém acredita nisso.

Os Bourbons, quando regressaram a Paris depois do fim do Império napoleónico, acreditaram poder regressar à "doçura de viver" do Antigo Regime. Sócrates, que veio de Paris, não ambicionaria tanto, mas julgou poder reviver o passado e, sobretudo, reescrevê-lo. Mas o país que encontrou é outro. É um país, no mínimo, mais céptico e menos propenso a embarcar no tipo de ilusionismo em que é especialista. Já não encontra quem lhe compre auto-estradas, aeroportos e cheques-bebé, como em 2009.

Sócrates é daqueles que acredita que pode mudar a realidade como quem muda o cenário num estúdio de televisão. Mais: que o pode fazer através do discurso e daquilo a que chama "acção política". Trata-se de um voluntarismo duplamente perigoso. Primeiro, porque muitas vezes mascara a realidade, e fá-lo de forma deliberada. Em nome da criação de "expectativas positivas", falsifica o real no limite da mitomania: o mundo de Sócrates é um mundo que ele mesmo criou, mas em que acredita ao ponto de achar que esse mundo de fantasia é o verdadeiro. Depois, este esforço de modelação da realidade conduz também ao autoritarismo, um das marcas do seu consulado, pois não aceita contraditório.

Ora se o Portugal de hoje já não é o país imaginário das várias "narrativas" do "sucesso", da "competitividade" e da "modernidade", antes um país confrontado com o duro dia-a-dia de estar a pagar a conta de muitos desvarios, a verdade é que o distanciamento face ao discurso irreal não corresponde ainda a uma compreensão plena dos desafios que temos pela frente.

Há quatro realidades muito duras que ainda não digerimos por completo. A primeira é que o país foi de facto à bancarrota. Há quem o tenha dito alto na última semana (Daniel Bessa, Pedro Soares dos Santos), só que poucos o assumem. Tecnicamente, é verdade, o país nunca falhou os seus pagamentos, mas isso é uma ilusão: apenas não o fizemos porque o Estado (no tempo de Sócrates) começou por obrigar a banca portuguesa a financiá-lo e, depois, chamou a troika. Sem isso estaríamos insolventes.

A segunda é que, para evitar a bancarrota formal (que nenhum PEC4 contornaria, diga-se de passagem), tivemos de aceitar ser um país "de programa", a mesma coisa é dizer, um país de soberania limitada. O dinheiro só chega se passarmos nos exames trimestrais, algo que tende a ser esquecido. Tão esquecido que o próximo cheque da troika pode ser atrasado por estarmos atrasados no plano de cortes na despesa pública. Já alguém pensou nas consequências de esse cheque eventualmente não chegar?

A terceira realidade que nos atormenta é a da dimensão da dívida e o tempo que levaremos a fazê-la regressar a níveis comportáveis. Só para recordar os mais esquecidos: de 2005 a meados de 2011 a dívida passou de 90 para quase 170 mil milhões de euros (passou entretanto os 200 mil milhões) e agora vai ter de baixar para o equivalente a 100 mil milhões. É uma geração de austeridade. É um preço enorme a pagar.

A quarta e última realidade é que não vai ser possível levar este barco a bom porto no actual clima de confrontação política, de que a moção de censura do PS é apenas uma manifestação infeliz e, de certo modo, cobarde. Também não creio que possamos confiar num hipotético "pacto de regime" como o sugerido pelo governador do Banco de Portugal: não poderíamos ter um melhor pacto do que PS, PSD e CDS terem assinado o memorando da troika, mas viu-se o tempo que esse consenso sobreviveu. Em Portugal, com a nossa cultura política, a única solução que compromete os partidos é a partilha directa do poder. Previ-o e defendi-o ainda antes das últimas eleições, vejo agora mais gente a concordar. Não sei é se vamos a tempo e muito menos sei como chegar a um governo de base mais alargada sem ter pelo meio uma crise que deite borda fora o que já alcançámos.

E ainda há o problema Europa.

Voltou a estar na moda falar de guerra na Europa. Uns falam dos seus fantasmas, outros evocam 1913, o ano antes da grande tempestade, há até quem receie que algum tresloucado da Europa do Sul se lembre de reeditar um atentado, desta vez contra um ministro da Europa do Norte. Não estou, confesso, demasiado inquieto, mas por uma razão bem prosaica: quase já não há, na Europa, exércitos dignos desse nome. Para já e por agora essa é a nossa principal garantia de que isto não acaba muito depressa e muito mal.

A falta de militares em armas tem sido compensada pela abundância de plumitivos de espírito bélico. Vivemos numa espécie de nova irracionalidade, em que tudo e qualquer coisa passou a ser culpa, sempre e só, da Alemanha e da chanceler Merkel. Voltámos a vê-lo no caso de Chipre: ainda antes de sabermos o que se tinha passado na famosa reunião do Eurogrupo que decidiu a primeira fórmula do resgate, mesmo quando se multiplicavam as versões contraditórias, o único consenso estabelecido foi que o malvado era o ministro Schäuble.

Junto a esta nova irracionalidade vem a retórica incendiária. É só uma questão de escolher o insulto preferido: "huno", "teutão", "fascista", "neonazi", "Hitler de saias" ou o que mais vier à cabeça. Tudo serve para descrever a Alemanha e os seus líderes. Mesmo pessoas sensatas e inteligentes, como Viriato Soromenho Marques, comparam, no plano moral, o resgate a Chipre à chacina dos judeus, como se aquilo que acabou por acontecer - a falência de dois bancos que foram mal geridos - não devesse ser a regra e não a excepção.

Sobram pois os sinais de que o debate europeu se deslocou da realidade e foi substituído pelo preconceito. O que nos obriga a procurar algum realismo. Um bom começo encontrei-o esta semana nas páginas do mais europeísta dos jornais europeus, o Financial Times, onde três dos seus principais colunistas - Martin Wolf, Gideon Rachman e Wolfgang Münchau - pareceram convergir num ponto: não há nem haverá forma de fazer funcionar bem uma união monetária que agrega países com culturas económicas tão diferentes como a Alemanha, a Holanda e a Finlândia, de um lado, e Portugal, a Grécia e o Chipre, do outro. Sendo assim, aquilo que lhes agradeceríamos era que nos começassem a ajudar a encontrar forma de sair do imbróglio em que os "líderes visionários" de há duas décadas nos enfiaram. E que o fizessem antes de alguma coisa de mais grave acontecer.

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José Manuel Fernandes

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REVIRAVOLTA

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A governação de Passos Coelho falhou em toda a linha. Este já só se aguenta no poder porque não há à vista qualquer alternativa credível.
A equipa de Coelho, Portas e Gaspar, não só não conseguiu tirar o país do beco para onde Sócrates nos tinha atirado, como ainda piorou a situação.

As finanças públicas estão num caos. Há milhares de empresas a fechar, o desemprego é galopante. Os mais pobres passam fome, a classe média extingue-se. A coligação PSD-CDS não reduziu a despesa com as estruturas inúteis do estado. Não se baixaram sequer as rendas das parcerias, como preconizava o memorando com a troika.

Caminhamos para o abismo e o maior drama é que nem sequer há alternativa eleitoral. O PS é inconsistente. Seguro é feito da mesma massa de Passos e Relvas. Vindo das juventudes partidárias, não tem mundividência nem currículo. Não se lhe conhece uma ideia. Apenas se sabe que domina bem o aparelho socialista. Seguro é, afinal, um clone de Passos.

Restaria, como opção, a hipótese de um governo de iniciativa presidencial, apadrinhado por Cavaco Silva. Mas quais seriam as políticas desse seu executivo? Provavelmente, apenas fazer chegar à governação a ala cavaquista do PSD, constituída por gente habituada a bons empregos do estado, negócios fáceis e privilégios; e que está ávida de poder.

E quem seria o preferido de Cavaco para primeiro-ministro? Talvez Rui Rio ou Guilherme de Oliveira Martins.

Mas das escolhas de Cavaco há que temer. Recorde-se que foi o atual presidente que, enquanto líder do PSD, nomeou para secretário-geral Dias Loureiro, um dos principais responsáveis pela maior burla financeira do regime, o BPN. Como primeiro-ministro, designou como líder parlamentar um atual presidiário, Duarte Lima. E já recentemente, para liderar o grupo de sua iniciativa "EPIS - empresários pela inclusão social", escolheu João Rendeiro, o responsável pela fraude do BPP. Não se pode pois confiar em quem erra tão clamorosamente em nomeações de tamanha importância.

Os portugueses estão em fim de linha, reféns de um governo incompetente, e não depositam qualquer esperança na oposição. Sabem que o Presidente é desastrado. Só com novos protagonistas poderemos sair deste atoleiro. O regime precisa de uma reviravolta.

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Paulo Morais

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OSCAR PISTORIUS CASE: THE BLONDE IS THE VICTIM HERE, BLADE

If you have just accidentally shot dead the woman you love, what do you do? Is it:

a) Dial 999 and summon an ambulance

b) Call your girlfriend’s parents and beg forgiveness

c) Go to a church and pray hard

d) Hire a leading PR to manage your reputation.

Call me a foolish romantic, but I would rule out “d” right away. If you were innocent and grief-stricken, why would your thoughts turn to “crisis communications”? Yet this is exactly what Oscar Pistorius did within hours of the violent death of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp at his home in Pretoria.

The 26-year-old Paralympian called up Stuart Higgins, the former editor of The Sun and now a public relations expert. Pistorius’s PR team lost no time in relaunching his website to put the most positive spin on what they variously describe as “these tragic events” and “this terrible, terrible tragedy”. Looking at the website, with its stirring pictures of the Blade Runner in action, you notice that the words murder and death do not feature. For, lo, we have entered the soothing land of PR euphemism, where world-famous disabled heroes do not gun down.

Among those paying tribute to Oscar is his uncle, Arnold Pistorius. “Words cannot adequately describe our feelings,” says Arnold. “The lives of our entire family have been turned upside down for ever by this unimaginable human tragedy and Reeva’s family have suffered a terrible loss.”

Observe that it is the Pistorius family which has suffered “an unimaginable human tragedy” – their golden boy faces a career-wrecking charge of premeditated murder. The family of Reeva Steenkamp, the victim of the crime who appears to have been shot three times while in the toilet, has merely suffered “a terrible loss”.

Reeva’s irrelevance to the main event was confirmed by a tabloid headline. “Blade Slays Blonde”, it proclaimed, not bothering to give her the dignity of a name. On Tuesday, as a hearse took Reeva’s body to the crematorium, Oscar Pistorius sobbed throughout a bail hearing. It was an affecting performance. One might almost call it Oscar-winning. Commentators began to admit they felt a sneaky sympathy for the stricken track star. Even the magistrate asked him if he was feeling all right.

And so, very cunningly, the tragedy is appropriated from the dead woman and becomes the tragedy of the man accused of killing her. The fact that, according to a neighbour, he silenced Steenkamp’s screams with two further gunshots, is of little consequence to Pistorius’s supporters.

“I didn’t have my prosthetic legs on. I felt vulnerable,” explained Pistorius, playing the disability card for the first time in a life that has, until now, been remarkably free of self-pity. He was explaining why he fired at a locked bathroom door behind which he was convinced there was a burglar. Because burglars always lock themselves in bathrooms, don’t they? To steal the soap and the hand towel. Just as girlfriends always lock the door when they need a pee in the middle of the night. And men who think there’s a burglar in the bathroom never bother to shout out first and give their girlfriend a chance to say, “Baby, put the gun down, it’s only me.”

Pistorius’s story has more holes than a colander. I don’t feel an ounce of pity for him. Of course, his PR man, Stuart Higgins, begs to differ: “Our job is to capture some of the support that Oscar is receiving from all over the world, lots of positive messages from people who still believe in him,” explained Higgins.

Fame – that is, real global fame of the kind Oscar Pistorius enjoys – has its own protective forcefield. You can believe in a star even when you no longer believe the story they’re trying to peddle. That’s why Michael Jackson kept selling records. That’s why, even now, there are Lance Armstrong fans who have clung to the faith. When fans say they still “believe” in a celebrity, what they mean is: “I refuse to let any unpleasant facts interfere with the noble image I have of you.” Even if those unpleasant facts include the corpse of a 29-year-old model and law student who was, by all accounts, as lovely as her face.

At the height of the Jimmy Savile scandal, the entertainer’s niece told ITV’s This Morning that her relatives were angry when she decided to speak out about what creepy Uncle Jimmy had done to her. “Without his fame, they’d be nothing,” explained the niece.

Fame can do that. It zips people’s lips and mortgages their hearts. Only weeks ago, Oscar Pistorius fired a gun in a restaurant. The bullet narrowly missed a friend’s foot, but police were not called. If a complaint had been made, maybe the testosterone-fuelled athlete might have realised he was not above the law. But the restaurant owner was happy to accept that no gun had been fired because Oscar’s friends lied to protect his reputation.

The obvious comparison here is with O J Simpson, who went on trial in Los Angeles in 1995 for the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman. Like Pistorius, Simpson had form when it came to domestic violence. The prosecution thought it had a solid case. But, also like Blade Runner, O J was a good-looking sports god who had overcome considerable odds to find fame, fortune and a beautiful blonde. Race was a complicating factor, but it was O J’s celebrity that turned a vicious murder case into the Trial of the Century. Last September, 18 years after Simpson was sensationally acquitted, Kato Kaelin (a TV personality and witness at the trial) was asked if Simpson killed Brown and Goldman. Kaelin replied: “The statute of limitations has now passed… so I can now say… yes, he did it.”

Asked why he let O J Simpson get away with murder, Kaelin said: “I was too scared. I was terrified… People hated me. I’ve been spat upon. They threw gum in my coffee.”

Fame can do that, too. Never underestimate the human desire not to know the worst about our heroes.

Let me leave you with a piercing irony. Just days before Reeva Steenkamp was killed, she sent tweets offering her support for female victims of violence. Her country has a deplorable record in that area. On average, a South African woman is killed every eight hours by her partner or relative.

After her funeral, Steenkamp’s Uncle Mike told reporters that his niece wanted to be an activist for ending abuse against women. “Unfortunately, it has swung right around, but I think that the Lord knows that her statement is more powerful now,” he said.

It certainly is. When Oscar Pistorius’s case comes to court, it should be the man who faces the murder charge, not the sporting legend. Gold medallists can be made of baser metals. There is only one victim of unimaginable human tragedy here. Her name was Reeva Steenkamp.

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SCANDALE BANCAIRE PORTUGAIS: LES VACANCES A RIO DE DIAS LOUREIRO

Le président de la République portugaise Anibal Cavaco Silva a décidé de déferrer au Tribunal constitutionnel, c'est une de ses prérogatives, certaines dispositions d'un budget 2013 d'austérité aggravée parce qu'il a des «doutes» sur le caractère équilibré des efforts imposés à la population d'un pays qui va entrer dans sa troisième année consécutive de récession, une situation inédite depuis la révolution des oeillets de 1974. Des doutes?

Au moment même où ce chef de l'Etat à la réputation personnelle plus que ternie se livrait à cette manoeuvre parfaitement démagogique, on apprenait qu'une des principales figures du «cavaquisme», Manuel Dias Loureiro, passait les fêtes de fin d'année au Copacabana Palace de Rio de Janeiro, où une simple chambre coûte quelque 600 euros la nuit. Soit d'avantage que le salaire minimum du pays. Voilà qui devrait suffire à lever les «doutes» de l'occupant du palais présidentiel de Belem.

Détenteur de portefeuilles ministériels clefs dans les gouvernements PSD dont Cavaco Silva était le chef, ancien membre du Conseil d'Etat, ce saint des saints de la caste politicienne portugaise, Dias Loureiro, «protégé» de Cavaco, est une figure centrale de ce qui devrait être un énorme scandale européen, une affaire d'Etat, la faillite de la banque BPN. Cette faillite frauduleuse pourrait coûter au contribuable portugais, celui là même qui resserre sa ceinture d'un cran année après année, jusqu'à sept milliards d'euros, soit près d'un dixième de l'aide financière internationale que le pays a du demander en 2011, avec comme contrepartie le programme de remise en ordre des finances publiques surveillé par la «troïka» UE-BCE-FMI.

L'activité principale des dirigeants de cette banque du «bloc central» (les partis de centre gauche et centre droit qui alternent au pouvoir depuis la chute de la dictature salazariste) consistait à accorder, par dizaines ou centaines de millions d'euros, des prêts à leurs amis, familiers, clients...et à eux-mêmes. Dans un reportage remarquable, le journaliste de la télévision SIC Pedro Coelho vient de révéler, par exemple, qu'une entreprise de ciment de la galaxie Dias Loureiro avait reçu du BPN un prêt de 90 millions d'euros. Une autre personnalité du «cavaquisme» comme Duarte Lima, ancien chef du groupe parlementaire PSD, emprisonné à Lisbonne et soupçonné de meurtre par la police brésilienne, a détourné 49 millions d'euros. Cavaco lui-même avait bénéficié, dans des conditions suspectes, d'une attribution à prix cassé par le patron du BPN José Oliveira Costa, un de ses anciens secrétaires d'Etat, d'actions de la SLN, holding de tête de la banque, qu'il a pu revendre avec une plus value de 140%. En bref, le scandale du BPN est très largement celui du «cavaquisme». Et ce personnage a des «doutes» sur l'équité de la politique d'austérité ?

Ces milliards d'euros sont considérés comme définitivement perdus...mais par pour tous le monde. Quand le scandale a éclaté en 2009, la presse portugaise a révélé que Dias Loureiro, administrateur de la SLN, avait soigneusement organisé son insolvabilité personnelle en transférant ses avoirs à des membres de sa famille ou des sociétés offshore. De quoi payer la chambre au Copacabana Palace, sans doute ?

Et au fait, qui donc Dias Loureiro a-t-il retrouvé pour les fêtes dans cet hôtel de rêve, jadis favoris des vedettes de Hollywood ? Nul autre que Miguel Relvas, pilier de l'actuel gouvernement PSD, ami proche et «père Joseph» du Premier ministre Pedro Passos Coelho. Relvas, dont le maintien au gouvernement est en soi un scandale, alors qu'il a été convaincu d'avoir obtenu frauduleusement une licence universitaire afin de pouvoir porter ce titre de «docteur» dont la bourgeoisie d'Etat lusitanienne est si ridiculement friande.

Comme Armando Vara, ami intime de l'ancien Premier ministre «socialiste» José Socrates qui a placé le FMI sous la tutelle de la «troïka», Dias Loureiro et les «cavaquistes» du BPN, sont l'illustration que la politique professionnelle est bien, dans certaines «démocraties» européennes, le chemin le plus sûr vers l'enrichissement personnel rapide d'une classe d'aventuriers. En Grèce, en Irlande, en Espagne, au Portugal. Et en France ?

C'est la première leçon. La seconde, c'est que les graves dysfonctionnements de systèmes judiciaires eux-mêmes gangrénés par la corruption et les réseaux d'influence permettent à de tels individus de jouir en toute impunité de biens mal acquis. Il est à noter que les responsables directs des désastres bancaires à l'origine directe de la crise financière globale ont joui jusqu'ici aux Etats-Unis et en Europe, à de rares exceptions près, d'une impunité civile et pénale absolue.

Enfin, cerise sur le gâteau, la surveillance bancaire confiée désormais dans la zone euro à la Banque centrale européenne, y sera sous la responsabilité du vice-président Vitor Constancio, hiérarque socialiste portugais et gouverneur de la Banque du Portugal, le régulateur bancaire, quand les «cavaquistes» du BPN se livraient à leurs acrobaties nauséabondes. Fermez le ban !

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OS FANTASMAS

.Esta coisa de escrever crónicas “é um jogo permanente entre o estilo e a substância”. Uma luta entre “o deboche estilístico” do gozo da escrita e “a frieza analítica” do pensamento do cronista. Por isso, enquanto cidadão, só posso ver este governo como uma verdadeira praga bíblica que caiu sobre um povo que o não merecia. Mas, enquanto cronista, encaro-o como uma dádiva dos céus, um maná dos deuses, “um harém de metáforas”, uma verdadeira girândola de piruetas estilísticas.

Tomemos como exemplo o ministro Gaspar, licenciado e doutorado em Economia, fez parte da carreira em Bruxelas onde foi director do Departamento  de Estudos do BCE. Por cá, passou pelo Banco de Portugal, foi chefe de gabinete de Miguel Beleza e colaborador de Braga de Macedo. É o actual ministro das Finanças. Pois bem. O cronista olha para este “talento” e que vê nele?! Um retardado mental? Uma rábula com olheiras? Um pantomineiro idiota? Não me compete, enquanto cidadão, dar a resposta. Mas não posso deixar de referir a reacção ministerial à manifestação de 15 de Setembro que, repito, adjectivava os governantes onde se inclui o soporífero Gaspar, como “gatunos, mafiosos, carteiristas, chulos, chupistas, vigaristas, filhos da puta”. Pois bem. Gaspar afirmou na Assembleia da República que o povo português, este mesmo povo português que assim se referia ao seu governo, “revelou-se o melhor povo do mundo e o melhor activo de Portugal”! Assumpção autocrítica de alguém que também é capaz de, lucidamente, se entender, por exemplo, como um“chulo” do país? Incapacidade congénita de interpretar o designativo metafórico de “filhos da puta”? Não me parece. Parece-me sim um exercício de cinismo, sarcástico e obsceno, de quem se está simplesmente “a cagar” para o povo que protesta. A ser assim, julgo como perfeitamente adequado repetir aqui uma passagem de um texto em forma de requerimento “poético” de 1934. Assim: “A Nação confiou-lhe os seus destinos?...Então, comprima, aperte os intestinos. Se lhe escapar um traque, não se importe…Quem sabe se o cheirá-lo nos dá sorte? Quantos porão as suas esperanças num traque do ministro das Finanças?...E quem viver aflito, sem recursos, já não distingue os traques dos discursos.”

Provavelmente o sr. Ministro desconhecerá a história daquele gajo que era tão feio, tão feio, que os gases andavam sempre num vaivém constante para cima e para baixo, sem saber se sair pela boca se pelo ânus, dado que os dois orifícios esteticamente se confundiam. Pois bem. O sr. ministro é o primeiro, honra lhe seja concedida, que já confunde os traques com os discursos. Os seus. Desta vez, o traque saiu-lhe pelo local de onde deveria ter saído o discurso! Ou seja - e desculpar-me-ão a grosseria linguística – em vez de falar, “cagou-se”. Para o povo português. Lamentavelmente.

Outro exemplar destes políticos que fazem as delícias de um cronista é Cavaco Silva. Cavaco está politicamente senil. Soletra umas solenidades de circunstância, meia dúzia de banalidades e, limitado intelectualmente como é, permanece “amarrado à âncora da sua ignorância”. Só neste contexto se compreende o espanto expresso publicamente com “o sorriso das vacas”, as lamúrias por uma reforma insuficiente de 10 mil euros mensais, a constante repetição do “estou muito preocupado” e outros lugares comuns que fazem deste parolo de Boliqueime uma fotocópia histórica de Américo Tomás, o almirante de Salazar. Já o escrevi aqui várias vezes. Na cabeça de Cavaco reina um vácuo absoluto. Pelo que, quando fala, balbucia algumas baboseiras lapalicianas reveladoras de quem não pode falar do mundo complexo em que vivemos com a inteligência de um homem de Estado. Simplesmente porque não a tem. Cavaco é uma irrelevância de quem nada há a esperar, a não ser afirmações como a recentemente proferida aquando das comemorações do 5 de Outubro de que “o futuro são os jovens deste país”! Pudera! Cavaco não surpreenderia ninguém se subscrevesse por exemplo a afirmação do Tomás ao referir-se à promulgação de um qualquer despacho número cem dizendo que lhe fora dado esse número “não por acaso mas  porque ele vem na sequência de outros noventa e nove anteriores…”. Tal e  qual!

Termino esta crónica socorrendo-me da adaptação feliz de um aforismo do comendador Marques de Correia e que diz assim: “Faz de Gaspar um novo Salazar, faz de Cavaco um novo Tomás e canta ó tempo volta para trás”. É que só falta mesmo isso. Que o tempo volte para trás. Porque Salazar e Tomás já os temos por cá.

P.S.: Permitam-me a assumpção da ‘mea' culpa. Critiquei aqui violentamente José

Sócrates. Mantenho o que disse. Mas hoje, comparando-o com esse garotelho

sem qualquer arcaboiço para governar chamado Passos Coelho, reconheço que é

como comparar merda com pudim. Para Sócrates, obviamente, a metáfora do

pudim. Sinceramente, nunca pensei ter de escrever isto.

Luís Manuel Cunha

Professor

In “Jornal de Barcelos”

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HANGOVER EM REVISTA

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Of the miseries regularly inflicted on humankind, some are so minor and yet, while they last, so painful that one wonders how, after all this time, a remedy cannot have been found. If scientists do not have a cure for cancer, that makes sense. But the common cold, the menstrual cramp? The hangover is another condition of this kind. It is a preventable malady: don’t drink. Nevertheless, people throughout time have found what seemed to them good reason for recourse to alcohol. One attraction is alcohol’s power to disinhibit—to allow us, at last, to tell off our neighbor or make an improper suggestion to his wife. Alcohol may also persuade us that we have found the truth about life, a comforting experience rarely available in the sober hour. Through the lens of alcohol, the world seems nicer. (“I drink to make other people interesting,” the theatre critic George Jean Nathan used to say.) For all these reasons, drinking cheers people up. See Proverbs 31:6-7: “Give . . . wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more.” It works, but then, in the morning, a new misery presents itself.
A hangover peaks when alcohol that has been poured into the body is finally eliminated from it—that is, when the blood-alcohol level returns to zero. The toxin is now gone, but the damage it has done is not. By fairly common consent, a hangover will involve some combination of headache, upset stomach, thirst, food aversion, nausea, diarrhea, tremulousness, fatigue, and a general feeling of wretchedness. Scientists haven’t yet found all the reasons for this network of woes, but they have proposed various causes. One is withdrawal, which would bring on the tremors and also sweating. A second factor may be dehydration. Alcohol interferes with the secretion of the hormone that inhibits urination. Hence the heavy traffic to the rest rooms at bars and parties. The resulting dehydration seems to trigger the thirst and lethargy. While that is going on, the alcohol may also be inducing hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), which converts into light-headedness and muscle weakness, the feeling that one’s bones have turned to jello. Meanwhile, the body, to break down the alcohol, is releasing chemicals that may be more toxic than alcohol itself; these would result in nausea and other symptoms. Finally, the alcohol has produced inflammation, which in turn causes the white blood cells to flood the bloodstream with molecules called cytokines. Apparently, cytokines are the source of the aches and pains and lethargy that, when our bodies are attacked by a flu virus—and likewise, perhaps, by alcohol—encourage us to stay in bed rather than go to work, thereby freeing up the body’s energy for use by the white cells in combatting the invader. In a series of experiments, mice that were given a cytokine inducer underwent dramatic changes. Adult males wouldn’t socialize with young males new to their cage. Mothers displayed “impaired nest-building.” Many people will know how these mice felt.

But hangover symptoms are not just physical; they are cognitive as well. People with hangovers show delayed reaction times and difficulties with attention, concentration, and visual-spatial perception. A group of airplane pilots given simulated flight tests after a night’s drinking put in substandard performances. Similarly, automobile drivers, the morning after, get low marks on simulated road tests. Needless to say, this is a hazard, and not just for those at the wheel. There are laws against drunk driving, but not against driving with a hangover.

Hangovers also have an emotional component. Kingsley Amis, who was, in his own words, one of the foremost drunks of his time, and who wrote three books on drinking, described this phenomenon as “the metaphysical hangover”: “When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you, start telling yourself that what you have is a hangover. . . . You have not suffered a minor brain lesion, you are not all that bad at your job, your family and friends are not leagued in a conspiracy of barely maintained silence about what a shit you are, you have not come at last to see life as it really is.” Some people are unable to convince themselves of this. Amis described the opening of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” with the hero discovering that he has been changed into a bug, as the best literary representation of a hangover.

The severity of a hangover depends, of course, on how much you drank the night before, but that is not the only determinant. What, besides alcohol, did you consume at that party? If you took other drugs as well, your hangover may be worse. And what kind of alcohol did you drink? In general, darker drinks, such as red wine and whiskey, have higher levels of congeners—impurities produced by the fermentation process, or added to enhance flavor—than do light-colored drinks such as white wine, gin, and vodka. The greater the congener content, the uglier the morning. Then there are your own characteristics—for example, your drinking pattern. Unjustly, habitually heavy drinkers seem to have milder hangovers. Your sex is also important. A woman who matches drinks with a man is going to get drunk faster than he, partly because she has less body water than he does, and less of the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase, which breaks down alcohol. Apparently, your genes also have a vote, as does your gene pool. Almost forty per cent of East Asians have a variant, less efficient form of aldehyde dehydrogenase, another enzyme necessary for alcohol processing. Therefore, they start showing signs of trouble after just a few sips—they flush dramatically—and they get drunk fast. This is an inconvenience for some Japanese and Korean businessmen. They feel that they should drink with their Western colleagues. Then they crash to the floor and have to make awkward phone calls in the morning.

Hangovers are probably as old as alcohol use, which dates back to the Stone Age. Some anthropologists have proposed that alcohol production may have predated agriculture; in any case, it no doubt stimulated that development, because in many parts of the world the cereal harvest was largely given over to beer-making. Other prehistorians have speculated that alcohol intoxication may have been one of the baffling phenomena, like storms, dreams, and death, that propelled early societies toward organized religion. The ancient Egyptians, who, we are told, made seventeen varieties of beer, believed that their god Osiris invented this agreeable beverage. They buried their dead with supplies of beer for use in the afterlife.

Alcohol was also one of our ancestors’ foremost medicines. Berton Roueché, in a 1960 article on alcohol for The New Yorker, quoted a prominent fifteenth-century German physician, Hieronymus Brunschwig, on the range of physical ills curable by brandy: head sores, pallor, baldness, deafness, lethargy, toothache, mouth cankers, bad breath, swollen breasts, short-windedness, indigestion, flatulence, jaundice, dropsy, gout, bladder infections, kidney stones, fever, dog bites, and infestation with lice or fleas. Additionally, in many times and places, alcohol was one of the few safe things to drink. Water contamination is a very old problem.

Some words for hangover, like ours, refer prosaically to the cause: the Egyptians say they are “still drunk,” the Japanese “two days drunk,” the Chinese “drunk overnight.” The Swedes get “smacked from behind.” But it is in languages that describe the effects rather than the cause that we begin to see real poetic power. Salvadorans wake up “made of rubber,” the French with a “wooden mouth” or a “hair ache.” The Germans and the Dutch say they have a “tomcat,” presumably wailing. The Poles, reportedly, experience a “howling of kittens.” My favorites are the Danes, who get “carpenters in the forehead.” In keeping with the saying about the Eskimos’ nine words for snow, the Ukrainians have several words for hangover. And, in keeping with the Jews-don’t-drink rule, Hebrew didn’t even have one word until recently. Then the experts at the Academy of the Hebrew Language, in Tel Aviv, decided that such a term was needed, so they made one up: hamarmoret, derived from the word for fermentation. (Hamarmoret echoes a usage of Jeremiah’s, in Lamentations 1:20, which the King James Bible translates as “My bowels are troubled.”) There is a biochemical basis for Jewish abstinence. Many Jews—fifty per cent, in one estimate—carry a variant gene for alcohol dehydrogenase. Therefore, they, like the East Asians, have a low tolerance for alcohol.

As for hangover remedies, they are legion. There are certain unifying themes, however. When you ask people, worldwide, how to deal with a hangover, their first answer is usually the hair of the dog. The old faithful in this category is the Bloody Mary, but books on curing hangovers—I have read three, and that does not exhaust the list—describe more elaborate potions, often said to have been invented in places like Cap d’Antibes by bartenders with names like Jean-Marc. An English manual, Andrew Irving’s “How to Cure a Hangover” (2004), devotes almost a hundred pages to hair-of-the-dog recipes, including the Suffering Bastard (gin, brandy, lime juice, bitters, and ginger ale); the Corpse Reviver (Pernod, champagne, and lemon juice); and the Thomas Abercrombie (two Alka-Seltzers dropped into a double shot of tequila). Kingsley Amis suggests taking Underberg bitters, a highly alcoholic digestive: “The resulting mild convulsions and cries of shock are well worth witnessing. But thereafter a comforting glow supervenes.” Many people, however, simply drink some more of what they had the night before. My Ukrainian informant described his morning-after protocol for a vodka hangover as follows: “two shots of vodka, then a cigarette, then another shot of vodka.” A Japanese source suggested wearing a sake-soaked surgical mask.

Application of the hair of the dog may sound like nothing more than a way of getting yourself drunk enough so that you don’t notice you have a hangover, but, according to Wayne Jones, of the Swedish National Laboratory of Forensic Medicine, the biochemistry is probably more complicated than that. Jones’s theory is that the liver, in processing alcohol, first addresses itself to ethanol, which is the alcohol proper, and then moves on to methanol, a secondary ingredient of many wines and spirits. Because methanol breaks down into formic acid, which is highly toxic, it is during this second stage that the hangover is most crushing. If at that point you pour in more alcohol, the body will switch back to ethanol processing. This will not eliminate the hangover—the methanol (indeed, more of it now) is still waiting for you round the bend—but it delays the worst symptoms. It may also mitigate them somewhat. On the other hand, you are drunk again, which may create difficulty about going to work.

As for the non-alcoholic means of combatting hangover, these fall into three categories: before or while drinking, before bed, and the next morning. Many people advise you to eat a heavy meal, with lots of protein and fats, before or while drinking. If you can’t do that, at least drink a glass of milk. In Africa, the same purpose is served by eating peanut butter. The other most frequent before-and-during recommendation is water, lots of it. Proponents of this strategy tell you to ask for a glass of water with every drink you order, and then make yourself chug-a-lug the water before addressing the drink.

A recently favored antidote, both in Asia and in the West, is sports drinks, taken either the morning after or, more commonly, at the party itself. A fast-moving bar drink these days is Red Bull, an energy drink, mixed with vodka or with the herbal liqueur Jägermeister. (The latter cocktail is a Jag-bomb.) Some people say that the Red Bull holds the hangover at bay, but apparently its primary effect is to blunt the depressive force of alcohol—no surprise, since an eight-ounce serving of Red Bull contains more caffeine than two cans of Coke. According to fans, you can rock all night. According to Maria Lucia Souza-Formigoni, a psychobiology researcher at the Federal University of São Paolo, that’s true, and dangerous. After a few drinks with Red Bull, you’re drunk but you don’t know it, and therefore you may engage in high-risk behaviors—driving, going home with a questionable companion—rather than passing out quietly in your chair. Red Bull’s manufacturers have criticized the methodology of Souza-Formigoni’s study and have pointed out that they never condoned mixing their product with alcohol.

When you get home, is there anything you can do before going to bed? Those still able to consider such a question are advised, again, to consume buckets of water, and also to take some Vitamin C. Koreans drink a bowl of water with honey, presumably to head off the hypoglycemia. Among the young, one damage-control measure is the ancient Roman method, induced vomiting. Nic van Oudtshoorn’s “The Hangover Handbook” (1997) thoughtfully provides a recipe for an emetic: mix mustard powder with water. If you have “bed spins,” sleep with one foot on the floor.

Now to the sorrows of the morning. The list-topping recommendation, apart from another go at the water cure, is the greasy-meal cure. (An American philosophy professor: “Have breakfast at Denny’s.” An English teen-ager: “Eat two McDonald’s hamburgers. They have a secret ingredient for hangovers.”) Spicy foods, especially Mexican, are popular, along with eggs, as in the Denny’s breakfast. Another egg-based cure is the prairie oyster, which involves vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, and a raw egg yolk to be consumed whole. Sugar, some say, should be reapplied. A reporter at the Times: “Drink a six-pack of Coke.” Others suggest fruit juice. In Scotland, there is a soft drink called Irn-Bru, described to me by a local as tasting like melted plastic. Irn-Bru is advertised to the Scots as “Your Other National Drink.” Also widely employed are milk-based drinks. Teen-agers recommend milkshakes and smoothies. My contact in Calcutta said buttermilk. “You can also pour it over your head,” he added. “Very soothing.”

Elsewhere on the international front, many people in Asia and the Near East take strong tea. The Italians and the French prefer strong coffee. (Italian informant: add lemon. French informant: add salt. Alcohol researchers: stay away from coffee—it’s a diuretic and will make you more dehydrated.) Germans eat pickled herring; the Japanese turn to pickled plums; the Vietnamese drink a wax-gourd juice. Moroccans say to chew cumin seeds; Andeans, coca leaves. Russians swear by pickle brine. An ex-Soviet ballet dancer told me, “Pickle juice or a shot of vodka or pickle juice with a shot of vodka.”

Many folk cures for hangovers are soups: menudo in Mexico, mondongo in Puerto Rico, işkembe çorbasi in Turkey, patsa in Greece, khashi in Georgia. The fact that all of the above involve tripe may mean something. Hungarians favor a concoction of cabbage and smoked meats, sometimes forthrightly called “hangover soup.” The Russians’ morning-after soup, solyanka, is, of course, made with pickle juice. The Japanese have traditionally relied on miso soup, though a while ago there was a fashion for a vegetable soup invented and marketed by one Kazu Tateishi, who claimed that it cured cancer as well as hangovers.

I read this list of food cures to Manuela Neuman, a Canadian researcher on alcohol-induced liver damage, and she laughed at only one, the six-pack of Coke. Many of the cures probably work, she said, on the same distraction principle as the hair of the dog: “Take the spicy foods, for example. They divert the body’s attention away from coping with the alcohol to coping with the spices, which are also a toxin. So you have new problems—with your stomach, with your esophagus, with your respiration—rather than the problem with the headache, or that you are going to the washroom every five minutes.” The high-fat and high-protein meals operate in the same way, she said. The body turns to the food and forgets about the alcohol for the time being, thus delaying the hangover and possibly alleviating it. As for the differences among the many food recommendations, Neuman said that any country’s hangover cure, like the rest of its cultural practices, is an adaptation to the environment. Chilies are readily available in Mexico, peanut butter in Africa. People use what they have. Neuman also pointed out that local cures will reflect the properties of local brews. If Russians favor pickle juice, they are probably right to, because their drink is vodka: “Vodka is a very pure alcohol. It doesn’t have the congeners that you find, for example, in whiskey in North America. The congeners are also toxic, independent of alcohol, and will have their own effects. With vodka you are just going to have pure-alcohol effects, and one of the most important of those is dehydration. The Russians drink a lot of water with their vodka, and that combats the dehydration. The pickle brine will have the same effect. It’s salty, so they’ll drink more water, and that’s what they need.”

Many hangover cures—the soups, the greasy breakfast—are comfort foods, and that, apart from any sworn-by ingredients, may be their chief therapeutic property, but some other remedies sound as though they were devised by the witches in “Macbeth.” Kingsley Amis recommended a mixture of Bovril and vodka. There is also a burnt-toast cure. Such items suggest that what some hungover people are seeking is not so much relief as atonement. The same can be said of certain non-food recommendations, such as exercise. One source says that you should do a forty-minute workout, another that you should run six miles—activities that may have little attraction for the hung over. Additional procedures said to be effective are an intravenous saline drip and kidney dialysis, which, apart from their lack of appeal, are not readily available.

There are other non-ingested remedies. Amazon will sell you a refrigeratable eye mask, an aromatherapy inhaler, and a vinyl statue of St. Vivian, said to be the patron saint of the hung over. She comes with a stand and a special prayer.

The most widely used over-the-counter remedy is no doubt aspirin. Advil, or ibuprofen, and Alka-Seltzer—there is a special formula for hangovers, Alka-Seltzer Wake-Up Call—are probably close runners-up. (Tylenol, or acetaminophen, should not be used, because alcohol increases its toxicity to the liver.) Also commonly recommended are Vitamin C and B-complex vitamins. But those are almost home remedies. In recent years, pharmaceutical companies have come up with more specialized formulas: Chaser, NoHang, BoozEase, PartySmart, Sob’r-K HangoverStopper, Hangover Prevention Formula, and so on. In some of these, such as Sob’r-K and Chaser, the primary ingredient is carbon, which, according to the manufacturers, soaks up toxins. Others are herbal compounds, featuring such ingredients as ginseng, milk thistle, borage, and extracts of prickly pear, artichoke, and guava leaf. These and other O.T.C. remedies aim to boost biochemicals that help the body deal with toxins. A few remedies have scientific backing. Manuela Neuman, in lab tests, found that milk-thistle extract, which is an ingredient in NoHang and Hangover Helper, does protect cells from damage by alcohol. A research team headed by Jeffrey Wiese, of Tulane University, tested prickly-pear extract, the key ingredient in Hangover Prevention Formula, on human subjects and found significant improvement with the nausea, dry mouth, and food aversion but not with other, more common symptoms, such as headache.

Five years ago, there was a flurry in the press over a new O.T.C. remedy called RU-21 (i.e., Are you twenty-one?). According to the reports, this wonder drug was the product of twenty-five years of painstaking research by the Russian Academy of Sciences, which developed it for K.G.B. agents who wanted to stay sober while getting their contacts drunk and prying information out of them. During the Cold War, we were told, the formula was a state secret, but in 1999 it was declassified. Now it was ours! “HERE’S ONE COMMUNIST PLOT AMERICANS CAN REALLY GET BEHIND,” the headline in the Washington Post said. “BOTTOMS UP TO OUR BUDDIES IN RUSSIA,” the Cleveland Plain Dealer said. The literature on RU-21 was mysterious, however. If the formula was developed to keep your head clear, how come so many reports said that it didn’t suppress the effects of alcohol? Clearly, it couldn’t work both ways. When I put this question to Emil Chiaberi, a co-founder of RU-21’s manufacturer, Spirit Sciences, in California, he answered, “No, no, no. It is true that succinic acid”—a key ingredient of RU-21—“was tested at the Russian Academy of Sciences, including secret laboratories that worked for the K.G.B. But it didn’t do what they wanted. It didn’t keep people sober, and so it never made it with the K.G.B. men. Actually, it does improve your condition a little. In Russia, I’ve seen people falling under the table plenty of times—they drink differently over there—and if they took a few of these pills they were able to get up and walk around, and maybe have a couple more drinks. But no, what those scientists discovered, really by accident, was a way to prevent hangover.” (Like many other O.T.C. remedies, RU-21 is best taken before or while drinking, not the next morning.) Asians love the product, Chiaberi says. “It flies off the shelves there.” In the United States, it is big with the Hollywood set: “For every film festival—Sundance, the Toronto Film Festival—we get calls asking us to send them RU-21 for parties. So it has that glamour thing.”

Most cures for hangover—indeed, most statements about hangover—have not been tested. Jeffrey Wiese and his colleagues, in a 2000 article in Annals of Internal Medicine, reported that in the preceding thirty-five years more than forty-seven hundred articles on alcohol intoxication had been published, but that only a hundred and eight of these dealt with hangover. There may be more information on hangover cures in college newspapers—a rich source—than in the scientific literature. And the research that has been published is often weak. A team of scientists attempting to review the literature on hangover cures were able to assemble only fifteen articles, and then they had to throw out all but eight on methodological grounds. There have been more studies in recent years, but historically this is not a subject that has captured scientists’ hearts.

Which is curious, because anyone who discovered a widely effective hangover cure would make a great deal of money. Doing the research is hard, though. Lab tests with cell samples are relatively simple to conduct, as are tests with animals, some of which have been done. In one experiment, with a number of rats suffering from artificially induced hangovers, ninety per cent of the animals died, but in a group that was first given Vitamins B and C, together with cysteine, an amino acid contained in some O.T.C. remedies, there were no deaths. (Somehow this is not reassuring.) The acid test, however, is in clinical trials, with human beings, and these are complicated. Basically, what you have to do is give a group of people a lot to drink, apply the remedy in question, and then, the next morning, score them on a number of measures in comparison with people who consumed the same amount of alcohol without the remedy. But there are many factors that you have to control for: the sex of the subjects; their general health; their family history; their past experience with alcohol; the type of alcohol you give them; the amount of food and water they consume before, during, and after; and the circumstances under which they drink, among other variables. (Wiese and his colleagues, in their prickly-pear experiment, provided music so that the subjects could dance, as at a party.) Ideally, there should also be a large sample—many subjects.

All that costs money, and researchers do not pay out of pocket. They depend on funding institutions—typically, universities, government agencies, and foundations. With all those bodies, a grant has to be O.K.’d by an ethics committee, and such committees’ ethics may stop short of getting people drunk. For one thing, they are afraid that the subjects will hurt themselves. (All the studies I read specified that the subjects were sent home by taxi or limousine after their contribution to science.) Furthermore, many people believe that alcohol abusers should suffer the next morning—that this is a useful deterrent. Robert Lindsey, the president of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, told me that he wasn’t sure about that. His objection to hangover-cure research was simply that it was a misuse of resources: “Fifteen million people in this country are alcohol-dependent. That’s a staggering number! They need help: not with hangovers but with the cause of hangovers—alcohol addiction.” Robert Swift, an alcohol researcher who teaches at Brown University, counters that if scientists, through research, could provide the public with better information on the cognitive impairments involved in hangover, we might be able to prevent accidents. He compares the situation to the campaigns against distributing condoms, on the ground that this would increase promiscuity. In fact, the research has shown that free condoms did not have that effect. What they did was cut down on unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease.

Manufacturers of O.T.C. remedies are sensitive to the argument that they are enablers, and their literature often warns against heavy drinking. The message may be unashamedly mixed, however. The makers of NoHang, on their Web page, say what your mother would: “It is recommended that you drink moderately and responsibly.” At the same time, they tell you that with NoHang “you can drink the night away.” They list the different packages in which their product can be bought: the Bender (twelve tablets), the Party Animal (twenty-four), the It’s Noon Somewhere (forty-eight). Among the testimonials they publish is one by “Chad S,” from Chicago: “After getting torn up all day on Saturday, I woke up Sunday morning completely hangover-free. I must have had like twenty drinks.” Researchers address the moral issue less hypocritically. Wiese and his colleagues describe the damage done by hangovers—according to their figures, the cost to the U.S. economy, in absenteeism and poor job performance, is a hundred and forty-eight billion dollars a year (other estimates are far lower, but still substantial)—and they mention the tests with the airplane pilots, guaranteed to scare anyone. They also say that there is no experimental evidence indicating that hangover relief encourages further drinking. (Nor, they might have added, have there been any firm findings on this matter.) Manuela Neuman, more philosophically, says that some people, now and then, are going to drink too much, no matter what you tell them, and that we should try to relieve the suffering caused thereby. Such reasoning seems to have cut no ice with funding institutions. Of the meagre research I have read in support of various cures, all was paid for, at least in part, by pharmaceutical companies.

A truly successful hangover cure is probably going to be slow in coming. In the meantime, however, it is not easy to sympathize with the alcohol disciplinarians, so numerous, for example, in the United States. They seem to lack a sense of humor and, above all, the tragic sense of life. They appear not to know that many people have a lot that they’d like to forget. In the words of the English aphorist William Bolitho, “The shortest way out of Manchester is . . . a bottle of Gordon’s gin,” and if that relief is temporary the reformers would be hard put to offer a more lasting solution. Also questionable is the moral emphasis of the temperance folk, their belief that drinking is a lapse, a sin, as if getting to work on time, or living a hundred years, were the crown of life. They forget alcohol’s relationship to camaraderie, sharing, toasts. Those, too, are moral matters. Even hangovers are related to social comforts. Alcohol investigators describe the bad things that people do on the morning after. According to Genevieve Ames and her research team at the Prevention Research Center, in Berkeley, hungover assembly-line workers are more likely to be criticized by their supervisors, to have disagreements with their co-workers, and to feel lousy. Apart from telling us what we already know, such findings are incomplete, because they do not talk about the jokes around the water cooler—the fellowship, the badge of honor. Yes, there are safer ways of gaining honor, but how available are they to most people?

Outside the United States, there is less finger-wagging. British writers, if they recommend a cure, will occasionally say that it makes you feel good enough to go out and have another drink. They are also more likely to tell you about the health benefits of moderate drinking—how it lowers one’s risk of heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and so on. English fiction tends to portray drinking as a matter of getting through the day, often quite acceptably. In P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster series, a hangover is the occasion of a happy event, Bertie’s hiring of Jeeves. Bertie, after “a late evening,” is lying on the couch in agony when Jeeves rings his doorbell. “ ‘I was sent by the agency, sir,’ he said. ‘I was given to understand that you required a valet.’ ” Bertie says he would have preferred a mortician. Jeeves takes one look at Bertie, brushes past him, and vanishes into the kitchen, from which he emerges a moment later with a glass on a tray. It contains a prairie oyster. Bertie continues, “I would have clutched at anything that looked like a life-line that morning. I swallowed the stuff. For a moment I felt as if somebody . . . was strolling down my throat with a lighted torch, and then everything seemed suddenly to get all right. The sun shone in through the window; birds twittered in the tree-tops; and, generally speaking, hope dawned once more. ‘You’re engaged,’ I said.” Here the hangover is a comedy, or at least a fact of life. So it has been, probably, since the Stone Age, and so it is likely to be for a while yet. 

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