I don't know if I understand why there is so much noise around Freemasonry. We journalists have this. Every now and then we come up with a theme and for weeks we can't talk about anything else. The problem is that from the second day onwards we don't add anything new to the discussion and what follows is boring stuff, with more of the same.
Did the thing work? Was the public interested? So let's keep going, poking around until there's nothing left. Kill the subject. We insist so much, so quickly and with such laziness that the outcome is always the same: we saturate people and we saturate ourselves.
Given the hysteria of the past few days, it seems we've now discovered that Freemasonry exists. Worse. As if until a fortnight ago nobody knew that Parliament, political life and public life in general are full of Freemasons.
The thing is so evident that in the Assembly of the Republic there is a bathroom – yes, toilets – that has been marking, for years, the Masonic presence in that organ of sovereignty. Well: washrooms with the traditional black and white of the movement.
Faced with the evidence – there must be no secret organization more public than this – hands to heaven, come the usual enlightened ones to defend a declaration of interests, to demand that whoever is – damn, it's almost everyone – be obliged to say so.
Even if they did, what would happen next? Would politics in Portugal become a spring thing?
Pressure groups will always exist. Let's call them Freemasonry, Sonae or Isabel dos Santos, the result will be identical.
That said, let's refocus the discussion on the essentials: do the types tighten their aprons by themselves or ask the Freemason at their side for help?
Nuno Andrade Ferreira is journalist, lives and works in Mindelo (Cape Verde) and regularly writes on his blog Marcha dos Pinguins: http://marchadospinguins.blogspot.com
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