Why Every Photo of Jair Bolsonaro Has the Internet Peeing Its Pants – By Ben Mathis-Lilley (Slate) / Jan 6, 2023
He once hiccuped for ten days. He may currently be staying in a Minions-themed bedroom. And he was until recently one of the scariest people on Earth.
On Dec. 31, 2022, a Brazilian expat account posted a photo on Twitter of outgoing Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, a tall man with a gone-to-seed look and a beaky nose, wearing a blue polo shirt and eating what appears to be a chicken thigh at a KFC outside Orlando, Florida. On Jan. 2, progressive activist David Adler reposted the picture with the caption “I will pay a large commission for a painting of this photograph of Brazil’s disgraced ex-president Jair Bolsonaro eating KFC in Orlando, Florida on the day of Lula’s inauguration.” According to Twitter’s metrics, Adler’s post has been viewed 4.3 million times.
For the record, Bolsonaro’s rival Lula—Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—was inaugurated on Jan. 1, and Bolsonaro, whatever one might think of his right-wing politics, is not “disgraced” in the conventional sense of having resigned amid scandal or criminal prosecution. It is, nonetheless, intrinsically funny to see a world leader—someone associated with awesome power, tailored suits, and diplomatic summits in the Alps—seated at a Formica tabletop, head hunched over his body, lips barely maintaining their purchase on a moist, dangling string of chicken and loose breading that was purchased for something like six dollars in central Florida. It is what Alexander Pope would call bathos.
But this is not the first photograph of now-former president Bolsonaro to “go viral.” Far from it. Indeed, for a certain left-leaning segment of the American news audience, he is less relevant for his place in world affairs than because so many images of him are, for some reason, very funny.
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