Red Meat

On 7 September Brazil will celebrate the bicentennial of its independence from Portugal, and Jair Bolsonaro will mark the occasion by according full military honours to a lump of dead flesh. In keeping with the Roman Catholic fetish for souvenirs in the Ed Gein style, the heart of Emperor Pedro I was extracted after his untimely death and pickled in formaldehyde, to be hoarded in a golden urn by priests at a Portuguese church. The urn has now been dispatched to South America, where the Boris Johnson of Brasilia will pay it hypocritical homage before placing it on seventeen days' public display at the foreign ministry. A liberal monarch who respected the constitution and planned to phase out slavery, Pedro represented everything Bolsonaro hates; but it is hoped that the relic will conjure up the emperor's "bravery, passion and immeasurable strength" rather than anything so worldly and vulgar as his politics.