Charivari Time.

If you scroll down, you'll find a cool video of last night's protest against Dilma Rousseff and the PT (Workers' Party) here in São Paulo. But before you do, let me say a little bit about it.

Last night's pot-banging, whistle-blowing, light-switch flicking show made it the second consecutive Sunday in which this has happened, and yesterday it was accompanied by a day of protests across Brazil and, on a smaller scale, among Brazilian ex-pats worldwide. The last two times this peculiar form of protest happened (including yesterday, that is) it was on a Sunday at around 7pm. Tonight, however, being the following Monday, there was another presumably ad hoc outburst, which appears to have been triggered by a bloke simply leaning out of his window and, in very Brazilian style, booming out the cry of 'Fora Dilma' (out with Dilma) in much the same way that, in happier times, he'd have bellowed out the name of his favourite football team. This was enough to rouse the sofa-bound masses from their after-work torpor into an orgy of banging, howling and air horns that was shorter than last night's but just as impassioned.

I think I quite like these protests. They seem very Brazilian to me – a form of protest that one can make from the comfort of one's own living room, which might be all too easily ignored by those sitting in the Presidential Palace, yet which has a touching humanity to it. There's a funny kind of solidarity to seeing everyone come to their windows and either shouting or watching the shouters. It reminds me of the old tradition of the charivari or chivaree that I read about not so long ago in which, back in them olden days, the village would turn out en masse and, often drunkenly, troop round to the house of some wrong-doer (a wife-beater, perhaps, or a widower who remarried too soon) and shame them into seeing the error of their ways through ye ancient art of banging pots and pans and yelling. Personally, I think it's a massive, very touching testament to the gregariousness and idealism – although some would undoubtedly call it naïveté – of Brazilians, that they have found a means of protest which begins where politics itself begins, in their homes.

On the down-side, the clatter of cutlery, the howls of outrage and the dying elephant wail of the vuvuzelas does sound a bit like the build-up to the final battle in The Return of the King, which tends to make my daughter wake up and howl with terror. 

But that's not the the point. The point is that it feels like there's a powder-keg of resentment waiting to blow under our feet all the time at the moment. In six years of living in Brazil, I've never felt the overall mood in the streets to be so deflated or the tendency to complain, to denounce and to oppose, so strong. I feel like party-political arguments pale into irrelevance at this point, as does, to some extent, the argument that this outburst of emotion is a purely national thing. Yes, of course, there are people who are fanatically anti-PT and who think that Aécio Neves would have saved Brazil from the brink (to give you an idea of how close we are, an article in the admittedly right-wing Veja today noted that the approval rating of Dilma is the lowest that any president has had since Fernando Collor, who resigned in 1992 just before being impeached). And yes, of course, in the wake of the Petrobras scandal and her sundry other failures, Dilma's legitimacy to rule is pretty much risible.

However, it seems to me that that what we've got in Brazil right now is another offshoot of the same anger that is driving up into the light all over the world right now. It comes from the peculiar conjunction of ordinary people tiring of their leaders whilst simultaneously discovering that new technology provides them with the means to organise their opposition and thus expose or denounce the particular inequality endemic to their systems. Here in Brazil, for example, they rail primarily against corruption, because all the politicians here seem to be hopelessly, shamelessly corrupt. In the UK, meanwhile, we rail against the complacency of the ruling classes who assume that the hereditary entitlements of privilege give them indeminty to vandalise our environment, our infrastructure and our future. In the Middle East and the US, in India and Greece and Spain, it's the same old story, I think. People have had enough of the abuses perpetrated by those in power and those with power, as well as of the way that those whom we vote into office seem to think it is their responsibility to serve not the people who gave them their mandates, but the parasitic corporations and dynasties that feed off and rapaciously, shamelessly plunder our world. 

So, yeah, you woke up my daughter again. But I get it.