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| A Historical Perspective of Brazil | ||||||||||||||||||||
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A bit of history can help you understand what you're seeing and experiencing when you
visit Brazil. Just talking among ourselves, we can admit that most of us don't
have a clue about how Brazil came to be what it is! It's not like they teach
this in every high school outside Brazil!!! Oops, Captain, I Think We Found a Continent! 
Europeans stumbled onto Brazil by accident in 1500, when a Portuguese fleet led by Pedro Alvares Cabral was blown westward by storms as it was trying to sail south along the African coast. Fortunately, a crew member with sharp eyes spotted a mountain on the horizon. Aiming for that, Cabral's little fleet landed in Brazil at Porto Seguro, which is now a popular resort in Southern Bahia state. The Europeans didn't realize they had found a continent. They thought it was an island, and named it Vera Cruz. The Portuguese only spent enough time to scout around, celebrate a Mass, plant a pillar claiming the land for Portugal, and restock their provisions to resume their African voyage. Cabral had a scribe in his party, Pero Vaz Caminha, who recorded the events in a famous letter to the King of Portugal in which he took particular pains in describing the beauty and cleanliness of the native people they encountered, who wore no clothes and seemed to be charmingly warm and generous. Very little different from the Brazilians Cabral would encounter if his fleet landed on any beach in today's Brazil! Having found a mountain but no gold, Cabral and his crew sailed away, bidding a fond adieu to lovely Vera Cruz. Over the next few decades the Portuguese visited the Brazilian coast sporadically, mainly in search of Pau Brazil (a prophetic name in a country where the word "pau" is slang for a very popular part of the male anatomy). The brazilwood tree was valuable because it could be used to produce a vibrant red dye for the textile industries of the Old Country.  Eventually it dawned
on the Portuguese court that it would be necessary to permanently settle and
colonize the new territories to keep them out of the hands of the Spanish,
Portugal's eternal rivals who were grabbing up everything in sight in the rest
of the New World. Brazil (which had finally gotten its real name) was carved up
into a number of "captaincies" which amounted to a stretch of coastline and all
the land behind it going into the unknown heart of the continent. The King then
distributed the captaincies among his noble cronies, who were expected to
develop the new lands on their own dimes! A few did, but many of the captaincies
remained virtually unsettled. A capital was also established in Salvador, which
was founded in 1549 and remained the capital of Brazil for more than 200 years,
until the 1760s.
In the northeastern area that became the modern state of Pernambuco it was discovered that sugar cane grew there prodigiously! Sugar cane cultivation and sugar production, in case you didn't know, are backbreaking, filthy jobs that no Portuguese grandee in his right mind was going to do! The impoverished Portuguese peasantry weren't exactly leaping at the chance to exchange their hard-scrabble lives in the mother country to cross the Atlantic to toil in Brazil's sugar fields and mills. Without a huge labor force, though, it would be impossible to make the sugar industry successful, so the Portuguese decided that the solution was to enslave the native inhabitants and force those beautiful, warm and generous people to work on their plantations for nothing! 
Unsurprisingly, the indigenous people were less than thrilled
about these new, involuntary career opportunities. Slave labor on a sugar
plantation was, after all, totally incompatible with their own carefree and
ecologically-correct lifestyles. As a response to being enslaved, the natives
either decided to drop dead on the job or escape into the trackless jungles,
leaving the white men far, far behind. Unsuccessful in enslaving the indigenous
Brazilians, the Portuguese looked to the next obvious source, Africa. Thus began
the stream of literally millions of African slaves to Brazil, far more than were
imported to any other country in the New World, including the United States. For
most of its history, in fact, the white European inhabitants of Brazil were a
small minority in an overwhelmingly black African population. The Portuguese usually didn't bring their wives and families with them in the early days of colonization. This encouraged liaisons and even marriages between the settlers and the natives, and with the Africans after they were forcibly brought to Brazil. Unlike the uptight Anglo-Saxon colonists in North America later on, the Portuguese were a randy lot who seemed to be color-blind when it came to bed partners. From the five centuries of couplings among Portuguese, Africans and natives come the stunning people we know as the Brazilians. Same-sex couplings were taking place, too, according to the earliest records of the colonies! In fact, in an era without radios or television, or DVD players or MP3s, the main recreational activity of the inhabitants of Brazil seemed to be coupling! With anyone and everyone who struck their fancy! When the Church finally began establishing roots in Brazil, its newly arrived priests and envoys were "shocked, shocked" at the vile goings-on they encountered in the new country! Just as soon as they could send off to their superiors in Portugal and Rome pornographically explicit descriptions of the depraved activities everywhere around them, many (probably most) gleefully joined right in! Portuguese Catholicism was never as severe and ascetic as the Spanish version, so Brazil's laissez-faire attitude to all things sexual was born in the earliest days of its history. As a convenient old proverb said, "There's no sin south of the Equator!" Amsterdam in the Tropics 
With the sugar industry
taking off, and European demand for sweets being insatiable, covetous eyes were
soon cast on the burgeoning Brazilian sugar colonies. The Dutch, in particular, had become a wealthy nation in the 1600s, and the Portuguese settlements in Brazil seemed ripe for the plucking, so pluck they did! The Dutch invaded Northeastern Brazil in 1630 and established their capital in Recife. The brilliant (and fashionable) Prince Maurits van Nassau was sent to govern Dutch Brazil, and for the next twenty-four years under Dutch rule Pernambuco bloomed into one of the first centers of science and culture in the New World, as well as a fabulously successful sugar-producing enterprise. Not one to be outdone by any other Renaissance prince back in Europe, Maurits brought over teams of artists and scientists to begin describing and recording everything they saw and experienced in this new country. It's from the realistic paintings by Dutch artists like Albert Eckhoudt and Frans Post that Europeans first formed their visual imagery of the New World.
With the return of the Portuguese, the Church, and the Inquisition to the former Dutch territories, the Jews once again had to flee. Most returned to the Netherlands, but one ship with Jewish refugees had to veer westward because of severe weather and arrived one fateful day in 1654 in New Amsterdam. Even though it was a raw, unpreposessing outpost, to stay the least, most decided to stay. An inconvenient glitch was that they were cordially unwelcome as far as the colonial governor, Peter Stuyvesant, was concerned. Not the kind of folks who take "no" for an answer, the refugees appealed to the Dutch West India Company, which owned the small colony, to let them settle there. Their request was granted. New Amsterdam, of course, became New York, so the first Jewish settlers in what became the United States were Brazilians from Recife! The Portuguese Get Serious. Really! Once the Portuguese expelled the Dutch it became clear that they needed to get serious about their colonial enterprise if they had any hope of hanging on to it. The hit-or-miss captaincy system was scrapped and real, full-fledged colonies were established to replace them. Salvador became the second city of the Portuguese empire, and for the most part the new colonies settled down to a long and somnolent existence. Greedy, rapacious and selfish, the Portuguese would allow no industries, no foreign trade, and no universities or printing presses in their colonies, the better to keep them firmly dependent on the mother country for all their needs for manufactured goods and higher learning. While the Spanish rivaled the Portuguese in rapaciousness, they were less rigid in controlling their New World colonies, so by the end of the 1500s, when Salvador was still a small provincial town, cities like Mexico and Lima had become great and rich, with universities, book publishing, theater and other cultural amenities. 
In theory, Spain and
Portugal had decided to divide the territories of the New World between them in
the treaty of Tordesillas, with everything lying west of an imaginary line going
to Spain and everything to the east to Portugal. This brilliant plan was hatched
before anyone really knew the dimensions of the Americas, and the Portuguese
came up with the short end of the stick! The lands to the east of the imaginary
line only took in a small sliver of what is now eastern Brazil. Everything else
was supposed to be Spanish. Fortunately for the Portuguese, the Spanish were
even more crazed for gold and precious metals than they were, and having found
mountains of gold and silver in their colonies in Mexico and along the western
coast of South America, they could hardly be bothered with the pestilential,
jungle-covered interior of the continent. The Portuguese colonies were slowly growing, though, and in the south raiding parties of "bandeirantes" would head inland from the settlement of São Paulo, looking for land to settle and Indians to enslave (they still hadn't learned the lessons of that failed effort in the Northeast). Nevertheless, the bandeirantes, a bunch of ruffians and cutthroats if ever there was one, are held in the same regard by Brazilians nowadays as the early pioneers are admired by Americans. The bandeirantes pushed ever inland, claiming everything for Portugal, until they nearly reached the Andean lands held by Spain. This explains how Portugal ended up with half of South America, the "Line of Tordesillas" notwithstanding! Of course, tt didn't hurt that for a good chunk of the 1600s the Spanish and Portuguese crowns were united under Spain, thanks to twists and turns of the dynastic soap operas in the home countries. By the end of the 1600s Portugal managed to wrest itself from the Spanish and regain its sovereignty and monarchy. All of this was going on in the Old World during the period that the bandeirantes were laying claim to much of the New World. Since they were all under one crown at the time nobody got too worked up over it, and when the two nations went their separate ways, they just decided to accept the facts on the ground and everyone kept what they had. In the case of the Portuguese, that was a helluva lot more territory than they would have been able to claim under the old treaty! Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend. Colonialists Like Them, Too! 
Lo and behold,
toward the end of the 1600s (and after Brazil was securely Portuguese again) the
bandeirante expeditions hit paydirt! Diamonds were discovered far in the
interior, not far from present day Brasília, and Diamantina became the diamond
capital of the world! Fortunes were made in the new world, fabulous wealth
flowed back to Portugal, and legendary figures like Xica da Silva, the beautiful
and intelligent slave girl who conquered the heart of the Portuguese governor of
Diamantina, entered Brazilian history. In the 1700s gold was discovered, too,
generating a huge rush of prospectors. A succession of mining towns arose in the
mountainous region that became known as Minas Gerais (or "general mines"). With
untold wealth, mining towns like Sabará, Congonhas and Ouro Preto became jewel
boxes of Portuguese baroque architecture, with magnificent mansions, civic
buildings and churches adorning the new cities. The enormous mineral wealth of
Minas Gerais had to be transported to the coast for shipment to Portugal. The
first main port was the town of Paraty, south of Rio de Janeiro, which became a
colonial jewel in its own right. The increasing importance of the gold and
diamonds and other precious stones to the colonial enterprise finally caused
Portugal to move Brazil's capital from Salvador to Rio in the 1760s. A new road
was carved through the wilderness from the mining area to Rio, which became the
chief port for the export of the precious cargo to Portugal. Paraty died on the
vine and became a virtually forgotten sleeping beauty for the next 200 years!
Brazil Goes Imperial: The Unfilmed Epic!
Pedro II wasn't just a scientist. He was a skillful politician and mediator, who managed to keep the distant and often fractious provinces within the Empire. Under Pedro, Brazil entered into its one major military adventure. The Triple Alliance of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay went to war against Paraguay, then a strange, isolated country under the grip of a loony long-time dictator. The War of the Triple Alliance was long and bloody. The Alliance was victorious, but at the cost of enormous loss of life and treasure. Large parts of Paraguay were carved off and added to the victorious Brazil and Argentina. Almost all the adult men of Paraguay were slaughtered in the war, and what remained of the country sank once again into isolated obscurity. In spite of all this, the war was a great unifying experience for Brazil, and by the time it was over Brazilians, perhaps for the first time, really regarded themselves as all belonging to the same nation. The Fall of the Empire, As Not Told By George Lucas Slavery continued to be the great stain on Brazilian history. The Emperor and his family were sympathetic to the abolitionist cause, but the power of the landed oligarchy whose livelihoods and prosperity depended on slave labor made ending slavery extremely difficult. Under pressure from the British, Brazil began eliminating slavery piecemeal. The importation of slaves was banned (although smuggling continued for decades). Slaves who fought in the war against Paraguay were given their freedom. A law freeing all slaves over the age of 65 was passed. Later, another act known as the Law of the Free Womb declared all future children born to slaves to be free. But slavery lingered on in Brazil, long after it ended in the U.S. and the Spanish empire.
Triumph of the Republic: Also Not the George Lucas Version
Flirting with Fascism
After the war Vargas couldn't sustain himself in power and was forced out as dictator. His replacement in the "Second Republic" wasn't much better, and before long Vargas was back in power, re-elected democratically by a nostalgic and amnesiac electorate. Being Supreme Dictator encourages habits that are hard to break, and sure enough, Vargas was soon acting in heavy-handed ways. An attempt to assassinate one of his best known political opponents (as he was leaving his apartment building just a few blocks up Tonelero from the Atlântico Copacabana) went badly wrong. Vargas's security chief and personal enforcer was identified as being one of the would-be assassins. Rather than resign, Vargas chose to "enter history" by shooting himself in his bedroom in the Presidential Palace. 
After Vargas, Brazil struggled along until the presidency of
Juscelino Kubitschek (JK) who was an inspiring go-getter from Diamantina, the
old diamond-mining boom town in Minas Gerais. Remember Diamantina? Brazil took
some important steps forward during JK's administration, but he will forever be
remembered as the driving force behind the construction of Brasília and the move
of the capital from coastal Rio to the vast, underpopulated interior. Would you
be completely surprised, by the way, to learn that Brasília is not very far from
JK's hometown of Diamantina? A lot of people were skeptical about Brasília's
chance of success and considered it just another visionary dream, but it
succeeded beyond expectations. From nothing but a vacant lot in 1960, it has
truly become Brazil's capital, growing to a metropolis of more than 3,000,000
people with the highest per capita income in Brazil! It has also fostered the
settlement of the rest of the Brazilian interior, fulfilling the dreams of those
who wanted to move the capital to the center of the country.The Military Gets Uppity, But Learns That Money Makes the World Go 'Round! Juscelino's successors, Jânio Quadros and João Goulart, were both weak, quirky men. Both were considered to be leftists, and viewed with great suspicion by the ultra-conservative elite and their good friends, the military. With the Cold War at its peak, and nightmares about Cuban influence in the Americas overpowering good sense in the halls of Washington, the military took over at the end of the 1960s with the blessings of the U.S. and ruled until the mid 1980s. While less extreme than the dictatorships in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, the Brazilian dictatorship was bad enough. Political opponents, journalists, and just ordinary citizens "disappeared" or were imprisoned and tortured. Many opponents of the regime went into exile. In its first years, the military managed to turn around the ailing economy, and Brazil experienced another of its great leaps forward in the late sixties and early seventies, with great expansion of industry and huge investments in infrastructure. It turned out to be unsustainable, and inflation took off, soon turning into hyperinflation as the printing presses worked around the clock printing ever more worthless cruzeiros. 
Before long, banknotes reading 100,000 or 500,000
cruzeiros were circulating everywhere, and prices of ordinary goods were being
expressed in the millions! For once in their lives, just about everyone in
Brazil was a millionaire! The problem was that a million would barely buy you a
Bauru sandwich! In a series of unsuccessful efforts to do SOMETHING, bunches of
zeros were periodically dropped from the banknotes and a brand new currency was
announced, which was soon as worthless as the previous one had been! Cruzeiros
got replaced by cruzados which got replaced by new cruzeiros which got replaced
by who-can-remember? It was a great time for foreign visitors with hard
currency, but living hell for ordinary Brazilians. The fall of the military
dictatorship in Argentina after the insane Falklands War, coupled with the
insane economy at home, put the Brazilian military dictatorship under heavy
pressure. Whatever popular support the military might have had during the early
boom years of the "Brazilian Miracle" had long ago evaporated under the
repression and the mind-boggling inflation. In 1985 the military agreed to hand
power back to civilians. Tribulations of the Telegenic: A Rede Globo Super-Production! The transition back to democracy was cinematic, to say the least. Through an indirect electoral process, a tremendously well-respected politician named Tancredo Neves was to become the first civilian president in nearly 20 years. On the eve of his inauguration, Tancredo fell gravely ill and was rushed to the hospital. The entire nation stopped, waiting for news of his recovery. It was not to be. Tancredo, an older man, didn't survive a post-surgical infection. Brazil discovered that its first new democratic president would be the vice-president designate, the virtually unknown José Sarney, a traditional-style political leader from the backward and impoverished northern state of Maranhão, which was his family's political fiefdom. Sarney managed to hold things together, although not in any particularly distinguished way. He was succeeded by the young, handsome and photogenic Fernando Collor, heir to another northeastern political fiefdom. Collor was heavily promoted by the Globo TV network, the world's fourth largest and the overwhelming audience leader in Brazil. Perhaps not uncoincidentally, the Collor family's media empire owned all the Globo TV affiliates in their home state of Alagoas. 
It's hard to know how Collor could go so wrong. At
first, through clever media manipulation, he was wildly popular and managed to
convince Brazilians that he was a reformer in the John F. Kennedy tradition.
Fernando was tall, good-looking and athletic, and was constantly being shown
running or jogging, wearing the T-shirt of his "cause of the week." Behind the
scenes, though, Collor's former campaign manager, P.C. Farias, was running a
gargantuan bag operation, collecting monumental bribes from anybody and
everybody in Brazil who could afford to buy access and influence. P.C.
cheerfully raked in hundreds of millions of dollars before the scheme was
uncovered, and life was good for the Collor inner circle until the roof caved
in. In an effort to stop hyper-inflation, Collor froze bank accounts and issued yet another new currency with fewer zeroes. Needless to say, finding that they couldn't access their savings and checking accounts enfuriated the nation. Matters weren't helped by Collor's millionaire playboy lifestyle, which wasn't trimmed back during this excruciating economic crisis. His air-brained shopaholic wife Roseane, daughter of a powerful political boss in the interior of Alagoas, didn't help, either. Neither did all the rumors of cocaine use in truckload quantities (nor the constant gossip in the gay community about Collor's adventures with hot aides and hunky soldiers whenever Roseane was power-shopping her way across New York, Miami, London and Paris.) Gentle readers may think this sounds like a plot straight out of a Globo soap opera, but wait! 
In a supremely soap-operatic move, Collor's younger brother Pedro
spilled the beans on the gigantic corruption scheme. It seems he felt he was
being unjustly pushed out of the family TV and publishing empire back in Alagoas
by Fernando and P.C. The story broke wide open, with the nation glued to the
tube to learn the latest twist and turns. Brazilians were repulsed by the
revelations of the unprecedented scale of corruption and the lavish lifestyles
of the Collor gang while the rest of Brazil was up against the wall with frozen
bank accounts and continuing hyperinflation. Students and other young people
took to the streets by the millions, painting their faces the colors of the
Brazilian flag and insisting on change. Their parents and relatives followed.
What to do? What to do? Stunningly, Congress rediscovered Brazil's constitution,
and impeachment proceedings began. To their incredulous amazement, Brazilians
learned that they actually had a way to get rid of a corrupt president without
having to resort to violence or a coup d'etat. Collor fought to the end, but he
was impeached and removed from office and banned from political participation
for many years to come.
A Collor-less Interregnum 
The presidency passed to
Collor's virtually unknown vice-president, Itamar Franco. Itamar turned out to
be fairly honest and managed to hold the nation together, although he had a
number of eccentric quirks that amused Brazil no end. Nearly 70, Itamar
considered himself quite the Lothario, combing his gray hair into a kind of
trademark pompadour. Itamar went through several young girlfriends, with the
breakups reported in all the papers, but he stamped himself indelibly into the
memory of the nation when he was photographed from below while he was in one of
the VIP boxes at Rio's Sambadrome during Carnival. By his side, with his arm
around her, was one of the gorgeous queens of the Carnival, clad in a longish
T-shirt. As it happens, that's ALL she was clad in. From below, the entire
presidential press corps was able to get telephoto shots of the gorgeous
carnival queen's, um, private parts as she was being happily embraced by the
President of the Republic, who was completely oblivious to the cause of the
commotion below! Itamar did one genuinely worthwhile thing while he was president which Brazilians generally tend to overlook and forget. Itamar invited a scholarly academic named Fernando Henrique Cardoso into his government to try to get hyperinflation under control, once and for all. Although a sympathizer of the left, Cardoso applied traditional neo-liberal methods to the problem, and to the joy and amazement of the entire nation (and to the relief of the rest of the world that was stuck with Brazilian debt) Cardoso succeeded and inflation ground to a near halt. The Future Finally Arrives in the Eternal "Country of the Future." Cardoso became an obvious choice to succeed Itamar, and FHC (as he came to be known in the press) was indeed elected president. Popular when he came into office, FHC was considerably less so when he finally left. 
In his first term FHC managed to keep the lid on inflation and began
work on the Augean task of cleaning out Brazil's political stables. FHC
inherited a 500-year-old legacy of corruption, malfeasance and bad management,
encumbered by mind-boggling petty bureaucracy and paperwork, all designed to
serve the interests of the tiny but staggeringly wealthy oligarchy and to keep
the middle and working class subservient, without ever considering the welfare
of the millions of Brazilians living in abject poverty and completely outside
the market economy. Within the inevitable constraints caused by Brazil's
crushing debt load, FHC started tackling some of the worst problems resulting in
Brazil's immense social deficit. Somewhere along the way, though, he became
convinced that his single five-year term of office wasn't sufficient, and he
began squandering a great deal of time, energy and political capital on amending
the constitution to reduce the presidential term to four years, but with a
chance for re-election. There was great public ambivalence about the change and
the need for it, and opportunities were lost while FHC was trying to push it
through. He succeeded and was re-elected, but somehow momentum was never
recovered, and FHC was never as popular in his second term as in his first. In
spite of that, he kept inflation under control, the economy began recovering,
and more progress was made to reduce Brazil's social inequalities. After having been a candidate against Collor and FHC in both of his presidential campaigns, Brazil finally decided in 2002 to give a chance to Lula. Luis Ignácio Lula da Silva is a long time activist and labor leader from São Paulo who rose to head the Worker's Party (PT), the only serious political party in Brazil. (The other parties are just coalitions of convenience held together by the force of personality of their top leader.) Many people were just positive that Lula was a communist and was going to be the next Castro, but over time he'd mellowed out somewhat, and he was widely regarded as being someone honest who would look out for the interests of the politically excluded. The opposition candidate was gray and colorless by comparison, and Lula won with a landslide and a huge margin of victory. 
Not to the surprise of some, in office Lula turned
out to be a pragmatist who basically continued the neoliberal economic policies
initiated by FHC. Brazil was still heavily indebted, the economy was in a
recession, and he wasn't about to risk the kind of economic stimulus the
hardliners in the PT wanted for fear of sending Brazil back into hyperinflation.
At least for the first couple of years, the Brazilian public was willing to be
patient, because Lula was able to convince them there was no magic wand that
could undo five centuries of problems overnight. It helped that Lula was born
dirt poor in the Northeast and went to São Paulo as a migrant when his mother
took him and his siblings to try to find their father, who had gone to São Paulo
to make his fortune and then abandoned them. As a child, Lula's family often
went hungry. When he was older he became a shoeshine boy on the streets of São
Paulo to help support his family. Lula managed to find his way into the metal
workers union where he became a leader during the years of the dictatorship. A
machinist, he lost a finger in an industrial accident. He moved on and up into
the leadership of the PT, and eventually became its president and perennial
candidate to lead the nation. When Lula was finally elected, he was the first
Brazilian president who was not from the elite class and who had not graduated
from university. For the first time in Brazilian history, one of the "little
people" was in the driver's seat. In the second year of Lula's administration the economy began showing signs of turning around, and indeed it started growing again. A devaluation of the real during FHC's presidency made Brazilian products and commodities good values in the export market, and sure enough, the export trade began to boom, as did tourism, driving the rest of the economy forward. Brazil has become one of the world's largest exporters of agricultural goods, including soybeans, orange juice concentrate and coffee, as well as beef and poultry. Brazil is also one of the top producers and exporters of steel, and the automobile and aircraft industries have been making huge gains in exports. Employment began increasing, and through a series of reforms access to banking and credit has been made much easier for the lower and middle classes and small businesses, stimulating a boomlet in internal consumption. The minimum wage has increased in real terms, and optimism about Brazil's future began growing again, along with enormous amounts of foreign investment in new industrial facilities, oil exploration, etc. Unfortunately, the fall of the dollar in the past year is complicating things, because the real has strengthened in value and that has started making Brazil's exports more expensive. Some exporters are starting to feel the effects. Interest rates remain sky high, in an effort to control inflation, but they, too, are starting to hurt the growth of the economy. The supposedly incorruptible PT has suddenly faced some big-time corruption charges in the past few months. While no one believes Lula is corrupt, or is benefitting personally from any of the shenanigans, he was slow to react, finding it difficult to believe that some of his comrades-in-arms of all these years have allowed themselves to sell out. Lula's high ratings in public opinion polls have begun slipping. There will be presidential elections in 2006, though, and so far no candidate looks capable of beating him for re-election. Lula's finally beginning to take action on the spreading scandals and has vowed to cut into the PT's own flesh if necessary to stamp out corruption. And here endeth this brief history of Brazil. The rest lies in the future. So, Who's Laughing Last, Chuckles? A Final Meditation
An infinite amount remains to be done, but Brazil in 2005 has come a long, long way from the Brazil of 1985, and it won't be going backwards any more. Years ago, the very grand and monumentally tactless Charles de Gaulle deeply hurt Brazilians when he said, during a state visit to Brazil, that it "was not a serious country." DeGaulle's crack has rankled Brazilians ever since. But guess what, Chuck? Brazil has become a serious country! However, it may be the world's only "serious" country that still has an irrepressible sense of humor, and a love and joy in life and its pleasures that make all the sacrifices and hardships more bearable, because even when things look bleak Brazilians know, in their heart of hearts, that there will always be beer, the beach, Carnaval, futebol, and most importantly, family and friends! Besides, who ever said that a "serious" country can't be one that also has fun? So eat your heart out, Chuck, wherever you are, because Brazil is not only "serious," it's absolutely, undisputably, and without challenge the world's number #1 country in the creation, production and enjoyment of fun! That may be Brazil's greatest contribution to human civilization. It's certainly the greatest gift she has bestowed on all of us from "serious" countries that seem to have forgotten that fun ever existed in the world! |
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