Brazil's identity crisis.

[Carlos Eduardo Rebello <crebello@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The piece by Larry Rother is more or less correct, as it is only a
mish-mash of articles published in the Brazilian press about the 500th
anniversary failure. What annoys me is exactly that Mr. Rother seems to
be one of these gringos who by a twist of fate happen to live in Rio de
Janeiro, absorb all the mannerisms, and with them a very carioca
(gentilic for Rio de Janeiro natives) kind of radical-chic frivolity
that comes straight from the 1960s Ipanema - then a middle-class quarter
of Rio where middle-class intellectuals could rent cheap appartments,
mingle in the fashionable bars, bash (mostly verbally) the military
dictatorship, pursue love affairs, etc., and exchange *bon mots*.Most of
the "authorities" quoted by Mr. Rother are exactly that -middle-aged
survivors of good ol' Ipanema, who make a living out of producing
frivolous bon mots about Brazil having no way out, about all governments
being corrupt, etc. - in a world, the cheapest kind of typically
Brazilian petty-bourgeois cynicism.

Perhaps Mr. Rother should begin to realize that, for a long time,
Ipanema has become throughly gentrified, and is now fashionable only for
those who want to make a shopping-spree hunting for Brazilian
semi-precious stones; also, that the intensity of open class struggle in
Brazil is reaching unprecedented levels, and therefore does not allow
cheap radical-chic (or perheps radical-cheap) cynicals to function as
the mouthpieces of those "from below". If he wants to settle in Rio and
write something like the satire of manners by Ms. Patricia Ann Goslin,
"How to be a Carioca",good; but offering this kind of stuff in place of
serious analysis in a supposedly serious bourgeois newspaper is another
matter. Perhaps he should begin by stop trying to be more Brazilian than
the Brazilians, and begin browsing for things such as the *Anuário
Estatístico do Brazil* (Yearly Book of Brazilian Statistics), the last
issues of the economic magazine *Conjuntura Econômica*, etc. But then
that seems to be the problem with these American correspondents: they
fall prey to the relative liberty of manners in Brazil, combined with
the pampering that the Brazilian upper classes usually give to guests
from the imperialist countries- and finally, they do not realize the
utter irrelevance of Rio de Janeiro as a vantage point for serious
analysis; therefore, they tend to begin writing tourist guides, not
journalism. Mr. Rother's could be acceptable as part of Amy Irving's
travelogue, and not as an article in the International section of the
NYT.

Carlos Rebello