Ode to Brazil

It's hard to sit down and explain,
What to 'zilians has caused so much pain,
Because like it or not,
This country was Hot!
But is now just the butt of disdain.

We are having enormous disruption,
Due to various schemes of corruption,
There are kickbacks like crazy,
On details I'm hazy,
But we're pelted with no interruption.

It all started with President Lula,
Who behaved like a helluva rulah,
He started the graft,
And his cronies all laughed,
And now he is rolling in moolah.

He passed it all on to Miss Dilma,
Who has not yet been caught on a filma,
But she's fast losing ground,
Her speeches confound,
Some say, Give her the axe!
And she says, Raise the tax!
Pretty soon it'll be, "Good-bye, Dilma!"

'Cause the schemes in once-proud Petrobras,
Have been one solid kick in the ass,
From kickbacks to bribes,
It's too much to describe,
We are in a depression, en masse.

Oh, my wonderful, dear, sweet Brazil,
We are all still so full of goodwill,
You've got Judge Moro's squad,
So go squash all that fraud!
Understanding the battle's uphill.

Judge Sérgio Moro — hated by some, feared by many, beloved by the rest of us!

Different Strokes . . .

I notice that I'm spending a lot of time focusing on the differences between Brazil and the United States, and not enough on the similarities. I think I'm annoying my Brazilian friends and, if so, I apologize. North America/South America . . . it's all one big America. That's quite possibly why I immediately felt so at home here. Some day I shall indeed comment on the similarities, but let's face it, the differences make for better copy. So here are a few more:

I consider the following the biggest divide between American and Brazilian women:

Good 'ole American "granny" panties

Brazilian "dental floss" panties

An American governor: Rod Blagojevich, former governor of the State of Illinois, currently serving 14 years in federal prison for corruption and misconduct in office, including a charge of lying to the FBI. A former attorney, he has been disbarred.









A Brazilian governor: Paulo Maluf, former governor of the State of São Paulo, currently serving as a Federal Deputy from São Paulo. Convicted of only one of the many charges of corruption against him, he served a few weeks in jail. Currently wanted for fraud, conspiracy and theft by Interpol. Helped coin a new verb in Portuguese, malufar, meaning "to steal public money."

See the word, "push"? A Brazilian will instinctively pull.

                                                                           

                                                         See the word, "puxe"? An American will instinctively push.  

Pfizer is agressively fighting to keep generics from the public, as The New York Times reported recently in an article entitled "Plan Would Delay Sales of Generic for Lipitor"

      

In Brazil, generics are readily available, including the generic of Lipitor.

I had a friend bring this box from the States so that I could cut off pieces of saran wrap. See that nice, sharp cutting blade along the edge of the box? 

The Brazilian method. Not very efficient, considering the alternatives available elsewhere. And this in a country that loves technology!

Senator Ed Muskie cried during the 1972 presidential primary, was thought to be a wimp, and lost. Not a good idea to cry in the States.

                                                                         

    Lula cried during his entire presidency and was beloved.

    In Brazil, crying is macho.



NOTE TO MY READERS: I'll be taking a little hiatus starting next week, will be back after the Ides of March. See you then!

Madame President

Dilma Rousseff, Most Excellent Madame President of the Federative Republic of Brazil. The majority of Brazilians refer to her simply as "Dilma." I think it's cool to have a woman president, and I'm enjoying living this moment in Brazil's history. My impression of her so far? More than favorable. This woman brooks no nonsense. She has walked into a house ransacked by adolescents, taken a deep breath, rolled up her sleeves and started putting the house in order. She's taken over and taken charge, and plenty of ministers and other government appointees are running scared.

I thought Dilma was terrible as a candidate, a complete turn-off. She was humorless, she had no personal touch, she was a boring speaker, she lumbered along from campaign stop to campaign stop looking as uncomfortable as she probably felt. Typical wonky technocrat. Had I been Brazilian and able to vote, I would have voted for the other guy, José Serra.  He happens also to be a fairly humorless technocrat with no personal touch, boring and lumbering. But he had a slight edge in the experience department, having already been governor of São Paulo state, mayor of São Paulo city and an innovative national Minister of Health.

But as president Dilma's come into her own. For those politicians who for years routinely considered seat-of-government Brasilía to be a pit stop between long weekends back in their home states, Dilma had other ideas. She began scheduling ministerial meetings for Friday afternoons. For those politicians who had regularly expropriated the Brazilian Air Force for their weekly commutes, Dilma strongly "urged" commercial aircraft. She responded to the indignant public outcry against the diplomatic passports that President Lula, in the last days of his tenure, granted to his sons and grandchildren, and who knows who else. Dilma's new rules? No more diplomatic passports except to government officials and diplomats. If you're like me, and you get indignant at the self-importance and self-enrichment of elected officials, you gotta love this woman.

The Anointed, by Nicholas Lemann

Lula was a very popular president, and now that he's battling cancer he's practically been canonized. But it was during his eight-year term that corruption in Brazil flourished. It was during his watch that there was all that back-slapping and winking and looking the other way, when certain political parties took it as le droit du seigneur that they owned certain ministries. You'll get no back-slapping from Dilma. The words used to describe her? Austere, exacting, serious, blunt, stern and restrained. An article in the December 5, 2011 issue of the New Yorker paints Dilma as a "forceful presence" who speaks in a "deep, stentorian voice," and who "commands attention" with her "considerable determination." That may not sound very flashy and exciting, but given the moral mess Lula left behind him, I believe her manner will serve her well. You go girl!

It's Raining, It's Pouring

São as águas de março, 
fechando o verão ...

One thing I did know before moving to Brazil was the Tom Jobim song, Aguas de Março, the Waters of March, so I was expecting March to be the rainy month. Not so. Rains don't just mark the end of summer, as the song says. They mark summer's beginning as well. Year in, year out, there are heavy, tropical downpours in December and January, and the new climate phenomenon, La Niña, has, if anything, made matters worse. You'd think that, after last year's disaster, the civil defense authorities would have gotten themselves prepared for this year's rains. But whatever measures they did take have turned out to be totally inadequate.

Last year's rains, which peaked just one year ago, constituted the worst civil disaster in Brazil's history. A total of 918 people died, 30,000 or more lost their homes, and 215 are still considered missing. In other words, their bodies have never been recovered. The worst of the suffering took place not in some remote region of the Amazon but in the gorgeous Rio de Janeiro State mountain towns of Nova Friburgo, Teresópolis and Petrópolis that, if our binoculars were more powerful, we could practically see out our window. By car, you can reach the closest of these towns in an hour and a half, and Mark and I have always enjoyed visiting those towns. We have friends up there in the mountains.

We watched last year's disaster unfold on television, and saw unbelievable acts of courage and heroism as neighbors helped neighbors, such as in the spine-tingling rescue in the video above. (Incredible how everything is filmed nowadays, even a catastrophe that caught everyone off guard.) But as I read today's O Globo I want to strangle someone. I want to scream, enough is enough. Why has so little been accomplished in one entire year? Why are so many people up there in the mountains still struggling to get their lives back in order? The paper today has been reminding us that the mayors, town councilmen and businessmen of these mountain towns stole the government's generous emergency funds in an unprecedented spectacle of fraud and profiteering. Even in Brazil, where corruption is so much a part of governing that people no longer pay attention to it, this disgusting revelation has shocked. The government is demanding the return of its 10 million reais, and I'm delighted to say the government's also been freezing the assets of the sleazeballs involved.

 Last year's disaster, but these pictures were just taken for today's paper. Disgraceful.

We have also been hearing these last days that, in an astounding display of arrogant political piggishness, 90% of the government's emergency anti-flood funds for this year have been diverted to just one state, Pernambuco (a state generally plagued by drought) which also happens to be the home state of the minister charged with distributing the monies. This goes a long way to explaining why state civil defense authorities weren't prepared for the floods and landslides happening right now in southeastern Brazil. The worst of the current catastrophe is in the state of Minas Gerais, where 99 cities are in a state of emergency, and about 12,000 people have lost their homes. The final disposition of the monies sent to Pernambuco is, believe it or not, in limbo. The government wants it back. Pernambuco wants to keep it. If I were President Dilma I'd wring someone's neck.

Nothing bad happened to us personally here in Búzios last year, and nothing bad is happening to us this year either. We're just getting wet. We haven't had much of a taste of summer yet, haven't put away our blue jeans and gotten out our shorts. Since Christmas, all it's done is rain. It's been all rain, all the time, with just a few days of something akin to sun. And the ten-day forecast? It shows more rain. We can't help but think about those people still suffering after one year, and the ones suffering right now.