Brazil

...Nobody thought the state had institutions with enough authority to get to the bottom of it...

...Our friends were afraid of the answer...

...The party grows out of a militant labor movement, rooted in ClOesque industrial unionism, but also in white-collar unions...

...got many gifts, the most precious from an umbanda priest, a statue of Ze Pelintre, the Afro-Brazilian umbanda god of the city and of night in the city (he looks like Sporting Life in Porgy and Bess...

...Far more prominent, with bigger headlines, a more WINTER • 1994 • 29 Politics Abroad highly charged story in much greater detail, was the murder of a leading telenovela actress by the actor who played her lover on television...

...I did say it, but even the best listeners Politics Abroad wouldn't hear...

...The United States Information Agency picked up the tab (it evaluated me as "a counter-cultural figure who is also a deeply patriotic American...

...Last year the big drug dealers decided these kids were attracting too much attention and jeopardizing serious business, so they cut off some of their hands...

...It was my second visit...

...Two years ago, President Fernando Collor de Mello was impeached by the nation's Congress...

...Luis Schwarz, my publisher, was selling more books than ever last year, and had three out of the top ten national best-sellers, but almost went broke because several of the big banks, after taking huge losses in world money markets, withdrew their credit lines from small businesses...

...Shellie: "Everybody seems to live in a favela or behind a fence...

...but as "a cultural worker among the people," he can't afford to appear ignorant of their latest twists, and the morning papers publish summaries of the coming action every day...

...The young mayor, Tarso Genro, and his commissioners, are rightly proud of their work...

...There are several daily national newspapers, a decent facsimile of the Wall Street Journal, a couple of news magazines in the Time class...

...although, thanks to the grace and finesse of Brazilian design, it's easy for householders to forget the iron cages they live in...

...Luis has never loved capitalism, but he always thought that at least it had a coherent system of meanings: you make money if you sell a commodity that people want, you lose money if you don't...

...and this juridical bankruptcy evoked their worst memories of military dictatorship, which after all wasn't so long ago...

...In the middle of one night in July, a group of Military Policemen converged on the church and fired point-blank into the crowd, killing nine kids and wounding dozens more...

...Last summer, I got to do Flying Down to Rio, Part Two, this time with my wife, Shellie Sclan...

...People who worked for universities, or who worked in the health professions or social services, saw a prospect far more bleak...

...After awhile I came to feel there was something weird about this talk...

...Kids who have grown up there are civically proud but spiritually bored...

...We saw immense, sublime modern ruins, abandoned factories near the waterfront that once kept the city's poor people at work...

...on the other hand, governments everywhere are willing to subsidize international conferences, symposia, festivals, exhibitions, and all forms of intellectual exchange...

...But everybody's primal source is the Globo TV network, whose stylish graphics and sexy yet insipid programs are often seen by as much as 90 percent of the households in the country...

...In the North, in Bahia, which southerners patronizingly call "Little Africa," many people are black, descendants of African slaves, but most look like what North Americans would call "Latino...

...One of the high points of the trip was an encounter with a group of PT shop stewards from the Metal Workers' Union, at union headquarters in Sao Bernardo, an industrial suburb just north of Sao Paulo...

...Everybody felt that the quality of Brazilian life, so informal and mellow not so long ago, has turned brutal and paranoid today...

...Our ruling classes also know that enlisting intellectuals in the process of cultural exchange is a good way to keep us content...

...But you will get lots of chances to travel...

...In Brazil this summer, there were floods of talk about the violence of underclass boys: violence done by them, violence done to them...

...For instance, I couldn't say the United States also has very high levels of violence, and I couldn't say that discourse about violence has all sorts of symbolic weight in American political culture...

...The PT program evokes European social democracy today: sophisticated about public health, worker safety, environmental destruction (there is lots about the Amazon), racism, equality for women...

...Good business, good politics: nice work if you can get it...

...Or did they come looking for somebody, but the search got out of hand...

...Brazil is full of clubs that watch these shows and vote approval or disapproval of their plots...

...They talk about the arrastdo, a maneuver where pickup gangs of fifty or a hundred boys descend from the favelas and sweep the beach or the Avenida Atlantica, robbing and stabbing everyone in their path...

...People do as much of their business as possible by check, even buying drinks in a bar...

...Brazilians consider 1981 the watershed year in the life of their still fragile democracy...

...All the time we were in Brazil, people couldn't stop talking about the mass murder...

...We couldn't find any clear consensus on why the inflation had gotten so bad, but everyone seemed to agree that parasitic state corporations (there are over seven hundred, many run by military officers) were a big factor in it, and no one had any confidence in the government's capacity either to clean them up or to sell them off...

...got into a public argument about public space with Oscar Niemeyer, the architect of Brasilia, a city with no public space (NIEMEYER CHAMA BERMAN DE IDIOTA, said a headline in 0 Globo...

...We went as guests of the PT, the Parti dos Trabalhadors, the Workers' party, and of the city of Porto Alegre...

...Our driver in Sao Paulo, a student and participant in radical theatres, has no television set himself and can't stand these shows...

...We need to pay attention, to hear what people aren't saying and see what they aren't showing, along with all they do say and show...

...People who work for large corporations and organizations make direct-deposit deals with banks that give high interest rates (30 percent a month, say) indexed to the previous month's inflation...

...This means, for instance, that price tags in stores mean very little: every day a new master price list goes around...

...So a crucial feature of adolescence in Brazil is a very personal encounter with class barriers that are peremptory and absolute...

...In the South, most people look like what North Americans would call "white...

...Did "the public" hate those kids so much that it would tolerate mass murder and throw away the rule of law that it had fought so hard to secure...

...At the end of July, just before we arrived, the violence exploded...

...Between North and South are Rio and Sao Paulo, two of the most fascinating cities in the world: Rio, where a spectacular mountain/ ocean topography, with miles of gorgeous beach, frames an urbanism of colonial palaces, plazas and gardens, hundreds of beautiful vernacular Bauhaus and Art Deco apartment blocks, and a flashy, glamorous, vaguely sinister pedestrian street life...

...people wait till the last possible moment before withdrawing cash from their high-interest accounts...

...Why did they do it...

...On one hand, it's hard to find a government anywhere that, when it makes its big policy decisions, will give intellectuals more than the time of day...

...My Brazilian translator and I spoke for about an hour and a half—too long, I feared—but the shop stewards kept our discussion going till maintenance people came to close the hall...

...It has gotten more than 40 percent of the vote in national elections, and Lula, its charismatic leader, who began his career as a metalworker, could well be elected President in the fall of 1994...

...Indexed" is a life-and-death word in Brazil today...

...And why not...

...But after awhile, I began to see what Brazilian discourse of violence is really all about...

...I had to tell big lies to free us from our handlers for a few hours alone...

...the contours of this drama, it's a story we should know all too well...

...Cash machines are everywhere...

...Nobody seems to know...

...But this pleasure will create a special obligation...

...they provide a legitimate pretext for any two strangers to talk...

...The cost overruns, we heard, were grabbed by giant construction companies, some private, some public, all profoundly corrupt and untouchable...

...Were they punishing the kids for failing to pay protection...

...In addition, they are dubbed into Spanish and sold to the entire Spanishspeaking world...

...They have spent money and energy trying to create jobs for the poorest people...

...Three things made them depressed and anxious: Brazil's inflation, the chronic decline of its public services, and daily fear and anxiety about violence...

...This was most striking in Rio, where several people talked about how they "grew up on the beach" but fear to go there now...

...Now and then they engage in what North Americans might consider legitimate work, but mostly they live by begging, smalltime drug dealing, and theft...

...When we finally got to go to the beach, up in Bahia, it rained...

...But there was another ruin of a kind that I haven't seen in the United States: abandoned schools and hospitals whose construction was stopped before they could open, broken promises of a welfare state that never worked...

...But we got to see so many vivid environments, and to meet so many smart, sweet people, and even though we saw things from a special perspective, we saw a lot...

...it contains few landmarks, it's impossible to navigate without a car, but it spreads forever and ever, and contains dozens of cities within it—Italian, Japanese, Korean, Arab, Jewish, industrial, intellectual—you drive past carburetor factories on the way to the art museum...

...What upsets people most, though, is the violence...

...It pointedly does not feature nationalization...

...Once more we were locked into a format that devoured every minute and gave us no time to relax or reflect...

...maybe the most alluring city in the world (maybe tied with Venice), and one whose citizens often feel drunk and drugged on their allure...

...Rio's beautiful domed Baroque Catedral de Candelaria, in the old center of the city, is home to hundreds of 30 • DISSENT pivetes, who sleep on its porches and benches...

...The educational system does nothing to help them in...

...It had a pathos and an emotional intensity that seemed to take on a life of its own...

...Brazilians take pride in this as a symbol of their country's cultural strength...

...A T-shirt on sale in Porto Alegre's public market said, "Don't Kidnap Me, I'm A Professor"—in other words, a person without capital, slim pickings...

...For those who are going to be in one of the big parades, it's tempting to spend the whole year working on our raps and our masks and our floats...

...But its productivity has been sapped by chronic inflation...

...Single-family houses have iron fences that in effect place the house in a cage...

...What happened...

...and had the time of my life...

...Or what...

...We have to be sure we don't simply reproduce colorized versions of the world we already know...

...if the store you're in hasn't yet received (or figured out) its list, they will take the figure and the date on the tag, and jack the price up accordingly...

...when I remarked on this, I was told that a great deal of Brazil's economy is nationalized already—including some of its most rapacious corporations, especially in oil and iron extraction—and that it hasn't done the workers a bit of good...

...they dream of life in bigger, nastier, messier cities like Rio or Sào Paulo or Paris or New York...

...when the new system supplanted the old, biohazardous city dump, the men and women who had lived by scavenging in the dump were retrained, incorporated into the civil service, and given skills that will be increasingly marketable...

...Favelas exist everywhere in Brazil, but Porto Alegre's seem almost luxurious compared with Salvador's, where the shacks are folded into precarious gullies, subject to lethal mudslides every time it rains, where you can see the walls shake in the wind and smell the raw sewage that runs in the streets...

...Brazilians ordinarily love conversation, but once a Brazilian started talking in this vein, there wasn't anything I could say, except "Gee, that's terrible...

...City governments appear both adept and humane...

...To my amazement, the book hit the charts, and all sorts of Brazilians wanted to meet me...

...In Salvador, Bahia's capital, we saw some of the sharpest polarities in Brazil: a lavish, glitzy tourist sector along the ocean, and an enormous network of shanty towns (the Brazilian word is favelas) just a little bit inland...

...But private schools in Brazil offer no scholarships...

...But their talk went round and round in futility...

...now they grab people who often have little or nothing to give, and sometimes this makes them mad and they kill...

...Our poor people haven't quite reached the tragic pass of poor people in Brazil, a country that feels inexorably split between the favelas and the fences...

...Globo is the leading producer of telenovelas, Brazilian soap operas, which are broadcast in prime time, feature steamy sex scenes (alas, not in the three hours we saw), and draw a higher proportion of the total audience than anything Americans can imagine...

...Sao Paulo, whose cityscape is as different from Rio's as Los Angeles' is from New York's...

...We felt this had an apocryphal ring, but we could see the point: there is a solid, thriving industrial economy here, but many millions of Brazilians who are totally outside it, and who have no imaginable way in...

...In Porto Alegre, and in the South as a whole, people are largely blond (even the poorest, most ragged people), descended from German colonists who hacked family farms out of the jungle a century ago...

...But on the day he was brought down, this tremendous event rated only a minor place on page one...

...I gave dozens of speeches and interviews...

...Porto Alegre reminded us of some progressive provincial cities in America — Minneapolis, for instance—that work wonderfully, but aren't so interesting...

...We didn't have enough time in Rio or Sdo Paulo...

...Sdo Paulo has a 28 • DISSENT Politics Abroad full-fledged, vibrant industrial sector, and all the paraphernalia of industrialism that have virtually disappeared from the United States...

...And there is no system of community colleges, and nothing like the high school equivalence exam, and no way to move into higher education if you're late getting out of the gate, and no cultural pressure to get poor kids into and through college, and no institutions for workers' education (though the PT seems to be trying to create some...

...They fear turf wars and shootouts by well-armed drug gangs, but also random stickups by coked-up pivetes, twelveyearold street kids with guns, and kidnappings by crooks who have run out of rich victims and democratized their business, working their way down into the lower middle class...

...Sao Paulo is the birthplace of the PT and its greatest source of strength today...

...Now he has come to see it as pure theater of the absurd...

...Among the Brazilians we met, people close to the labor movement and the PT were the most optimistic about the future...

...In August 1993, I made a visit to Brazil...

...Today's ruling classes understand not only that the promotion of culture can be good for business, but that it can provide a government with an aura of legitimacy...

...And in an age when tourism has become the number one worldwide industry, cultural promotions are wonderfully easy to arrange...

...Brazilian children are tracked far more rigidly than Americans...

...They seemed mostly in their upper twenties and thirties, about a third were women, couples held hands and smooched while I spoke, a couple of women nursed babies, older kids ran and jumped around at the other end of the cafeteria where we sat...

...A couple of the cops who were involved have been arrested (many others weren't), but nobody thinks they will do hard time...

...They asked complex questions about multinational companies, computers and robotics, about the destruction of the environment, about modern art and anti-art, about the decline of the American labor movement, about the conflicts within American feminism, about the fall of the USSR...

...It represents itself as a fusion of the Metal Workers Union from the northern industrial suburbs and the Bank Workers Union downtown...

...All the Brazilians we met felt that in recent years the violence has gotten a lot worse...

...In Salvador's favelas the congestion is as intense as anyplace in New York, there's not an inch to spare...

...they reminded me of my old South Bronx...

...clubs' letters, some with thousands of signatures, often lead the network to annul marriages, drive companies out of business, afflict their characters with sudden death or miraculously bring them back to life...

...One thing that everyone we met insisted on is that it is impossible to get into college without going to private school...

...They are locked in unending struggles with the Military Police, who suspect them of everything (about half the time they are right), and who are said to shake them down...

...Yet American culture has more second acts, more entrance and exit lanes, more holes to fall into, but also more holes to crawl out of...

...One story told to us several times was that the World Bank had delivered a message to Brazil, saying the country had one-third too many people...

...Nonchalant fatalism was the attitude that most marked people in the North...

...For a little while we'll have a chance to think and feel more intensely, to be smarter and sexier, more like the selves we want to be...

...The first was in August 1987, a few months after my book, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, appeared in a Brazilian edition...

...Because they see no signs of anything turning up for these kids, they WINTER • 1994 • 31 Politics Abroad judge them beyond help or hope, and they see their number as bound to grow and grow...

...The answer was, because they'd be shot for treason...

...When Brazilians talk about their deadend kids, they tell themselves something like this: Of course they'll do anything, because there isn't anything out there for them...

...And most kids who go through this encounter, as all kids must, are doomed to end up as permanent losers...

...And then, when we did get free, I found myself inept at the simplest human communication: I couldn't make it clear WINTER • 1994 • 27 Politics Abroad that I wanted something to eat...

...We'll find people like ourselves in unlikely places, we'll open up dialogues that transcend frontiers, we'll feel we belong to what Kant called the "world society of citizens...

...Cities are relatively prosperous, with highly skilled populations (lots of scientists and engineers), plugged into world computer and biotech industries...

...The PT has a program and a world outlook surprisingly close to that of Dissent (Irving Howe would have enjoyed its critique of Latin American Leninism), and about 34 million voters...

...half a mile away there are splendid postmod skyscrapers that belong to national banks or to the Bahia state government, built on lavish suburban plazas that are empty of people and landscaped as if they had all the space in the world...

...The plots and characters of these programs are said to define the staples of Brazilian conversation...

...One of the things that holds Brazil's radically contrasting scenes together is a system of mass media with a nationwide reach...

...Carnivals are supposed to be dead, but intellectuals have found a moral equivalent in international cultural events...

...They were as thoughtful and lively a group as I've ever talked to, and I thought Brazil would be lucky—indeed, any country would be lucky—if people like them should come to power...

...Meanwhile, people talked angrily about a "new class" that has gotten rich on currency speculation and sapped the national economy's productive power...

...Brazil has one of the most dynamic economies in the world, with productivity and exports growing around 3 percent every year...

...Porto Alegre has a high-tech municipal enterprise for waste disposal, recycling and environmental cleanup...

...Middle-class apartment houses in Rio and São Paulo have security systems far more ambitious and elaborate than their equivalents in New York or Chicago...

...Or were they just having drunken fun...

...For the past year, the inflation has been rising a little over 1 percent a day...

...When we saw the vast, empty state government plaza, I asked why the local poor people didn't try to start a favela here...