Where I write from

What's around here cannot fail to color my perception of what is not

These are interesting times, indeed. Especially when seen from down here, in the Brazilian countryside, next door to the end of the world. After all, when Pope Francis was elected he said he had been called from the end of the world to its Roman center, and his hometown Buenos Aires is just around the corner from here. And, in fact, now that things are on fire in Europe and North America, we do have an end-of-the-world feeling here. Like the Irish during the fall of the Roman Empire, I surmise. We are far away from not only the present European war but – most importantly – from most of its consequences. We are not considered part of the collective West, even though we are arguably the most Western of all peoples.

(I’m trying to pitch elsewhere an article on why Latin America is what remains of the once great Western Civilization, so I won’t extend on the matter here now.)

We are the periphery, the forgotten suburbs of what passes for the West nowadays. Even though we’re not anywhere near to the West’s Main Street, we still have most of the technology that seems to define things today: cellphones, the internet, computers, modern cars, and such. In fact, we now probably have more industrial production that most European or North American countries, albeit much less than the Eastern ones. As being an industrial country is no longer requisite for being a Western country, I’m probably just throwing some irrelevant data around, anyway. We belong to the BRICs, but unlike our most-important partners we fortunately do not appear much on the American radar. We are neither its adversaries, as Russia, China, and increasingly India, nor enemies like Iran or North Korea. On the other hand, we are no longer the vassals we have once been. Today full American-vassal status is the doubtful privilege of the other Anglo countries and Western Europe. We’re just the forgotten people who live “down there” and don’t make much of a fuss.

We end up trading with both sides of the fence we sit on; after the beginning of the war, for instance, Brazilian sugar exports for Russia grew two- or threefold. Soybeans exports went through the roof. All that and McDonalds’ junk, Coke, and iPhones, too, at the same time. There is much good in being geopolitically inoffensive, perhaps even irrelevant. Having one of the most closed self-sufficient economies of the world, an inheritance of our former military governments, doesn’t hurt much either when things are going downhill all over the globalized world.

We do suffer the forceful exportation of the ever-changing wokeness that substitutes for the Enlightenment values the USA used to force down the throats of everybody they could put their hands (and cannon-boats) on; I, for myself, am presently being sued by some Ford-Foundation-bankrolled transgender lobby. The difference, though, is that nobodies believes in wokeness down here. Apart from the lobbyists themselves (and even then…) we do not have genuine wokesters. Brazil has always been a very tolerant country; “don’t ask, don’t tell” has always been the name of the game here. As long as one was polite enough to refrain from discussing what one did between walls, nobody would bother with one’s taste for pink or fuchsia velvet suits, or with one’s infinite cortege of handsome young “cousins from the countryside”. The only difference wokeness wrought here occurs in the judicial fields and in the on-your-face-ness of sexual commentary in legacy media. There is no visible change on the streets, and if for some reason the USA suddenly stopped enforcing conformity with its cultural whirlwinds very little would change in daily life.

We also did, of course, import a great deal of that extremely impolite American political binary-ism. The difference, again, is that nobody cares much for politics here. We do care for people, so these days the supporters of the guy on the extreme-left corner, Lula, hate those that support the guy on the center-right corner (Bolsonaro, the sitting president), and that hatred is reciprocated with glee. The average Brazilian, though, has no idea of what party Bolsonaro belongs to. I certainly don’t, and I write on politics for an important newspaper. Lula’s party is known, but that’s because the party belongs to him, not the other way around.

So that is what’s around the keyboard I write with in my little corner of the world. The birds keep singing, the sky is still blue, and mostly everybody keeps minding their own business, especially in sexual matters. Few are those who live more than a few kilometers away from their mothers, thankfully, and nobody mistakes the government for society. This is where I write from, and I can tell you that from this here viewpoint the so-called West (which for us would be mostly North-by-North-East) just seems, well, crazily suicidal.

I’ll keep in touch; spread the word.