I got a call the other day from a guy with quite a posh English accent but Indian name who was a friend of the owner, Danny from Birmingham, for whose English School I worked. I’ll digress.
I had done a course on the internet where you could easily cheat if you didn’t know the answer and it gets you a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) certificate. It means bollocks of course, but so much in life can be bought, in this case for the $300 I’d spent on this chicanery.
The interview with Danny had not been stellar, having concluded with a thoroughly unwanted teasing on my part in questioning him on why, after nine years in Bahia, he hadn’t ended up with a Bahian wife.
“The women here are exceptional, don’t you think?” This is a common thread of conversation among ex-pat men, lots of whom, like me, succumb to the charms of the female half of the population here.
He looked a bit embarrassed and may have blushed. In fact, he was much more interested in the Bahian men and was the boyfriend of the other owner. My ‘gadar’ had obviously been impaired, he’d been in the army, in Northern Ireland actually, so I had, with great prejudice, assumed he liked woman. Why would any gay man want to join an institution most of whose members actively disliked or at least were suspicious of them? It seems a little incongruous, like a black man wanting to join the Klu Klux Klan.
Initially I was excited to hear from Farouk because this could mean some work, although Howdy Doody paid much less than most other English schools. But Howdy Doody occasionally handed out large translation jobs, rewarding the most keen teachers, which meant I rarely benefited, but you never knew.
The other owner of the English school, Danny’s lover, worked for the state tax collecting agency but had special prices at the school for people who paid for their classes under the table. When in Rome. The books they used were oriented towards business, and seemed purposefully designed to be as dull as fucking possible.
Danny himself was not personable in any outward way and liked to show occasional irritation to reiterate who was in charge.
So in other words, Farouk’s path to me was not through a person I’d garnered a lot of sympathy for. And almost immediately it became clear he wasn’t a source of work but wanted to, in his capacity as a financial planner, have my money for him to invest and take care of my retirement needs.
“There are plenty of good ways to make your wealth grow exponentially and I’d love to get together and go over some details with you about how better to manage your money with immediate benefit and long term stability.”
Business shibboleth sounds as if it was invented by a computer, too hygienic. This all seemed dandy, though, and I’m always looking for new experiences. I agreed to meet him the next time he was in Salvador. But I sent him an email afterwards to make sure I wasn’t misleading him.
“I think Danny thinks because I was late collecting a couple of pay checks that I’m rich. Unfortunately, this is not the case, but if you hear of any schemes that will throw money my way I’d greatly appreciate it.”
Financial planners cannot afford to be put off by the cynicism of jaded expats who worry they’ll have to work until they die for lack of financial planning. He wrote back that he’d be delighted to meet with me and was not only concerned with rich people but interested in ‘communicating the possibilities’ for all levels of wealth.
We agreed to meet in a Coconut Highway Shopping Mall. Malls are a stalwart feature of middle class life here where consumerism, in a safe environment (with occasional lapses as is inevitable anywhere in Brazil) becomes a leisure option for many. This seems to be a phenomena around the world, depressing for those of us yet to warm to the shopping mall’s many allures. Shopping has become a noun in Portuguese, so you go to the ‘shopping.’
I arrived early and almost went into an evangelical bookstore, but chickened out for fear I’d be immediately snuffed as an imposter by someone convinced of their virtue due to their belief in Christ. Tons of enticing looking CDs and books were on display in the window, though the content of both were slightly one dimensional. Is there nothing in this world besides Jesus and God for these people?
I moved on and ordered a coffee. A text message came through.
“Was hoping for British timing but this taxi isn’t playing ball.”
The waitress, also, took her time as she served a rather rotund chap a plate of ‘bread cheese’ (as the doughy concoction shaped in a ball is called), and a coke. If you are what you eat, this guy did kind of look like rising dough; healthy was not how you would describe his appearance.
I twiddled about as one does when waiting for someone. These are the kind of situations when you miss cigarettes, the perfect filler of small time gaps.
Farouk arrived at seven after ten, very apologetic and flustered because he had ‘kept the client waiting.” I hadn’t realized we had that kind of intimacy.
Things I learned immediately were that he was from London, went to Bristol University and had been living in Brazil for the past two years. I asked how old he was and he asked me to guess. I didn’t fall into that lame trap and he divulged it to be 33.
“The age of Christ,” I said with great cultural authority. Brazilians equate thirty three with Christ’s death so getting through thirty three unblemished is better than Jesus managed. I didn’t ask whether he was married or not, I’m not a complete fool having learnt from the experience with Danny, Farouk’s friend.
He lived in a city called Vitoria, the capital of Espirito Santo, a state that borders Bahia to the south. I have never met another foreigner who lives there, but it’s referred to as the smaller version of Rio and quite pretty.
“God, the heat here is terrible.” Farouk said as if he’d come from Alaska or something. Vitoria is not that fucking far away.
We were not here to learn about each other’s favorite philosophers so we quickly moved onto financial sorcery.
He handed me a card, with his company’s name, WadeGlobal, and its logotype that looked somewhat like waves. He was a senior partner it informed me. On the back was the mission statement of the company. ‘Keeping your investments afloat’ is not that reassuring a slogan. And ‘providing independant advice where financial goals can be achieved.’ You shouldn’t have a spelling mistake in your mission statement. They had a virtual office in London to add to their legitimacy.
Farouk pulled out a couple of folders from his briefcase, a blank sheet of paper and a couple of pages with numbers on them.
He specialized on emerging markets and long term investments. China and India continued to be ‘fantastic bets’, particularly India with its human capital. I wanted to ask whether he’d read ‘The White Tiger’, which kind of exposes India’s underbelly and the other 800 million wretchedly poor people absent from the economic statistics. But he was of Indian descent so might be offended.
This had happened to me once in Heathrow airport. On one of those interminable human conveyer belts, I was behind an Indian man and his family who were trying to pass by two guys. Politely he squeezed through and suddenly one of the guys shouted, ‘Oi, you, watch it. Who the fuck do you think you are?”
This was a plain case of naked racism. A verbal raucous ensued and in my great moral certitude, I sided with the Indian, who said he was a doctor and in the United States people wouldn’t dare say that to him, not like ‘you English bastards.” After the police arrived and said they couldn’t do anything, I asked the Indian guy if he’d seen the just released film, Gandhi. My credibility with him went out the window.
From Farouk I learned that Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man were excellent and safe bets for long term investment, having no taxation. That was good to know.
Russia was presenting ‘very positive conditions for a healthy investment climate.’ I nodded my head attentively, thinking never in a million years would I put my money in the Russia of Putin, the Mafia and all that still afflicts that volatile place.
“The middle class is growing rapidly,” was Farouk’s take on it.
His company was keen on Brazil, Chile and Mexico though the latter is ‘going through a difficult period.’ That’s kind of an understatement; there’s open warfare between the government and drug dealers in the north of the country, a festering Indian problem in Chiapas, and high kidnapping rates in Mexico City.
I was informed that Mauritius, Bermuda and Luxemburg were also great places for off-shore investments. What about the Cayman Islands? I asked with a rather haughty chuckle considering that place is the synonym for financial shenanigans.
“Oh, that was just one bad case and now the government is being much more strict about whose money it handles. As they are in Panama.”
Thank goodness for that. Back to China, which was, of course, on track for indefinite growth. Here Farouk drew one of the many graphs he whipped up on the stationary of WadeGlobal. It just went up and up in a straight line like the Washington Monument. Other graphs had more of a gradient, though obviously never going down.
All this optimism was making me dizzy. According to Farouk the current economic malaise was in fact a good thing, giving the financial system a needed jolt to grow robustly in the years to come. In fact any mention of potential ill in the future was slapped down as ‘well that’s what the doomsayers might say’ attitudes, and more statistics showing how superb everything was.
His proposal was to have me pay five hundred dollars a month into some infallible fund, which he would handle. Once I had $10,000 accumulated, I then would “let the money sit and do its thing,” like it was a stew or something but have no access to it for two years. After that, however, it would be as if I had won the lottery.
“You have to start planning for your retirement and take control of your finances. With this, it’s a win, win, situation.”
I think Farouk by that point realized I was ‘like an ashtray on a motorbike’ in terms of utility to him. In one last-ditched effort he asked if I knew any English people with pensions. There was some government loophole, soon to be closed, and for those drawing government pensions, ‘the time to act was now.’ There seems to be no problem with using clichés in business speak. I said I’d put him in touch with the many English people I know drawing pensions, approximately zero.
He was a pleasant guy, though, and I wished him luck with attracting more risk-friendly people than me.
“Next time you’re in town, we should have a beer and you being a single man, can check out the girls.” I said with slightly feigned enthusiasm. His half-smile told me I’d made the same mistake again as I had done with Danny.
Friday, 18 December 2009
Sunday, 29 November 2009
The Dog and the Fiat
Shaggy came to us as an adult. Therefore we cannot be held responsible for her being a terrible racist. This is embarrassing in a city that is 80% in some way descended from Africans. An otherwise docile, loving bitch, on seeing black children or women, she would growl and transform herself to something approaching dangerous.
“Racism is a crime without bail,” joked the man who works in our condominium during the day. Despite Adailton being both gentle and friendly, Shaggy never truly warmed to him, on account of his dark skin.
In Brazil, if someone calls you a racial epitaph and there are witnesses, the person can be put in jail and only freed after the trial. The most famous case was when an Argentine player racially insulted a Brazilian player whose nickname was ‘Graphite’ because of his skin color. The visiting player was hauled off to jail and there was a big hoopla since he was Argentine and Brazilians are prickly about Porteños. But he got out quickly.
Shaggy was also a black dog and its previous owners were friends of ours who were moving back to the States. They were the opposite of white racists, they loved everybody and embraced diversity with fervor, the good Americans a lot of people doubt exist. The problem was they both worked and our poor Shaggy was left alone with a maid and her kids who must have terrorized her.
I’d never had a dog before as an adult and since I’m white, Shaggy liked me immediately. As dogs do, they become family, sometimes better because they can’t talk.
About the same time we got Shaggy, we acquired a Fiat from one of our neighbors who was moving away. He was from Uruguay, and seemed a perfectly decent sort as most people from that nice but rather innocuous country are. His wife was from the south of Brazil and they had a baby daughter.
She was not the cutest thing in the world but of course you can’t say that and coo at her and say how adorable she is instead. It’s lucky you don’t turn a certain color when you’re being hypocritical.
The car seemed in good shape although knowing nothing about cars, my judgment about that type of thing is pretty baseless. I paid him and happily went off to register the car, which proved impossible because he hadn’t paid the yearly tax.
“How the fuck do you sell me a car and not tell me about that?” was what I wanted to say but being a polite bloke I left out the ‘fuck’.
He was moving away the next day and was sheepishly apologetic when I confronted him. He swore he would pay and would send proof of that through the mail. So I could have been screwed since, realistically, was I really going to drive 1500 miles to get the three hundred and fifty bucks?
They asked to spend the last night at our house having moved out all their stuff. Fortunately I was away, for as guests they were slightly crass. Some couples spend a lot of time just sniping at each other, it’s awkward. These guys seemed to loathe each other. The guy would say things like:
“Come on you fat bitch, get on with the washing.” He would pretend it was a joke but it wasn’t really. She was equally derogatory calling him slow, a fool, a fucking foreigner. They were a delight to be around. Amazingly, he sent the payment the next week.
Our Fiat was what are called ‘popular’ cars here. That means a 1.0 litre engine and in our case, no frills at all except a radio that died almost immediately. No air-conditioning, no power steering, just basic. I was taking the carbon footprint bullshit seriously. But it was reliable and only seemed to break down in convenient places like next to a garage.
So we had our car and Shaggy and were starting out a life together. We had to be careful about walking Shaggy because she had a mortal enemy within the condominium. Marie, a King James Spaniel, would cause a transformation in Shaggy, ‘a race without definition’ as mutts are called here, who became an attack dog. She was like one of those Bolsheviks who’d found some wretched nobleman and pummeled him to death.
One dreadful time, Shaggy attacked Marie while the owner, a man who masculinity pretty much left alone, screamed and failed to do anything. I had to drag Shaggy away, while the owner and Marie whimpered.
“She has a heart condition,’ he said accusingly.
He is a professor at the state university and is keen to let you know how many conferences he speaks at and how hard he works. His specialty is fungal genetics so you can imagine what fun those conferences must be to attend. His wife is also an academic and expert in obscure ancient languages. She feels the need to explain things she suspects lesser intellects than herself, i.e. us, will be confounded by. So you learn fascinating stuff about archaic Greek or Aramaic and such. Shaggy outlived poor Marie whose heart eventually pushed her from this world.
Dogs and cars get older, and both start to cost you money, cars particularly. I think I practically replaced the entire engine over these nearly ten years of owning our reliable Fiat. I thought this would be a good experience, since I’d learn how a car worked, but if you don’t have a mechanical mind, the mechanics of a car are boring as shit.
By the time I managed to sell the car, the headlights were so pathetic you prayed the street lamps were good. Many years before the back windshield wiper had fallen off and all that remained was the metal stub, which would miraculously come to life and start scratching the fuck out of the back window. You had to stop the car and remove the stub which could be inconvenient. We had to measure the gasoline tank by the amount of kilometers we’d gone since the little gas indicator packed in. The left blinker was dodgy, often failing to function, causing heaps of indignation from other drivers. The muffler was full of holes, which meant you could tell from a couple of miles away when we were arriving.
In the meantime, our neighbors have new cars every couple of years. In our case, the difference in car standards is because we travel abroad every year. The world is accessible to middle class people who don’t get too hooked on material things.
The name Shaggy caused some estrangement to English relatives. When my nephew called and was given the message (by my wife) that I was with Shaggy on the beach, in wonderment he told his mother (my sister) that I was shagging on the beach. Brazil is really liberal, he must have thought.
There had been an early trauma in Shaggy’s life with us. We had had an adorable Cocker Spaniel puppy (well mixed, this is Brazil after all) foisted on us and stupidly did not resist. Shaggy, the darling of a childless couple, suddenly competed with an cute dog who spent a good deal of the rest of his life humping her. She eventually succumbed to his charm (at times well hidden) and would often reciprocate the humping in a role reversal that maybe was indicative of some latent butch lesbianism on Shaggy’s part. Tragically the spaniel was killed and like us, Shaggy was distraught.
Another jolt ultimately re-compensated but nevertheless discombobulating to Shaggy’s world view was our adoption of a black child, another unwelcome entrant into the house with racial baggage to boot. But she came to love him, as he did her.
Very suddenly, things started to go down hill for Shaggy. She had trouble breathing and began having seizures, normally brought on by too much excitement. Like an epileptic, she would writhe around on the floor, mouth foaming, peeing and crapping uncontrollably. We spent a good deal of money to find out she had a bad heart, for which she needed more regular expensive medication. But what are you going to do, let the dog die because it’s straining your budget?
Unable to be convinced that the car would last another day, we decided to sell it. The characteristics outlined earlier didn’t give it mouth watering appeal to a second-hand car salesman. In addition, its particular shade of blue was the only kind that makes blue look ugly, there were two small dents and the horn had developed a habit of going off all the time, most consistently when you were trying to get out of parking spaces. Worse, the chassis number had been obliterated by rust.
The car would therefore have to be sold on the street. This is done by going to a certain part of town where men stand on street corners and flash their fingers at passing cars offering to buy them. As a salesman, I am unbelievably bad and since I knew the car was a piece of shit, how was I going to convince anybody else otherwise?
So I enlisted a more street wise friend of mine, who miraculously managed to sell the thing for almost four thousand dollars. The world is unfair. The US is fifteen times as rich as Brazil yet things like cars are outrageously expensive here. For four thousands dollars, you can get a decent car in the US. Here, well you get something like my old wreck.
The last night of Shaggy’s life she paced around, unable to lie down because of the pressure on her bloated heart. She looked at us beseechingly, it was heart wrenching. The next day she was exhausted and we decided to take her to the vet. On the way she died in the arms of my nephew who thought I’d been shagging on the beach. She was thirteen, she’d had a good life.
So the car and Shaggy are gone. Both were faithful souls and are positively etched in our memories, all that we can ask for of the past.
“Racism is a crime without bail,” joked the man who works in our condominium during the day. Despite Adailton being both gentle and friendly, Shaggy never truly warmed to him, on account of his dark skin.
In Brazil, if someone calls you a racial epitaph and there are witnesses, the person can be put in jail and only freed after the trial. The most famous case was when an Argentine player racially insulted a Brazilian player whose nickname was ‘Graphite’ because of his skin color. The visiting player was hauled off to jail and there was a big hoopla since he was Argentine and Brazilians are prickly about Porteños. But he got out quickly.
Shaggy was also a black dog and its previous owners were friends of ours who were moving back to the States. They were the opposite of white racists, they loved everybody and embraced diversity with fervor, the good Americans a lot of people doubt exist. The problem was they both worked and our poor Shaggy was left alone with a maid and her kids who must have terrorized her.
I’d never had a dog before as an adult and since I’m white, Shaggy liked me immediately. As dogs do, they become family, sometimes better because they can’t talk.
About the same time we got Shaggy, we acquired a Fiat from one of our neighbors who was moving away. He was from Uruguay, and seemed a perfectly decent sort as most people from that nice but rather innocuous country are. His wife was from the south of Brazil and they had a baby daughter.
She was not the cutest thing in the world but of course you can’t say that and coo at her and say how adorable she is instead. It’s lucky you don’t turn a certain color when you’re being hypocritical.
The car seemed in good shape although knowing nothing about cars, my judgment about that type of thing is pretty baseless. I paid him and happily went off to register the car, which proved impossible because he hadn’t paid the yearly tax.
“How the fuck do you sell me a car and not tell me about that?” was what I wanted to say but being a polite bloke I left out the ‘fuck’.
He was moving away the next day and was sheepishly apologetic when I confronted him. He swore he would pay and would send proof of that through the mail. So I could have been screwed since, realistically, was I really going to drive 1500 miles to get the three hundred and fifty bucks?
They asked to spend the last night at our house having moved out all their stuff. Fortunately I was away, for as guests they were slightly crass. Some couples spend a lot of time just sniping at each other, it’s awkward. These guys seemed to loathe each other. The guy would say things like:
“Come on you fat bitch, get on with the washing.” He would pretend it was a joke but it wasn’t really. She was equally derogatory calling him slow, a fool, a fucking foreigner. They were a delight to be around. Amazingly, he sent the payment the next week.
Our Fiat was what are called ‘popular’ cars here. That means a 1.0 litre engine and in our case, no frills at all except a radio that died almost immediately. No air-conditioning, no power steering, just basic. I was taking the carbon footprint bullshit seriously. But it was reliable and only seemed to break down in convenient places like next to a garage.
So we had our car and Shaggy and were starting out a life together. We had to be careful about walking Shaggy because she had a mortal enemy within the condominium. Marie, a King James Spaniel, would cause a transformation in Shaggy, ‘a race without definition’ as mutts are called here, who became an attack dog. She was like one of those Bolsheviks who’d found some wretched nobleman and pummeled him to death.
One dreadful time, Shaggy attacked Marie while the owner, a man who masculinity pretty much left alone, screamed and failed to do anything. I had to drag Shaggy away, while the owner and Marie whimpered.
“She has a heart condition,’ he said accusingly.
He is a professor at the state university and is keen to let you know how many conferences he speaks at and how hard he works. His specialty is fungal genetics so you can imagine what fun those conferences must be to attend. His wife is also an academic and expert in obscure ancient languages. She feels the need to explain things she suspects lesser intellects than herself, i.e. us, will be confounded by. So you learn fascinating stuff about archaic Greek or Aramaic and such. Shaggy outlived poor Marie whose heart eventually pushed her from this world.
Dogs and cars get older, and both start to cost you money, cars particularly. I think I practically replaced the entire engine over these nearly ten years of owning our reliable Fiat. I thought this would be a good experience, since I’d learn how a car worked, but if you don’t have a mechanical mind, the mechanics of a car are boring as shit.
By the time I managed to sell the car, the headlights were so pathetic you prayed the street lamps were good. Many years before the back windshield wiper had fallen off and all that remained was the metal stub, which would miraculously come to life and start scratching the fuck out of the back window. You had to stop the car and remove the stub which could be inconvenient. We had to measure the gasoline tank by the amount of kilometers we’d gone since the little gas indicator packed in. The left blinker was dodgy, often failing to function, causing heaps of indignation from other drivers. The muffler was full of holes, which meant you could tell from a couple of miles away when we were arriving.
In the meantime, our neighbors have new cars every couple of years. In our case, the difference in car standards is because we travel abroad every year. The world is accessible to middle class people who don’t get too hooked on material things.
The name Shaggy caused some estrangement to English relatives. When my nephew called and was given the message (by my wife) that I was with Shaggy on the beach, in wonderment he told his mother (my sister) that I was shagging on the beach. Brazil is really liberal, he must have thought.
There had been an early trauma in Shaggy’s life with us. We had had an adorable Cocker Spaniel puppy (well mixed, this is Brazil after all) foisted on us and stupidly did not resist. Shaggy, the darling of a childless couple, suddenly competed with an cute dog who spent a good deal of the rest of his life humping her. She eventually succumbed to his charm (at times well hidden) and would often reciprocate the humping in a role reversal that maybe was indicative of some latent butch lesbianism on Shaggy’s part. Tragically the spaniel was killed and like us, Shaggy was distraught.
Another jolt ultimately re-compensated but nevertheless discombobulating to Shaggy’s world view was our adoption of a black child, another unwelcome entrant into the house with racial baggage to boot. But she came to love him, as he did her.
Very suddenly, things started to go down hill for Shaggy. She had trouble breathing and began having seizures, normally brought on by too much excitement. Like an epileptic, she would writhe around on the floor, mouth foaming, peeing and crapping uncontrollably. We spent a good deal of money to find out she had a bad heart, for which she needed more regular expensive medication. But what are you going to do, let the dog die because it’s straining your budget?
Unable to be convinced that the car would last another day, we decided to sell it. The characteristics outlined earlier didn’t give it mouth watering appeal to a second-hand car salesman. In addition, its particular shade of blue was the only kind that makes blue look ugly, there were two small dents and the horn had developed a habit of going off all the time, most consistently when you were trying to get out of parking spaces. Worse, the chassis number had been obliterated by rust.
The car would therefore have to be sold on the street. This is done by going to a certain part of town where men stand on street corners and flash their fingers at passing cars offering to buy them. As a salesman, I am unbelievably bad and since I knew the car was a piece of shit, how was I going to convince anybody else otherwise?
So I enlisted a more street wise friend of mine, who miraculously managed to sell the thing for almost four thousand dollars. The world is unfair. The US is fifteen times as rich as Brazil yet things like cars are outrageously expensive here. For four thousands dollars, you can get a decent car in the US. Here, well you get something like my old wreck.
The last night of Shaggy’s life she paced around, unable to lie down because of the pressure on her bloated heart. She looked at us beseechingly, it was heart wrenching. The next day she was exhausted and we decided to take her to the vet. On the way she died in the arms of my nephew who thought I’d been shagging on the beach. She was thirteen, she’d had a good life.
So the car and Shaggy are gone. Both were faithful souls and are positively etched in our memories, all that we can ask for of the past.
Monday, 23 November 2009
Travels in West Africa
I have never thought of myself as a squeamish traveler. I have overnighted in hotels that cockroaches would avoid, with stained sheets, stinking carpets with cigarette burns and toilets that look as if someone had a personal challenge to make them as disgusting as possible. I have traipsed around rainforests at night in torrential downpours, avoiding snakes and thorny, aggressive plants and strange invisible bugs that fall out of trees and deliver a painful bite to rival a Box jellyfish.
Yes indeed, until this point I have had an overrated opinion of my capacity to weather hardship, scoffing at squeamishness as if it showed unacceptable weakness and cowardliness. I’m really a joy to be around.
But such haughty, self-congratulation has recently been shattered. I have just finished reading a book by an Englishwoman, Mary Kingsley, who travelled into the depths of West Africa on her own in 1895. Compared to her, my traveling travails seem, quite frankly, pithy.
Her goal was to collect botanical species, and she had contact with tribes rather fond of human flesh and others whose behavior was unpredictable. Through it all, she maintained a wonderful sense of humor with the florid Victorian language masking biting wit and superb observation.
She spent a good deal of time with the Fans, a tribe known for its fierceness and cannibalism. But she did not fear them since,
“The cannibalism of the Fans, although a prevalent habit, is no danger, I think, to white people except as regards the bother it gives one in preventing one’s black companions from being eaten.”
She had hired a group of men to accompany her and was constantly having to curb truant or lascivious behavior. In one village she,
“chaperoned my men while among the ladies of the Esouai, a forward set of minxes, with the vigilance of a dragon and decreed, like the Mikado of Japan, ‘that whosoever leered or winked, unless connubially linked, should forthwith be beheaded.’”
Pages and pages were devoted to describing the various juju and fetishes that seemed to play a large role in many of the tribes with whom she cavorted. Most of these spirits are quite malevolent and much time is devoted to appeasing them. She claims that more Africans died as a result of some juju than anything else.
She also detailed many of their customs, which for one tribe included the habit of dressing up like a crocodile. But she wryly remarked that,
“I doubt whether any native would chance himself inside a crocodile skin and swim about in the river among the genuine articles for fear of their penetrating his disguise mentally and physically.”
She faced unbelievable hardship and showed an unbelievable courage and determination. In one room of a hut where she was spending the night, she had to clear from the wooden plank on which she was to sleep a bag containing several severed fingers and hands. The tribe believed that evil spirits could be placated by throwing human limbs into the forest.
She fell into a trap where her extensive crinolines saved her from lethal perforation by the spears that lined the bottom of the hole. She navigated through hostile vegetation, one vine she described vividly:
“It is covered with short, strong, curved thorns. It creeps along concealed by decorative vegetation, and you get your legs twined in it and of course injured. It festoons itself from tree to tree and when your mind is set on the other things, catches you under the chin and gives you the appearance of having made a determined but ineffectual attempt to cut your throat with a saw. It whisks your hat off and grabs your clothes and commits other iniquities too numerous to catalogue here.”
But she describes these numerous privations and physical discomfort matter-of-factly and without a whiff of self pity.
“My face and particularly my lips are a misery to me, having been blistered all over by yesterday’s sun and last night I inadvertently whipped the skin all off one cheek with the blanket and it keeps on bleeding and, horror of horrors, there is no tea until the water comes.”
The last part of her journey was an unsuccessful attempt to reach the summit of the Great Peak of Cameroon, an arduous task and one thwarted in the end by rain and wind. Before the final ascent, they had found a camping spot but she had sent her men out to look for caves for,
“I am not thinking of taking out a patent for our present camp site.”
Her ear for dialogue was well tuned and she relates wonderfully the way they expressed themselves.
One of her crew members, complaining about the cold, said to her,
“Oh, ma! It be cold, cold too much, Too much cold kill we black men, all same for one as too much sun kill you white man. Oh, ma!”
Or when her men were talking among themselves about one of their companions who had amassed some money:
“He gets plenty money, but he no have none no time. He go frow it away on woman and drink, he no buy clothes.”
Another replies, “What can a man buy with money better than them thing he like best.”
Her attitudes toward Africa and Africans were obviously Victorian in the sense of believing them to be an inferior race and mostly savage. But clearly she loved the continent and greatly enjoyed the company of her men, many of whom she admired and respected. This dichotomy is evident in many of the descriptions of European travelers of the time whose genuine affection for the ‘natives’ whether in Asia, South America or Africa was always within the context of the innate superiority of the Europeans.
This would no doubt raise the ire of those self-anointed defenders of the repressed who would condemn the moral fiber of such people as Mary Kingsley. Yet it is clear from her experiences that she would rather be in Africa than anywhere else.
“The charm of West Africa is a painful one: it gives you pleasure when you are out there, but when you are back here it gives you pain by calling you….Come back, come back, this is your home.”
Alas, Africa would be the end for our intrepid traveler. Volunteering as a nurse during the Boer war, she was dead within two months of Typhoid fever. And while the European colonial powers were crassly carving up Africa for themselves (helped immensely by the stark divisions and mistrust within many African societies) a voice with great sympathy for the Africans was forever quieted.
Yes indeed, until this point I have had an overrated opinion of my capacity to weather hardship, scoffing at squeamishness as if it showed unacceptable weakness and cowardliness. I’m really a joy to be around.
But such haughty, self-congratulation has recently been shattered. I have just finished reading a book by an Englishwoman, Mary Kingsley, who travelled into the depths of West Africa on her own in 1895. Compared to her, my traveling travails seem, quite frankly, pithy.
Her goal was to collect botanical species, and she had contact with tribes rather fond of human flesh and others whose behavior was unpredictable. Through it all, she maintained a wonderful sense of humor with the florid Victorian language masking biting wit and superb observation.
She spent a good deal of time with the Fans, a tribe known for its fierceness and cannibalism. But she did not fear them since,
“The cannibalism of the Fans, although a prevalent habit, is no danger, I think, to white people except as regards the bother it gives one in preventing one’s black companions from being eaten.”
She had hired a group of men to accompany her and was constantly having to curb truant or lascivious behavior. In one village she,
“chaperoned my men while among the ladies of the Esouai, a forward set of minxes, with the vigilance of a dragon and decreed, like the Mikado of Japan, ‘that whosoever leered or winked, unless connubially linked, should forthwith be beheaded.’”
Pages and pages were devoted to describing the various juju and fetishes that seemed to play a large role in many of the tribes with whom she cavorted. Most of these spirits are quite malevolent and much time is devoted to appeasing them. She claims that more Africans died as a result of some juju than anything else.
She also detailed many of their customs, which for one tribe included the habit of dressing up like a crocodile. But she wryly remarked that,
“I doubt whether any native would chance himself inside a crocodile skin and swim about in the river among the genuine articles for fear of their penetrating his disguise mentally and physically.”
She faced unbelievable hardship and showed an unbelievable courage and determination. In one room of a hut where she was spending the night, she had to clear from the wooden plank on which she was to sleep a bag containing several severed fingers and hands. The tribe believed that evil spirits could be placated by throwing human limbs into the forest.
She fell into a trap where her extensive crinolines saved her from lethal perforation by the spears that lined the bottom of the hole. She navigated through hostile vegetation, one vine she described vividly:
“It is covered with short, strong, curved thorns. It creeps along concealed by decorative vegetation, and you get your legs twined in it and of course injured. It festoons itself from tree to tree and when your mind is set on the other things, catches you under the chin and gives you the appearance of having made a determined but ineffectual attempt to cut your throat with a saw. It whisks your hat off and grabs your clothes and commits other iniquities too numerous to catalogue here.”
But she describes these numerous privations and physical discomfort matter-of-factly and without a whiff of self pity.
“My face and particularly my lips are a misery to me, having been blistered all over by yesterday’s sun and last night I inadvertently whipped the skin all off one cheek with the blanket and it keeps on bleeding and, horror of horrors, there is no tea until the water comes.”
The last part of her journey was an unsuccessful attempt to reach the summit of the Great Peak of Cameroon, an arduous task and one thwarted in the end by rain and wind. Before the final ascent, they had found a camping spot but she had sent her men out to look for caves for,
“I am not thinking of taking out a patent for our present camp site.”
Her ear for dialogue was well tuned and she relates wonderfully the way they expressed themselves.
One of her crew members, complaining about the cold, said to her,
“Oh, ma! It be cold, cold too much, Too much cold kill we black men, all same for one as too much sun kill you white man. Oh, ma!”
Or when her men were talking among themselves about one of their companions who had amassed some money:
“He gets plenty money, but he no have none no time. He go frow it away on woman and drink, he no buy clothes.”
Another replies, “What can a man buy with money better than them thing he like best.”
Her attitudes toward Africa and Africans were obviously Victorian in the sense of believing them to be an inferior race and mostly savage. But clearly she loved the continent and greatly enjoyed the company of her men, many of whom she admired and respected. This dichotomy is evident in many of the descriptions of European travelers of the time whose genuine affection for the ‘natives’ whether in Asia, South America or Africa was always within the context of the innate superiority of the Europeans.
This would no doubt raise the ire of those self-anointed defenders of the repressed who would condemn the moral fiber of such people as Mary Kingsley. Yet it is clear from her experiences that she would rather be in Africa than anywhere else.
“The charm of West Africa is a painful one: it gives you pleasure when you are out there, but when you are back here it gives you pain by calling you….Come back, come back, this is your home.”
Alas, Africa would be the end for our intrepid traveler. Volunteering as a nurse during the Boer war, she was dead within two months of Typhoid fever. And while the European colonial powers were crassly carving up Africa for themselves (helped immensely by the stark divisions and mistrust within many African societies) a voice with great sympathy for the Africans was forever quieted.
Monday, 16 November 2009
Buying a Car in Bahia
The only thing good about waiting in line while the Brazilian bureaucracy badly attends to its citizens who pay for it to function, is meeting people. Bahia is one of the places in the world where every time you go out and have interaction with strangers, you will have a laugh, a pleasurable or at least interesting experience. So cheerful and friendly are baianos that even wasting hours of your life trying to resolve bureaucratic shit does not damper their humor.
This is not the case with me. I glower and sulk and dry-heave indignation as the cogs of the machinery grind at an abominably slow rate. As a result, I try and minimize any contact with the bureaucracy, which in Brazil you can do by hiring a professional called a ‘dispatcher’, whose expertise is working the bureaucracy. Besides taking care of your paper work, his other function is greasing the palms of state employees who magically transform the one- month waiting time for many documents into ten minutes.
But this time I could not avoid contact with the beast. Having bought a car I had to have my signature ‘recognized’ as they say here. A normal signature is worthless without the stamp of the notary for anything official; everyone agrees this is a totally pointless procedure that takes millions of hours of labor away from the market. But it continues.
The previous owner of the car was a rather mousy American woman long resident in Brazil. Americans who stay here for a long time adopt a kind of sing-song English, where emphasis is put as it would be in a Portuguese phrase that sounds strange in English though it’s being delivered by a native speaker. She lived in a nice house and like many of her status had a couple of house servants, one which she rather obscenely referred to as her house boy. The young man was 25 and looked surly, maybe being addressed as a boy didn’t agree with him. The car was practically new and a good deal, so all was well.
To guarantee service at the Notary Public (at least mine), you have to get there way before opening hours. In my case, I arrived at 6:30 a.m. and still found twenty people in front of me. I calculated two hours as a wait, which was stupid since if your wait exceeds that, you really get fucking mad.
There was a young man in front of me who was reading a paper. As he looked at the picture of an unfortunate French tourist who had almost had his ear sliced off, he turned to me and said of the gang who perpetrated this barbarity and had been caught.
“They need to be beaten badly. A lot of hits. For me, the cops should have killed them then and there.”
I had not uttered a word to this guy and sort of said something completely non-committal, burying my head in my book trying not to get drawn into a conversation on the rights and wrongs of extra-judicial killing.
There was a child running about going up to people in the line and being cute in front of them. This being Brazil, of course everyone smiled and cooed at him, a couple of people actually held his hand and took him for a little walk. His mother looked on from afar, not more than 18, one of her front teeth already missing and the kind of clothes that give away the fact that the person wearing them is extremely poor. Her skirt was frayed, her flip-flops worn; her tee-shirt featured a smiling politician known for his brazen corruption. Little John, despite being cute, was probably condemned to a life of material squalor. He’d better enjoy it since people will pay fond attention to poor children but not at all to poor adults.
Eight o’clock passed and it had not opened yet. The guy in front of me, he who wanted to exterminate criminals, had switched his cellular to become a radio and the tinny sound of carnival music piped out. The woman behind me started dancing and singing; she knew all the words to the songs. Not dancing exaggeratedly, but moving and letting the music be with her. Here I was stewing in resentment, saturated with the American ‘time is money’ theory, and she was dancing and smiling. I think her attitude is probably more correct.
Finally, the doors were opened by a middle aged woman, who sighed as she said, “I almost didn’t open this morning, you know. Two of my workers called in sick, it’s going to be a terrible time for me today.”
I hated this woman immediately. She made us, some of whom had waited for two hours, feel she was doing us a favor. And she had an earnest smile. ‘You should be apologizing to us for our inconvenience, you bitch,’ was the way I saw it.
We ambled in, my number 19, seemed years off being serviced. The woman, after ushering the lucky ones in, began turning away others who would have to wait until 12 to get a number for service starting at 14:00. She locked the doors with a crude chain. She was perpetuating an outrageous affront to a long suffering public and she still had that matronly fucking smile on her face. Hellish thoughts were jumping around my head, such as going up and seizing her and shaking her and…..
After ten minutes the first person was still being served, a guy stood up and started to complain.
“What are all those people doing back there?” he asked as he pointed to people who seemed to be scurrying around doing nothing.
He was confronted by a stern looking supervisor, a young woman with short hair who explained with great rigor how their repeated requests for more staff had been ignored by authorities higher than her.
“That’s a disgrace,” the man said, his voice rising to a level that started to cause some concern. “Brazil doesn’t advance because of this shit.”
Some people have charisma, others don’t. This guy did not, was unattractive and rude and people were starting to get sick of him.
“Sit down, sit down,” a couple of the people said aggressively. Eventually he left, but all his points were valid, everyone knew this. I have witnessed many similar instances, in bank queues, and other place where you are required to wait. The strangling bureaucracy thwarts progress and gets a few people indignant enough to shout about it. If the majority did, there’d be a revolution but, let’s face it, most people do not want to get caught up in a revolution.
As the clock began to show an hour, then an hour and a half had passed, ire ate at me like some corrosive acid, no wonder they call it one of the Capital Sins. I watched the woman working, as a hawk watches its prey. She seemed to work in slow motion and insisted on making chit chat to each customer. Seconds were wasted on these meaningless banters, and I resented them.
Some compensation was acquired from complaining with the people sitting next to me, in this case two attractive and friendly women.
“It’s absolutely absurd, one employee to serve fifty people. A lack of respect, a shame.”
We all agreed. Later, I felt betrayed by my former allies when their transaction, one ahead of mine, was taking ages mainly due to some fucking chit chat they insisted on engaging with the hated employee. Those last ten minutes were agony. It’s lucky that in Brazil I can’t go to Walmart and pick up a gun and start shooting people. If Americans had to go through this, there’d be even more mass shootings than there are now.
It was nine-forty in the morning when I finally managed to escape with what I wanted. I called my fix-it man, Goofy. That’s what it says on his card, Papeta, ‘the good dispatcher’. We had gone to get the car inspected together so had a certain intimacy; attainable here between complete strangers in good moods.
On the way to the inspection place, he told me about some poor bastard he had seen, trying to get a free ride by hanging onto the back of a truck, who had fallen off and been run over. I felt stupid when I asked if the guy had died, which Papeta replied with an ‘isn’t it fucking obvious’ look on his face. He was cool.
The inspection process is surprisingly efficient. The first car I bought in Brazil had a cracked windshield and was missing a bumper. Employing a guy like Goofy, I managed to get it through and legitimized without a single authority having a look at the car. It was magical, corruption benefiting the small guy, in this case me and the fix-it man.
That was 14 years ago. This time they inspected the car, well sort of, they forgot a couple of things but the guy knows Papeta so well and money may have changed hands. But not enough, apparently, as the inspector insisted he couldn’t get the chassis number off the engine and this required a form with my recognized signature. And hence the nightmare.
Goofy just called to say all was well. The new document is ready. It does work out in the end, but the system certainly does not make it easy. And as my wife says, I ‘should grow some patience.’
This is not the case with me. I glower and sulk and dry-heave indignation as the cogs of the machinery grind at an abominably slow rate. As a result, I try and minimize any contact with the bureaucracy, which in Brazil you can do by hiring a professional called a ‘dispatcher’, whose expertise is working the bureaucracy. Besides taking care of your paper work, his other function is greasing the palms of state employees who magically transform the one- month waiting time for many documents into ten minutes.
But this time I could not avoid contact with the beast. Having bought a car I had to have my signature ‘recognized’ as they say here. A normal signature is worthless without the stamp of the notary for anything official; everyone agrees this is a totally pointless procedure that takes millions of hours of labor away from the market. But it continues.
The previous owner of the car was a rather mousy American woman long resident in Brazil. Americans who stay here for a long time adopt a kind of sing-song English, where emphasis is put as it would be in a Portuguese phrase that sounds strange in English though it’s being delivered by a native speaker. She lived in a nice house and like many of her status had a couple of house servants, one which she rather obscenely referred to as her house boy. The young man was 25 and looked surly, maybe being addressed as a boy didn’t agree with him. The car was practically new and a good deal, so all was well.
To guarantee service at the Notary Public (at least mine), you have to get there way before opening hours. In my case, I arrived at 6:30 a.m. and still found twenty people in front of me. I calculated two hours as a wait, which was stupid since if your wait exceeds that, you really get fucking mad.
There was a young man in front of me who was reading a paper. As he looked at the picture of an unfortunate French tourist who had almost had his ear sliced off, he turned to me and said of the gang who perpetrated this barbarity and had been caught.
“They need to be beaten badly. A lot of hits. For me, the cops should have killed them then and there.”
I had not uttered a word to this guy and sort of said something completely non-committal, burying my head in my book trying not to get drawn into a conversation on the rights and wrongs of extra-judicial killing.
There was a child running about going up to people in the line and being cute in front of them. This being Brazil, of course everyone smiled and cooed at him, a couple of people actually held his hand and took him for a little walk. His mother looked on from afar, not more than 18, one of her front teeth already missing and the kind of clothes that give away the fact that the person wearing them is extremely poor. Her skirt was frayed, her flip-flops worn; her tee-shirt featured a smiling politician known for his brazen corruption. Little John, despite being cute, was probably condemned to a life of material squalor. He’d better enjoy it since people will pay fond attention to poor children but not at all to poor adults.
Eight o’clock passed and it had not opened yet. The guy in front of me, he who wanted to exterminate criminals, had switched his cellular to become a radio and the tinny sound of carnival music piped out. The woman behind me started dancing and singing; she knew all the words to the songs. Not dancing exaggeratedly, but moving and letting the music be with her. Here I was stewing in resentment, saturated with the American ‘time is money’ theory, and she was dancing and smiling. I think her attitude is probably more correct.
Finally, the doors were opened by a middle aged woman, who sighed as she said, “I almost didn’t open this morning, you know. Two of my workers called in sick, it’s going to be a terrible time for me today.”
I hated this woman immediately. She made us, some of whom had waited for two hours, feel she was doing us a favor. And she had an earnest smile. ‘You should be apologizing to us for our inconvenience, you bitch,’ was the way I saw it.
We ambled in, my number 19, seemed years off being serviced. The woman, after ushering the lucky ones in, began turning away others who would have to wait until 12 to get a number for service starting at 14:00. She locked the doors with a crude chain. She was perpetuating an outrageous affront to a long suffering public and she still had that matronly fucking smile on her face. Hellish thoughts were jumping around my head, such as going up and seizing her and shaking her and…..
After ten minutes the first person was still being served, a guy stood up and started to complain.
“What are all those people doing back there?” he asked as he pointed to people who seemed to be scurrying around doing nothing.
He was confronted by a stern looking supervisor, a young woman with short hair who explained with great rigor how their repeated requests for more staff had been ignored by authorities higher than her.
“That’s a disgrace,” the man said, his voice rising to a level that started to cause some concern. “Brazil doesn’t advance because of this shit.”
Some people have charisma, others don’t. This guy did not, was unattractive and rude and people were starting to get sick of him.
“Sit down, sit down,” a couple of the people said aggressively. Eventually he left, but all his points were valid, everyone knew this. I have witnessed many similar instances, in bank queues, and other place where you are required to wait. The strangling bureaucracy thwarts progress and gets a few people indignant enough to shout about it. If the majority did, there’d be a revolution but, let’s face it, most people do not want to get caught up in a revolution.
As the clock began to show an hour, then an hour and a half had passed, ire ate at me like some corrosive acid, no wonder they call it one of the Capital Sins. I watched the woman working, as a hawk watches its prey. She seemed to work in slow motion and insisted on making chit chat to each customer. Seconds were wasted on these meaningless banters, and I resented them.
Some compensation was acquired from complaining with the people sitting next to me, in this case two attractive and friendly women.
“It’s absolutely absurd, one employee to serve fifty people. A lack of respect, a shame.”
We all agreed. Later, I felt betrayed by my former allies when their transaction, one ahead of mine, was taking ages mainly due to some fucking chit chat they insisted on engaging with the hated employee. Those last ten minutes were agony. It’s lucky that in Brazil I can’t go to Walmart and pick up a gun and start shooting people. If Americans had to go through this, there’d be even more mass shootings than there are now.
It was nine-forty in the morning when I finally managed to escape with what I wanted. I called my fix-it man, Goofy. That’s what it says on his card, Papeta, ‘the good dispatcher’. We had gone to get the car inspected together so had a certain intimacy; attainable here between complete strangers in good moods.
On the way to the inspection place, he told me about some poor bastard he had seen, trying to get a free ride by hanging onto the back of a truck, who had fallen off and been run over. I felt stupid when I asked if the guy had died, which Papeta replied with an ‘isn’t it fucking obvious’ look on his face. He was cool.
The inspection process is surprisingly efficient. The first car I bought in Brazil had a cracked windshield and was missing a bumper. Employing a guy like Goofy, I managed to get it through and legitimized without a single authority having a look at the car. It was magical, corruption benefiting the small guy, in this case me and the fix-it man.
That was 14 years ago. This time they inspected the car, well sort of, they forgot a couple of things but the guy knows Papeta so well and money may have changed hands. But not enough, apparently, as the inspector insisted he couldn’t get the chassis number off the engine and this required a form with my recognized signature. And hence the nightmare.
Goofy just called to say all was well. The new document is ready. It does work out in the end, but the system certainly does not make it easy. And as my wife says, I ‘should grow some patience.’
Tuesday, 10 November 2009
Churches
Churches
The best way parents can put their children off religion is to make them go to church regularly. Nothing cuts into a Sunday like a service that seems interminable, dreary and against the nature of most young people to sit still for more than twenty minutes.
In my case, I was forced to daily worship within the confines of a British Public School and Sunday being the only time when you are truly free (albeit for half a day), the one and a half hour Chapel service was particularly galling. I think God would have understood how we felt.
And then there’s the bible itself. The crucifixion of Christ is disconcerting to a young person for whom death is far away. There are a few nuts like Mel Gibson who seem to think it’s good for us to watch the grizzly and tortuous last hours of Christ’s life, but seeing that scene from Ben Hur when I was seven kind of traumatized me.
That’s why Christmas is so much better than Easter. The egg hunts and that bunny are alright but don’t compare to mounds of presents obviously and the fact you are not celebrating death. Of course there’s the resurrection but I have not ever seen someone become undead.
All those sermons were always inevitably leading back to Christ, there was never any plot change; it was just too damn predictable. As I became older and imbued with a sense of socialist righteousness, my aversion to religion was reinforced by world events. Northern Island, India-Pakistan, The Middle East, everywhere you looked there was violence being unleashed in the name of somebody’s God. Clearly the whole business must be rotten to the core.
Predictably, as death becomes startlingly tangible, the reason about 90% of the world believes in God becomes more comprehensible. I thought nothing of having my son baptized, and it was in this same church that I recently attended a service, mostly, it must be admitted, because my father was playing piano in it.
The South Cushing Baptist Church was built in 1854 and is a marvelous barn-like old building, austere yet lovely inside with no electricity. This was an annual service and I think once a year is a about right in terms of frequency of worship, at church anyway.
As you walked in, a Baroque concert was in session with musicians whose average age was about 80. Their concentration was magical, still at that age thrilled by notes and instruments and the divine wonder that is music.
A Conch was blown and the welcome given by an older man started out fine. He outlined the accomplishments of the local historical society that takes care of the church. If you’re not from the area you kind of switch off. Unfortunately his legs started to shake and shook more and more as he read on. He is known to be long-winded and by the end we all thanked God that he didn’t keel over there and then.
A list of the recently deceased in the community was read out and my five-year-old son wondered why Michael Jackson, who had died less than a month earlier, had not been mentioned. I told him it was unlikely he’d resurrect but you never know; Elvis seems to have, for a while anyway, at least for those who think he is equivalent to Jesus. And Michael Jackson, while alive, lived in Neverland, not in southern Maine.
This was followed by an extremely belabored reading of the first 31 verses of Genesis; you wished you could fast forward the reader like you do a CD. Then came a five verse Gospel reading highlighting man’s excessive concern with clothes and food when God provides everything. Now that’s more like it, short and sweet.
There were lots of prayers and getting up and sitting down and kneeling (though the program did specify that only those able should stand, giving away the rather advanced age of the congregation). No rest for the weary apparently is taken literally in most religious services. I feel like a spoilsport to point this out, nor do I intend to demean God’s greatness, but the gushing praise, for instance ‘oh Lord, how majestic is your name,’ and you are ‘deep, perceptive, bold, powerful, glorious, masterful, center of unbroken praise’, kind of reeks of sycophantic trembling, which I suppose is the point.
The problem is with perfection to serve, man pretty much fails miserably to adopt even mild versions of God’s virtues. It’s just not a fair competition between us and God and quite frankly makes us look bad and pathetic. Maybe we should try and emulate something more realistic, some deity that messes up occasionally, shows vulnerability or pettiness. It’s just a thought anyway.
There’s all that language specific to hymns and church services, like ‘o’er, thine, O (without the H), Ye, Alleluia, Thou, doxology, offertory,’ etc.. that are not used anywhere else in normal language. And then of course there is the sermon.
In this case, it was ably delivered by a woman, comparing nature to the divine, which is more the way I see things and so, of course, the correct version! Destroying nature is destroying God, etc; things we can relate to in a time where global warming is the talk of the cocktail party circuits of the world.
Listening to this woman; articulate, passionate, spiritual and connected to God, you want to strangle those retrogrades who insist women shouldn’t preach. It’s absurd. Why don’t you guys just get over it? It’s destroying the Anglican Church. That Catholic priests can’t marry, nothing to do with liturgy but an edict based on economic greed, may have a correlation with all the weird sexual stuff we hear about.
We sung one more hymn praising God. I was proud watching my father play the piano and happy to have shared this experience in a spiritual haven. Despite my cynicism, the faith of believers (not religious extremists who should all be banished to one island and made to fight it out amongst themselves with live ammunition in a reality-type show situation) is a gift for them, a provider of comfort, a welcome support. I wish I had it.
Pedro fell asleep right after the Michael Jackson observation and woke up as we exited the church. We all felt abuzz and the sermon had infused us with a feeling of warmth for humanity. At least until we got home, watched the news, and were reminded of how wretched humans can be to one another, often in the name of religion. But it was nice and I’ll try and go next year. I’ve always wanted to see someone turn water into wine, but I know that’s the wrong attitude to start out on.
The best way parents can put their children off religion is to make them go to church regularly. Nothing cuts into a Sunday like a service that seems interminable, dreary and against the nature of most young people to sit still for more than twenty minutes.
In my case, I was forced to daily worship within the confines of a British Public School and Sunday being the only time when you are truly free (albeit for half a day), the one and a half hour Chapel service was particularly galling. I think God would have understood how we felt.
And then there’s the bible itself. The crucifixion of Christ is disconcerting to a young person for whom death is far away. There are a few nuts like Mel Gibson who seem to think it’s good for us to watch the grizzly and tortuous last hours of Christ’s life, but seeing that scene from Ben Hur when I was seven kind of traumatized me.
That’s why Christmas is so much better than Easter. The egg hunts and that bunny are alright but don’t compare to mounds of presents obviously and the fact you are not celebrating death. Of course there’s the resurrection but I have not ever seen someone become undead.
All those sermons were always inevitably leading back to Christ, there was never any plot change; it was just too damn predictable. As I became older and imbued with a sense of socialist righteousness, my aversion to religion was reinforced by world events. Northern Island, India-Pakistan, The Middle East, everywhere you looked there was violence being unleashed in the name of somebody’s God. Clearly the whole business must be rotten to the core.
Predictably, as death becomes startlingly tangible, the reason about 90% of the world believes in God becomes more comprehensible. I thought nothing of having my son baptized, and it was in this same church that I recently attended a service, mostly, it must be admitted, because my father was playing piano in it.
The South Cushing Baptist Church was built in 1854 and is a marvelous barn-like old building, austere yet lovely inside with no electricity. This was an annual service and I think once a year is a about right in terms of frequency of worship, at church anyway.
As you walked in, a Baroque concert was in session with musicians whose average age was about 80. Their concentration was magical, still at that age thrilled by notes and instruments and the divine wonder that is music.
A Conch was blown and the welcome given by an older man started out fine. He outlined the accomplishments of the local historical society that takes care of the church. If you’re not from the area you kind of switch off. Unfortunately his legs started to shake and shook more and more as he read on. He is known to be long-winded and by the end we all thanked God that he didn’t keel over there and then.
A list of the recently deceased in the community was read out and my five-year-old son wondered why Michael Jackson, who had died less than a month earlier, had not been mentioned. I told him it was unlikely he’d resurrect but you never know; Elvis seems to have, for a while anyway, at least for those who think he is equivalent to Jesus. And Michael Jackson, while alive, lived in Neverland, not in southern Maine.
This was followed by an extremely belabored reading of the first 31 verses of Genesis; you wished you could fast forward the reader like you do a CD. Then came a five verse Gospel reading highlighting man’s excessive concern with clothes and food when God provides everything. Now that’s more like it, short and sweet.
There were lots of prayers and getting up and sitting down and kneeling (though the program did specify that only those able should stand, giving away the rather advanced age of the congregation). No rest for the weary apparently is taken literally in most religious services. I feel like a spoilsport to point this out, nor do I intend to demean God’s greatness, but the gushing praise, for instance ‘oh Lord, how majestic is your name,’ and you are ‘deep, perceptive, bold, powerful, glorious, masterful, center of unbroken praise’, kind of reeks of sycophantic trembling, which I suppose is the point.
The problem is with perfection to serve, man pretty much fails miserably to adopt even mild versions of God’s virtues. It’s just not a fair competition between us and God and quite frankly makes us look bad and pathetic. Maybe we should try and emulate something more realistic, some deity that messes up occasionally, shows vulnerability or pettiness. It’s just a thought anyway.
There’s all that language specific to hymns and church services, like ‘o’er, thine, O (without the H), Ye, Alleluia, Thou, doxology, offertory,’ etc.. that are not used anywhere else in normal language. And then of course there is the sermon.
In this case, it was ably delivered by a woman, comparing nature to the divine, which is more the way I see things and so, of course, the correct version! Destroying nature is destroying God, etc; things we can relate to in a time where global warming is the talk of the cocktail party circuits of the world.
Listening to this woman; articulate, passionate, spiritual and connected to God, you want to strangle those retrogrades who insist women shouldn’t preach. It’s absurd. Why don’t you guys just get over it? It’s destroying the Anglican Church. That Catholic priests can’t marry, nothing to do with liturgy but an edict based on economic greed, may have a correlation with all the weird sexual stuff we hear about.
We sung one more hymn praising God. I was proud watching my father play the piano and happy to have shared this experience in a spiritual haven. Despite my cynicism, the faith of believers (not religious extremists who should all be banished to one island and made to fight it out amongst themselves with live ammunition in a reality-type show situation) is a gift for them, a provider of comfort, a welcome support. I wish I had it.
Pedro fell asleep right after the Michael Jackson observation and woke up as we exited the church. We all felt abuzz and the sermon had infused us with a feeling of warmth for humanity. At least until we got home, watched the news, and were reminded of how wretched humans can be to one another, often in the name of religion. But it was nice and I’ll try and go next year. I’ve always wanted to see someone turn water into wine, but I know that’s the wrong attitude to start out on.
Wednesday, 4 November 2009
The Economist Habit
The Economist Habit
Doctors always tell us that addiction is a bad thing, bringing damage to the mind and body. A few exceptions come to mind to counteract this argument, Keith Richards still being alive is perhaps the most obvious. But smoking, drinking, taking drugs or spending eight hours a day on internet porn sites will probably do your mental and physical health little benefit. Yet to be tackled appropriately by the mental health world, however, is addiction to a magazine.
Let me explain. Having been deluged with renewal notices about six months before my Economist subscription was to expire (most distasteful, by the way), my subscription lapsed. The pathetic bits of news available on the website for the non-paying customers is nothing more than a tease, like taking a drag of a cigarette or a sip of good red wine and then cut off. The fifteen dollars for the magazine charged at my Brazilian city’s airport further helped me to quit cold turkey.
I was Economist free and quite happy with that until travelling back top the States last month. There it was, beckoning me with its cover, poignant as usual, from the newsstand at the airport. I was hooked with alarming celerity.
I have been an Economist reader for 25 years, all of my adult life basically. What is it that has captivated and induced me to spend literally thousands of pounds over the years purchasing it? Here, me, a struggling writer, feeding the monster.
For starters, it’s got the best obituaries. Being an ecological sort, I like that animals also receive esteemed attention at the end of the issue. A fish and a parrot have been thus honored in recent issues. The parrot was extraordinary because it knew 100 different words or something, limiting communication with this animal obviously but it’s a start. But you learn about the lives of brave and slightly insane British women explorers, or geishas, or failed Presidents, scoundrels and saints, people you’ve heard of, many you haven’t.
You read about places you don’t elsewhere. Coverage of places where misery is never very far away, like Haiti, Bangladesh, Chechnya or Moldova is widely available. But political instability in the Marshall Islands, presidential elections in Togo, deforestation in Suriname, women’s rights in Papua New Guinea, you’ll only hear about it in the Economist.
The Economist likes to use arcane vocabulary which sends all of us intellectual wannabies rushing to our dictionaries so that we can pull these words out at cocktail parties and use them with people who are a lot more successful than us. But abuse by others in this rather unctuous display of erudition is scolded as crass in the Economist, as in the word proleptic being used twice in a book, an unpardonable pretention.
The Economist might, for example, describe as an anabiosis England’s football fortunes under Cappello, or call any scholarship that counteracts the magazine’s philosophy of reverence for markets a case of sciolism which renders worthless the scholar’s lucubration. The five hour perorations favored by leftist Latin autocrats or their steatopygous counterparts in Africa are treated with the scorn they deserve.
There are times when you try hard to fight your demons, and the demons help you with this. The ‘newspaper’s’ decision to support the Iraq invasion and pin accolades on George Bush left the bitter taste of a wretched hangover in one’s mouth. As the disaster unfolded, the ‘newspaper’ could not and still refuses to admit the recklessness of such an endeavor. For many years this undermined the magazines otherwise stellar fairness in coverage on the Middle East conflict. It was a great disappointment.
But for me, it was the letters that let me forgive The Economist. Some of those printed dissected, with surgical precision and scathing tone, every argument put forward to justify the war in Iraq. These soothed and appeased and ultimately won me back. And the fact that it’s not afraid to use the word fuck helped.
My family hates the Economist, no luck in making this a multi-generational subscription I’m afraid. My subscription has now been renewed and I’m awash in unread issues. This serves to completely isolate me from the world for hours at a time, like someone who has just smoked opium and wants nothing except to lie there and think.
I have just finished reading an interview with David Cameron and the problems entailed with the slump in champagne prices. My wife and son are calling me for lunch but I pretend not to hear since I have to read about Africa’s burgeoning population and whether that’s a problem. Food can wait.
Doctors always tell us that addiction is a bad thing, bringing damage to the mind and body. A few exceptions come to mind to counteract this argument, Keith Richards still being alive is perhaps the most obvious. But smoking, drinking, taking drugs or spending eight hours a day on internet porn sites will probably do your mental and physical health little benefit. Yet to be tackled appropriately by the mental health world, however, is addiction to a magazine.
Let me explain. Having been deluged with renewal notices about six months before my Economist subscription was to expire (most distasteful, by the way), my subscription lapsed. The pathetic bits of news available on the website for the non-paying customers is nothing more than a tease, like taking a drag of a cigarette or a sip of good red wine and then cut off. The fifteen dollars for the magazine charged at my Brazilian city’s airport further helped me to quit cold turkey.
I was Economist free and quite happy with that until travelling back top the States last month. There it was, beckoning me with its cover, poignant as usual, from the newsstand at the airport. I was hooked with alarming celerity.
I have been an Economist reader for 25 years, all of my adult life basically. What is it that has captivated and induced me to spend literally thousands of pounds over the years purchasing it? Here, me, a struggling writer, feeding the monster.
For starters, it’s got the best obituaries. Being an ecological sort, I like that animals also receive esteemed attention at the end of the issue. A fish and a parrot have been thus honored in recent issues. The parrot was extraordinary because it knew 100 different words or something, limiting communication with this animal obviously but it’s a start. But you learn about the lives of brave and slightly insane British women explorers, or geishas, or failed Presidents, scoundrels and saints, people you’ve heard of, many you haven’t.
You read about places you don’t elsewhere. Coverage of places where misery is never very far away, like Haiti, Bangladesh, Chechnya or Moldova is widely available. But political instability in the Marshall Islands, presidential elections in Togo, deforestation in Suriname, women’s rights in Papua New Guinea, you’ll only hear about it in the Economist.
The Economist likes to use arcane vocabulary which sends all of us intellectual wannabies rushing to our dictionaries so that we can pull these words out at cocktail parties and use them with people who are a lot more successful than us. But abuse by others in this rather unctuous display of erudition is scolded as crass in the Economist, as in the word proleptic being used twice in a book, an unpardonable pretention.
The Economist might, for example, describe as an anabiosis England’s football fortunes under Cappello, or call any scholarship that counteracts the magazine’s philosophy of reverence for markets a case of sciolism which renders worthless the scholar’s lucubration. The five hour perorations favored by leftist Latin autocrats or their steatopygous counterparts in Africa are treated with the scorn they deserve.
There are times when you try hard to fight your demons, and the demons help you with this. The ‘newspaper’s’ decision to support the Iraq invasion and pin accolades on George Bush left the bitter taste of a wretched hangover in one’s mouth. As the disaster unfolded, the ‘newspaper’ could not and still refuses to admit the recklessness of such an endeavor. For many years this undermined the magazines otherwise stellar fairness in coverage on the Middle East conflict. It was a great disappointment.
But for me, it was the letters that let me forgive The Economist. Some of those printed dissected, with surgical precision and scathing tone, every argument put forward to justify the war in Iraq. These soothed and appeased and ultimately won me back. And the fact that it’s not afraid to use the word fuck helped.
My family hates the Economist, no luck in making this a multi-generational subscription I’m afraid. My subscription has now been renewed and I’m awash in unread issues. This serves to completely isolate me from the world for hours at a time, like someone who has just smoked opium and wants nothing except to lie there and think.
I have just finished reading an interview with David Cameron and the problems entailed with the slump in champagne prices. My wife and son are calling me for lunch but I pretend not to hear since I have to read about Africa’s burgeoning population and whether that’s a problem. Food can wait.
Veja Magazine
I have read Veja, Brazil’s principal weekly magazine, religiously for the almost 15 years of my residence here in Brazil. I find the tone of the journalists horribly condescending, ideologically predictable and in coverage of foreign news, suspiciously similar to what came out in The Economist the week before. But I read on.
One becomes accustomed to format in things we read and perhaps this is the magazine’s great strength.
They always have an interview and this week is was with an Israeli mathematician and 2005 Nobel Prize winner for economics. He has a very long beard, which makes anybody look strange.
He is an expert on something called Game Theory, which apparently is a good base from which to conduct negotiation. He uses the example of Mutually Assured Destruction to portray how peace was kept between the US and USSR during the cold war, and Chamberlain’s capitulation at Munich to show how placating or trying to hard to assuage your adversary can be extremely dangerous.
All good stuff, until he talks about how Israel has been too weak with the Palestinians, citing the settlement pullout from the Gaza Strip as proof of a pattern of craven concessions to the Arabs. There is a tendency among many, though by no means all, Israelis to ignore the fact that 800,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes to make way for the creation of Israel. This delegitimized his argument slightly.
The ‘Panorama Page’ features a picture of the carnage wrought by a recent suicide bomb in a market in Pakistan that went off just when mothers were picking up their kids from school. Most of the victims, therefore, were women and children. Yet the non-existent outcry, Veja disdainfully declared, from those who decry the FMI, World Bank and other pillars of global capitalism, was significant for its absence. Pakistan seems like a complete basket case.
A few statistics are interwoven to articles, of interest this time was the fact that Brazil’s carbon emissions increased 25% between 1990 and 2005; 15% of the Brazilian population is Evangelical and the economy is running a 7.6 billion real deficit. The governor of Paraná State also declared that the recent cases of breast cancer among men have been caused by all these gay parades.
An article on the crack epidemic, exemplified by a nice middle class boy who strangled his girlfriend under the influence, points out that 16,000 psychiatric beds have been removed from hospitals in the past few years. The ‘generous’ health insurance companies, maintained by those few who can afford them, agree to pay for 15 days of counseling for drug addicts and no more, hardly sufficient time for chronic cases. Whoever invented crack is in the same league as hackers, destroying society for kicks.
A disheartening article on the principals of public schools in Brazil, 80% of who are women, stated that while 98% don’t think it’s their fault that their students perform so horrendously, 64% judge themselves unprepared for their responsibilities. Contradictions are many in this country and galling when the middle class pays 37% of its income to the government for universal health and education that is so bad they have to use the private sector.
The international feature story was about Venezuela. This is like asking a victim of crime to say something positive about their attacker. Chavez is the devil incarnate for Veja, his Bolivaran revolution close to as dangerous as the Ebola virus. Endless evils are cited, including those attesting to plummeting industrial and agricultural production. Not to defend Chavez, a pretty rancid guy, but if Venezuela was so great before, why in this country full of oil, land and a small population were most people poor? And why is it different when the president of Colombia, Alvoro Uribe, amends his country’s constitution to perpetuate his rule, as opposed to Chavez and his other leftist clones in Latin America?
Despite its obvious bias, Veja is not without a sense of humor. In the section entitled People, devoted mostly to celebrities, it reported on the rapper Diddy’s latest song on Brazil. It goes something like this, translated by the author:
Booties, booties, booties.
First class booties, round booties, everywhere
It’s a Tsunami of booties.
And remember, Diddy went out with Jenifer Lopez so knows a thing or two about “booties.’
Salvador, Bahia, 03/11/09
One becomes accustomed to format in things we read and perhaps this is the magazine’s great strength.
They always have an interview and this week is was with an Israeli mathematician and 2005 Nobel Prize winner for economics. He has a very long beard, which makes anybody look strange.
He is an expert on something called Game Theory, which apparently is a good base from which to conduct negotiation. He uses the example of Mutually Assured Destruction to portray how peace was kept between the US and USSR during the cold war, and Chamberlain’s capitulation at Munich to show how placating or trying to hard to assuage your adversary can be extremely dangerous.
All good stuff, until he talks about how Israel has been too weak with the Palestinians, citing the settlement pullout from the Gaza Strip as proof of a pattern of craven concessions to the Arabs. There is a tendency among many, though by no means all, Israelis to ignore the fact that 800,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes to make way for the creation of Israel. This delegitimized his argument slightly.
The ‘Panorama Page’ features a picture of the carnage wrought by a recent suicide bomb in a market in Pakistan that went off just when mothers were picking up their kids from school. Most of the victims, therefore, were women and children. Yet the non-existent outcry, Veja disdainfully declared, from those who decry the FMI, World Bank and other pillars of global capitalism, was significant for its absence. Pakistan seems like a complete basket case.
A few statistics are interwoven to articles, of interest this time was the fact that Brazil’s carbon emissions increased 25% between 1990 and 2005; 15% of the Brazilian population is Evangelical and the economy is running a 7.6 billion real deficit. The governor of Paraná State also declared that the recent cases of breast cancer among men have been caused by all these gay parades.
An article on the crack epidemic, exemplified by a nice middle class boy who strangled his girlfriend under the influence, points out that 16,000 psychiatric beds have been removed from hospitals in the past few years. The ‘generous’ health insurance companies, maintained by those few who can afford them, agree to pay for 15 days of counseling for drug addicts and no more, hardly sufficient time for chronic cases. Whoever invented crack is in the same league as hackers, destroying society for kicks.
A disheartening article on the principals of public schools in Brazil, 80% of who are women, stated that while 98% don’t think it’s their fault that their students perform so horrendously, 64% judge themselves unprepared for their responsibilities. Contradictions are many in this country and galling when the middle class pays 37% of its income to the government for universal health and education that is so bad they have to use the private sector.
The international feature story was about Venezuela. This is like asking a victim of crime to say something positive about their attacker. Chavez is the devil incarnate for Veja, his Bolivaran revolution close to as dangerous as the Ebola virus. Endless evils are cited, including those attesting to plummeting industrial and agricultural production. Not to defend Chavez, a pretty rancid guy, but if Venezuela was so great before, why in this country full of oil, land and a small population were most people poor? And why is it different when the president of Colombia, Alvoro Uribe, amends his country’s constitution to perpetuate his rule, as opposed to Chavez and his other leftist clones in Latin America?
Despite its obvious bias, Veja is not without a sense of humor. In the section entitled People, devoted mostly to celebrities, it reported on the rapper Diddy’s latest song on Brazil. It goes something like this, translated by the author:
Booties, booties, booties.
First class booties, round booties, everywhere
It’s a Tsunami of booties.
And remember, Diddy went out with Jenifer Lopez so knows a thing or two about “booties.’
Salvador, Bahia, 03/11/09
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