A Provincial Reading of Half Truths

Hallo blog, long time no write about overheard conversations in the locker room of our local pool.  Not that I haven’t gotten pissed off in general mind you, it’s just that I have not had the desire to relive those moments in written words; but today’s overheard conversation is still rattling around in my over-tired brain that has not fully accepted the fact that two days ago it was in Paris and now it is back to the provinces where once upon a time I felt at home but in my old(er) age no longer have the patience for, so here goes:  

Today, as I started peeling off my bathing suit in the shower, I heard the voice of A, a very sweet woman from other shores, say to B, a not so sweet woman from these here parts, “I saw a documentary about Brazil yesterday, it was awful!  It was about… what are those people who live on the hills called?”  …. My mind is silently screaming, “favelados” and I am thinking, “Here we go again, all the clichés and sensationalist unbalanced bullshit that the media likes to dole out.”  And I am cursing, “Goddamn it Brazil, couldn’t you just have been satisfied with having the Copa (World Cup)?!  You barely pulled that one out of your ass and you just had to have the hubris to bribe your way into having the Olympics too!?”  It’s been a long time since I have been to that beautiful land, but I was born and raised in it and to see it fail so miserably saddens me profoundly.

Back to the shower…  

While A is trying to remember the Brazilian word for slum, B, who apparently has hosted a Brazilian student in her house at some point, says, “Yes, Brazil is in a world of hurt.  Now, that’s socialism for you!”  At which point I no longer can contain myself and say from behind my shower curtain, “Brazil is not socialist.”  “What are they?” she asks.  I respond with, “They are capitalists like us, they just have a very corrupt government.”  I refrain from saying, “It’s just that their government is even more corrupt than ours.”  I also refrain from saying, “Norway is a socialist country and they don’t seem to be in a world of hurt, you do the math.” 

B did not respond to the world shattering news I had just delivered from behind my shower curtain; and while A kept talking about open sewers in the favelas, B kept on spouting about how even rich Brazilians don’t have central heating or air-conditioning, all the while assuming it to be one more national failure instead of questioning why it is that so few people have either.  In a place where it never freezes and where opening the windows pretty much cools you off, people might not need climate controls.... Granted, climate change is affecting temperature extremes all over the world and it is indeed very cold in parts of Brazil this year; if this continues, residential construction practices will catch up to the changes, commercial ones already have, and people will eventually have air and heat because, contrary to popular American belief, not all Brazilians live in favelas, no matter how the media is spinning it at the moment….