Laughing all the way to the Lubyanka

As Brazil enters the final year of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva’s presidency and October’s election looms closer, his Workers Party (PT) administration is frantically abandoning the centrist mixed economy policies that have stood the country in such good stead for the last eight years, and lurching alarmingly to the left.

Two clear examples of this have emerged in the last ten days….

First, hearty congratulations are due to Luiz Carlos Prestes Ribeiro Filho, son of the Brazilian communist guerrilla leader, Luis Carlos Prestes, who led a column of 2,000 men in an attempt to overthrow the República Velha in the 1920s. The Justice Ministry’s Amnesty Commission has awarded him compensation to the tune of R$100,000 ($55,000) for the persecution he suffered during the military dictatorship between 1964 and 1984, when he was forced into exile in the Soviet Union.

Prestes - laughing all the way to the Lubyanka

Strange. One would have thought that growing up in the type of workers’ paradise that his father wished to impose in Brazil, and supported by the authors of the calamitous third National Human Rights Programme (PNDH3) (an untypically lazy piece by The Economist with some illuminating comments), would be recompense enough for his exile.

The most disturbing aspect of PNDH3, however, is not the repealing of the Lei da Anistia (Amnesty Law), but the populist, authoritarian attacks on property and free speech contained within it….

The Decree not only wants to create a “commission of truth” to discuss past crimes, but it aims also at advancing a left wing agenda comprising violation of the property rights, restrictions on freedom of speech, enlargement of the powers of the executive branch, intervention in the markets and so on, in a Venezuelan and Cuban style. Not only the military, but also the civil society is repealing (sic) it.

The Economist should had (sic) gotten more information on the Decree before taking side on this issue.

Talking of which, how’s it going in Caracas these days?

Never let it be said that He’s Spartacus shies away from tackling the serious issues in life head on.

I invested in a new rug yesterday. I regret to report, however, that I got it home and discovered it is just wrong on every conceivable level. It would, I have decided, suit the apartment of a homosexual drug dealer.

Ah well, I shall just have to heave a sigh of resignation and return to the interior design drawing board.

Coincidentally, the chap who lives across the landing from me actually is a real life, walking, talking, gay drug dealer. Very nice man, despite the fact that he appears to believe shirts are an unnecessary encumbrance, who takes tremendous care of his dogs. People like that are the very bedrock of the community.

I’m considering selling him the rug, although I find myself on the horns of a dilemma in this regard….

Do I just offer it to him without further comment or do I suggest that it is the perfect adornment to any gay drug dealer’s home?

English as she is spiked

I had occasion yesterday to visit one of Copacabana’s most celebrated beachfront eateries for lunch. It is so celebrated, in fact, that I have absolutely no idea what it’s called, which doesn’t matter in the slightest as I shan’t be returning there any time soon.

Aside from the food being borderline inedible and the service that time-honoured Rio combination of studied  indifference and chronic disorganisation, what really caught my eye about this establishment was the sheer artistry and imagination that the proprietor had put into the signage. I mean in all conscience, how could I resist the mouthwatering proposal, winking seductively at me from the lightbox hanging from a chain in the window, that I dine on “Chicken Ass Barbecue”?

Now to the untrained eye, this may seem rather baffling, but it really isn’t. The answer was simple, I concluded; the owner had taken the word, asas, meaning wings, and….erm….winged it.

As regards the culinary motorway pile up that was my lunch, I am reminded of Bill Bryson, who suggested in one of his books that you should never eat in restaurants that display their menus in pictures. He may very well have a point. Such enticements should be the sole preserve of food halls in giant out of town shopping centres, the sort of place you visit on some devil may care whim, fully cognisant of the risk, and warmly embracing the bewilderment that accompanies the arrival of a dish that looked completely different in the photo.

Returning to the language question for a moment though, it would be churlish to suggest for a second that putting foreign languages through the mangler is the sole preserve of the Brazilians. I have plenty of British colleagues and friends, who have been here for years, for whom a Portuguese phrase is a verbal and grammatical endurance test, which they fail with depressing regularity.

I’m sure the Brazilians laugh at us plenty. Which is absolutely fine.