Go shopping.

One thing you probably take for granted in the US that Brasileans never get to do is window shop when the stores are closed. The stores here all have metal doors that are pulled down and locked when they´re closed. If you walk down a street at night or on Sunday, you have no idea what kind of establishment you are passing because all of those gray metal doors look alike. It´s probably different in the malls, but how often do you walk around in a mall with closed stores?

Speaking of malls, I don´t know of any in São Paulo like the big sprawling suburban malls in the US with acres and acres of parking lot. I am familiar with a couple of malls that are very similar internally to the ones in the US, with several floors of retail shops, food courts and multiplex cinemas, but (I think) without the big anchor department stores. The two that I know of have underground parking, but not nearly as much as there would be in the US, because lots of people arrive there on buses or the subway. I do know of one huge mall on the outskirts of the city of Campinas, about an hour away from São Paulo, that is exactly like the US model, and something like that may exist in São Paulo too and I just don´t know about it.

I saw a headline in the paper the other day, by the way, that the population of São Paulo just went over the 11 million mark. I know people of asked me at various times about the population, and I never knew the answer.

Another little retail oddity. There are areas in São Paulo where all the stores sell the same things. If I want embroidery thread for cross stitching, I go the area next to the São Bento subway station and there are dozens of fabric stores that all sell what I need. A couple of weeks ago when Heitor´s ipod headset quick working, I went to several stores to find a replacement, but all they sold were the little ear buds. Finally a guy in one of the stores told me to go to Santa Ifigênia street, and he was right. It is a street where there are stores selling every imaginable type of thing electrical and electrical-related. I know of a similar area for luggage stores, and even stores that sell the kind of things a front-yard mechanic would want (oddly enough right next door to the area of fabric stores). There is another type of mall here that you might encounter on any given street. It has several floors of retail shops that all sell the same things. I know of one that has 3 or 4 floors of nothing but shoe stores. Another where the stores all sell either cameras, or clocks and wristwatches.

I hope this has inspired you to go shopping...for the sake of the US economy.

Tchau

Poverty and the 2nd Amendment

One can´t live where I do in Brasil without thinking frequently about poverty, and then there were articles in both last sunday´s NY Times and the leading sunday paper in São Paulo which hit on the topic. The NY Times article by Barbara Ehrenreich ("Is it Now a Crime to be Poor?") was obviously about the criminalization of poverty and the one here in São Paulo was about a specific area where homelessness and poverty are associated with the use of crack.

I don´t know the comparative statistics about poverty and homelessness, but I´m willing to believe that it is still a greater problem in Brasil than the US. But for how much longer, given the unemployment (and under-employment) statistics in the US? Whatever the actual numbers and trends might be, one thing is clear. The US does a much better job of keeping the poverty out of the public eye. As the Ehrenreich article makes clear, we hate the necessity of witnessing poverty more than we hate the fact of the poverty itself.

I think that we good people in both countries have created myths about the poor to obviate the need to see real people. They´re drug-addicted. They´re mental cases. They have no ambition.
And, most importantly, they´re not our fault or our problem.

One thing which makes the whole mix more volatile in the US is the addition of guns. It occurred to me the other night, when I was walking in an area where everyone who reads this would be terrified, but where I felt reasonably comfortable (alert, but comfortable), that one big difference is that people in Brasil don´t have weapons.

I know that guns exist in the favelas around Rio, where there seems to be something like a state of war between the drug dealers and the police, but that part of Brasil is totally alien to me. In general, I am assured that people don´t have guns and would find them difficult to buy if they wanted them. Thank goodness.

Because I think Frank Rick is always worth reading:

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/frankrich/index.html

It´s about a book really, not the pictures

These are not timely fotos, but they are just about the only ones we´ve taken with people in them since I arrived here in August 2008. They were taken in May when Heitor and I took a weekend trip to a neary artsy community. There was nothing particularly noteworthy about the trip, and we only remembered to take these photos as we were in the process of leaving the little place where we stayed, which is typical. But, since I just ran across them and some of you have been bugging me for photos, I will include them.

I just finished listening to the audiobook of "The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women: Exploding the Estrogen Myth," by Barbara Seaman. The author and the book are probably well known to most women, or at least I hope they are, but I´d never heard of either and I only listened to the book because the title sounded like something important. That´s embarrassing to admit, even more so because Seaman died last year before I even knew of her.

Obviously the book is most important for women, but anyone concerned with the irresponsibility of drug companies, the double standard applied to the approval process for drugs used by women as opposed to those used by men, the issue of artificial horomone use in cattle and the runoff of these hormones in animal waste into the environment (and some already-documented, horrendous environmental side effects) should also read this book. Not to mention anyone who still thinks they need to defer to their doctor in matters of their own health care.

As regards the history of the drug companies and their irresponsible falsification and misrepresentation of research data or, in short, their commitment to their profits and their shareholders rather than to their integrity, I am reminded of one of my bosses at General Mills describing a particular Democratic candidate for Congress as anti-business. I think it was at one of the semi-regular pitches made by the General Mills PAC in its effort to recruit new members (although the PAC always made a great point of insisting that they contributed to candidates from both parties, this particular guy was definitely a Republican). I remember thinking what a stupid statement it was, as if any serious politician in the US is anti-business, and wondering what exactly that meant to him. Now I have an idea what it might have meant; he probably didn´t like those meddlesome government regulations that interfered with the bottom line.

Tchar for now.

Frank Rich, Bob Herbert and Conan O´Brien

Here are links to two excellent perspectives on Gatesgate. America: It´s not post racial quite yet.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/opinion/02rich.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/01/opinion/01herbert.html



From one of Conan Obrien´s monlogues last week:

"Yesterday, of course, on Fox News commentator Glenn Beck said that he believes President Obama is a racist. Well, to be fair, every time you watch Glenn Beck, it does get a little easier to hate white people. "

Currency Exchange Rate...Booooring

I wish I had paid more attention to boring things like monetary policy and economics in general. Not that I´d necessarily feel any more comfortable with the current state of things than I do now, but it might feel like a more educated insecurity, or even a more educated panic.

Like almost everyone else, I imagine, Heitor and I are wrestling with the uncertainties of the US economy. In our case, we are specifically concerned with the value of the US dollar vs. the Brasilean Real and where it is likely to go.

When I first came to Brasil in late 2005, the exchange rate was about R$2.00 = $1.00. On future trips the dollar was a little weaker, but it still bought about 1.9 Reals. I just checked the historical daily exchange rates from July 1, 2008 to today. In that one single year, the rate has swung all the way from R$1.5 to $1.00 all the way to R$2.44 to $1.00 (and about every point in between). For the last couple of weeks it has been about R$1.89 to $1.00.

As dramatic as that one-year range seems, every Brasilean can remember a point in the mid-1990s when the two currencies traded at R$1.00 to $1.00. And as recently as when Lula was first elected in late 2002, the capitalist world panicked and the rate went to R$4 to $1. Both of these extremes are considered by Brasileans to have been semi-disastrous, and there has been a lot of talk recently by government officials and economists about how Brasil would like to see the rate remain at roughly R$2 to $1. But it is a floating exchange rate and, while government monetary policies can apparently have an influence on the rate, they don´t dictate it.

So....can anybody tell me where it will be 6 months from now? Please? Imagine trying to budget for a larger apartment, with a two (or more)-year lease and dealing with such uncertainties.

Is anyone else struck by the irony that the US economy is being propped up by the Chinese, and that, when they lose confidence, we´re something like sunk? Forty years ago we were still refusing to recognize the existence of China, and now our capitalist system can´t exist without them.

Miscellany

Ok, I´ve got to revert to writing about Brasilean oddities and cultural differences. I don´t think I´ve ever mentioned that the grocery stores do not sell milk in their refrigerated dairy sections. Virtually all of the milk that is sold here is UHT-treated (ultra high temperature) and doesn´t require refrigeration before it is opened. Some stores have the milk in plastic containers that are shaped like an old-fashioned milk bottle, but most of the milk by far is sold in boxes. My very unsophisticated, or possibly deadened-over-time, palate can´t detect a difference, although I have read on the internet that some people do feel the high temperature alters the taste.

Heitor and I live in the center of São Paulo, and any morning when I happen to be awake between about 5 and 6 a.m. I am serenaded by a rooster somewhere in the vicinity. I don´t think it is close enough and loud enough to actually wake me (it certainly never wakes Heitor) but, if I happen to be awake, I hear this bird. Heitor has never heard it, but I do know what a rooster sounds like and I hear him without fail if I am awake early. My only conclusion is that someone is keeping him on the roof of one of the apartment buildings. There is a little store in my block that has a parrot who wolf whistles at passersby all day long, but I think that is the extent of his vocabulary, and that store isn´t open at such early hours. And would he be smart enough to imitate a rooster at dawn and a lecherous Brasilean the rest of the day?

The reaction to Obama´s statement about the Cambridge police having acted stupidly was perfectly predictable and totally frustrating. As Jon Stewart pointed out, Obama´s statement was...how should Jon say it?...stupid, because he should have foreseen the reaction to it. And he had already said he didn´t have all of the facts in the matter. But it seems to me that what he said was completely true. If the Cambridge police arrest a man in his own home and drop all charges the following day (or day after?), isn´t that a tacit admission that the arrest was a mistake? I know that all mistakes are not stupid, but I think this one was.

This has nothing to do with what Professor Gates may or may not have said to aggrevate the situation. My first thought, after all, was that Gates should have been pleased to have alert neighbors who got involved and called the police when they saw something suspicious. But a later thought was that his gratitude to his neighbors has nothing at all to do with his reaction to the behaviour of the police.

It has been a pet peeve of mine for at least 40 years that the police do not accept responsibility for their mistakes, and that their normal overreaction to verbal abuse of themselves or to any questioning of their actions is part and parcel of their us-versus-them mindset. We are always reminded that theirs is a dangerous profession, and that they are only human, both of which are valid considerations. But we also have a right to expect that the police behave as the public servants that they are. A request for an officer´s badge number is always legitimate. In fact the refusal to honor that request, or even to treat it as an aggressive act, seems like an admission on the part of the police that they are acting in error. If an officer is in the right and knows it, why wouldn´t he proudly offer up his badge number? And how can police unions anywhere think they still have any credibility at all when the only reaction they know is a kneejerk defense of their members in any and all situations. Have you ever known a police union to act differently?

Finally, I don´t understand how an officer in Cambridge, Massachusetts who apparently prides himself on his racial sensitivity doesn´t recognize Henry Louis Gates in this situation. I think I´d recognize him if I ran into him on the street in São Paulo, unless his cane threw me. But I sure as hell would have recognized him from his Harvard ID card.

Tchau

Holidays, God Bless ém

For about as long as I´ve been here, I have been meaning to add up the number of holidays that Brasileans celebrate every year, because it has always seemed to me that they have a lot of them.

Officially there appear to be 11 national holidays, four of which are distinctly religious (Good Friday, Corpus Christi, Our Lady of Aperecida, and All Souls Day), or five, if you want to insist Christmas is still a religious holiday, the case for which may be stronger in Brasil than in the US.

But this number doesn´t tell the whole story. For example, Carnaval Monday is a national holiday but, in reality, the following Tuesday (Shrove Tuesday) and Wednesday (Ash Wednesday) are also holidays. I remember how deserted the city was for those three days this year and how one friend and I had to rearrange a lunch schedule to find a restaurant that was going to be open on Tuesday.

These 11 days are augmented by additonal holidays that are specific to a state or city. There are at least 2 days that are celebrated only in the state of São Paulo.

Finally, it appears that mid-week holidays frequently spill over into other days. Corpus Christi day was on July 9th this year, which was a Thursday. For all practical porpoises, it was a 4-day holiday except for the unlucky people in retail jobs.

And there was another mysterious Thursday holiday in mid to late June which I can´t find on any of the internet lists. I remember it because Thursday is one of my assigned days at the gym, and there have already been two Thursdays since my membership started in June when it was closed for a holiday.

I can see that there have been legislative attempts at the national level to move mid-week holidays to either Monday or Friday, but I have no idea how likely that is to occur. I know I wouldn´t bet on it. And I hope it doesn´t happen. Life is too short to always organize it around ideas of sound business efficiency or similar practical concerns. The whole world need not emulate the Yankee model.