Irmãos americanos, The Economist

Segue ótimo artigo publicado no site do The Economist comparando Brasil e EUA. O artigo aponta muitas semelhanças como se vê, mas com uma ressalva: o Brasil é o irmão Dionisíaco.  Ainda recomendo que acessem os comentários ao texto na pagina do referido sítio. é isso.

Saudações Dionisíacas

American brothers

Aug 13th 2010, 11:31 by The Economist online | SÃO PAULO

OTHER Latin Americans think of Brazilians a bit like the rest of the world thinks of Americans: loud, flashy and rich. This is as it should be, because a strong argument can be made that Brazil is actually is the United States—just disguised beneath a Carmen-Miranda-style fruit hat.

Sounds a stretch? Think of two continent-sized countries built on gold rushes and cowboys, on sugar and slaves. Think of the United States being the first country to recognise Brazilian independence. Above all, think of the two countries’ topographies. Both consist basically of big cities on the coast where most of the people live; a vast, spectacularly beautiful and largely empty wonder of the natural world in the deep interior (the Rockies for America and the Amazon for Brazil); and, in between, endless savannahs where all the food grows. In either place, it’s soyabeans as far as the eye can see. Looking down from an airplane as it traverses the flyover states, you would be hard pressed to know whether you were crossing South Dakota or Goias, Mato Grosso or the corn belt.

Perhaps Australia and Canada might say the same. So consider the people. Both the US and Brazil have similar collections of ethnic and racial groups. Each has big minorities of indigenous peoples, of blacks (because both had slavery until the second half of the 19th-century), and of immigrants from Italy, Germany and Asia (Chinese predominate in the US; Japanese in Brazil). São Paulo makes many of those hard-to-verify claims about itself: it is the largest Japanese city outside Japan, the largest Portuguese city outside Portugal, the largest Spanish city outside Spain and the largest Lebanese city outside Lebanon. In the same vein, New York is the world’s second-largest Jewish city, its second-largest Italian city, and so on. Parts of Santa Catarina, in southern Brazil, still look and sound German, rather as parts of Cleveland used to. Even the largest ethnic groups are of comparable scale. In Brazil, people of Portuguese descent make up just over half the population. In the US, whites are just under two-thirds, and heading downwards.

Then think about the cities. Obviously São Paulo is New York—the commercial, industrial and financial capital; a city that never sleeps; a 24-hour traffic jam; a gaudy megacity that works; “an oceanic sprawl” (to quote Norman Gall of the city’s Fernand Braudel Institute). Equally obviously, Brasília and Washington, DC are sisters under the skin; all boulevards which are too wide, public buildings which are too big, public spaces without grace and public life without liveliness. It’s true that many invented capitals plonked in the middle of nowhere—which was true of Washington when the site was chosen—could say the same.

But less obviously think of a coastal city of blazing sunshine and hedonism; of beaches and beach culture; a city that helped define the 1960s and then began to sink backwards into its problems; a city, therefore, also of drug gangs and brutal police. Rio de Janeiro or Los Angeles? Well, both: cities of God and the Angels.

And, last, think of New Orleans on the Gulf coast and Salvador de Bahia, in Brazil’s north-east. Both are the centres of black culture in their two countries. Both are the native places for some of the world’s best music—jazz in New Orleans; tropicalismo, afoxé and caribé in Salvador. Both have huge, celebrated carnivals, notoriously corrupt local politics and famous local cuisines based on ground-up shellfish (gumbo and crayfish in the Big Easy, vatapá and shrimp in Bahia). Separated at birth, it seems.

Obviously, the list of dissimilarities would be as long as your arm, or as Brazil’s coastline. But if this English blogger can be allowed one further indulgence, a big difference lies in the inheritance from the colonial power. Britain bequeathed to the United States a language; a legal system; a political elite (WASPs); a middle-class liking for commerce; a tradition of political liberalism (in the British sense); and a certain puritanical impulse. Portugal bequeathed Brazil the language and Catholicism. And that is about it. Brazil itself developed the rest. And it did so with something that most of the United States lacks: a Dionysian spirit, a happy sense that all the squalor and conflict will end—or at least be suspended—in a samba.

Fonte: http://www.economist.com/blogs/newsbook/2010/08/comparing_brazil_and_united_states