Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture by Roberto Schwarz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Roberto Schwarz is a culture critic and thinker. Privileged for his austrian heritage and his refined culture and biased by his critical theory. He realizes what Levi-Strauss denounced in Tristes Tropiques: The emptiness of a society. The digestion a authentic brazilian identity is slowed by a self-denying and alienated culture. Brazil is named as cheap commodity (pau-Brasil) where colonizers mostly from Latin Europe came in other to rob the land from the indigenous and put african slaves to work in the stolen land. Slave society was probably more perverse than Feudalist Russia, but how cultural and willingness of westernization evolved have some similarities. Despite Machado de Assis is not comparable to Dostoevsky, the author notices the grandeur of this great brazilian writer, and his visions on the country is ahistorical lost in space and time while the XIX century social, political and technological developments unfolds. Like today, Brazil still lives in the past far from the enlightenment and the social upheavals that shook more civilized cultures in Europe. According to Schwarz, Assis through his cynical realism tries to replicate the experience of living in a country that is ideals peacefully get along with a much different reality. Brazil was country was created by mercantilist appetite in Europe where countries that were launched fast material accumulation through sucking resources from satellite colonies. The brazilian consciousness is formed similarly like Peter's Great Russia, a huge country, unequal with a very powerful aristocracy composed of rentiers (landowners that stole big chunks of land with fraudulent papers, bankers and the senior State officer in the executive, parliament and justice) and, of course, lobbyists (politicians). He calls attention for the fact that after the Coup of 1964 a new culture was generated in order to deliver cultural comfort (while the free world was having the 1960s liberation) and the silliness and the infantile brazilian way were manifest in the Tropicalia and Jose Celso's Oficina. According to Schwarz they were just shallow cultural expression based on bourgeois need to have a superfluous contact with art in times that the brazilian aristocratic society was having a dictatorship which prevented liberty and thus true Art. In the era of mass media, the Brazilian dictatorship were keen to not only censor but also reward those media outlets that would Politically conservative + Liberal Economic Policies that made the super riches even more richers and the poor less poor. The modernization of a country led a Fascist inspired Military Junta was a hoax since it is excuse was to eliminate foreign ideas such as Marxism. How a nationalist military coup sponsored by CIA and aligned with conservative-liberal values was imbued to launch Brazil into modernity. Obviously, it was catastrophe.

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