Sex, Football and Hair-Transplants

A two-finger salute: the only Churchillian gesture Brazilian politicians

have to offer their electorate.

At her 2013 end-of-year press conference, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff sounded a
schizophrenic note. Regarding modest projections for Brazilian economic growth in 2014 she
told the assembled press corps, 'I don't make GDP predictions and I don't think you should
either,' before duly conceding: 'We are in a position to state that the GDP (for 2013) will be
around 2%, 2 something.' The rhetorically-challenged Rousseff, notorious for Ron
Burgundyesque blunders when performing off the cuff, then lurched onto the defensive: 'I'm
not going to tell you what the GDP will be, either for this year or next year, because if I get it
wrong by 0.2 percent, I'll be the one left carrying the can.' Continuing in split-personality
mode, she warned that it was 'absolutely unforgiveable for a government to be pessimistic.
Unless you're facing a war, and even then I prefer Churchill's approach: "blood, sweat and
tears, let's go on to the end, let's defeat (the enemy)" - that's how you win.'

At a time when the biggest challenge facing Brazil, according to its President, is the relative
non-apocalypse of 2% GDP growth - a rate for which David Cameron would willingly trash a
Bullingdon Club restaurant - it was curious that she should invoke a speech designed to rally a
country as it braced itself for invasion by Nazis.

A few months earlier, the Brazilian Senator, Cristovam Buarque, one of the few righteous souls
in the Sodom-and-Gomorrah twinning-candidate of the federal capital, Brasilia, cited the same
Churchillian rhetoric, though in a different vein. Responding to news that, despite possessing
the 7th largest economy in the world, Brazil continued to occupy a dismal 88th position in
global Human Development Indices, Buarque observed that, in Brazil, such reports are
generally greeted with bland assurances that we're 'we're winning the war' rather than
Churchillian entreaties to tighten belts and dig metaphorical Anderson Shelters.

Churchill's 'blood, toil, tears and sweat' speech was designed to introduce a sense of urgency
into the political debate and to distance him from the complacency which had characterized
his predecessor's appeasing administration. It was also carefully calibrated to resonate with
that puritanical strain in the British psyche which thrives on the idea of thrift, ration-books and
'There's a war on, don't you know?' hardship.

Such an appeal has little currency in the increasingly consumerist, pleasure-fixated, conflict-
and toil-averse culture of modern Brazil, where a kind of anti-work ethic prevails, the legacy of
four centuries of slavery when physical exertion was exclusively identified with a despised
slave class. (The Brazilian journalist Elio Gaspari has observed that whenever Brazilian
politicians quote Churchill's speech they invariably omit the 'toil' aspect.) To find a receptive
audience in Brazil, Churchill would have to declare: 'I have nothing to offer but sex, football,
Xboxes and holidays!'

The political complacency highlighted by Senator Buarque was further evidenced in the end of
year review delivered by President of the Brazilian Chamber, Renan Calheiros. Calheiros
devoted much of a self-congratulatory speech to highlighting cuts in wasteful government
spending. What he failed to mention was that, a few days earlier, he had chartered a Brazilian
Air Force jet to fly him 2,000 kilometres for a hair-transplant operation. When news of this
flagrant abuse of government resources leaked, Calheiros issued a qualified mea culpa: he
would clarify with the Air Force whether he had committed a breach of decorum. (Having
agreed to reimburse public coffers to the tune of R$32,000 a few months earlier, after it was
discovered that he had used an Air Force jet to fly him to a friend's wedding, it seemed odd
that the President of the Chamber should require further clarification.)

By a curious non-coincidence, the surgeon who conducted Calheiros's transplant was the same
medic who had replenished the Bond-villain hairline of Lula's disgraced, and now incarcerated,
former chief-of-staff, José Dirceu, the alleged architect of the so-called Big Monthly (Mensalão)
slush-fund scandal. (Dirceu managed to engineer a further mini-scandal from prison when it
was discovered that the hotel where he'd landed a R$20,000 a month 'managerial' position -
permissible under the terms of his 'semi-open' prison sentence - was owned by a shell
company in Panama in which Dirceu himself may have had an interest.)

But the honour for most obscenely complacent Brazilian politician of 2013 must surely go to
congressman, former Brazilian President and vanity publisher, José Sarney. The embodiment
of old-school Brazilian rotten-borough politics, Sarney and his family have run the north-
eastern state of Maranhão like a private fiefdom for generations. His 2009 election to the
Presidency of the Senate was described by The Economist as a "a victory for semi-feudalism".

In response to reports that, in 2013, 59 prisoners were murdered - as many as 14 decapitated -

in a Maranhão prison complex (under the ultimate responsibility of his daughter, the State
Governor, Roseana), and that wives and sisters of inmates were being routinely raped by gang
members during prison-visits, Sarney proudly declared: 'Here in Maranhão, we've managed to
keep the violence in the prisons and off the streets!' (In November, in a similarly detached
vein, no less a figure than the Brazilian Justice Minister, José Eduardo Cardozo, described
conditions in Brazil's prisons as 'medieval': 'If I had to spend many years...in some of our
prisons, I'd prefer to die!" he added, grateful no doubt that, as a university graduate, he'd
never have to do time in one of the hell-holes reserved for the common refuse of Brazilian
society).
If the sober spirit of Churchill's wartime oratory fails to resonate in contemporary Brazil, his
famous rhetorical flourish - "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat" - has a
tenuous double-Brazilian connection. By one account, it was the re-unifier of Italy, Giuseppe
Garibaldi, who coined the original phrase, telling revolutionary forces outside Rome, in 1849: "I
offer hunger, thirst, forced marches, battle, and death." Garibaldi had previously fought in the
separatist Ragamuffin War (the Guerra dos Farrapos) in the southern Brazilian state of Santa
Catarina (Churchill had once considered writing a biography of him).

An alternative theory suggests Winston's inspiration was a speech delivered by Theodore

Roosevelt when, in 1897, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, he told members of the Naval
War College: "Every man among us is more fit to meet the duties and responsibilities of
citizenship because of ... the blood and sweat and tears, the labor and the anguish, through
which, in the days that have gone, our forefathers moved on to triumph."

Roosevelt famously took part in a 1913-14 expedition to the Brazilian Amazon led by the great
defender of Amerindian rights, Cândido Rondon, where, afflicted by infection- and fever-
induced delirium, the former US President repeated the opening line from Coleridge's Khubla
Khan on a loop, as his party struggled to trace the headwaters of the aptly named River of
Doubt (later renamed the Roosevelt River).

Despite assurances that "this year we had a better performance... in every respect we did
well", Dilma's Churchillian allusions suggest intimations of gathering storm clouds (if not
Luftwaffe squadrons): burgeoning inflation, a weakening currency, the possibility of a credit-
rating downgrade, the ongoing loss of BRIC lustre, the corresponding flight of international
investment, the prospect of being overtaken by Russia as the world's 7th largest economy and
looming World Cup-related protests, not to mention the perennial problems of creaking
infrastructure, excessive bureaucracy, corruption, public order challenges and substandard
education.

Regardless of the urgency of the problems, the rhetoric, in a World Cup-election year, will
remain relentlessly upbeat. But as Senator Buarque observed, 'During the Second World War,
while Churchill asked for "blood, sweat and tears", Germany used its propaganda machine to
create the impression that everything was fine on the front and that the critics were defeatists.
And we all know who lost the war.'