THE DECLINE OF THE GAME OF RUGBY

Imagine if you will a person going to a football club or othe sporting association and suggesting a variation on the game of soccer in the following terms: "I've just had this amazing idea for a new game. It involves picking up the ball and running with it and the opposition is allowed to hold on to players to tackle them. Of course, one obligatory element of the game means that every year one or two young men will be injured sufficiently to paralyse them from the neck down and there may be occasions when players might attempt to insert their fingers into their opponents’ eye sockets. It's been necessary to incorporate a large number of rules to control the chaotic behaviour that can ensue and also to make the game more audience-friendly for television, so the referee will keep up a continuous monologue, instructing players how to play".

I'm not sure that you would get very far with such a suggestion and yet this is a factual representation of some (only some) of the less attractive aspects of Rugby Union Football today.

Let's look further into the problems faced by the game:

1. Rugby today is heavily weighted in favour of defence. The reason for this is mainly that even amateur players are much fitter than they used to be and 15 of them can cover the area of the field much more effectively than their fathers could. We now also have the free use of substitutes rather than substitutes for injuries only, so if a defender is becoming too tired to cover is part of the pitch he can be replaced.  This makes the game boring to watch and tedious to play.

2. The same question of fitness and specialised training applies to the scrum, which is where young men in the amateur game tend to break their necks when the scrum collapses. We also have the ridiculous situation where, if a front-row forward is injured and there is no specialist replacement available for that position, scrums have to be 'uncontested'. The situation arises because of the immense forces generated within the scrum by young men who are fitter, stronger and better-trained than the average player in times gone by. At the amateur level, the disparity of fitness and physical size within the scrum, together with less well-trained players, can lead to the broken necks and paralysis. Should you doubt this statement, ask any sample of fathers if they would like their sons to play in the scrum and I guarantee that the majority will say no.

3. On the subject of the scrum, some television reports of professional games now have a little clock in the corner of the screen to add up the number of minutes in the game lost to re-setting failed scrums. Some years ago it was calculated that the ball was in play for only 20 minutes of an 80-minute game. This may have improved with changes to the rules, and it would be interesting to see what this figure is today.

4. And if we are talking of the rules, we could go on all night. I understand that football has 11 rules. Theoretically rugby has 22 'laws', but these are subdivided so that they comprise a small book. Also, the rules of football have been unchanged for decades whereas the rules of rugby are continually being tinkered with. Why should this be? Basically because football is a game to be watched, while rugby is a game to be played. The problem has been that, in the northern hemisphere at least, the Five (now Six Nations) games began to appear on television, which made rugby's shortcomings as a spectator sport become more obvious. So rules were changed to give more points to the try, to prevent too much kicking into touch and to prevent pileups on the ground from which the ball would never emerge. This has led to a curious situation: rugby is now the only sport in the world in which the referee maintains a continuous stream of instructions telling the players how to play the game (at some stadiums you can even hire headphones to listen to the referee’s commentary directing the game), on the other hand certain rules are specifically ignored. It is rare today to see the ball put in straight to the scrum and the same frequently happens at the lineout. These transgressions are almost never punished. And yet how often do we see a scrum ordered for a 'knock forward' when the ball has actually fallen vertically or gone sideways?

5. In trying to recruit new players in other countries I often make fun of American football, advertising rugby as "What American football would be like if mothers didn't watch", and indeed, while I respect any athletic endeavour I find it impossible to react to the absurd exaggerated body-armour of the US game (not to mention the face painting) without smiling. And yet there has been a creeping influx of body armour into rugby. When I started playing the game one or two forwards would wear a leather scrum-cap to prevent them developing the cauliflower ears that mark a rugby forward or boxer for the rest of his life. You were allowed to wear shoulder padding if you could provide a suitable medical justification such as a previously broken collarbone. Today, among both forwards and backs we find some players using a helmet composed of tablets of a solid material and underneath the shirts it is quite clear that there is body armour protecting the trunk as well as the shoulders. This is understandable (if not particularly impressive) among professional players who (a) play too many games in a season and (b) need to protect their bodies in order to pay their mortgages. At the amateur level, however, it creates a difference between those who can afford to buy body armour and those who can't, and the ensuing disparity in the amount of physical aggression delivered and the results of physical aggression received.

So, is there hope? I don't think there is any hope of reforming the professional game, simply because too many vested interests have too much money invested in it. However, I believe the situation is similar to that of the beer industry. The big breweries are interested only in mass-producing carbonated horse-piss they can transport around the country in aluminium barrels but there is a significant proportion of the public that has reacted against this and supports the products of small, local breweries, a movement summarised in the title of the Campaign for Real Ale. It should be possible at grassroots level to launch a Campaign for Real Rugby. It might involve the following elements:

1. There can be no justification whatsoever for continuing to sanction a game in which it is guaranteed that a certain number of players will (will, not may) suffer an accident in a planned part of the game that can lead to permanent paralysis. The scrum must be de-powered and this can easily be done by removing two players from the back row. These two players could either stand out of scrums or be removed from the field altogether (see the next point).

2. As I have mentioned above, there are too many players on the field of the conventional 15-a-side rugby union game today and many people prefer to play the 7- or 10-a-side game. I don't see any problem in reducing the number of players to 13. A friend of mine to whom I have made this suggestion replied rather tartly: "Well why don't we just play rugby league then?" Why not indeed? In many ways rugby league is a rather more interesting game, but I don't see any intrinsic problem in playing a form of rugby union that gives players more room on the pitch to show their skills and evade tacklers. Although not designed to this end, this change would actually make the game more interesting to spectators.

3. Every sport that I know of is afflicted with a senior bureaucratic management made up of ex-practitioners or bought-in professional managers, people who generally feel an unconquerable need to wear suits, or even worse, blazers. These are the people who have tampered with the rules of rugby, generally to the detriment of the game. The Campaign for Real Rugby would ask the clubs for suggestions for rule changes. Rules that were adopted would then be applied equally by officials and one would hope that these rules would be sufficiently clear that referees would not need to instruct players how to obey them.

4. If there is a stratum of the rugby-playing world sufficiently delicate that their mothers insist they wear body-armour, perhaps they could be directed towards American football where I'm sure they would love prancing around in those macho shoulder pads and the buttock-hugging pantyhose. With fewer people in the scrum, the Campaign for Real Rugby might even abolish the ear-protecting scrum cap, but that's open for discussion.

5. The very nature of rugby does attract certain individuals who see the field of play as an opportunity to commit acts of violence that have nothing to do with the game. In Wales we have recently seen a promising young player blinded in one eye by an opponent who had heard of this practice happening at the highest levels of the game. Not only should those found guilty of such acts be banned for life, but legal proceedings should be taken against them.

6. The rugby world is rather smug about the behaviour of its spectators compared to footbal fans, but I have noticed a decline in behaviour at games, especially the booing of players taking penalty kicks (which you don't hear so much in football), except in Ireland, where they still maintain some ideas of sportsmanship.  This is a form of spectator interference is the equivalent to a fan running onto the pitch, which would cause the game to be stopped, so if spectators make too much noise and a kick at goal fails, the referee should allow it to be taken again.

This year I had my 67th birthday and just before it I finally retired from playing rugby even though my appearances on the field had been sporadic of late because of travel commitments. I have never played it well – I've played alongside enough good players to recognise that – but I have always enjoyed the game so the comments made above are intended as constructive criticism aimed at making rugby more enjoyable to players and spectators alike.

JUST ANOTHER MURDER IN THE AMAZON

I don't often get angry, but this is what achieves it:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/24/amazon-rainforest-activist-killed

I've committed a large part of my professional and personal life to Brazil and understand the problems it has in achieving its social and economic goals, but the rainforest issue hangs over the country like the dark clouds before a storm in the Amazon.  I really believe there is a complicity between the government and loggers/charcoal burners to the effect that statements will be made publicly in favour of conservation while nothing will actually be done to stop the destruction because of the contribution hardwoods make to exports and charcoal to being cheap fuel for industry.

The point is that it is OUR problem, or will be when the reduction of the rainforest to isolated reserves has destroyed the greatest lung in the world and eliminated uncalculated and incalculable measures of biodiversity.  The Brazilian argument that the 'Western world' destroyed its forests to achieve industrialisation is invalid (a) because the countries involved never had tropical rainforests and (b) the USA in particular has employed an immense REforestation programme of its temperate woodlands.  I challenge any Brazilian to show evidence of reforestation of the Atlantic or Amazonian rainforests and of a single illegal logger being imprisoned or given a significant fine.

And let's not forget that the victim here, like Chico Mendes, is a Brazilian - he was not a foreign missionary like Dorothy Stang, who was murdered for the same reasons and who might be dismissed as a go-gooder from outside.  Brazilians who know the forest and grew up there want to preserve it.

Please send this news item on to other people as we should keep nagging away from the outside world because one thing Brazil does care about is its image abroad, especially in terms of its ambitions for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council (for whatever good that will do it).

JASON BOURNE AND THE AMERICAN DILEMMA

I am endlessly fascinated by The Bourne Trilogy of films based on the novels by Robert Ludlum. First of all there is the technical excellence of the films, directed by Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity) and Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum). This is what American cinema does very well, the car chases in particular, which have come a long way since Steve McQueen in Bullitt and Gene Hackman in The French Connection.

There are some gaping holes in the storytelling which we shall pass over here but it is worth noting two clichés of modern American television and cinema productions. The first and rather puzzling one is the general contempt shown towards the FBI and CIA, the former usually depicted as complicating the lives of honest policemen and the latter shown as subversive or ineffective. The second cliché is that of employing fading British actors as villains, in this case the once-magnificent Albert Finney and also the more workaday Brian Cox.

So what is the American dilemma and how do these films relate to it? The United States is possibly the only country in the world to have been deliberately and specifically founded according to the ideals of a religious sect within the framework of a more or less democratic political system (omitting the slaves and the indians). When it achieved independence it enshrined its philosophical and political ideals in a Constitution, hence the dilemma. While the Constitution preached the principles of brotherly love, harder heads were massacring native indians, annexing lands occupied by Mexicans, buying more territory belonging to France and Russia and finally colonising distant islands.

We could say that by the mid-20th century, with its domestic situation more or less settled and having played a major part in saving the world from, first of all the foul regimes of Germany and Japan and later protecting much of the world from the foul and incompetent regimes of Russia and China, the United States might be felt to have paid its dues to history by reason of its contribution to the modern world.

This was the scenario at the end of the 1950s when a sudden polarisation took place within the USA. On the one hand young people wanted to extend their ancestors’ brotherly love beyond the restrictions of traditional religious limitations. This impulse was shown at its most extreme by the hippies, but we must also remember that there were hundreds of thousands of apparently far more conventional youngsters who gave themselves over to the joys of rock ’n’ roll while still maintaining the overall appearances of Middle America.

On the other hand we have the magnificent hypocrisy of the Camelot Kennedys, featuring a sex-addicted President whose bootlegger father had rigged his son's election with the aid of the Mafia, maintaining oppressive regimes in Central and South America and beginning to send young men half-way across the world to fight to maintain a corrupt (but anti-communist) regime in South Vietnam. Now, in contrast to the hippies, we have the CIA coming onto the scene, smuggling opium with its Air America, and ordinary soldiers committing atrocities such as the events that My Lai, which not only involved killing 300 people, as is usually reported, but also large-scale rape of women and young girls. Interestingly, progress of that massacre was halted by two American helicopter crew risking their lives to remonstrate with the soldiers and the atrocity was publicised by an American journalist Seymour Hersh, writing in an American publication.

And this is exactly the conflict we see played out in the Bourne films: the pragmatic, hard-nosed officials using Al Qaeda’s atrocities as justification to order their subordinates to step beyond the limits of the law and (because this is Hollywood) their defeat by civilised, humane upholders of the Constitution. Indeed, in the last few weeks, while we have seen overwhelming support for the killing of Osama bin Laden, some doubts have automatically been raised concerning the legality of the action.

The new twist introduced in the Bourne films lies in resolving the moral problem of those at the sharp end of the conflict – the killers. On the one hand, if the special forces who had had Osama bin Laden in their sights ten years ago had enjoyed the autonomy to shoot to kill, the Al Qaeda problem might be on its way to resolution by now, but the Constitution was followed and permission to shoot was withheld. On the other hand the group to which Jason Bourne volunteered his services were trained to kill at will but in order to make Bourne a hero he has to be given doubts which are eliminated by means of brainwashing and torture.

The justification offered by the high-ranking CIA official for setting up the Treadstone and Blackbriar operations is, in effect, that while the USA operates by the rulebook, its enemies do not, so “no more mister nice guy”. In the real world, is it not surprising that films of Guantánamo Bay prisoners suffering sensory deprivation by being blindfolded and wearing ear protectors and wheeled around on trolleys should be made available to the world’s news agencies? Is it not equally surprising that details of the repeated waterboarding of the man said to have masterminded the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon should also be made public? Is it not actually rather shocking that those who have inherited the principles of the US Constitution should cynically keep their prisoners beyond the reach of their country’s laws, ironically in the communist dictatorship of Cuba?

These questions are quite simply answered if we follow the ideas I have set out above: the USA wants the world to know that it can be brutal if and when it feels the need. One of the greatest weapons in the hands of the enemies of America and Western Europe is the conviction that the states making up these bodies have been weakened by the laws they themselves have made. In this sense, the Bourne films tend to reinforce that impression by allowing the nice guys to win. If the virtuous CIA figure Pamela Landy were faced with the option of ordering or committing the extra-judicial killing of an Osama bin Laden (or a Reinhard Heydrich), what would she do? What would you or I do?

And this is what good drama does: it makes us check on our values by entering the world of fictional figures. With the democratisation of Western society it is interesting to see how drama has changed from Shakespeare’s day when the figures facing these problems belonged to the nobility or royalty; today’s Hamlet is the ordinary guy David Webb who was turned into Jason Bourne by the brutal technicians employed by a liberal democracy.

For nations that have stepped off the global stage or have not yet entered it (while nonetheless enjoying the protection of the USA) and for individuals who enjoy the privilege of free speech without necessarily suffering the responsibilities of government, it is very easy to criticise the hardline pragmatists. Nevertheless, I feel that for the last 50 years the USA has been suffering the same kind of national nervous crisis that Reformation Britain passed through (see the relevant essay on this blog) and the crisis has generated the same kind of artistic creativity. In 1968 I was chatting to an American fellow-tourist in Machu Picchu, a man who had fought in World War II and said to me rather plaintively: “I can remember when the Europeans were glad to see American bombers in the skies”. And because America is now quite an efficient democracy all Americans of voting age have to wrestle with the question: where does justified aggression stop and murder begin? The Bourne Trilogy, representing the liberal-left thinking of Hollywood, points us in one direction while Clint Eastwood’s films point us the opposite way. As the Americans would say: “Go figure”.

ART AND THE GREAT TRADITION

I have just paid the princely sum of £25 (US $40) for one of my greatest cultural investments of recent years. In a second-hand bookshop in Brasilia I came across a copy of Masterpieces of Western Art, edited by Ingo P. Walther, presumably taking time off from making guns, and edited by Taschen. The shop wanted the equivalent of £100 for it so I bought it on the Internet and to save on postage had it delivered to my home in Wales. I have just got back and opened the package, to be stunned by the contents: two heavy volumes containing every masterpiece you would wish to see, from the Middle Ages until today. When I go to London my first stop is usually the National Gallery to visit the old friends who wait patiently for me on its walls and now they have come to stay with me permanently on my bookshelf – and brought their friends from all over Europe. The content of these books would be a bargain at any price but what is astounding is the physical quality: the reproduction is pin sharp and sometimes you think you have turned over two pages at once, such is the weight of the paper that has been used.

These artists represent the Great Tradition in European painting and their works make up the stock of references to which our civilisation turns: those mediaeval religious paintings remind us of one of the pillars of our civilisation; these Renaissance imaginings of classical figures remind us of another; the portraits of hard-faced Italian mercenaries, German moneychangers and English landowners allude to the lives of those individuals to give us various lessons in how to deal with our lives today.

But what, you may well ask, is the contribution of this tradition to the rest of the world? Let me explain first of all that in Brazil I translate books on art from Portuguese into English, a task that has been very instructive in teaching me about art and culture in that country. Secondly, just before I returned from there two days ago, while looking for cheap thrillers to read on the aeroplane I bought in that same bookshop a used copy of a book on American (US) painting. Although I only had time to quickly glance at it before leaving, the three strands of painting and culture represented in these experiences gave rise to some thoughts.

The major idea that has struck me is: how do ‘newly-invented’ countries develop a cultural and artistic tradition to use as their reference points? This is especially interesting when we compare and contrast the traditions of the USA and Brazil. In many ways the two share historic parallels – both founded by Europeans who imposed a culture on a pre-existing indigenous base; both immensely large in area and possessing vast mineral wealth; both benefiting from, and subsequently struggling with the legacy of, slavery; both maintaining linguistic and, to a great extent, cultural unity.

And then they have their differences: the USA seamlessly inherited the global influence of the British Empire whereas Brazil’s relationship with the remnants of the Portuguese empire is limited to the rather futile Organisation of Portuguese-Speaking Countries; internally, the United States devastated its natural heritage of forests and hills to become the most powerful economic power in the world whereas Brazil is devastating its natural heritage to export raw materials to be manufactured or consumed in other, more economically powerful countries; culturally the USA dominates the global film industry and its television programmes appear everywhere whereas Brazil made some small global impact with bossa nova but its only other globally recognised ‘cultural’ brand is football.

If we turn to the more specific theme of painting we find that while the USA probably benefited from its proximity to Europe as a base for establishing its own themes and traditions. Brazil suffered from two problems: its distance from the metropolis, which made it a less attractive destination for an artist to re-establish himself, and also the weaker position of Portugal itself in terms of an artistic tradition. The Reformation in northern Europe had freed painters from the near-monopoly of the Catholic Church while Portuguese painters were still mainly restricted to religious painting and portraiture.

Nevertheless, when the Portuguese Court was removed to Brazil by reason of the invasion of Napoleon, one of the first things the King did was to set up a School of Fine Arts, but the next step, after the fall of the French tyrant, was to invite a group of French artists to Brazil to ‘kickstart’ art in the country. This led to a social division in Brazilian art: the social elite studied at the School of Fine Arts while the slaves and recently-released slaves were employed to paint in churches religious works they copied from illustrations in European books. Links with European traditions also were maintained by scholarships that took promising painters (not all of them from the social elite) to Europe, but there remained much more of a gulf between the United States of Brazil and Europe than there was between the United States of America and Europe.

One of the reasons for this lies quite simply in the physical differences between the two countries. The landscape of North America is not markedly different from that in many parts of Europe but the painter stepping off the boat in 19th-century Rio de Janeiro was faced with a landscape that does not exist in his artistic tradition and walked into an Atlantic rainforest which was totally new in terms of its representational demands. How do you begin to paint the profusion of plants in a jungle when you have never seen a jungle before? 

And a third element of the influences referred to above comes into play - a social difference exists as well: the racial separation between the three main groups in North America – indigenous, European and African – was then as now much more marked than in Brazil. American indians appear in 19th-century US paintings merely as Romantic, 'walk-on' figures and black people hardly at all, so the subject-matter of social painting is recognisably European. With the smaller numbers of Europeans colonising Brazil, miscegenation was inevitable and so the representation in painting of these different physical types is more blurred. The painter in Brazil has to paint a new kind of society.

Nevertheless, the European scholarships provided for Brazilian painters and the influence of the latter when they returned to Brazil, provided a sense of tradition and a line of logic in painting that lasted until the disaster of the Week of 1922. Note that I am writing this from the safety of my home in Wales otherwise I would be liable to assassination at the hands of enraged Brazilians for referring to their famous Week as a disaster, but let’s take a closer look at it.

In literature TS Eliot published The Waste Land in 1922. What is significant about this year? It is three years after four of the most catastrophic years in European history - the First World War.  European history is an almost non-stop chronicle of war, so why should this one have been one of its greatest disasters? First because European civilisation had reached the point when it should have been possible for rational diplomacy to avoid war, especially as most of the heads of state involved were related to one another. Second because the results of rational industrial methods (mass production of both traditional military items as well as of civilian goods such as barbed wire, mass transport and poisonous chemicals) were forced into service to perform an irrational mass extinction of human beings. Thirdly, this was a truly world War, fought in Europe, Africa and the Middle East and, as the gravestones on the Western Front indicate, involving also soldiers from Canada, New Zealnd, Australia and India, and labourers were even brought from China to dig trenches.

To those who had followed or participated in the Great Tradition of European culture represented by its magnificent literature and by the paintings contained in the books I have just bought, and used that tradition as a source of reference believing it illustrated and assisted the process of working towards a civilised way of life, the self-destruction of European civilisation in World War I was traumatic. The invention of photography before the War had already caused painters to rethink their art and this feeling intensified in the 1920s.

For Brazil, which had always looked to Europe for its values, the situation was similar to watching one parent murdering another. Suddenly the country had to look for its own values within its own traditions, but so little investment had been made in either of those elements that new art had to be created out of very little, and by a restricted number of people.  This restriction was caused not only by the rigid social hierarchy of Brazil but also because economic and social development still clung mainly to the Atlantic coastline. Where there was agricultural development in the interior, primitive transport facilities limited the exchange of people and ideas.

The United States, by contrast, had two coastlines, no impenetrable interior and easy communication between developed cities throughout its territory. For example, after the First War artists travelled to the American Southwest by means of the Santa Fe Railroad and the railway company then used their work in advertisements to popularise the region and attract people to visit it. In addition, the US education system, which included scholarships to higher education, was well-developed and could teach art widely throughout the country, while again its proximity to Europe meant that even young people without much money (e.g. Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald) could go to Europe in larger numbers than their Brazilian counterparts. In that Europe they discovered the ruins of a once-proud civilisation but, like TS Eliot, they had enough in common with it that they could use those ruins on which to build their new culture. During the subsequent depression years of the 1920s the US government used some of its vast wealth to create financial schemes to support artists and the first of these produced 15,000 works in one year. Portuguese-speaking Brazilians found very little in Europe that they could relate to because their society was so different from that of either Portugal or the rest of the continent.

But the most profound difference in the reactions of the USA and Brazil to World War I was that America, which had started the war with an army smaller than that of Portugal, used it to gain a foothold in Europe which it has never given up. Brazil on the other hand, except for maintaining certain cultural links with France, turned away from Europe and in the Week of Modern Art in 1922, staked its claim to the creation of its own form of Modernism based in Brazil.  One of the elements of the Modernist movement that played a part in the 1922 Week was that of ‘Anthropophagy’, a reference to the cannibal tradition attributed to the original inhabitants of Brazil, especially the consumption of Bishop Sardinha. The Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade, one of the instigators of the Week, understood the idea of ‘antropophagism’ or cultural cannibalism in the sense of taking what Europe had to offer, consuming it, and using it for Brazilian artistic purposes. Unfortunately, if we follow that analogy to its logical conclusion, the results can only be called shit.

Nevertheless, we can see the reasoning behind this thinking: if the Great Tradition of Europe has resulted in catastrophe and if Portugal has become such a geopolitical nonentity that the troops it sent to World War I had to be pulled out of the front line and set to digging trenches, it is logical that Brazil should feel the need to look for its own roots. At the start of this new movement the elite artists had the paradoxical advantage of having studied in Europe and were able to turn to national themes with a technical background based in the Great Tradition. Tarsila do Amaral, one of the more original painters in the group and possibly the most successful, used to invite Picasso and the boys to Brazilian lunches in Paris when she was studying and painting there. It is later, as the European connection begins to fade, that I feel Brazilian painting gets out of its depth. In an attempt to overcome that problem, some artists turned to the United States while others turned to the heritage of black art that had been preserved by slaves.

Here again it is an advantage to be writing from a distance because I have to make the heretical statement that the visual heritage of African art is rather limited. We have the Benin bronzes, wooden carvings and textile designs. We have the figures of a cosmology that were taken to Brazil to produce the Afro-Brazilian religions. We have the music that once did produce the core of Brazilian popular music, and that is about it. Of course African art was produced during the whole of the period encompassed by my two volumes of European masterpieces but we simply don’t have a record of most of it. Black Brazilian artists have gone to Africa in search of their cultural roots but it is a hard historical fact that the recoverable roots found there are very shallow.

And the moral of the story? Certainly in Britain, painting seems to have lost its way; any society that can support the playful antics of Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Jake and Dinos Chapman and Gilbert and George cannot be taken seriously. In Brazil you can go to the São Paulo Biennial and I challenge you to find any work of art you would wish to give house room to. I must confess that I am not conversant with the very latest US painters but again we have to recall that it was the blue-rinsed matrons of America who made the fortune of the meaningless hollow man, Andy Warhol.

The solution? To follow the advice of Voltaire and do what I have been doing this afternoon after four months away, ‘cultiver notre jardin’, prowl the markets until you see a work of real value, pounce on it and buy it.

RANDOM THOUGHTS ON BRAZILIAN DEMOCRACY

It is difficult to park in Brasilia.  This is because more people have cars than were planned for when the city was designed 50 years ago.  The original city planners still had the feudal mindset of 1950s Latin America which said that only a small proportion of people were going to have motor cars.  (Actually, this makes it even less forgivable that they did not design a proper public transport system, but we'll let that one go.)  Although the distribution of wealth is still restricted in Brazil as a whole, evidence of it in the larger cities shows that increased democracy has brought increased prosperity to more people and it is not too fanciful to attribute this situation to legitimate demands for access to wealth expressed through the popular vote.

One of the results of this parking difficulty is that I take my wife to her work near the Lower House of Congress to avoid her spending half an hour looking for a parking place.  Yesterday, as we crawled through traffic and approached the entrance of Congress a tall, elegantly dressed man of mixed race passed in front of us, his hair plaited into dozens of small, tight tresses in the manner favoured by black singers.  A little further on, a middle-aged white man was conducting a group of indigenous Brazilians dressed in shirts and trousers but wearing their feathered headdresses.

It seems reasonable to suppose that the gentleman with the plaits was either working in or visiting Parliament either as a senior civil servant (judging by his expensive suit) or as a representative of a black Brazilian constituency.  As for the indians, there had been a large encampment of them on the grassy area half a kilometre from Congress last week so it is possible that the group we saw were dealing with related business, or perhaps other business of their own.

Whatever the facts behind these suppositions, these two chance sightings remind us how far Brazil has come since its military dictatorship slouched offstage a quarter of a century ago.  While Brazil's dictatorship, compared to those of Argentina and Chile, was relatively bland (perhaps 500 people were ‘disappeared’ as opposed to thousands in the neighbouring countries) the overnight eradication of democracy by generals frightened out of the half-portion of wits they possessed by a nonexistent Communist threat remains a shocking stain on Brazil's history.  Nevertheless, the reinstallation of democracy that has led to black and indigenous groups demanding and getting their representation in Congress, has been carried out with remarkable success, except for three elements.

The first is the constitutional structure that allows multiple parties to exist (I believe the current number is 27) in Congress.  This structure caters to the natural tendency in Mediterranean societies where many desire to be chiefs and none wish to be indians.  Thus, many political parties must have many chiefs and any party that wishes to rule the country must do so by means of forming alliances and such alliances are bought by handing out ministerial or other government-controlled posts according to an individual's party rather than his or her actual competence.  At least recent moves have tried to control the movement of politicians between parties, which had become ridiculous; about 18 months ago one deputy changed parties three times in one day.  This loosely-controlled situation leads to elected representatives spending for time playing politics than actually running the country.

The second problem is more apparent to outsiders than to Brazilians: the impunity of those who tortured and murdered during the military regime.  Brazilians pass off their reluctance to bring such people to justice as being evidence of their affable, peace-loving national character.  Others might say that the pre-emptive amnesty agreement the military insisted on imposing before they left power is an example of both military and civilian cowardice.  Military cowardice because those who claimed their actions were saving the state are afraid to defend those actions before a Truth Commission, and civilian cowardice because subsequent governments that did not sign the amnesty have been afraid to tear it up and bring to justice people who performed unspeakable deeds.  As I write, there is talk of a Truth Commission being instituted but holding one's breath in anticipation of its achieving anything would be a definite health risk.

Finally, we come to the third problem with the reinstalled democratic system and this is one which all Brazilians are quite happy to talk about: corruption.  The noxious crew that swaggered into power behind Luis Inácio Lula Da Silva had to be replaced almost to a man within a few years thanks to their cynical financial corruption.  As if that were not sufficient, many of these same individuals, having spent a year or two in the political wilderness, are now sneaking back into positions of power, some of them onto the Congressional Ethics Committee, an irony not lost on the Brazilian public.  If anything rots the moral fibre of a country it is widespread use of drugs/alcohol, and also financial corruption.  Unfortunately, Brazil is awash with both and there is little prospect of the effective reduction of either element thanks to the country's preference for rhetoric over action. 

An article in a news magazine this week refers to the recent legislation on environmental protection, saying that the new laws are generally sensible, but will they be kept?  The article referred to the ongoing deforestation of the Amazon, which continues in spite of existing legislation.  What is lacking here, and what would be present in a truly democratic society such as the USA in the same circumstances, is a sense of outrage and indignation against illegal deforestation.  The simple question would be asked: if these actions are against the law, why is the government not doing anything to stop them?  Just like the British with Margaret Thatcher, Brazil has elected a female First Minister with a reputation for toughness but an incapacity to be truly tough.  The inefficiency of British democracy, together with the lack of competent opposition, allowed Mrs Thatcher to rampage for eleven years, tearing great rents in the social fabric until she was eased into her padded cell by the democratic processes within her own party.  In spite of its democratic advances, Brazil has tolerated corruption through two presidential periods under Luis Inácio Lula Da Silva and to date things are not looking too bright under Brazil's own version of the Rubber Lady.