By GIOVANNI MESQUITA*
If China responds to cultural imperialism by banning Hollywood and creating its own social networks, it shows that sovereignty is not authoritarianism, but self-defense. Meanwhile, our elites parade around in Trumpist hats.
Ariano Suassuna said, in a talk, that “Instead of aircraft carriers, Americans today send Michael Jackson and Madonna to dominate Brazil”. How I miss the days when it was Madonna and Michael Jackson; today we have to put up with all kinds of inelegant scatology. Whether elegant or not, Ariano Suassuna’s sagacity in seeing the obvious is fascinating.
Continuing with this oval-shaped word, we have Nelson Rodrigues, who rubbed the obvious in the faces of all his contemporaries, carriers of the mongrel syndrome. These truths that howl and buzz seem inaudible to us who see, but we have difficulty seeing through the thick lens of ideology.
The call soft-power, with its crushing weight, plows into our consciousness and germinates only its aesthetics, its ideas, its assumptions. The Empire imposes its image as the universal personification of humans. You are there, watching a Japanese film, and the sound of a pop song comes on, as a soundtrack when you kiss, or a heavy metal, when the fighting breaks out. It's a Turkish series and a rap, prints and accompanies the landscape of Cappadocia. The art of popular dance (from here or from any other country), rich in images and dynamism, is replaced by jumps and caricatured passing of hands through the hair... Our roast meats are desecrated and sweetened with barbecue sauce.[I]
It’s a tough journey to buy a T-shirt, for yourself or your child, that isn’t in the language of the empire, and you have to walk this ordeal to the sound of music from the same factory. You go to see a collar for your dog and find a cute little bone hanging on it, with the inscription: “dog”. It’s so annoying to be sensitive to that…
When you express this irritation, people close to you look at you as if you are about to refer them to a psychiatrist. When I criticize her music selection, my daughter responds: “Dad, let’s talk to me about these things when I’m out of my teens.” Noted!
Historically light power,[ii] as this form of domination is cynically called, is from the time of the Big stick[iii]. In Brazil, its most notable appearance occurred during the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt, nephew of the man with the Big Stick, Theodore. Roosevelt, the nephew, was in Brazil in 1943 to secure support for our country in the war against the Nazis. But before that, he sent his vanguard armed with pencils, paintbrushes and cameras.
In 1941, Walt Disney, in the flesh and blood in command of a battalion of artists, set up his headquarters at the Copacabana Palace. Reluctantly, these Soft Power soldiers had to drink a lot of Brazilian culture. But it didn't take long for them to put a fruit headdress on Carmem Miranda's head and show her dancing to the sound of maracas in a mix of Colombia and Mexico. Of course, Carmem was more... "they said I came back Americanized..."
Orson Welles was also sent to this front in 1942. He was intoxicated by the brilliance of our people, by our nature and by the consumption of several cases of whiskey, of course. They say he made a wonderful film called It's all true. It was so good that it never made it to the screen. One version says that the RKO studio wanted to cut the work, perhaps because of Jacaré's death.[iv]. Orson Welles got pissed and tried to fight everyone, but as a result they put the “truth” in a sarcophagus and buried it in some warehouse at RKO.
I always notice a strange look on people's faces when Luís Nassif and I say that we have the most beautiful music on the planet. Many progressives[v] and even Marxists, when asked about “their” Anglophile preferences, say: “yes, but it’s the music I like to listen to”. It’s as if taste, always leaning towards the same side, were a fruit of the tree of chance. It even seems that cultural dominance does not compose the framework of ideological predominance. In we are still here, many leftists have discovered the richness of Brazilian cinema, could it be that the majority are so young that they have never seen it? Kiss on the Asphalt?
When you walk through a wealthy neighborhood, the view is astonishing. The impact is not due to the glamour of its shop windows, but to the language of its signs. I, personally, am shocked by the level of servility and the contempt for our language and, certainly, for our people. Odetes Roitman parades through these places, with her hair dyed the now traditional scammer blonde. And the more parasitic the elite's business area, the greater the dominance of the alien lexicon, which, "coincidentally", as a rule, comes from the English language.
In the cinema, on the list of most watched films in the USA, the first foreign film that appears is at 520th.[vi] place. In other words, they flood the world with the production of their “cultural” industry while at the same time imposing a strong barrier against the entry of artistic and intellectual expressions from outside.
Donald Trump, despite hating every artist in his country, announced 100% taxation on foreign films. Keeping Americans ignorant about other cultures is a state policy, in other words, the cudgel of the soft-Power falls first on the heads of the US people themselves.
Going back a few steps in this conversation, what would be the importance and character of this culture? Marilena Chauí tells us that the word culture is originally linked to the idea of caring, sowing and growing. It is not a metaphor for agriculture; in fact, it seems that culture is a metaphor for it. The principle says that when humans do (work), they do themselves. This is also known as materialist dialectics.
Class societies, where the classes have different relationships with doing, present two distinct types of relationship with culture. For workers, culture is an act, conscious or not, of resistance. For employers, it is a tool for shaping servile behavior. When it is massified, through the financing of the elite, culture becomes its opposite: from resistance it is transformed into accommodation.
In general, the middle class is the one that carries out this transformation of culture into entertainment, but it is also the one that promotes this same demeaning culture. When the culture that comes from the process of forming a community, a region, a people is abandoned, resistance turns into capitulation. “The ruling class imposes conformity and entertainment. We are facing a tragedy.” [vii] Sometimes, in order to understand certain things, it is good to look at another aquarium, since the water that surrounds us, in our aquarium, is imperceptible to us.
The Roman Empire can serve as a perfect contrast for our cognitive experiment, since for many centuries it influenced the politics, economy and culture of the “Western” world it oppressed. Its domain extended from Egypt to Britain, from Lusitania to Romania. After the “Trumps” of those times and the invasions of the peoples of the East turned the ancient empire into dust, its powdered Latin, as Caetano sings to us, remained impregnated in all European languages and, along with the words, its culture. This is a type of contamination that can last longer than the radiation from some forms of plutonium…
As much as we can consider that the imposition of aspects of Roman culture was important for the construction of the contemporary culture of European countries, and of the lands they invaded, the cost must be weighed: “genocide” of cultures, languages, beliefs and customs of the indigenous peoples of America and Africa.
Thus, the main victim, after the extermination of several peoples, was diversity. An empire imposes its language, culture and religion as the main condition of its dominion. And, as a rule, the bastions of cultural resistance have always been the oppressed classes. The elites, in general, happily adapt to the oppressor, as Chauí, our Pallas Athena, or better yet, our Nanã Buruquê, shows us.
In our case, we inherited the last and beautiful flower of Lazio… but the price and the intention were clear. In a burst of lyricism and overwhelming passion, Mathias sings, in Calabar[viii] : “Guitars and accordions / Jasmines, coconut trees, fountains / Sardines, cassava. / On a soft tile / And the Amazon River / That runs behind the mountains / And in a tidal bore / Flows into the Tagus…” and I concluded, “There this land will still fulfill its ideal, and will still become an immense Portugal”. Today, with our dialectical use of the Portuguese dialect, we have cannibalized the language of Camões and from it emerged the language of Guimarães Rosa and that of Simões Lopes Neto, but the colonial mark has remained.
In the inversions of this crazy world, which seems to have been reopened since the mass escape of the far right from Arkham Asylum, cultural domestication is more clear and indecent. In Nazi demonstrations, the Yankee flag is always the largest. Governors and deputies parade around with little caps.Make America Great Again”. They are, without a doubt, patriots!
It is significant that, in the current uproar generated by Trump, China is responding by banning Hollywood productions in the country. Of course, this has been a concern for the Beijing government for some time now, since they have banned several social networks from their territory that have violated their laws. They used a simple principle: it doesn't matter whether you agree with our laws or not, on our territory you just have to comply with them!
To those who call this authoritarianism, I call it sovereignty. And this criterion has dragged down China, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google and YouTube. “How awful!” the monarchists would say, “the Chinese have been exiled from the networks!” No, they created their own networks and seem happy with them, there are even Americans who have joined them. See the phenomenon of xiaohongshu (Red Book), what a subtlety, it is creating a furor among the Yankee crowd.
It is, however, neither possible nor desirable for revolutionary thought to be alienated from the crucible where the spirit of the masses is mixed and forged. Critical thought has the capacity to subject all existing manifestations to the light of knowledge. And they are important, not always, or almost never, for their quality, but rather for the impact they have on the consciousness of poor workers.
But we must do what we Brazilians have always known how to do, transform these manifestations to the point where they become their opposite. We will thus show that since entertainment is the opposite of culture, and cultural manifestations become more and more entertainment and less and less culture, the opposite path is also possible. To illustrate, we can use the Portuguese story of stone soup from the Almeirim region. The traveler asked the locals for help in making stone soup. A carrot for one, two potatoes for another, an onion and so on, and “miraculously” the stone soup became a delicacy.
Yanis Varoufakis, the former Minister of Economy of Greece, began to create a syncretism between politics, economics and science fiction from the so-called Pop Culture in order to talk to his teenage daughter. Even though one does not agree with the full extent of the curvature he gives to the pedagogical possibilities offered by this arc, it is a little difficult to say that it is not a valid way to access youth, a concept that is increasingly extended.
Yanis Varoufakis, who according to some is a socialist, in another very extended arc, wrote the text Star Trek, communist series? in which he makes an accurate analysis that goes from Ferengi to Marx.[ix] But if the communist character of the world of Star Trek The anti-imperialist message of Star Wars, especially in Andor, is questionable, but it is unquestionable. But for the stone soup to become substantial, continuous, judicious and conscious intervention is necessary from those who want to free themselves from the shackles of the imperialism of the “cultural” industry. We have to row, in our interstellar canoe, from their “culture” to ours. Perhaps this is the path to building the so-called “counter-hegemony”.
Luís Nassif, when writing about the show by Chico Buarque and Mônica Salmaso, which he witnessed, made a sentimental outburst: “There were thousands of people, orphans not exactly of Chico, but of Brazil”[X]. The return to what we are, and our mammoth culture, is a path that must be followed with open eyes, aware that we know where we started from, but we do not know where we will arrive, because the important thing is not the arrival but the journey.
* Giovanni Mesquita He is a historian and museologist. Book author Bento Gonçalves: from birth to revolution (Suzano).
Notes
[I] You can't be a gaucho with impunity.
[ii] There are certain titles that the translation does not support
[iii] The translation of this would be obscene.
[iv] Character from the film and Brazilian history
[v] Who knows what that means…
[vi] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odu-sV9aGZY&t=676s. TV cringe, The dumbest country in the world
[vii] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YQcFNoiDMw Authentic Publishing Group
[viii] BUARQUE, Chico and GUERRA, Ruy. Calabar: the praise of betrayal, Publisher: Civilização Brasileira, 1973. An astonishing work.
[ix] https://outraspalavras.net/pos-capitalismo/star-trek-seriado-comunista/
[X] https://jornalggn.com.br/cronica/no-show-de-chico-o-reencontro-com-o-pais-que-ja-foi/
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