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SAO PAULO -- Brazil is the country the whole world loves to love. Brazil is a (joyful) riddle wrapped in an (chaotic) enigma, with the added complexity that the riddle and the enigma are ritualistically juggling with a football, dancing a samba, ogling a sensual mulata, watching a telenovela and sipping a lethal caipirinha -- all at the same time.
The distinctive cultural trace of Brazil is anthropophagy -- from culture to technology, the legacy of a former, lazy European monarchy in a tropical country where the aborigines, after banqueting over the odd whitey, were merrily exterminated while Europeans and black slaves copulated freely, with no Catholic guilt involved (there's no sin below the Equator). If this sounds like the plot of a carnival parade, that's because it is.
De Gaulle once quipped that Brazil "is not a serious country". Multi-ethnic, multicultural Brazilians, addicted to tolerance but most of the time drenched in complacency, preferred to believe -- and joke about -- the eternal promise of "the country of the future" (as novelist Stefan Zweig coined it over 70 years ago).
Now Brazil is on a roll -- and profiting from global goodwill has become a crucial element of Brazil's re-turbocharged soft power. It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that Brazilian swing. The country is the "B" in Goldman Sachs-coined BRIC -- the new, emerging global powers; less inscrutable and misunderstood than China, less authoritarian than Russia, less shambolic than India (and with no religious problems). And let's face it; much more fun. A new, two-fold national narrative has taken over; Brazil will become "the 5th power" -- that is, the 5th largest global economy (bye bye Britain and France). And the New American Dream is made in Brazil.
Surfing USA, remixed
No wonder Anglo-American elites of the North tend to fry their brains confronted with so much tropical ebullience. At the G-20 in London US President Barack Obama could not contain himself. "I love this guy," he said of Brazil's President Lula, "he's the most popular politician on earth." Time magazine recently named Lula as "the most influential person in the world." The Economist, never a fan of hyperbole, is convinced Brazil will become the 5th power by 2025.
But was the London Independent hyperbolic when it blared, "the world's most powerful woman will start coming into her own next weekend"? On Sunday, Dilma Roussef, 63, Lula's former Chief of Staff, may indeed become the next Brazilian President