Journalistos & Benevolent Colonialism I

Had the pleasure of meeting Matthew Shirts, the ‘Redator-chefe’ of National Geographic Brasil, who was invited to welcome the conference guests to Brasil with a brief conversation over breakfast, before our meeting began. Matthew is quite a character, a Brazilian import turned native, a wide-eyed kid who first came to Brazil in the mid-70’s as a high school exchange student, suddenly summoned to a border town in the interior hinterlands to study with elderly nuns amidst the sweet siren song of samba… it’s a beautiful thing to encounter archetypes you recognize on your journey, elders on parallel paths a little bit further on down the line, with similar stories to tell… we’re all threading our way into the same tapestry, hacking the slipstream in search of the most seductive sell, sipping on the same wine, studying the science of light and lines, drinking from the same well….drinking from the same well…

“Every foreigner in Brazil becomes an amateur sociologist…”
Matthew Shirts, from this morning

History to meditate on:
“…the first impulse toward independence was given by the Portuguese Royal Family. Terrified by the prospective invasion of the country by a French army, late in 1807 the Prince Regent, the royal family, and a host of Portuguese nobles and commoners took passage on British vessels and sailed to Rio de Janeiro. Brazil thereupon became the seat of royal government and immediately assumed an importance which it could never have attained as a mere dependency…The colonial subjects could not fail to contrast autocracy in Brazil with the liberal ideas that had made headway elsewhere in Spanish America. As a consequence a spirit of unrest arose which boded ill fo the maintenance of Portuguese rule.

Of all the Hispanic nations, however, Brazil was easily the most stable. Here the leaders, while clinging to independence, strove to avoid dangerous innovations in government. Rather than create a political system for which the country was not prepared, they established a constitutional monarchy. But Brazil itself was too vast and its interior too difficult of access to allow it to become all at once a unit, either in organization or in spirit. The idea of national solidarity had as yet made scant progress. The old rivalry which existed between the provinces of the north, dominated by Bahia or Pernambuco, and those of the south, controlled by Rio de Janeiro or Sao Paulo, still made itself felt. What the Empire amounted to, therefore, was an agglomeration of provinces, held together by the personal prestive of a young monarch.

Thanks to the political discretion and unusual personal qualities of “Dom Pedro”, his popularity became more and more marked as the years went on. A patron of science and literature, a scholar rather than a ruler, a placid and somewhat eccentric philosopher, careless of the trappings of state, he devoted himself without stint to the public welfare. Shrewdly divining that the monarchical system might not survive much longer, he kep his realm pacified by a policy of conciliation. Pedro II even went so far as to call himself the best republican in the Empire. He might have said, with justice, perhaps, that he was the best republican in the whole of Hispanic America. What he really accomplished was the successful exercise of a paternal autocracy of kindness and liberality over his subjects.”
William R. Shepherd The Hispanic Nations of the New World, 1914