Intermission

It has been a long time since I updated this blog. This has been for a variety of reasons, but first it was due to a general ‘desânimo’ (a disappointment, a disillusion that drains me of life), that came with shifting gears from Rio Grande do Sul into the life to which I returned in Brasília. I will say a little about three events that are marking of this period, from which I felt a need to withdraw into personal affections, most of which are distant now, and to put my body into work at my family’s garden and reading poetry and literature to heal the spirit.

The first event was a meeting of researchers of the Cerrado, organized by some faculty from the Center for Sustainable Development (CDS) here at UnB, during a weekend-long series of events celebrating the peoples, cultures, and biodiversity of the Cerrado. It was with this event in mind that I set my return date from my adventure in the South, so the disappointment with it was all the more marking of the contrast I felt in the experiences there and back here.

The academic presentations were reports on past research, and only 45 minutes were allotted at the end for a group discussion on how future work could be done by such a group towards the greater understanding and advocacy of healthy ties between the people who live on the Cerrado and this, our ecosystem. As a first gathering, expectations should not have been set too high, I understand, but the lack of preparation of those there still caught me off guard. Over 20 minutes were wasted at first by a woman who is neither researcher nor knows anything about the Cerrado, but enjoyed to hear herself change words around and speak of the Maya as though she were enlightening the world and all around her. She was by far the biggest waste of time, but not the only one to do so there.

When more serious deliberations were raised by others, they resulted, through a windy process, in the call for a committee of four to eight researchers to prepare next year’s meeting in order to take into consideration all the other comments raised during the conversation (which ended up doubling its allotted 45 minutes). Few volunteered to actually join such a working committee, and very little concrete directions were given for the improvement of the collective work of the group. I myself raised the suggestion that next year’s presentations not constitute reports on past research, but proposals for future collective research and work with social movements already invited for collective work and present at the meeting. This suggestion seemed timely, since not few of those present repeated the consideration that a large amount of money for work in the Cerrado was (or was to be made) available through the Ministries of Social Development, the Environment, and maybe some additional government branch or another. Yet there they were, self-important academics, for the most part, licking their chops over research budgets while itching around like blind mice who know not how to get their cheese, and fearful it would “go to the Amazon instead” or rot in some office, unused. The quickness with which my comment disappeared from the conversation (about budgets and the need to research the Cerrado, things which I would imagine needed no repetition given the very nature of the meeting) was a pillar of my disappointment that day.

Yet don’t let the focus on the disappointing aspects distort the reality that, even still, good came of my participation at that event. There I ran into some people mentioned in previous posts, and such occasional encounters are of utmost importance to the building of more significant ties. Some, for example, have persisted, as with Janjão, who was there as one representative of the regional MST, and who went with me and another group to spend last weekend at a settlement in the Minas Gerais region surrounding the DF (the Federal District in which Brasília is situated) – more on that at a later post.

Yet the event as a whole left me with a sour taste in my mouth for Brazilian academia in general, and the CDS at UnB in particular. It was the third-to-last straw in my consideration of trying applications already this round here in Brazil. The second-to-last came only a few days later, when the CDS hosted the Green Party (Partido Verde) presidential candidate, Marina da Silva, past Minister of the Environment and dissident from the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores – PT), for a talk on the topic of sustainability. The disappointment here was two-fold; with CDS and with the Greens, which meant further disillusion with academia and the electoral process.

As a PT dissident, Marina’s candidacy had represented for me, when I first returned to Brazil, the possibility that a serious challenge to the current government could, at least, force it into a position of accountability. If other leftist opposition parties rallied around the Greens, the PT would simply have to straighten itself out some, or all would risk a return to the rightist coalitions built upon the social-democratic PSDB. But Marina’s challenge is not serious by any stretch of the imagination… and I do not refer to how many votes she can get or “take away” from PT. Rather, I refer to the content of the speech she gave that night – pure bureaucratic banter of green reformism in pro-business developmentalist discourse. Big conservationist transnational NGOs have her in their palms, and she has no concrete alternatives to the economic or social policies of her erstwhile party. When pressured by more critical questions from the (younger members of the) audience, she responded with the most uninspiring bullshit about “consumer choices for green products” and “good corporate examples” in the “European models.”

To make matters even more ridiculously distasteful for me, one of only nine people who were able to raise questions after her speech was that woman-with-nothing-good-to-say-and-who-likes-to-hear-her-own-voice from the above mentioned meeting! And this – mind you! – was a recognized question by the same CDS organizers who already knew that woman was a verbose bag of egoism! But none of this seemed to bother the bigwigs of the CDS, and none of that environmental reformism or consumerist cooption seemed to bother the vast majority of people who packed that auditorium, and most of those faces are already beginning to be recognized by me as the same little clique of middle-class liberals from Brasília who would likely fawn over everything that distastes me about Boulder… And I realized that this would be the setting in which I would envelop myself if I were to ingress at the CDS program and dwell among the middle-class of Brasília, and this was the second-to-last straw…

The very last straw came the following week when I went to the VIII National Bioethics Congress, to present an essay on “Agroecology of Agribusiness? Revolution or Genocide!” along with my mother, who was also presenting some other works of her own in more bio-medical ethics. My presentation was a very, very short summary of the argument about agroecology in a chapter of my thesis, but even such a short summary did not have the opportunity to be discussed during the congress. Other than the keynote speakers and very few “round” table discussions by a few other bigwigs, all other, and I mean the vast majority of the presentations, were limited to a ridiculous 10 minute interval. That did not allow for a proper exposure of a research topic, its results, an argument, or much less any debate about the issues at hand. This fact alone suffices to characterize the congress, in my view, as a complete failure, and an embarrassment to Brazilian academia.

But this is not all that is embarrassing and disappointing. The chair of my session did not even bother to show up, and this forced us to delay our already short time of presentations. Those researchers who did have time for proper presentations and Q&A’s that I saw were, for the most part, very poor speakers, with weak arguments, empty rhetoric, and uninteresting content. In particular, the speakers who addressed the “environmental crisis” focused on it as a result of some abstract “anthropocentrism” and advocated for its solution, therefore, a “planetary ethics” with no specificity whatsoever. When I, and a few others, raised questions about what such a “planetary ethics” would entail in concrete terms for the solution to the problems presented, as political alternatives, or at least social practices, the same resounding stupidity of “consumer choices” reared its ugly head, but this time the aura of importance shifted from electoral politics to the “moral high ground” of academic masturbation over –isms.

Now, I do not expect everyone, or even the majority, to agree with me, or to part from the same questions or considerations… but at least I would be satisfied if there were at least some echo to the seriousness of the work that these people claim to be doing that corresponded in any way with reality. It is as though there were three sorts of characters in this land: those Pontius Pilates who see themselves as so much more intelligent and pure than the rest for preaching “conscious personal choice” while they wash their hands; a small minority of politically engaged illiterate prophets whom they crucify; and a vast sea of ignorant and willingly-ignorant sheep who demand only the liberation of the soap-opera that kills their mind and rapes their dignity, instead of those who sacrifice themselves for a better world.

Let this image conclude, then, my account of the first twenty of my past forty days. With a decision to not subject myself to an application process into Brazilian academia for now, and while endeavoring to care for my own sanity by withdrawing into the privileges of my family’s hammock and backyard, I had felt no ‘ânimo’ to write anything… not until I busied myself with more rewarding activities, and with a new injection of life in my very physical presence, have I now been able to write again.