I’d spend years exclusively in pursuit of some form of you, in that youthful time, but how blessed that it should have been exactly you, so well equipped for a leap of faith that would admit me to this private revolution.

With you, were fleshed out most pleasant dreams, which sprang up and engrossed the landscape of my mind. And in those compressed whispers, I find how much more you knew of me than I. If great expanses have ceded us lightly to time’s treachery, there are days I’m found as close as my most daring travels ever brought me.

Thus, by my choice that you should be my talisman, yet here a thousand days have passed that your word is novel every time it is recast. Your introspective artistry, you far outpaced me to the mastery of self that only now I’d come to tread and quickly recognize your step, that none of it had been at ease.

I recall your dwelling, and the scars, the rotten flesh I’ve since revisited and there I learned how you’d become yourself, so that I’m bound to this most fascinating thought of who you’ll have become today.

The above was left on the comment section of the latest video on RioOnWatch’s youtube channel. My friends, yes, I am about to chase after a comment and spill out my guts about it. I am very mad.
This comment represents how we, in the movement against the eviction of squatter communities in Rio de Janeiro, are alone, and those directly afflicted by it are alone, barely a single unaffected Brazilian citizen ready to stretch an arm in support, society instead washes its hands as our government violates its own people. It represents how much I hate Rio de Janeiro’s society, how much I despise it, really, and how there is no way I can live in Rio de Janeiro without in some way being close to the struggle of our poor, not for anyone’s sake but my own, because I don’t want the schizophrenic condition that marks you a “carioca”.
With “as far as I know”, the speaker, from his podium, declares that although his knowledge admittedly only goes so far, it is sufficient to write off an entire group of people and have them shipped to the Gulag. But what really kills me is when he says the constitution “flawed”. What he means is that the constitution in fact protects people’s right to housing, people’s right to the land they have settled on for several years, whether or not they owned it on paper. Not that Government actually observes this from the constitution, but this guy is not only aware of it, but he thinks it should be changed, presumably, so that it may not be further exploited by the greedy poor. That is a higher level of sophistication than we normally see.
And now… we roll back to 1500, when Pedro Álvares Cabral arrives in Salvador and, with money from the Portuguese crown, buys Brazil from the indigenous peoples that inhabited the area, who were promptly relocated to the firmament. Portugal subsequently transferred ownership of the individual lots of land to the families that still own them or have themselves transferred it to yet other owners since. This should exhaust any possibility that the squatters featured in the video may have been justified in their wild greed.
So this happened 500 years ago, yes I know, it couldn’t possibly still have any significance today. Likewise, it shouldn’t really matter that Brazil’s official language is Portuguese, that Blacks and Indians, even after centuries of enslavement came to an end, don’t live in complete equality in any society in the Americas (another injustice deeply connected to ownership of land). All these things are merely incidental, as something that happened 500 years ago cannot influence events today, the only things that can have any bearing on anything today is things that have happened during my lifetime, because then, corporal punishment can be administered, if nothing else, and thus, blame rightly in place, society is absolved and Humanity can roam free on the Garden of Eden.
Which brings me to Brazil’s most popular religious character, the one depicted atop Corcovado in Rio de Janeiro. I know, I know hypocrisy is old news, but I’m gonna carry on, you don’t have to read if you don’t want to… I just want to pose one question: when Jesus was up on the cross, what did he say of his killers?
I’m not a religious person, but I kind of like the story of Jesus, and I thought that that moment was really the climax, and defined the entire story and message in one line: what I’d call ultimate forgiveness. Regardless, a good story to be influenced by, like many have been influenced by “Scarface” or “Jackass”, in their behavior. But for all the adoration, this is something we are completely lost to incorporate in our real lives. And that’s fine, I don’t want our society to institutionalize ultimate forgiveness, that could be messy, I know, but what I really don’t want to see is a population volunteering to operate the guillotine themselves.
A citizen like the writer of that comment is able to freely sign off on another group of people’s fate. “What for?” is my question. How can you be so disconnected from another human being that you don’t give it a second thought, you don’t put yourself in their place? And knowing that a democratic country’s leaders are really just a reflection of the society they represent, evidently in Rio de Janeiro, I wonder, what other country in the world treats its own citizens like that? The Brazilian citizenship is worthless, we are treated like rubbish, we hear and see other countries where citizens have reason to be proud of their citizenship, where citizens have things to be grateful for, where the country is always hooking its citizens up, helping them out, making life easier on them. Not in Brazil. In Brazil, sometimes the only problem you have in your life is that you live within its borders and it is coming out to get you.
The thing is, though, there have been other situations in history in which the society had the means through which to officially deny the citizenship of its oppressed. Not in Brazil. Maybe if favela dwellers were all members of a specific caste or ethnicity, it would be easier to understand what is going on. The big drawback of Brazil’s racial amalgamation. Maybe that’s what’s missing, for people to start understanding that Brazil operates an Apartheid society: giving the poor an identity.
My conclusion: Brazilian society wants the poor dead. Brazilian society is ripe for a lunatic to come up with the final solution for the problem of the poor. If someone could propose it confidently, Brazil would vote it into law.
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=7200929494560754174&hl=en&fs=true

“The Social Network”, on the other hand, was really awesome. Great music, great acting, great story… Absolutely not banking on the significance of Facebook in our recent human history and culture, the movie is really about the character Mark Zuckerberg and his conflicts with himself, and so good at that, if it was a true story or not, I very soon stopped thinking about it. It is so well written and acted that I seem to find the fictional Zuckerberg more real than the real one. I even want to watch it again. The music is really special, too, particularly in the first few scenes, when Zuckerberg is doing the Facemash.com thing. The people that made “The Social Network” deserve a lot of credit for making a real film out of some intellectual property that could easily have been turned into garbage in the hands of most anyone else, like these Disney pricks, for example.

That you say “while [my] comment may have been in jest, [you] cannot be sure of that” makes me a little proud of my form, to be honest.

As a general rule, I am never just kidding. And, it is always far more likely that I’m portraying my rhetoric as jest while meaning it frankly than the other way around.

I speak of fun and good things in just the same way you do, referring specifically to its most commonly observed occurrences: the conscious ones, superficlal ones.

I dislike it when people show a prejudice against bad things, which I believe is what leads people to superficially overvalue things like fun and things that are generally regarded as good or happy, to be more precise, itself a weak interpretation of the human experience, seeking to, in the low-level domain that is our own, somehow have a grasp on self-worth.

In the words of my GP, we have moments of what we cherish as happiness, but overall, the nature of the human experience is one of suffering. And we are putting a heavy burden on ourselves by measuring life on this scale of the ineffable.

What I’m saying is, as you list things that you can appreciate in other human beings, I think there is one prize that today rises above everything else, to me, and that’s the ability to see beyond the scope of what is good and what is bad, what is happy and what is sad, and to arrive at a condition of pure love for the human being, in all its misery and insufficiency.

And finally, you know, and we all know, that no one expects the Spanish Inquisition.

On May Day, just after leaving her fiancé, 23-year-old Evelyn McHale wrote a note. ‘He is much better off without me … I wouldn’t make a good wife for anybody,’ … Then she crossed it out. She went to the observation platform of the Empire State Building. Through the mist she gazed at the street, 86 floors below. Then she jumped. In her desperate determination she leaped clear of the setbacks and hit a United Nations limousine parked at the curb. Across the street photography student Robert Wiles heard an explosive crash. Just four minutes after Evelyn McHale’s death Wiles got this picture of death’s violence and its composure.

I frankly don’t know how well known the photo is, since it is more than 60 years old.

So how to think about this photo? I certainly don’t think it is beautiful or elegant, I think it just evokes emotions in you. Photography is not necessarily about beauty.

Perhaps you imagine you are the dead woman, the center of attention having her death invaded by a crowd of onlookers, like a bunch of scavengers whose lust is intensified by the glamourized violence against women that our culture loves, that even in death it is important to the viewer that a woman looks serene in a passive and graceful pose.

But obviously we all know it is not tabu to display a violated woman in a passive and serene pose, the tabu is about this one being dead and on a smashed car. The fact that the pose and the clothes are aesthetically pleasing by our standards is what turns it on its head and makes people look at it a second further and then contemplate, it’s like it somehow fools your cognitive devices and shields from your superficial consciousness what you can still see is there.

Imagine that you were there, you think something like “this is it, right there, a woman like any other, a human being like myself, but dead, by her own accord”. And then, what are we going to do about it? Nothing… we all just respond with vulnerability, all you can do is clear out the body, tow away the car and move on.

A screenwriter here in Rio once said that he’s always wanted to successfully capture the emotions of the gratuitous, violent loss of someone you love, in film, and that “El Secreto de sus Ojos” does it as well as he’s ever seen it. I absolutely agree, and that is just what we’re talking about here. To the “innocent bystander”, a body falling from the sky and smashing into a car is this: gratuitous, extreme, senseless violence of the kind that paralyzes a human being into shock.

In war zones, photographers have shot dead bodies before by the thousands, even the moment of someone’s death. Then, they were shooting history, because war is the justification for anything you want, it’s the opposite of civilization. In war, anything goes and is merely anecdotal, because we have the balancing act of cities, orderly communities, organized society and so on, and their margins are left to absorb all the death and destruction and absolve us of all guilt.

Ultimately, the ones that pay for the tabu are the actors, in this case, the suicide. What of the suicides, then? Tabu is good for marginalizing human population and absolving the hypocrites snuggly inside society. By forbidding a story from being told, you abandon the characters in it, leaving them to sink deeper into whatever hole they are in, offering no solace, no compassion and no empathy, instead retreating to the customary, guilty human condition.

I spoke of a time I thought I wasn’t quite happy. “When are you ever happy?”, someone says to me. Not that it was pertinent, but, to a speaker that doesn’t gleefully utter an empty word, I give consideration. Indeed, joy is not my expertise. I know that when I smile it is not with full abandon, that euphoria is not a language that I speak. But love of life and human can hardly be expressed in Earthly cypher, I don’t think. If only you could enter my mind, so you might see how much love there is in me, that I’ve no chance for a daily gesture of excitement, but am seized completely in personal interludes, unseen by the human eye.

But I thought of a smile, the other day. Whence before there sprung a secret contradiction, in her eyes, that by their sharp attunement to the truth shone brightly through her gesture, somehow there remained but a transparency of joy. It was a smile I never knew of, the muscles of her cheeks appeared commanded by some other than herself. There was one day, not long ago, that I too had smiled anew, a smile much wider, careless, freer and dettached. I do remember now, but hardly did I know it then, and neither shall I know it now, not until today is fondly crystallized in remembrance, years from now. So it is…

This was a DVD version which featured a Cosmos Update at the end of most of the episodes, in which, 10 years later, Carl Sagan gives us a look at what’s going on. Sagan is always harsh on such events as the Dark Ages and the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, and, rightly so, on any event in which fear and superstition undermine the development of science, sometimes to disastrous consequences. Sagan’s fascination with the Library of Alexandria is awesome. In one episode he names it the place he would be, if he could travel in time and space to anywhere he wants. In another episode, he describes how the Library contained 123 plays by Sophocles, only something like 9 of which remain today, that it would be as if we had the text of such plays as “A Winter’s Tale” and “Love’s Labour’s Lost” by a William Shakespeare and only knew of the titles of others by the names of “Hamlet”, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, “King Lear”, “Romeo and Juliet”…

The 13th and final episode of the series is all about how humanity is on course to destroy itself, and questions about whether perhaps this is the fate of all technical civilizations, that perhaps in the cosmic scale all civilizations across the Universe promptly self-destruct immediately after achieving high technology. At the Cosmos Update at the end of the episode, an older Sagan speaks hopefully of fundamental changes in popular consciousness and the overcoming of ideological barriers exemplified by footage of the Berlin Wall being torn apart and Nelson Mandela and Frederik Willem De Klerk shaking hands. So this was in 1990, and looking at history, I have to think that the single event that has set us back since then has been the election of George W. Bush as president of the United States.

I’m not saying he single-handedly did anything, but 8 years of policies from the world’s most influential nation inevitably have huge effects on the status quo of the world, and the general disposition of people and of other leaders across the world. I would like to know of a single event that may have undermined the development of humanity as a society more than his 8-year tenure as the US President. I know well what frown Carl Sagan would have on his face, were he still alive today.