While Rocki reads in bed

A few days ago, my brother-in-law Mauricio asked me what I thought was a primary difference between Brazil and the United States. "Besides language?" I asked smart-assedly. He meant culturally.

That's a hard one. Because of language, it is usually far easier to see differences than to see similarities. But the primary difference? There are so many Brazils, like there are so many USs and every other country. I live in one of them - a middle class and Euro-Brazilian culture, and then witness lots of others through riding the bus, walking the streets, watching the news and other shows, listening to the radio.

But even though it's a hard question, there was an image that came up for me right away. Driving from Rio to Sao Paulo, we passed the skeletons of almost-projects - big cement monoliths that looked like the struts of never-finished factories or colleges or stadiums. So many of them littering the landscape, they have that 1970s World Bank feel - when the dollars flowed but the planning didn't. Great big projects were begun but then, money or enthusiasm or vision was lost in the process and you were left with a cement scar. Passing by these monoliths made me think a lot about cultural imperialism and its long term effect.

If there was one thing I have noticed that exists across class in Brazil, it's an unashamed ability to appreciate pleasure. Pleasure in the company of people you love, pleasure at the beach, in good food, in good music, in children, in just being together. In the states, we are still pretty mainstream-Calvinist where those who can afford pleasure either carefully hide it away or else assert it in a loud bombastic kind of way. Just plain straight up no holds barred enjoyment of the pleasures - from the simplest to the most expensive - well, we don't do that well in the States. But here, I think, people do a better job.

What we do well in the States - and oh lord, please know I'm always talking mainstream or generally with a zillion and one exceptions to prove the rule - is plan. You won't see cement monoliths littering the landscape because you don't start a multimillion dollar project without having it all planned out. (Like I would know what that looks like).

We plan things - new projects, political movements, weekends away, responses to the Bush administrations LACK of planning for Hurricane Katrina. Here, with the intensity of the poverty sitting right in your face, you don't see the kind of pedestrian political reaction that you see in the states. There are millions of political and community organizations from every political and cultural spectrum in the US. From church based to labor to identity based to neighborhood or issue based, at any given moment, lots of people are organizing things. And are given credibility one way or another for working so hard, even if they are not working to get rich. Our work ethic filters across politics to those who want to gain wealth, those who want to change the world and those who want to buy a car.

Planning is not a big Brazilian thing - with all of the stereotypes involved in this statement, there is more of a cultural "live for the moment" than there is in the US. Which brings me to cultural imperialism.

On every television station, on every corner, everywhere you see manifestations of the supposed "American Dream" continuing to be the biggest US export. Mostly, the idea of accessible wealth which is different from traditional Brazilian wealth in a class system that strongly separates wealth and poverty.

So, what do you have to do to "get rich"? Living for the moment and getting lucky with a lottery ticket, well, it don't happen much. There is a kind of planfulness - which might or might not be successful as there are other factors involved with not having things - but the belief in a kind of necessary planfulness is part of the picture. Planfulness does not easily allow for living in the moment.

It's a great big gain and loss picture, isn't it? You gain to lose and lose to gain - no matter what the choice and the change. Gain planfulness and the belief that you might gain wealth, lose some of that present-mindedness. And vice versa.

Somewhere in this muddle of words was my answer to Mauricio.