© Getty Images/ MARCOS DE PAULA
And that brings us, right from the start, to the overwhelming, predictably stupid gringo pre-Olympic Rio prognosis. The whole sorry spectacle has ranged from the plain stupid to the excruciatingly stupid, coming from pathetic, clueless gringos who know less than zero about Brazilian culture, extremely complex social nuances, geoeconomic issues, or the nation's unmatched sense of humor for that matter. But at least there are a few are not that clueless.
Rio is funky, sexy, dangerous, unpredictable and downright crazy. How's this for a start: the day the Olympic torch finally reached its destination after an epic 20,000 km journey across the nation an array of protesters were dealt with by tear gas and stun grenades while a few kilometers away no less than 450 heavily weaponized police were in a war with drug gangs trying to get some of them arrested in the middle of a sprawling slum. That would qualify for a lavish opening sequence in your average Hollywood blockbuster.
I spent the best part of my teenage years on Rio's beaches - and have returned, on and off, for decades. Whenever you land at Santos Dumont airport downtown, even if you're the ultimate cynic and/or nihilist, this nagging feeling overwhelms you: "There must be a God." Oh yeah, and he's right up there, on the top of Corcovado, blessing the whole ungodly mess below.
If you plunge into the Rio way of doing things, you expect all sorts of mini-miracles popping up amid an array of immense distress and inescapable woes. Eventually, things do get done. At the very last second.
So the first Olympics in South America - something the whole continent should be very proud of - will be a success, and every athlete and spectator, in a state of suspended animation brought out by the very best of sport, will be oblivious to the urban violence, the water pollution, the eyesore real state speculation, the Zika virus, and the barely organized chaos.
And then painful reality will set in again for those who remain.
Crookland Rules
If Olympic chaos in Rio will ultimately be quite manageable, political chaos is a completely different story.
The legally elected (54 million votes) nation's president - who won't be at the Olympic inauguration - runs the risk of being impeached before the end of the month by a bunch of notorious crooks, even though the Federal Public Ministry has ruled that her "crime," alleged fiscal embellishment, is not a crime.
And yet Brazilian mainstream media - controlled by five families, and I know most of these scoundrels from the inside - could not care less, and keep promoting this parliamentary coup just as they promoted the U.S.-supported 1964 military coup. Orwell meets Kafka in a demented Rio samba school plot; no "crime of responsibility" still qualifies as crime.
Crook-in-Chief, peerless racketeer and illegal Swiss account holder Eduardo Cunha, former leader of the lower house of Parliament, remains at large. Interim President Temer cannot even risk buying a soda in a grocery store because he'll be booed to Kingdom Come. Every sentient being in Brazil with an IQ dissimilar to the sub-zoology spectrum knows the coup is a farce; the interim "government" is illegitimate; the much-lauded fight against corruption in the fetid Brazilian political system is one-sided; and the supreme target of this farce is to return the nation to the lowly status of a U.S. colony.
Which brings us to corrupt, NSA-spied upon oil giant Petrobras - which, by the way, now keeps smashing records extracting oil from the pre-salt deposits, just as Political Crookland passed a bill in Congress paving the way to breaking it up and opening the exploitation of the sixth largest oil reserves in the world (estimated at 273 billion barrels) to U.S. Big Oil.
The interim Brazilian Foreign Minister, perennial loser Jose Serra, is not only a Chevron asset - thus directly implicated in weakening Brazil's top state company - but also a neoliberalcon who is totally adverse to Latin American integration. He knows as much about diplomacy as a drug runner in a Rio favela (no disrespect to the runner). He has already tried to break the rules of Mercosur, the South American common market. He despises Africa, and regards the BRICS as the plague - in trademark Washington vassal manner. In only a few weeks, he managed to turn Brazilian foreign policy into a Banana Republic lousy joke.
Meanwhile, the interim mantra is privatization a-go-go, disaster capitalism-style - from highways to basic health services, hospitals and water supplies, all that coupled with open-for-plundering (by multinational companies) of everything from the electricity sector to prime Brazilian land.
It's an immensely sad story, affecting a nation that was solidifying its role as a beacon of hope to the whole global South.
Well, first things first. Rio will deliver a memorable - funky, crazy - Olympics. Then, let's be Kennedy-esque; the torch shall be passed to a new generation of Brazilians who must seriously keep the flame of a mature democracy burning.
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