[conspire] source of "Brazil is the country of the future..."

[Eric De Mund]

All,

Edmund J. Biow <ejb1 at isp.com>:
] But then again, as someone once said "Brazil is the country of the
] future and always will be!"

The saying, "Brazil is the country of the future," is a slogan from the
1950s if not earlier; Charles de Gaulle is alleged to have turned it on
its head by quipping, "Brazil is the country of the future and always
will be."

Here's one reference:

     http://www.columbia.edu/cu/bw/b_and_w/nov04/columns/verily/verily.html
     Told Between Puffs

     [...]

     Verily Veritas once said that a word is like fashionable real
     estate: it can only last so long before overexposure and social
     climbing ruin it. As for finger-pointing, Verily can think of no
     one more culpable than the Futurists, for obvious reasons. The Fu-
     turists were the archetypal artists-as-pamphleteers. The modern
     world, they prophesied, would be an iron wonderland of speed, con-
     venience, and the razzle-dazzle of mechanized war. They promised to
     replace the past with the works of art befitting this stunning new
     age. And then they painted dauchsunds. On leashes. Nevermind that
     their rhetoric helped roll out the carpet for Mussolini, Fascism,
     and the industrial gore of the World Wars; for that you can hardly
     blame the poor dauchsund. No, Futurism's worst offense was to take
     a noble concept and drown it in bathos, and we have Marinetti and
     his goons to thank for the term's current vulgarity.

     Fittingly, it was one of the great luminaries of "Old Europe" that
     made contempt for the Future fashionable. After a visit to an in-
     dustrializing Brazil--the self-touted "Country of the Future"--
     Charles de Gaulle is rumored to have quipped that Brazil was indeed
     the country of the future, and always would be. If Verily recalls
     correctly, this was sometime in the late fifties, though most of
     that decade remains a haze of Campari and airline stewardesses.
     Verily only mentions the date to give de Gaulle credit for being
     cynical before it came into style. Since then, there have been
     terms aplenty accounting for this new stodginess. Francis Fukuyama
     calls it the End of History and, alas, a bummer. Lyotard calls it
     postmodernity, but no one asked him. Oddly enough, though, it was
     the late, grating Jacques Derrida who sensed that the term "the
     Future" wouldn't cut it. For him, there was la futur, an inevitable
     and driving force-capital "M" Modernism for readers with high to-
     lerances for tired terminologies. And then there was l'avenir (the
     coming)-a sense of unsureness and surprise he likened to the arriv-
     al of an unexpected guest.

     [...]

Eric
--
Eric De Mund              |   Ixian Systems, Inc.   | cell: 650.303.4336
email: <ead at ixian.com>    | 650 Castro St, #120-210 |  fax: 240.282.4443
http://www.ixian.com/ead/ | Mountain View, CA 94041 |  Y!M: ead0002