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Showing posts from October, 2018

Balls O' Na

Many years ago I was in the State of Paraná, Brazil, listening to the roar of the greatest (by volume) waterfall in the world. The Chilean girl I was with giggled at the name and explained that, in Santiago, this was a way of saying 'useless'. Jair Bolsonaro seems certain to be elected President of Brazil later this month on a ticket of shooting blacks. Balls O' Na doesn't quite put it that way, of course, but that's what it amounts to. Balls O' Blood won't be going out there himself to do the shooting, naturally: young Brazilian worker boys will be paid to take the bullets while he and his generals sit in Rio sipping cachaça , counting the reais and chortling. Well, so what? If the people of Brazil want to shoot their blacks, or at least have them shot, what can one do but grimace and turn to the sports pages? The idea of sending in the gunboats to try to instill a bit of civilization into the Savage World is not only unfashionable but too expensive...