Brighter days may be beyond Brazil’s troubled Olympics

It’s hard to erase the “Walking Dead” stories leading up to the Summer Olympics now under way in Brazil.

How can anyone possibly top the images of Australian athletes finding sinks falling off the walls in the Olympic Village, human body parts swimming along with you in Rio de Janeiro’s gorgeous Guanabara Bay or the train line to the stadium ending eight miles away from its destination?

Of course, there was the comfort of Rio’s interim governor, Francisco Dornelles, declaring “a state of public calamity” (a lot of people could have already told him that). And it was hard to get lonely with the 85,000 police and military manning the streets, which at least made foreign visitors feel that someone was paying “atencao!”

But despite the less hysterical press coverage after the games started, there actually were some fun things to write about.

Olympic golfers found that Brazilian golf courses are often overrun by a fascinating native animal, the capybara, the biggest rodent in the world, weighing between 77 and 150 pounds and standing 2 feet tall. It is sometimes called a cross between a donkey and a pig.

Brazilian law, as well as the International Olympic Committee’s regulations provide that no political demonstrations are to be permitted at the Olympics, but every once in a while someone couldn’t keep calm and would shout about the interim president, “TEMER OUT!” Which, of course, drove those 85,000 coppers just nuts! And sports like table tennis, which depend on “silencao,” excited the enthusiastic Brazilian crowds into so much cheering that the competitors couldn’t hear the little white balls hit the table, something crucial to the game.

But one thing — at least one thing — was curious: These Olympics actually have been going quite well, considering the possibilities. There has been little squabbling and kvetching since the games started because they’ve actually been a kind of reverse disappointment. And the Brazilian people are historically charming to foreigners, so that surely played into the magic.

I have read only once, in The Nation, the old expression in Brazil that for years has characterized the veneer Brazilians apply to fool the “Global North,” which is us: “Os Americanos” — “It is for the English to see.”

In short, as the writer Dave Zirin put it: “This veneer displays a more attractive version of Brazilian society than what actually exists.” He also calls that veneer “fantasy on display,” which is a good description of Rio, with its potato-shaped (chubby) mountains, its glorious (polluted) bay, its stream of beautiful (from a distance) high-rises along the (unevenly cleaned) beach and its welcoming statue of Christ the Redeemer with arms spread wide (and draped with night lights) to welcome us children to paradise after dancing the samba all night.

But the quote about “the English” has another meaning — a meaning embedded in time. Historically, the Latins, whether coming from the south of Spain or Portugal and Africa, have a problem with us descendants of the English-speaking worlds. We have made it, and they still aren’t even halfway there.

As Mary Anastasia O’Grady wrote presciently recently in The Wall Street Journal: “Brazil’s politicians aspire to first-world grandeur but insist on preserving third-world institutions.”

Yet, Brazil has been making progress, especially under the middle-ground government of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso from 1995 to 2002.

And even though the last two presidents are now under investigation for corruption involving the Brazilian oil monopoly, as the head of the Atlantic Council recently opined, “There are positive signs. The country’s judiciary has taken on business and political leaders in a manner that few countries can match. The fact that the judiciary is doing such a good job investigating them, shows that Brazil is, indeed, moving ahead.”

So the most important part of Rio’s Olympics may turn out to be not the negative pre-games publicity, and not even the Olympics themselves, but what comes after, now that the country has shown it CAN run an Olympics.

It was the no-words-wasted Charles de Gaulle who once voiced the famous words: “Brazil is a country of the future and always will be.” Could it be that, with this moderate success of the Olympics, Brazil’s future is now?