No one asked you to

On the Super Bowl, America's brutal history, learning Portuguese, and wearing Stars and Stripes

L.A. Photo by Jorge.

While most people were grilling their buffalo wings for Superbowl LIX, I was watching a two-and-a-half-hour documentary about the Brazilian military dictatorship. More precisely, I was bawling my eyeballs out at a tiny arthouse theater downtown with forty other University of Pittsburgh Portuguese students.

I emerged into the freezing Pittsburgh night just as Jon Batiste was singing the National Anthem. At home, where my Mexican husband had reluctantly turned on the game solely because my daughter, Elena, begged to see Taylor Swift’s boyfriend, I kept thinking of this Brazilian family in the 1970s whose father disappeared one day “for a few questions” and never returned.

I kept thinking of his five children, who waited and waited for him to come back and learned to live with the agony of that loss; of how the U.S. supported the dictatorship in Brazil, leading to thousands of such “disappearances” of labor and left politicians branded “communists”; of how the U.S. spent millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to overturn a democratically elected government in nearby Chile, install a brutal authoritarian dictatorship, and torture and kill thousands of innocent Chileans throughout the 1970s and 1980s; of how the U.S. did the same throughout Latin America, particularly egregiously in Guatemala and Nicaragua, where soldiers flown to the U.S. and trained in the U.S. “School of the Americas” under Ronald Reagan massacred women and children in indigenous villages.

HAPPY SUPERBOWL SUNDAY!

The other night, Jorge and I watched Soundtrack to a Coup d’État, one of the most stunning films I have ever seen, about the U.S.-engineered coup of Congo in the 1960s. (“Do you ever watch anything light?” asked Amaya, a very chill fellow student in my Portuguese class. “I guess not?” I answered.)

The film is composed almost entirely of archival footage, and even if you consider yourself fairly aware of and therefore deeply cynical about U.S. foreign policy, it will legit blow your mind. There’s Eisenhower, declaring before the U.N. how the U.S. respects the sovereignty of the Congo and its elected leader, Patrice Lumumba, then turning around to order the CIA to assassinate the latter – which it did, securing a tidy path to Congolese minerals for the U.S. for the next sixty years (you wouldn’t be reading this without Congolese cobalt!) Lumumba, like Allende in Chile, didn’t stand a chance.

At the screening of I’m Still Here (Ainda Estou Aquí), I asked my Portuguese teacher if she could recommend any Brazilian podcasts. I said I’d found one but it turned out to be a little creepy, and I showed it to her. “Oh yeah,” she said, “you have to watch out for anything with Brazil in the title.”

“Ah,” I replied, getting it. “It’s like ‘America!’” Since we were speaking in Portuguese, and my speaking ability is still that of a five-year-old, I made a florid hand gesture meant to evoke a bombastic white man beating his chest. “Isso!” she said. She gestured at her bag, which featured a prominent Brazilian flag. “I try to reclaim it,” she said. She meant from Bolsonaro and his ilk.

This had never occurred to me. I couldn’t in a million years imagine wearing a piece of clothing with an American flag on it, but I thought for a moment about what that would mean, to reclaim it. What would those stars and stripes signify to me on a tote bag? What would I proudly advertise, carry?

My Portuguese teacher, a young Brazilian woman here on a Fulbright, cried throughout the documentary too. I love her the way we love our teachers, and with a little extra fervor, because she reminds me of myself fifteen years ago. She wears thrifted sweaters and t-shirts to class and says “Ah, capitalism,” as an aside and assigns us projects like doing fake voiceovers for terrible TV ads. Last Friday, my whole Portuguese class – a sum total of six people: me; a fellow millennial from Argentina doing her PhD in history; and four gen Zs to keep it spicy – went with our teacher to the foreign language fair at the William Pitt Union.

Our task was to entice people into a brief Portuguese dialogue in exchange for coffee and a brigadeiro (a chocolate truffle). The fair was way bigger than I expected and so of course I had to text both my niece and Jorge: “THERE IS A TON OF FREE FOOD.”

They both dutifully showed up and we circulated for a while saying hello, how are you, thank you, in Turkish, Swahili, Italian, Quechua, Mandarin, and Swedish in exchange for various snacks and bizarre fizzy and caffeinated beverages. It was absolutely delightful.

There were people from all over the world, and students speaking so many languages. I ran into one of my Chernobyl students, who invited me to her modern Greek table and walked me through ordering a sour cherry juice and a cheese wedge. Then I did the same for her in Portuguese and we congratulated each other and she hinted that ancient Greek had been rather neglected and we might get multiple cheese wedges if we gave it a go (we did).

Jorge and I spent a long time chatting with a young Bolivian guy on a Fulbright in the U.S. to teach Quechua, and in the way of Latin Americans, he and Jorge exchanged numbers and promises to stay at each other’s houses if they were ever in Oaxaca or Cochabamba. At one point I looked around and thought, this! This is what I love.

Amidst all the angst I often feel about living in the U.S., in a place whose wealth and modernity are a direct result of the pillaging and sabotaging of much of the rest of the world, sometimes I have moments where I see a glimmer of hope.

The U.S. can be an immensely creative place. At their best, Americans are eager to learn and try something new: We want to taste the cardamom fried pastry and the sour cherry juice and the fluffy Irish cookie, maybe all compressed into a sandwich eaten in a single bite! We want to chug that licorice soda, chug, chug! We like a wild mix of cultures and people and ideas and we like throwing them all together to see what emerges. We like new forms and possibilities, paintings of soup cans, performance art, punk. At our best, we are humble, funny, weird, curious, and inventive, people hungry for and unafraid of change.

Last Sunday morning Elena and I were making Valentines when Jorge called from his run. “There’s a dragon dance on Murray Avenue,” he said. Elena and I threw on our 18,947 layers of cold weather clothing and raced each other the two blocks down to Murray. Nothing. Gray February day. You made me leave for this? I was about to face preteen wrath. And then – flash of a red velvet pant. We walked up half a block and found two guys smoking on the concrete steps behind a Vietnamese restaurant.

“You guys gonna dance?” I asked. They nodded. There was a small group of people nearby holding drums and instruments. Elena and I were the only spectators. The guys stood up and shrugged on their dragon costume. The drums began.

They become, instead of two dudes smoking on the side of this gray Pittsburgh street, a huge red furry dragon with coquettish eyelashes and a wiggly tail. The dragon wiggled and kicked, winked and cocked its giant head. It “ate” mandarins and a head of lettuce the restaurant owner had left out for it on the curb, and in exchange unfurled from its mouth a scroll that said “Happy New Year” in Vietnamese, which the restaurant owner accepted, bowing and saying thank you.

The dragon rose up on its hind legs, descended, shimmied over to us and winked at Elena, who laughed. It nudged her until she petted it, and then it danced off, up and down the street, past people picking up pizzas for the Superbowl, past giggling college students, past a car of people who paused to take a video and shouted “Great!” It finally came back to the restaurant and engaged in some dramatic twists and turns and acrobatic undulations before the drums stopped and it became two sweaty dudes, waving at Elena before collapsing on their stoop.

Before the movie, a Brazilian scholar visiting the U.S. gave a talk in Portuguese. She talked about how the U.S. backed the military dictatorship in Brazil, and how leftist labor movements across Latin America were flagged as “communist” by the United States and aggressively targeted, leading to the disappearance and torture of many innocent people. The audience, which was mostly the Portuguese and Latin American studies department at Pitt but also included a handful of people just there for the film, listened attentively, even if they didn’t speak Portuguese.

How messed up, I thought, to live in this country that did – and does – these things. And at the same time, we can have this university that hosts this conversation, and invests its money to invite a group of forty students to this film, and values this discourse, community, dreaming. This commitment to seeing things as they are and to remaking them. This belief that it doesn’t have to be this way: we can grieve, mourn, come together, rebuild.

It’s going to be a long four years in the U.S. It’s going to get grim. I’m almost positive that the answer on the left is NOT to double down on how wonderful our institutions and government were pre-broligarchy nightmare, to retrench ourselves in red and blue. It’s to seek another system entirely.

“The establishment,” as I’ve known it pretty much my entire adult life, has been a corrupt, exploitative enterprise, driven almost entirely by capitalist ideology (read: greed) and in the service almost exclusively of the wealthy and powerful. I don’t disagree with the assertion that “one side” has been “better” than the other – I have voted a certain way over the past twenty years – but I think we are beyond sides, beyond that status quo. If I were ever to wear an American flag, it would represent neither of those sides.

Instead, it would represent the people reclaiming gardens in New York from the real estate developers trying to turn them into luxury condos. It would represent the community of Puerto Ricans on the lower East Side Jorge and I met last summer, who threw a pot luck party to watch the Copa América final, who have fought gentrification in their neighborhood tooth and nail and who arm-wrestled Elena all night and gave us hamburgers and watermelon without ever demanding to know whether or not we had a right to be there.

It would represent the scholars and students who come here from other places and are welcomed with open arms, who teach Americans their languages and histories. It would represent the art and community that sparks joy and exists for its own sake.

It would represent immigrants and immigrant communities and their dreams. It would represent the wild learning that comes when we listen to the most marginalized people because inevitably, what is best for them is what is best for all of us, and what ails them, ails us too, though we may expend great amounts of energy denying it.

It would represent the land, animals, and plants. It would represent our American love of wilderness, which rarely travels back home with us to become a love of nature everywhere it manifests. It would represent opportunity: not to get rich, not to “pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps,” but to live more sanely, more healthfully, more peacefully, more joyfully with our fellow humans and creatures, to recognize that acknowledging our failures and our complicity doesn’t make us weak. It allows us, instead, to stop trying to be a gross, arrogant superhero, and actually be human, live at human scale.

What a relief. What a breath. Forget AI, forget big tech, war machines and nuclear arsenals, more paranoia and hate, “America first!”, massive corporations, billionaires. Our only dragons should be human-sized, with black t-shirts and lace-up cotton shoes.

Utopic, of course. But is it, really? For the Chernobyl class I’m teaching, I watched a talk given by the historian Kate Brown, as part of a series called “Facing the Anthropocene.” Brown’s current book is about community gardens and re-imagining the food system, and it argues that big agriculture is poisoning us and the land. Her interviewer asked her, “What do you say to the criticism, ‘Well, how are we going to feed 9 billion people?’” Brown said this question reflected “the hubris of the modernist moment.”

“No one asked you to!” she replied. Indeed. No one asked Monsanto to annihilate native corn to grow thousands of genetically engineered crops, or Facebook to make a super-powerful algorithm that would dominate our social lives. No one asked for novels to be replaced with 47-second reels selling wellness supplements. No one asked for a society in which massive corporations produce infinite varieties of processed junk food and then spend billions marketing pharmaceuticals for weight loss.

If you asked most people, I’d bet they say they want to spend time with their friends and family. They want health. They want to hear birdsong. They want peace.

For me, the flag starts there. With the micro. With what makes me say, this. What is that, and why? There I begin.

Thank you for dancing, I say to the sweaty dragon men. Happy New Year, they say.

In “A New National Anthem,” poet laureate Ada Limón writes, “The truth is, I’ve never cared for the National Anthem.”

She describes,

“something brutal

snaking underneath us as we blindly sing

the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands

hoping our team wins.”

Instead, Limón longs for a song that feels “like sustenance,” that sounds “like someone’s rough fingers weaving into another’s.”

Walking home with my daughter, holding her mitten-ed hand.

“Wasn’t it beautiful?”

“Yeah,” she says. “So cool how two guys can turn into a dragon, just like that.”

---

Liking this post below helps people find it. Please comment and say hello! 💚

---

Hellooooo folks! Do you crave writing you can’t find elsewhere in the media? Long for nuanced, complex essays about our lives and times? Support Terms of endearment with a paid subscription. Most of this work is free; a yearly subscription makes it sustainable and helps build a new media ecosystem. Thank you!

---

Recommendations

Woohoo do I have recommendations for you all this week! First off I have gone into a major nerd spiral and developed a huge crush on historian of science Kate Brown, whose writing is that very rare mix of extremely informed and extremely accessible. I read big chunks of Manual for Survival for my Chernobyl class and was shouting at regular intervals to Jorge in the other room, “I made the wrong life decision!!” As in, I should have been a historian of science. I really should have. But that is for another newsletter. In the meantime, read Brown.

After you read Brown, read this.

In other very chill and light reading, clearly my thing, I picked up this book on the Amazon: Banzeiro Òkòtó: The Amazon as the Center of the World. It’s Graywolf, so it’s bound to be good. I love that it’s by a Brazilian journalist who lives in the Amazon. I’ll keep you updated.

Okay NOW the chill light content you’ve been waiting for: a New Yorker profile of Mike White just before Season 3 of The White Lotus (!!!!) launches next week.

“The fascism of our era will make you want to batten down the hatches, not rock the boat. But I think things generally turn out better when people trust the groundbreaking, progressive elements within themselves. There is much company on this route, whereas the more conservative path tends to become smaller and smaller until it is just you alone in a house taking care of an old man.” Miranda July bringing the 🔥🔥🔥 and no I’m not blowing up my life and leaving Jorge but still there was quite a bit to get from this. And if you haven’t read All Fours I’m super jealous because you get to go do it right now.

Have a lovely week, everyone!