Brazil Is the New America: How Brazil Offers Upward Mobility in a Collapsing World (5 page)

Marcou argued that the name “America” was not an honorific tribute to Vespucci but a name that was brought back from the New World by early visitors there. In particular, Marcou suggested that the name derived from the name of an Indian tribe that inhabited a district purportedly rich in gold in Nicaragua called “Amerrique.” Both Columbus and Vespucci visited the area in Nicaragua inhabited by the Amerrique Indians. According to Ricardo Palma's
Tradiciones Peruanas
(
Peruvian Traditions
, 1949), the ending of the word “America” indicates this origin:

The ending ic (ica, ique, ico made Spanish) is found frequently in the names of places, in the languages and native dialects of Central America and even of the Antilles. It seems to mean “great, high, prominent” and is applied to mountains and peaks in which there are no volcanoes.
19

An informing feature of the story is that the Caribe Indians, whom the explorers beginning with Columbus all met, referred to the mainland of Central America as “Amerrique” due to a vocabulary deficiency. The mountain range that was home to the Amerrique Indians was visible from a distance, and the Caribe Indians apparently employed the name of the mountains as a short hand for the whole landmass. As Jonathan Cohen suggested in
The Naming of America: Fragments We've Shored against Ourselves
, “The Caribs, traveling far from their Carib or Cariay coast, could see the Amerriques in the distance, and these mountains for them could have signified the mainland.”
20

Thus “America” may have been a native name for the continental landmass in the region where the Iberian explorers first encountered it. Its only connection to Vespucci's first name may be a linguistic coincidence amplified in an ill-informed attempt by Waldseemüller to explain why “America” was called by that name.

Of course, there have been other attempts to identify a source for the name “America.” Some have suggested that it is a corruption of an old Norse word, Ommerike (oh-MEH-ric-eh), meaning “farthest outland.” Another version that stipulates a North Atlantic origin of “America” ties it to the 1497 voyage by John Cabot to the Labrador coast of Newfoundland. An early twentieth-century account claimed that the New World was named after a customs officer in the port of Bristol, a man called Richard Amerike, who may well have financed Cabot's voyage, and who seems to have backed numerous cod-fishing missions that may have ventured as far west as Labrador.

Another possibility is that America was named for the mythic land of the Western Star, “La Merica” which Essenes and other cultures believed was a land across the ocean inhabited by good souls. Not incidentally, some of the early (pre-Constantine) strands of Christianity held that Jesus Christ—along with John the Baptist—was an exponent of Nazorean (little fish) teaching. There is also a possible echo of this concept cited by Waldseemüller, repeating an account of the poet, Virgil:

Many have regarded as an invention the words of a famous poet [Virgil] that “beyond the stars lies a land, beyond the path of the year and the sun, where Atlas, who supports the heavens, revolves on his shoulders the axis of the world, set with gleaming stars” but now finally it proves clearly to be true. For there is a land, discovered by Columbus, a captain of the King of Castile, and by Americus Vespucius, both men of very great ability, which, though in great part lies beneath “the path of the year and of the sun” and between the tropics, nevertheless extends about 19 degrees beyond the Tropic of Capricorn toward the Antarctic Pole, “beyond the path of the year and the sun.”
21

The alternative history perspective that “America” may have been a mythic “land across the sea” long before it was associated with a specific landmass has a curious parallel in respect to Brazil. The name “Brazil” also has legendary origins, not Near Eastern, but Celtic. The Celts also believed in a mythic land across the sea, called “Bresil,” known in a legend dating back 3,000 years “as the Isle of the Living, the Isle of Truth, of Joy, of Fair Women, and of Apples.” I don't quite see why apples got equal billing with “truth, joy, and fair women,” but equally, apples also featured in the story of the fall of man in the Garden of Eden. The relative price of apples has evidently plunged in the last few millennia.

Seán Mac Mathúna argues that “Brazil was certainly well known during medieval times when explorers from Europe were setting out to discover what they called the “New World.”
22

As Russell-Wood elaborates: “Since the early fourteenth century, there had been references to an island called Brasil not far west of Ireland. Both name and island moved westwards, being transformed into a landmass and recognized as such by Duarte Pacheco Pereira in his
Esmeraldo de situ orbis
.” Further, “Brazil” was popularized in its current spelling by Italian cartographer Angelinus Alorto's 1325 map “L'Isola Brazil.”
23

Brazil appeared out in the Atlantic in the famous Catalan Atlas from 1375. It was also shown on Toscanelli's chart, circa 1475, said to have been used by Columbus. In short, as the Age of Exploration was being launched, there was widespread agreement that the “blessed land” of Brazil lay somewhere to the west. Some early charts depicted Brazil as an island west of Ireland. Others showed it far out in the ocean halfway to Zipangu (Japan). Indeed, some cartographers have argued that part of the reason that the new continent was not named “Brazil” was to avoid confusion with the imaginary Brazil. “The term used by some of the map-makers,
Land of Brasil
, was confusing, for
Brasil
was the name of an imaginary island located somewhere in the Atlantic, according to popular belief.”
24

The footnotes of the history of early European efforts to reach the “New World” suggest that North America rather than current-day Brazil might well have been chosen for designation as the legendary land of “Brazil” had English navigation in the open seas been the equal of Portuguese methods in the late fifteenth century.

When word of a “new land to the west” reached Bristol in the late 1470s this stimulated an English merchant, John Jay, to outfit at great expense an 80-ton ship to sail for “Brazil,” described as “a name often given in medieval European tales to a land far to the west of Ireland.” Setting sail in July, 1480, from Bristol, a dozen years before Columbus' first voyage, Jay's ship sailed west, intending to “traverse the seas” to Brazil. But the journey ended in failure. English crews had not mastered the new methods of astronomical navigation devised in Portugal and Spain: open, oceanic voyaging—as opposed to island hopping by way of Iceland and Greenland.

At a time of skimpy geographic knowledge, intrepid explorers set sail in search of faraway locales of no certain coordinates. Columbus set out to reach China, a real destination. John Jay set sail in search of Brazil, a legendary name attached to an imagined paradise over the sea.

Twenty years later, in 1500, Pedro Álvares Cabral (1460–1526), whose family hailed from Celtic Galicia, swung his fleet far to the west on a voyage around Africa to India. In the process, he bumped into present-day Brazil, which he duly claimed for Portugal.

It is fitting, in light of current developments that both “America” and “Brazil” may have been legendary lands of no fixed address for thousands of years before either was identified with a specific locale you could visit today. Strangely, “America” and “Brazil” were two names first given to present-day Brazil.

This is ironic in light of the universal appeal the idea of “America” came to have in the terms suggested by John Locke, as a land of opportunity unimpeded by government—a concept reflected in modern times in the American Dream. If anything, the American Dream has grown more popular over the past eight decades, even as it has become more difficult to realize in the United States.

In 1931 when James Truslow Adams introduced the phrase into the language, he was a bit reticent in asserting it. He wrote,

The American Dream is the dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars at high wages merely, but the dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.
25

Until recently, I would've supposed that nowhere on earth could match the United States of America as a setting for realizing the American Dream. The United States has seemed to be the ultimate beacon of economic opportunity.

But life is a candle in the wind. As I write, 48 percent of all Americans are either considered to be low income or living in poverty.
26
I argue in coming chapters that the decline in living standards in the United States is destined to become worse. This is not simply because approximately 57 percent of all children in the United States are living in homes that are either considered to be low income or impoverished. An astonishing 37 percent of all U.S. households are led by someone under the age of 35 with a net worth of zero or less than zero.
27

Not all people can realize what they wish for. The contest of ambitions and resentments makes politics volatile. At its best, politics is an exercise in self-restraint that involves cultivating freedom rather than seeking something for nothing at your neighbor's expense. As H.L. Mencken quipped, an election is “an advanced auction of stolen goods.” When everyone is bidding for favors from the Treasury, governments go broke and living standards suffer.

It is a truism that countries cannot easily retain either their prosperity or their freedom. Since the invention of gunpowder, the prospects for both have tended to depend upon the doubtful art of controlling a government strong enough to enforce property rights, but not too corrupt and overbearing to take away what is rightfully yours.

This was evident in Brazil in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Over a 15-year period preceding 1980, Brazil enjoyed startling real economic growth—averaging 9 percent per annum. Not surprisingly, foreign investment flooded in to capitalize on growth two to three times faster than that enjoyed by the North Atlantic economies.

By 1980, Brazilians had begun to demand far more of the government than it could afford. As a consequence, government spending skyrocketed beyond the available revenues. Deficit spending as high as 5.4 percent of GDP resulted in hyperinflation. Note that the actual and projected deficits in the United States over the past three years are two to three times worse than those that brought on hyperinflation in Brazil a generation ago.

By 1988, foreign direct investment in Brazil plunged by 75 percent below the average inflow during the “miracle” growth period. The root of Brazilian inflation was the monetization of the public sector's fiscal deficits. These deficits were not financed by borrowing from abroad or domestically, and they far exceeded available tax revenues.

The Brazilian government began to rely on “quantitative easing” or money conjured out of the clear blue sky to finance its deficits. Tax revenues fell sharply after 1983 as the government's annual profit on inflation jumped up to 3 percent to 4 percent of GDP. The result was a one trillion-fold increase in the price level from 1980 through 1997. As you would expect under the circumstances, economic growth came to a screeching halt. From 1981 through 1998, average annual real GDP growth in Brazil dwindled to 1.5 percent.

To make matters worse, Brazil faced recurring crises of contagion where economic trouble almost anywhere on the globe washed back with severe impacts in Brazil.

During the first two and half centuries after Columbus, Latin America was more economically important than North America. Brazil, in particular, became significant after gold and diamonds were discovered in Minas Gerais in the seventeenth century. Prior to the gold discovery, Brazil's economic importance rested with the exploitation of plantation crops such as sugar.

The General Brazil Company monopolized the Portuguese sugar fleets in competition with the Dutch West India Company until 1654. In that year, the Dutch West India Company surrendered its naval forces and soon thereafter abandoned its foothold at Pernambuco in northeastern Brazil.

Even when Brazil enjoyed success in the backward seventeenth- and eighteenth-century economy, its forward progress was limited by a restrictive imperial mercantile policy, inadequate property rights, excessive taxation, and religious animosities, embodied in struggles between “New Christians” (Portuguese Jews) among the merchant class, and Old Christians. There was also more than a little official persecution. (In 1650, the king of Portugal issued a royal order obliging all New Christians in the realm to invest in the General Brazil Company or face the Inquisition.)

During the past 250 years, from the mid-eighteenth century forward, North America, and particularly, the United States, became more economically vital than South America, enjoying a surge in economic growth based on secure property rights, low taxes, economic freedom, a larger yeoman population, and an early advantage in exploiting energy-dense coal and then oil. In due course, the United States became the world's foremost economy, a role that it continued to enjoy as the twenty-first century began.

However, early in the twenty-first century, the economic hegemony of the United States appears to have been broken in the credit crisis that precipitated a depression (or if you prefer, “balance sheet recession”). Contrary to generally optimistic accounts that forecast a blossoming of green shoots into an early and robust recovery, I expect a protracted downturn, more traumatic and possibly longer-lasting than the Great Depression of the 1930s. In particular, the widespread expectation among economists that the loss of output during the first four years of the crisis will not prove permanent could be overly optimistic. After the Great Depression, growth exceeded its long-run average during a recovery phase before reverting to trend. As a consequence, the depression had little impact on income levels in the long run. But with the resource constraints arising from peak oil, it is by no means obvious that a surge of above-trend growth lies in store for the United States and other advanced temperate zone economies.