Brazil Marks a Dire Anniversary

The World is a daily production of Public Radio International (PRI) whose simple name perfectly captures what it provides: an ongoing education about this complicated planet. This week, I was surprised (though I should not have been) to hear a reporter sign off from one of my favorite places: the Brazilian island city of Florianópolis. This was a sweeping, national story, however, set mostly in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. 

Protests in São Paulo, April 2023 Photo: Andre Penner

The story is about the annual commemoration of the 1964 coup, in which the Brazilian military removed President Goulart from office. This began a two-decade period of military dictatorship in Latin America's largest country. Unlike many other authoritarian regimes that were led by a single, outrageous character, this period was characterized by a series of bureaucratic-authoritarian governments whose individual leaders are rarely mentioned.

The immediate past president of Brazil had been complicit in the tyranny of those decades, however, making this anniversary very relevant to the rise and fall of Jair Bolsonaro and his continued relevance, even in defeat.

This blog has several posts with more information about the 1964 - 1985 period in Brazil and the U.S. support for some of those authoritarian regimes. My 2013 post Creative Resistance introduces the song and I discuss the U.S. role in the 2014 Overcoming Condor post.

Lagniappe 

Terry Gilliam's 1985 dystopian comedy Brazil never makes direct reference to the country, but it was released just as democracy returned to the country, and is a satire about bureaucratic-authoritarian (BA) regimes of all kinds, and they ways (known in Brazil as jeito) that ordinary people find to work around them. It is very instructive for those working in more benign BA circumstances, such as universities, state governments, or state universities. 

Modest Relief

NPR's coverage of the latest effort to reduce student-loan debt got some things right: Congress and the courts are making any such relief difficult and such relief programs benefit the entire economy. 

But then the discussion turned toward the "moral hazard" of such programs. Steve Inskeep is a good journalist, so I was surprised to hear him just nodding along with the secretary's nonsense talking points. 

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona

]I was not surprised to hear Sec. Cardona blame universities for the student-debt crisis, but I expected Steve Inskeep to point out the important role of state governments. Instead, he agreed with the Secretary's language of "moral hazard" as if universities just enjoy raising prices. 

Since the days of Reagan and Clinton, public-sector higher education has been under attack by both parties, shifting the 80/20 sharing of costs that people of my age enjoyed to the 20/80 (at best) sharing that exists today. Public universities are public in name only these days; we get a sliver of our budget from public funds, with students paying/borrowing most of what it takes to run a school.

This is why the anti-intellectual language of "ROI" has gained such traction, even among smart people like Mr. Inskeep.

Sir EGGOT

I remember where I was when I first saw this album. Even the name of the album seemed a bit transgressive to the sheltered kid I was at the time.

My father's youngest brother and sister were still teenagers when Elton John released Madman Across the Water. According to my fuzzy memories, my brother and I were in the back yard of our grandparents' home listening to a transistor radio when we learned about the album itself -- I don't remember knowing of any other rock albums before this.

So this morning I treated myself to this jazzy rendition that he had played for BBC television a week after it was released, and presumably a couple of months before I learned about it.

The occasion was Sir Elton's latest honor, this time at the instigation of my country's top librarians. Long after being knighted and shortly after becoming only the 19th person to achieve EGOT status (Emmy-Grammy-Oscar-Tony), the Librarians of Congress have granted Elton John and his writing partner Bernie Taupin its prestigious Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. Named for George and Ira Gershwin, the first honoree was Stevie Wonder. Joni Mitchell was the most recent winner, and the tribute performance of Big Yellow Taxi was captivating.

As of this writing, even the Gershwin Prize page at LOC does not yet divulge the news, which I learned early this morning from NPR journalist Neda Ulaby. who clearly enjoyed telling the story and who gets credit for the EGGOT acronym.

Words & Music: Bernie & Elton
Photo: Loic Venance

Cabo Verde Photos

This embedded slideshow is the best way I know to share all of the photos from my recent travel course in Cape Verde. This is captured from my Fogo 2024 album on Flickr, which is another way to view the same images and to capture them individually (with attribution, please). To view below, simply click < or > and click on the ... at the bottom to expand text. 

As those who know about my teaching are aware, I use coffee as a way to learn more about geography and geography as a way to learn about coffee. As I mentioned to a friend recently, coffee is the wedge -- we are always going to learn about a lot of things when we study it as geographers!

Background: In January 2024, I was delighted to travel to Cape Verde to co-lead my 16th international travel course and my first one since going to Costa Rica in January 2020 just before the world closed. I  always use the term "co-lead" even though I have been the academic instructor of record for all of these journeys. For most of my courses in Central America, I have relied on the expert guidance of Matagalpa Tours. 

For this visit to Cape Verde, I worked closely with experts on my own campus before, during, and after the travel -- just as I had done for the sustainability tour I led there in 2006. This time my colleagues at BSU's Pedro Pires Institute for Cape Verean Studies developed this program with me over the past five years, introducing me to some of the people we were to meet on the journey.

For all of these classes, we have also relied heavily on our Office of Study Abroad to promote the courses, organize the travel, and provide assistance from home during travel. The success of these courses really do depend on many collaborators, especially those who welcome us to their home communities where group travel may not yet be commonplace. 

During the course, I gave public lectures about the geography of coffee to audiences that included our own BSU students, local high school students, local dignitaries, the general public, and some experts who are themselves involved in coffee or coffee research. The idea was to provide some. context for a global industry that many in the audience already understood from an intimate, local level. Slides from these presentations are provided on the Café no Fogo post on my Coffee Maven blog, along with materials presented by Carolyn King, a recent BSU graduate who has done remarkable work on connections between Cape Verde and Cape Cod.

This led to exactly the kinds of exchanges of insights that I was hoping to have, and prepares us for further collaboration in the future. The constraints of our academic calendar caused us to take this trip during a relatively quiet time of the year for local coffee activities; I look forward to returning when the harvest and processing are more active.

Lagniappe 

I have more to say about the background and significance of this journey in a draft article I have written for the Pedro Pires Institute newsletter.

Îles de France

50 Largest Islands of France
(Click to enlarge)

A fellow geographer recently shared this graphic representing the geography of French islands. As with any map, the cartographer has made some choices, in this case depicting shape and size correctly but ignoring distance and location. 

A nod toward location is made, however, by shading the islands according to the oceans. and seas in which they are found. Even though some of these islands are considered "Antarctic Lands," they are not in the Southern Ocean which begins about 10 degrees further south. 

The largest of these islands is a bit bigger than Connecticut; the smallest is about half the size of Manhattan. 

I appreciate this map, but followers of this blog will know that I cannot resist making a Google map whenever I see a spatial list of this kind. The combination of perspectives is, I think, instructive.