Polo country

Waiting in line at a local Pao de Acucar supermarket, which seems to enjoy monopolistic pricing, I indulged in another spot of vox pop. Posing as a recently arrived innocent abroad, I asked the man in front of me how Brazilians coped with the cost of living. When asking such questions I always hope for a really interesting, thought-provoking answer but it never arrives. His response was, predictably enough, that this is a wealthy area but when pushed he did add that "there is no medium in Brazil", just very rich or very poor. He obviously hasn't been reading all those articles about the "rise of Brazil's middle class". And he also seemed not to realise that "very simple" areas like our former neighborhood do not enjoy correspondingly "simple" prices. I asked if many people were overstretched financially and he said yes. But as usual there was no sense of perturbation about him; it was business as usual and your frustrated interviewer once again had to admit defeat.

There is no middle in Brazil, hence my punny headline. No middle class and no geographical middle. The creation of Brazilia as a capital was supposedly based on it's equidistance from all corners of the country, but it turned out to be a meaningless, empty gesture, a soulless city whose creation and location owed as much to a corrupt, land-speculating president as to any noble, national aspirations.

Yesterday in our local Natural and Fresh, or was it Fresh and Natural, restaurant, we got talking to an American woman who had come here for her partner's diabetes operation - a cutting-edge procedure which was not available to them in the US, or at least not on health insurance. An actor and liberal, she struck the same sour note as many other squeezed middle-class Americans I have met in recent years. They are full of scorn and anger towards the country which betrayed them and seemingly removed the American Dream forever. Correspondingly, they often view the rest of the world through rose-tinted glasses.

It was her first trip to Brazil and, in classic American style, she waxed lyrical about Sao Paulo. Inevitably, our conversation progressed to more nuanced comparisons of life in north and south America. One thing stands out in my memory: in response to our complaints about the lack of middle class life here, she said: "Perhaps they're just more honest about it ?"

I suspect she would modify that conclusion quite dramatically if she stayed longer here and tried living on modest means. But she, and her comments, seem to sum up the new, globalized but deeply disturbed world we live in. On the one hand there is a shrinking middle class in the "developed world"; and on the other there is a sort of pretend middle class being created in much of the developing world. Pretend because it has none of the deep-rooted, carefully cultivated power previously enjoyed by its namesake in the formerly rich countries.

I fear that, if things continue down the polarized path we are on, Brazil will indeed live up to it's longtime label as "the country of the future". The US, the UK, Europe, they will all become Brazil: dystopias with only rich and poor; countries with no middle.