A Pet Elephant

A Pet Elephant

They didn't want to buy the Russian Sukhois, they'll regret it. There will never be a partnership with the US; it would be like an ant and an elephant, or a dove and a lion—one doesn't need the other, but one is much larger, and the other much smaller. The ant can't kill an elephant, but the elephant can't find the ant to trample it. The lion can't catch the dove in flight.

Thus, this dispute between the elephant and the ant, and between the lion and the dove, has no winners or losers; neither gains any advantage or disadvantage because they are on very different scales.

Brazil needs to realize that it is not a partner of Washington, like a lion looking at an anthill, or an elephant looking at a dove. There is no admiration or contempt, only apathy, indifference, nothingness, almost nothingness.

So the ant might admire the size of the elephant until it sees the amount of food it needs to eat every day, the amount of feces it produces daily, the amount of water that circulates in and out of the elephant's stomach.

The dove might admire the lion's immense strength until it sees the physical and mental effort required to obtain its food by hunting, stalking, chasing prey, accelerating its cardiopulmonary system to get food, and then, exhausted, needing to drink a lot of water and sleep for at least twenty hours.

Each with its own difficulties, its enormous costs.

The ant needs other ants, the organization of the anthill, to get rid of small and medium-sized predators, and everything is super organized and hierarchical in the anthill, following the routine until the next winter season, the monotonous routine, usually perfect and tranquil.

The opulent life of the lion is insane. The life of a slave, the size of the elephant, is insane. The minimalism of ants, who only need a little of everything: water, food, space, and shelter.

So, Brazil is as big as an elephant that can't be kept as a pet; it needs everything in abundance, produces a lot of trash, a lot of waste, a lot of debris, a lot of discarded items. It needs to produce millions of cars a year, billions of many things like nails, screws, paper, pens, sweets, cups, sachets—things that people only notice when they're missing, like drinking water, electricity, garbage collection, buses, trains, clothes, shoes, pots, cups, deodorants, soaps, perfumes. Therefore, the attempt to compare Brazil to China, India, or Russia is the work of psychopaths, like the elite within the USA.

Roberto da Silva Rocha, professor universitário e cientista político