:: How Darcy Ribeiro Build His Own Pedestal

Inhabitants of the year of the Lord 1997, we have witnessed in Brazil the crumbling in Brazil of one of the most fragile myths created by the Brazilian intelligentsia. Or maybe we should call it stupiditsia. The myth in question is the monoglot senator Darcy Ribeiro, who built his entire life and career on lies. He died last February and left a posthumous piece of trash, Mestiço é que é bom (Mixed Breed is Best) (Editora Revan Publishers, Rio, 1997). Before we get into the senator’s swindling, let’s read some of his pearls of wisdom. In this book, Darcy is interviewed by some of the most illustrious tupiniquim (1) communossaurs, like Antonio Callado, Antonio Houaiss, Eric Nepomuceno, Ferreira Gullar, Oscar Niemeyer, Zelito Viana and Zuenir Ventura. It’s important to list these names. If it were not for the testimony of these friends of his, one would have trouble believing the following paragraphs.

One of the most surprising revelations of this posthumous work by the illustrious humanist from Minas Gerais is the pleasure he derived from beating women. Oscar Niemeyer, one of the most solid bastions of Stalinism in Brazil, kicks the ball and Darcy scores the goal:

DARCY - It was in Paris, the first time I went to Paris, in 1954. There I found an incredible thing, a girl, of Turkish Lebanese origin, from Rio Claro, in São Paulo. At eighteen she had won the French language prize, she was a student. I arrived from Switzerland, I had spent a month in Switzerland, working. When I arrived in Paris I met the girl by chance, I liked her company and started hanging out with her.
She was terribly embarrassed of her virginity - French women are much more concerned with their virginity than Brazilian women, a French girl from a bourgeois family, that is -- but as she was living on the Rive Gauche, she was embarrassed of being a virgin there, because the boys fooled around and they wanted to fuck. I wanted to fuck, too, but she refused to fuck. I was already bored with her and she kept coming after me like a tick, holding on to me, but wouldn’t fuck with me. She came to see me in my room at the boarding house but wouldn’t fuck. A room at a boarding house, in those days, in Paris! This girl was very much ashamed of being a virgin, but very scared.
So, I kept going out with her, sightseeing in Paris. On a certain day, we went to catch the last subway, we had to catch it or we would have to walk several blocks. We went to the subway, we were at the edge of the subway, waiting, and she knew that when we arrived she was going to be fucked, otherwise I would bust her head. Soon I would be leaving so this was the day for her to be fucked, she was very nervous. Then the bitch suddenly threw me down the subway tracks, way down. That stuff is electrified, I could have died! I kept trying to get up, hanging by my hand at the edge of the platform, and she stepped on my hand. I was furious and I beat her up.
HOUAISS - You managed to climb up and get out of there?
DARCY - I managed to climb up - today I wouldn’t be able to - with her stepping on my hand. I really beat her up, man! She was real quiet, cried a lot and then she agreed and I fucked her.
That’s why I was just now, recently, walking with my chief of staff, who is a very good-looking woman, and her husband, in the market of Montes Claros and I went and said to one of those women vendors -- many of them know me:
- How are you?
She asked:
- Who is this, your wife?
- No; she works with me but doesn’t want to fuck.
- Beat her up and she will.
Not satisfied with proclaiming his qualities as an emeritus brutalizer of women, the senator proceeds to brag about his sexual adventures as an ethnologist, when he scored some “decadent Indians”. This time the one kicking the ball is the also deceased Antônio Callado:

CALLADO - Darcy, the first time I went to see the Indians, in 1950 or 51, it had been long established that you don’t fuck Indian girls so as not to mess things up too much, it was more or less traditional, so that they wouldn’t start fucking all the Indian girls. So much so that when I was there, Leonardo Villas-Boas was already at Fundação Brasil Central (Central Brazil Foundation) and he was being forced to leave the Indian Protection Service because he had fucked an Indian girl, whom he married. When did you arrive there for the first time? Was this law already in effect?
DARCY - It’s true. I started with the Indians in 1946. This law exists to this day, because of Rondon and classical Anthropology. I was educated not to have sex with the female Indians because, for the anthropologist, in my case specifically, long research work was difficult. Nowadays the women are already doing it with the Indians, the women anthropologists like to have sex with them, to create intimacy. They are really doing it, with them too. Poor guys, the Indians are human too. So they do it. And since they do it with the men, the men also started to fuck with the Indian girls, first-generation anthropologists. (...) I spent many months with the Indians and I always managed to have one. For instance, I never fucked the Urubus-Kaapor girls because I was doing work with the Kaapors, but I used to fuck the Tembés, who were some decadent Indian women found up there.

Let’s see this brilliant interpretation of Genesis proposed by the senator:

DARCY - By the way, I need to tell you about a very interesting thing that I have developed recently, kind of literary but very nice. It’s a story about Eve, I’ve been meditating about Eve and discovered that Eve is a trotskist. She is the first revolutionary in history. We owe fundamental things to Eve.
First, Eve created the fuck. Adam was a perfect jackass, standing there, with that dangling apparatus of his and didn’t know what to do. Eve said:
- Come here, Adam dear.
He put it inside her and it was such a good come, he had the orgasm, and when he came, the big angel descended and said:
- God doesn’t like it, God is pissed off at you. Out!
And he ran them out of Paradise. Paradise was shit, it was not plastic because there was no plastic yet, it was made of papier mâché. Because the flower is the plant’s genital organ, it fucks, there could be no flowers fucking in paradise. It was papier mâché. When the big angel ran them out of there, he ordered:
- Let’s make communism, let’s build Paradise out there.
Eve also left to make communism.

And since we are talking biblical themes, it’s worth having a look at the concept Darcy Ribeiro has of Jews:

DARCY - The Jews are such sons-of-bitches that from time to time they name the baby girl Lilith. Lilith is the sinful Eve, the one that offers the wandering, fiery little pussy.

Let’s admit that these confessions were the result of a lot of alcohol in the brain. Which by the way renders them more serious: in vino, veritas. However, we must suppose that the monoglot senator was not drunk when he wrote in Folha de São Paulo: “The expansion of the white man was the worst catastrophe in human history”.

If this statement had been made by some illiterate individual with no better concept of History or Geography, the phrase would simply be another piece of nonsense like so many others reproduced daily by the media. But it so happens that it was uttered by a Senator of the Republic, whose ideas, profession, life and career -- in spite of his monoglotism and lack of academic education -- were fed by Europe. Considering the source, such nonsense deserves some consideration.
That White Europeans killed, both in their continent and in the continents they conquered, no one in their sound mind can deny. But killers were also the Chinese, the Mongols, the Turkish, the Arabs, the Japanese. Blacks and Indians also killed and still do. As for as human beings are concerned, the only broad statement we can make without incurring in any fallacy is that the Green people, as well as the Blue people, have never killed their fellow creatures. Due to the simple fact that there are no green people or blue people.

The first man to create embryos of universities all over the world - and this happened 300 years before Christ - set out killing and conquering peoples, trampling them from Macedonia to Asia. Were it not for Alexander, the dialogue between East and West would have been delayed by centuries. There were times when cultures spread by the sword and those times are not very distant from our times. So the European conqueror stifled the Neolithic from Pindorama (2)? Good! If it were not for that, Darcy Ribeiro would not have had access to the cobalt bomb which in the 70s helped extend his life considerably.

The European white man killed and destroyed, as all men kill and destroy, except Green and Blue men. But he also discovered penicillin and nuclear fission, went to the Moon, is already contemplating Mars and its electronic eyes are now approaching Pluto. He gave us Mozart and Vivaldi, opera and cinema, communications and the computer. Even Christianity, in spite of its medieval murdering fury, has bequeathed us an aesthetics which cannot be thrown in the famous trash dumpster of history. There are no terms of comparison between the Notre Dame and a umbanda (3) yard. No one can confuse a native’s hut with the Eiffel tower. Even less the Paiakan caiapó (4) chief with Casanova.

To dismiss the expansion of the white man, that is, of European culture, is to deny Socrates and Plato, Cervantes and Shakespeare, Dante and da Vinci, Schliemann and Champolion, Fernão de Magalhães and Armstrong, Pasteur and Einstein. Not to mention Hegel and Marx, who are, ultimately, the foundation for Darcy Ribeiro’s “Weltanschaaung”. If we accept his fundamentalist view, then Van Gogh’s and Bosch’s canvases better be left to those who collect paper for industrial recycling. May the great museum collections be used to build diques in Holland, the Louvre and the Hermitage be closed, libraries, publication collections and film collections burned and all computers and parabolic dishes forbidden, as it is already happening, by the way, in the Islamic world. The first measure of the taleban fanatics, when they first entered Kabul, in Afganisthan, was to destroy all television sets.

White technology transported Darcy Ribeiro in its jets to the countries where he tasted “the bitter caviar of exile”. When he had to choose a refuge, he favored countries of White culture, the same culture which expansion, according to his accusation, resulted in the worst catastrophe in history. When death approached, Darcy chose to bite the hand that fed him.
Hieratic, enjoying the absolution that death confers, he died in an aura of sanctity. But that is not a reason to forgive the infamies which he uttered posthumously, thanks to the editorial effort of his “compagnons de route” (journey companions). There is an explanation for this amount of nonsense delivered by an intellectual of international fame: throughout his life, Darcy was a fraud.

Besides bragging that he was a monoglot, he boasted as his university degree a diploma from the School of Sociology and Politics in São Paulo, a course which was never recognized by the Ministry of Education and Culture. In the resume he sent to the Senate, he smartly entitled himself an ethnologist, an occupation which, like those of anthropologist, prostitute or psychoanalyst, is still not regulated in Brazil. He was awarded three federal retirement benefit packages, one of those by the University of Brasília, where he never had one single student and where he was never employed.
As if this were not enough, he used to say that he founded the University of Brasília. He did not. Nor did he ever teach there, although he retired from it.
He also said he founded the National University of Costa Rica. He didn’t do that either. By the way, there is no such university.
He bragged to have been awarded a Honoris Causa diploma from the Sorbonne. Pure intellectual fraud. Darcy received the Honoris Causa, in 1978, when the Sorbonne no longer existed. The diploma was conferred by the University of Paris VII and delivered in a room in the building of the former Sorbonne, which is quite different. Not to mention that the Honoris Causa diploma serves only to embellish business cards and doesn’t grant any academic qualification to its carrier.
Darcy knew very well that in this country where there are no better criteria for evaluating intelligence, cheating is the easiest resource for the uneducated man to prosper in life. Lying all the way, he was hoisted to a government ministry and to the Senate. Once in office, from the heights of his high school degree, the monoglot senator condemned in a single phrase the culture in whose bosom he was born and fed.
In trying to escape his spiritual death, Ribeiro did not choose the tantã (5) or the oral account under the shade of a baobab, but instead he chose modern printing houses assembled by the white man he so abominated. In his effort to escape physical death, which is an instinctive reaction of every human being, the anthropologist did not resort to witch doctors but to first rate hospitals. When Jesus called, he didn’t seek salvation through shamans. Instead, defeated, he begged the representatives of that same culture which produced him and which he, the turncoat, later decided to abominate.

The worst catastrophe in human history -- “the expansion of the White man” -- produced this country which in turn produced Darcy Ribeiro, and seasoned this cultural pot in which the senator, with his mineiro (6) cleverness, built his career and prestige. Before his death, he organized a foundation to ensure that his “thoughts” would not die. Obstinate graphonomer, he left an amount of work so volumous that he doesn’t know any more how many books he wrote nor in how many languages he has been translated. Thanks to whom? To an European called Gutenberg.