Brazil museum fire: ‘incalculable’ loss as 200-year-old Rio institution gutted
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
You know what is the worse? Is that I don't feel revolt, anger or indignation. I don't even feel surprised. I just feel sad, an heavy and paralyzing sadness.
This is how countries die on the inside. This is like seeing someone you love sliding into addiction and slowly destroying himself. You imagine a thousand ways to avoid it but the person just won't do anything.
We are not just loosing our culture, our past, our history. With growing lawlessness, crime and violence, environmental devastation, failing education, public health and public finances we are failing as country. We're loosing the country.
Even that old joke we tell about us is not funny anymore ("Brazil is the country of the future and will always be, it will never be the country of the present").
This is the fault of government bureaucracy and irresponsibility (eg. during the World Cup year a restoration was approved but the money never released — but money for stadiums was abundant).
Brazil’s ministry of culture (ha!) has historically spent millions sponsoring dozens of mainstream artists, but a museum with old stuff in it is unable to take part in political party propaganda.
Finally, the museum is administrated by a federal university whose directors refuse to take private money via donations (apparently leaving the museum in terrible conditions is preferable to taking dirty money from evil rent seeking capitalists...).