The following story appears in the March/April issue of Columbia Journalism Review.
After writing an article last May accusing Brazil’s popular president of drinking cachaca, a potent cane liquor, too much and too often, the New York Times correspondent Larry Rohter was threatened with expulsion. He dodged that one, but again angered his hosts in January with a story about the rise in obesity in Brazil. The local papers implied, erroneously, that Rohter had labeled Brazilian girls fat.
Further indignities were to come at Carnival. Rio’s journalists’ union made Rohter the subject of their annual song, a samba that is sung by thousands of revelers during the Mardi Gras parades. The title question of “Larry Rohter, is he or isn’t he?” comes from a 1960s ditty casting aspersions on the sexuality of a fictional hairdresser. The first verse begins:
It was in the New York Times,
That the Girl from Ipanema is chubby,
And flabby brown buns were seen,
With cellulite and thunder thighs,
That our muse is now a whale,
Mermaid of carnivals
gone by …
Is Lula the president or a keg?
And the chorus:
He doesn’t like cachaca,
He doesn’t understand women,
Larry Rohter, is he or isn’t he?
What Rohter is is resigned to his fate. The song, he says, is “petty and it’s stupid, but it’s also hilarious. How many foreigners can say they’ve been immortalized in a samba?”
–Andrew Downie
Andrew Downie is a contributor to CJR.