Why I Hate Copacabana, No. 67

While I love Rio, I absolutely hated going to Copacabana (a region of Rio, not a club), or even passing through it. Among my complaints, it was overcrowded (allegedly 25,000 people per square kilometer), traffic was perpetually stopped, and it was full of racist, selfish, old middle-class people who put on the airs of being far wealthier and "elite" than they actually were. (If they were nearly as "elite" as they think they are, they'd live in Ipanema or Sao Conrado or Barra da Tijuca, and NOT Copacabana). It is just a bastion of decaying bourgeois idiocy and racism (and not always subtle - one Copacabana resident I knew once openly complained that black people were allowed at the shopping malls now when she went to a mall a few years ago). Parts of Copacabana were no less pretty than other parts of Rio, but its residents and poorly-planned structure were just too much for me, literally offering dozens of reasons I really didn't like it. (And to get a better sense of the idiocy of the Brazilian middle-class, Venha Futuro has some great observations. The only thing I'd add is, in my personal and fully-subjective experience, Copacabana is Brazilian middle class "values" on steroids).

Well, add one more reason. Apparently, somebody has gone through and poisoned a bunch of the trees along one block on the beachfront (the article is in Portuguese, but the picture is easily understood). Police are trying to figure out who did it, and why. Residents are saying that it was probably some beachfront resident who didn't want the trees blocking his/her view of the ocean. And as horrible and vague ("somebody"), I'm inclined to agree. That kind of attitude is exactly the kind of self-centered, pretentious, putting-on-class-airs crap that you find from too many residents in Copacabana. Certainly, not all are like that, and the article mentions how many residents of this particular block are appalled (one 61-year-old woman worried that the elderly that go to the beach will "fry without the shade," though I'm not quite sure how, given that the beach itself has no trees on it, and you can rent umbrellas). But the fact that you have somebody doing this, killing what were beautiful trees, is bad enough; the fact that it might be for a better view of the beach is just appalling, and all too believable. Stupid Copacabana...