The Seu Jorge song, originally recorded by Bezerra da Silva goes on, "my people are industrious/ they've never had social welfare/ they just live there/ because the poor have no other way". Whilst calling for recognition, the translated lyrics suggest a certain resignation which some favela residents would argue and indeed do fight against.
Opinion polls suggest a sense of resignation that has allowed the functions of the state to be dismembered, fragmented and degraded as deliberate policy.
Perhaps what really distinguishes the British, though, has been a crop of horsey and not very funny jokes, suggesting a stoic resignation to yet one more scam that will go unexplained and unpunished, leaving ordinary people little choice but to look for a Monty Pythonesque bright side, and mull the old adage: caveat emptor, let the buyer beware.
But the way he has temporised and left doors open since his resignation suggests a certain reluctance to let go.
It became a huge hit, starting its six-year run in the same year as Nixon's resignation, suggesting a paradise lost before the fall.
But where the lyric might have once suggested a contented sort of resignation, it offered no such consolations in the context of the show.
Tall and gaunt, with graying dreadlocks, his deep-set eyes conveying a stoic, bone-weary resignation, he suggested a mythic African pilgrim leaning on a walking stick while roaming the world on an endless spiritual journey.
Mr. Gore said it was "especially painful" to suggest the resignation of Mr. Tenet, who served in the Clinton administration and whom Mr. Gore described as a personal friend.
Appearing on "Face the Nation" on CBS, Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 Democrat in the House, suggested that resignation was a far preferable option to a House ethics investigation and possible charges.
It suggests cheerful resignation to a time in which artists feel trapped in patterns of recycled or otherwise bootless significance.
