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Chuckling over Chavez
From the Daily News:
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez drew laughs and gasps at the UN yesterday by mocking [George] Bush as "the Devil himself" who acts like "he owned the world."
Chavez's taunts came a day after Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad railed against Bush - but the Iranian was downright diplomatic compared with Chavez.
"Yesterday, the Devil came here. Right here. Right here. And it smells of sulfur still today," Chavez said, blessing himself with the sign of the cross, and folding his hands as if in prayer and glancing heavenward.
The gesture drew laughter from the assembled heads of state.
Heh. Smell of sulfur - that's somewhat clever, at least. The really funny result, however, was this frothing editorial, also in the Daily News. Under the headline Venezuela oil pimp can have UN, they write:
You can take the UN, and you can shove it - there.
And you can shove the gasoline you sell to Americans through Citgo, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Venezuelan national oil company through which you are bribing your way into international power. [...]
And you can shove the fuel oil you are offering at a discount to some poor Americans, including folks here in New York with the aid and comfort of the moronically misguided Rep. Jose Serrano. This is nothing but a public-relations stunt by a populist poseur on the order of, well, Fidel Castro.
Hear that, poor people? This guy mocked our Dear Leader, so the Daily News really isn't OK with you getting that cheap demagogic heating oil Fidel Chavez is providing. You'd almost think the semi-reactionary Daily News is in a circulation war with the New York Post, eh? Can the frothing and posturing, gentlemen; the phrase "shove it" should of right only appear in a Murdoch publication. You're better than that; at least, you used to be.
Strange oil politics
Isn't it odd that oil rich nations, like Venezuela, that merely mock us and disagree with us are vilified and threatened. But oil rich nations that actually fund terrorists who attack us, like Saudi Arabia, are our best buddies.
Somehow that doesn't make sense to me!
Daily News
Ok, agreed that Chavez gets a bad rap in the US press compared to say, the Saudi government, which gets off pretty much free.
The truth is, I agree with a lot of things Chavez says. Bush is a bad guy who is taking our country down the wrong path.
However, and I'm approaching this with a Latin Americanist background, Chavez is a divisive force, not only in the US but all over the world. He is managing to completly alienate reasonable leftist leaders in south american like Bachelet in Chile and Lula in Brazil. It is those leaders that represent the best hope for that region, not nearsighted asses like Chavez who is wasting his country's wealth on playing petro-politics. Basically, he's George Bush, but on the left. I know that both of you have problems with how the inflexible and unreasonable the Greens are in domestic politics. To me, Chavez is like that on the international level, but far worse, because he actually has some power.
I tried really hard to like him, because he does do some good things in his country, but over the past few years i've been slowly turning sour to him. His recent trip to Iran, and attempted trip to North Korea pushed me over the edge. Not only is Chavez a bad guy, but he's a dangerous bad guy.
Fortunately, it seems as if the tide of support is turning against him, at least in South America. Recent elections in Peru were a resounding defeat for Chavez, as the candidate he activle supported lost handily to Alan Garcia, who pretty much nobody in Peru wanted to win. They only voted for him because they didn't want a Chavez proxy in power.
In Bolivia, Evo Morales hasn't been nearly as succesful implementing his policies as he or Chavez would like, and the truth is, it looks like he's turning out to be much more of a moderate than it originally seemed. Everyone thought that it was going to be a Morales-Chavez show in South America from the time he was elected. That has certainly not been the case so far, and doesn't seem as if it will be.
Chavez has made some in-roads with Kitchner in Argentina, and Kitchner's approval rating is around 70 percent right now. However, Argentina is not nearly as important in the region as it used to be. The real powerhouse is Brazil, and Lula recently scolded Chavez for being an overzealous and tactless moron.
Anyway, that's a bit long, but Latin America is kindof my thing. I don't like jingoistic responses from the US press anymore than you guys, and I probably would have laughed along with the world leaders at Chavez' speech. That doesn't mean Chavez is someone that leftists here or anywhere else should rally around.
Just a caution....
about discounting Chavez. I'm not thrilled that a caudillo--and not a mass organization--is the leader of an effort to redistribute wealth in a major third world nation. What they can give, strong men can take away, too. But I'd be equally suspicious of Chile's Bachelet and Brazil's Lula, who are tied at the hip to the IMF and the World Bank, which means continued underdevelopment and continued misery for their own people. Lula has already presided over a major split in his Workers Party over his coziness with international business and Bachelet is now hated by much of the Chilean left, including many in her own party, for the same reasons. Lula's main goal, raising the quality of life of Brazil's poorest has failed, in part because he doesn't control the parliament and in part because he's mortgaged to international capital. Bachelet doesn't even make the claims Lula, a former unionist, makes.
No, I am not defending Chavez. All I'm saying is: it's tricky taking sides. All of these movements represent potential challenges to neo-liberalism and all have problems. When France's Chirac opposed the US occupation of Iraq, he was heralded by the US left as a good guy. On that one issue he was. Name a second! So word to the wise: I'd keep the Bachelet and Lula pom poms in storage for a while, along with the Chavez brickbats. And full disclosure: I have to admit I'm partial to Morales and his indigenous movement--but that's just me. A critical distance rule-of-thumb should apply to him, too.
Nice post, Bouldin......
though you left out one delicious item. Chavez also replaced Oprah as the nation's leading book and book-club promoter when he showcased Noam Chomsky's "Hegemony and Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance" during the address. As reported in the Belfast Telegraph, "after Mr Chavez recommended that anyone wishing to understand 'what has been happening in the world through the 20th century' read Professor Chomsky's 2003 work, sales of the book soared. On Amazon.com's best-seller list, it leapt from 160,722nd position overnight to seventh." This morning, NPR reported it was #1 on the Amazon list.
Wanna read it together, Mr. B?
However,
Chavez also expressed regret that he never got to meet and converse with Chomsky during his lifetime, which makes me wonder how much attention he's been paying. And it must have been a real surprise to Chomsky.
The wonder is
that Hugo Chavez even heard of Noam Chomsky, let alone read him. The whole world doesn't read The New York Review of Books. Or Z Magazine. Besides, how many Venezuelan intellectuals, living or dead, can you name? I can name....one, if Manuel Puig is indeed Venezuelan. If he's not, then the answer is... none. Chavez's being able to quote Chomsky is what is remarkable. Thinking and saying a legend has crossed over is no faux pas. Isaac Asimov used to joke that people would come up to him and admit they thought he had joined the choir invisible, because he started publishing as a teen and continued writing well into his 70s. And Chomsky is no callow youth--he'll be gone soon enough.
Sorry, he's not.
Puig is Argentinean, and a terrific writer, BTW - I highly recommend "Kiss of the Spider Woman". I also recommend Mario Vargas Llosa (Peruvian), even though I can't endorse his politics.
I don't consider it "miraculous" that Chavez has read Chomsky. In fact, I think it's kind of arrogant to think of it of it that way. He's the elected leader of one of the major oil-producing nations of the world, not living with a tribe of Neolithic hunter-gatherers in the heart of the Amazon. Whatever you think of his politics, Chavez, by all accounts, is a very, very bright guy, and I'm willing to bet that (unlike our fearless leader) he reads widely and voraciously. And American hegemony is at least as much cultural as it is economic or military. It's not like they have a choice about it, but South Americans know a whole lot more about us than we do about them. Maybe I'm very conscious of this because I work with a lot of South American immigrants.
As far as knowing whether Chomsky's dead or alive, perhaps it would be less surprising if he weren't continuing to write and publish prolifically; he's no doddering wreck, as far as I can tell. He's 77, which doesn't seem as old to me as it used to when I was younger. Since he seems to be in decent health, I look forward to another ten years of writing from him, at least.
When a head of state admits to reading a book...
let alone an important book, it IS miraculous. Chavez is a military man. With the rarest exceptions, these guys are not deep thinkers. Tacticians, sure. Strategists, maybe. Institutional players, always. Bookish, not so much. As to being arrogant, no. What would be arrogance is assuming that Chomsky, as an American, must be the center of the anti-imperial universe, that world leaders must know and--if they are left--recommend him, and that Chavez was asleep at the switch for not knowing the good doctor was still alive. Noam is very good, and of course the rest of the world knows more about the US than we know about the world--but they also know their own cultures. There are a host of Latin American writers--Eduardo Galeano being just one--that El Jefe could have quoted. The genius of Chavez was in recommending an American author. And particularly THAT American author. Florishing Chomsky at the UN showed guts and brains and taste. And (again) when a political figure shows guts and brains, esp. when rattling the tiger's cage, it surely is miraculous.
You're right about Puig being a must read, though. I read Kiss of the Spider Woman in translation after seeing the movie. I wish the film--which was well worth seeing, too--had stuck to the book more. And you have a stronger stomach than I, or at least a more tolerant and eclectic nature, to recommend Vargas Lhosa. I'm sure you're right about him, too.
I wouldn't recommend
Llosa's political writings - it was a wonderful novel I was thinking of, "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter". I read it before I knew anything about him. It's completely apolitical, and I still recommend it if you love SA fiction as I do; put a paper cover on it if you don't want people to know you're reading him!