Yesterday it was the BBC. Today it is the Associated Press. Ian James from that outfit sings a paean to Hugo Chavez.
Chavez views presidency as epic struggle
Underneath the fiery persona is a man who both firmly believes in his vision and is shrewd enough to know how to sell it. Chavez sees the world in black and white and casts himself as crusader, a role that is at once genuine and expedient. He truly empathizes with the common people of Venezuela, but it is also vital for him to hear their cheers, be their hero and feel the power.
"Vamonos," Chavez bellows to his entourage in the hotel lobby. "It's a beautiful day."
Chavez gets behind the wheel, seatbelt off, and the motorcade sets out on a road trip through Apure state. He is visibly relaxed to be back in these southern plains, where he was once stationed as a soldier.
"Listen to this song," he says suddenly, turning up the volume on the stereo. It's a pasaje folk tune by Eneas Perdomo, a favorite from his childhood. He repeats the lyrics — "I remember the harp with tenderness like a watercolor painting…" — then raises his voice an octave and sings: "Apure is always Apu-u-u-re."
Entering a traffic circle, he abruptly veers away from the motorcade for a view of the Apure River, despite protests from his 27-year-old daughter Maria in the back seat.
"I'm going this way just a second," Chavez assures her. "It's a magical river," he muses out loud.
To understand Chavez, it helps to see these plains, spreading lush and green in the rainy season, all the way from the Venezuelan Andes in the west to the Orinoco River in the east. This is the land where Chavez grew up poor in the town of Sabaneta and later spent three formative years in Apure. It's a personal history he draws on often in his speeches.
"A man from the plains, from these great open spaces… tends to be a nomad, tends not to see barriers. You don't see barriers from childhood on. What you see is the horizon," says Chavez, whose first question to a foreigner is often, "Where are you from?"
The stereotype in Venezuela is that people from the plains, or "llaneros," tend to be talkative, boisterous cowboy types with a rich tradition of folklore. Chavez fits the bill.
"I have deep roots here," he says. "When I die I want them to bury me here in this savanna, anywhere, because you feel like a part of it."
He says it was the injustice he saw here — of "impoverished people living atop a sea of oil" — that drove him in the 1980s to lead a secret dissident group. As he drives past stands where poor people still sell pineapples and cantaloupes today, he reflects, "We're in the process of freeing the slaves. It's still slavery, disguised." He has expressed the idea so often that it sounds almost rehearsed, yet still seems heartfelt.
The few cautions James puts in are swept away by the pure, gush of painting Chavez in a beautiful light. Funny, it sounds really familiar:
Lenin took and shaped Marxism to fit the Russian foot, and although circumstances compelled him to abandon it temporarily for the New Economic Policy, he always maintained that this political manoeuvre was not a basic change of policy. Sure enough, Stalin, his successor and devout disciple, first emasculated the NEP and then set about abolishing it. Today the NEP is a sorry stave in the outer courts of the Soviet palace.
That is what Stalin did and is doing to our boasted Western individualism and spirit of personal initiative—which was what the NEP meant—not because Stalin is so powerful or cruel and full of hate for the capitalist system as such, but because he has a flair for political management unrivalled since Charles Murphy died.
Stalin is giving the Russian people—the Russian masses, not Westernized landlords, industrialists bankers and intellectuals, but Russia’s 150,000,000 peasants and workers— what they really want namely, joint effort, communal effort. And communal life is as acceptable to them as it is repugnant to a Westerner. flits is one of the reasons why - Russian Bolshevism will never succeed in the United States, Great Britain, France or other parts west of the Rhine.
Stalinism, too, has done what Lenin only attempted. It has re-established the semi-divine, supreme autocracy of the imperial idea and has placed itself on the Kremlin throne as a ruler whose lightest word is all In all and whose frown spells death. Try that on free-born Americans or the British with their tough loyalty to old things, or on France’s consciousness of self. But it suits the Russians and is as familiar, natural and right to the Russian mind as it is abominable and wrong to Western nations.
This Stalin knows and that knowledge is his key to power. Stalin does not think of him as a dictator or an autocrat, but as the guardian of the sacred flame, or ‘party line’ as the Bolsheviki term it, which for want of a better name must be labeled Stalinism.
The more things change. Everything old is new again.
Animals | Gaius Sunday, 23 September , 2007 | 
Comments (4) 
