In this comment thread, Dr. Dawg takes exception to my shot at Hugo Chavez.
“Mass graves?” Come on.
Gentlemen, start your bulldozers!
Faced with an accelerating inflation rate and shortages of basic foods like beef, chicken and milk, President Hugo Chávez has threatened to jail grocery store owners and nationalize their businesses if they violate the country’s expanding price controls.
Food producers and economists say the measures announced late Thursday night, which include removing three zeroes from the denomination of Venezuela’s currency, are likely to backfire and generate even more acute shortages and higher prices for consumers. Inflation climbed to an annual rate of 18.4 percent a year in January, the highest in Latin America and far above the official target of 10 to 12 percent.
Mr. Chávez, whose leftist populism remains highly popular among Venezuela’s poor and working classes, seemed unfazed by criticism of his policies. Appearing live on national television, he called for the creation of “committees of social control,” essentially groups of his political supporters whose purpose would be to report on farmers, ranchers, supermarket owners and street vendors who circumvent the state’s effort to control food prices.
Now Dawg, you were saying?
In terms of your 9:14 AM comment, you are right, Dawg, you won. I have never seen you call people, or groups of people, names, or use cheap perjoratives. Those self-indulgent tactics, seen frequently on blogs left and right, not only convince no one who is not convinced, but make the convinced question their convictions. You avoid that approach comprehensively, which is a real and worthy achievement I respect you for.
But there’s also the niggling matter of what it is, exactly, that you defend.
When Chavez strutted around at the UN like an armed comic, and sniffed the air, and called a world leader “Satan”, to the amusement of selected member states, I’m just wondering, if we are to assume that peace and international cooperation are the goal, did that sort of language bother you, or seem unproductive?
When Chavez makes lewd, macho, half-wit, sexually insinuating sing-song remarks calling out a high-ranking female official of another government — Condoleeza Rice in this case — in a language that suggests a rape threat, don’t you think you should look at the man, take him at face value, and concede the unbridgeable gap between you two?
We already know you don’t like perjoratives and name-calling, since you point out your lack of same as evidence of a victory that’s political in some manner of self-description.
It seems to me that Chavez’s tone — the way he panders to grievance, real or perceived, and uses language predicated on hatred and threats and villification and, ultimately, self-pleasure — has generally not been a sign of good things to come. Historically speaking.
It’s hard to tell if you are defending reasonableness itself from those who don’t have any good arguments, defending Chavez against unreasonable arguments, or defending Chavez, the man the plan.
Would you describe yourself as a Chavez supporter, more or less? I know you aren’t active on his behalf, and that you can’t vote for him, etc etc, I’m just wondering, do you agree, more or less, with his objectives and tactics?
Thank you EBD. In response to your questions, which I reflected upon while walking the dog this morning. I would indeed see myself as a Chavez supporter, more or less. No point beating around the bush on that, no pun intended. But let me enlarge a bit.
Chavez is a left-wing version of Don Cherry–colourful, full of himself, pretty blunt and direct, and often provocative for the sake of being provocative. I can see why he reduces the Right to spluttering rage. But, of far more importance, he is standing up to traditional US hegemony in South America–and on what the latter has meant, read some of Eduardo Galeano’s meticulously researched material in The Open Veins of Latin America, and his lyrical trilogy, Memory of Fire.
What galls the Right is that Chavez has limitless supplies of money to do that, and that he is wildly popular and keeps winning elections. He has been spreading his not inconsiderable largesse to surrounding poorer countries, setting up an independent television network, and giving his people far better access to education and medical care and drugs.
Now, Chavez can certainly act ham-handedly. But I don’t see him trying to rule cheap food into being for much longer. Command-and-control doesn’t work in an economy except in the short term. On the political front, I have already said that I cannot support rule by decree, but this has been used in the past by other Venezuelan presidents without a chorus of media outrage, so there’s something a little selective in the current disapproval. Finally, if the recall petition names are really being used to screen Venezuelans out of jobs and so on, that is obviously way wrong: but it appears that complaints in this respect are being investigated by an outside agency, so we shall see.
To sum up, what I see in Chavez is a person genuinely wanting alternative economic and social arrangements, including a vast redistribution of wealth, and having the means to carry this forward. He stands against the natural order of things: the US in control, comprador governments keeping the peons in line for a few crumbs, and impoverished people sitting on mountains of natural resources.
All this, frankly, pisses a lot of people off. And I like that, I must admit. His style is not mine, but I will confess to having gotten a chuckle out of his brash take-no-sh*t-from-anyone-especially-Bush public outings. And, far more importantly, I like what he is trying to do in Venezuela, bumps in the road notwithstanding.