i have come to believe, as have many other progressive folk, that Hugo Chavez, self-proclaimed ‘populist’ president of Venezuela, is little more than an autocratic, delusional megalomaniac. he seems to have been infected from the start with the Latin American ‘Il Duce’ contagion that has swept the region in the many decades since european and american colonialism and imperialism bastardised the political elite and robbed the indigenous people of all their rights.
but yesterday, he received a well-deserved rebuke from one of the remnants of his country’s colonial legacy – King Juan Carlos of Spain – who told him to shut his face in the same manner one speaks to a child in Castilliano. i have to admit, i was pretty amused to see it happen.
i’m now every bit as annoyed when idiots like Papa Chavez, Mah-moody Ahmadinejad and Comrade Vlad “Impaler” Putin throw around words like “Imperialist,” “dictator,” “tyrant,” and “fascist” with the same ease that Premier Bush uses American buzz words like “freedom,” “insurgents,” “terrorists” (pronounced “tersts” for my unenlightened foreign readers) and “enemies of democracy.” I am by no means a violent individual, but I would like very much to invite these and other shit heads of state to my imaginary castle for a tea party, and then beat the crap out of them. I will need help with Mr. Putin as he apparently knows some serious Kung Fu shiznit. Any takers, please feel free to let me know.
seriously, has the word “freedom” been forever contaminated in anyone else’s mental lexicon? I’ll never be able to walk through a “Freedom Plaza” or look at the much-maligned and prudently dreaded “Freedom Tower” in Lower Manhattan (anybody want 80th floor real estate? If you want to buy that, I will sell you my fingernail clippings, because you are a moron) without conjuring up a mental image of our “folksy” president speaking with his stupid “commander-in-chief” windbreaker speaking in front of droves of tanks flanked by dozens of strikingly similar looking photoshopped troops. I am angry that in my unfortunate mind he has usurped a word and a concept that i love and uphold and associated it with the invasion of another country.
speaking of idiots, unless you have been living in a black hole (or the East Coast) you may have heard that the Chinese have gifted our lovely Bay with 58,000 gallons of oil, just in time to seriously fuck up wildlife and delay the start of Dungeness crab season. apparently the jackass captain (who, it should be told, was not actually Chinese but a Bay Area based pilot) has a history of stupid shit like crashing into big bridges. anyway, the incident probably caused a backlog of tankers all the way back to China full of lead-based toys, cheap colour TV sets, crappy garlic and slave-labour underwears. just in time for Christmas shopping season! which reminds me, note to self, see this movie when it comes out.
but alas, as i’ve argued time and time again, we are unable to sever ourselves from the incessant I.V. of cheap Chinese shit. people wouldn’t pay $700 to include our fair-labour costs for a 24-inch CRT television made in the U.S. of A., not when they can get a perfectly good Chinese one (and the quality is improving quickly) for $150 at Wal-Mart (Wal-Mark, if you’re from Philly). so the realpolitik can continue to bitch and moan about how China is becoming the next world superpower, whatever the fuck that means, while meanwhile we do our part to ensure it happens, and watch more and more oil-soaked Cosco Busan tankers head towards the sunset back to Shanghai to pick up more cheap underwears, whilst all we can do is watch them take the U.S. economy away with them.
as my brother is keen to point out, we have succumbed to decadence. as with other empires in the past, this marks a heady downfall into dissolution.
