Vapid Venezuela

Forgive me if I sound intemperate, but Venezuela has always brought out the worst in me.
I was there a decade ago, while still at university, backpacking my way across the top of the southern American continent. Flying into Maiquetia Airport, in Caracas, I ambled off the plane into the terminal--straight into the vision of a burly soldier, buzz-cut, toting a machine- gun, boots up to his knees, and a real ugly scar on his chin.

In full view of everyone, he beckoned me to one side--there were four or five other soldiers, each of whom beckoned his own quarry--and then asked me to follow him down a stairwell that led to a small unlit room. There, I was asked for $200 at gunpoint.

I won't bore you with details, but at the end of a hectic session of dialogue--much of it quite heated--I was allowed to leave without paying him a cent. It helped that I spoke Spanish--able to deploy all the crisply respectful forms of address, in a situation where any irreverence or incomprehension on my part might have proved painful--and that I was being received at the airport by a senior figure of Acción Democrática, then one of the country's two leading political parties.

Piecing the incident together 10 years later, this is what I think I must have said: "I should tell you, señor, that Señora XYZ is waiting for me outside. If she doesn't see me in 10 minutes, she is bound to make inquiries. And you should not forget, señor, that a number of people observed me being taken to one side by you. You will have questions to deal with should anything happen to me."

The logic slowly sank in. Clearly, I couldn't be robbed without there being adverse consequences for the soldier. "OK, then give me $50," he said. I stood my ground, and he had no option but to let me go. "Sonofabitch," he muttered. "I've wasted my time with you. I should have tried a woman." That last word, "mujer,", he said as "mujel"--the swapping of an "r" for an "l" being commonplace among poorly educated Caribbean speakers of Spanish. Perhaps unduly cocky, I replied: "Next time just leave people alone. Is this the first impression you want tourists to have of Venezuela?"

He ignored me. He didn't care. He hadn't made his instant killing, and he was brooding, and impotent.

The man embodied Venezuela. In the three weeks I was there, I encountered numerous people with his mindset: brooding, impotent folk whose aim in life was to get happy quick, to make a buck without a sweat, to gratify the senses instantly. I've traveled widely--in all continents--and never have I encountered a national character that is so feckless, and so indolent, as the Venezuelan one.

Of course, these are impressions; by their nature, they are superficial. But the sense I had on that trip through the country--in Caracas, in Merida, Maracaibo, Puerto Ordaz, Tucupita, Ciudad Guayana--has endured; and nothing I have read about Venezuela, or seen on TV since I left, has caused me to alter my assessment in the slightest.

From top to bottom, Venezuela is a welfare state that lives off oil. Nothing of note is manufactured there. Nothing of note is manmade. The country's riches--oil, vast rivers, rich delta soil, rainforests, a vivid coastline, huge gold deposits, spectacular waterfalls and some of the most beautiful landscape one could hope to see--are all part of nature's bounty. What man--Venezuelan man--has done is to take, take, take.

And what he has built, or done, has been vile. Caracas is the ugliest city in South America. And Venezuela's civitas is the most underdeveloped of any of the major Latin American countries, its intellectual resources virtually nonexistent, its universities numbingly mediocre, its art a ghastly simulacrum of imported trends. Even its soccer team sucks. (The local excuse for the latter is that the national game is beisbol, but that game doesn't rise to great heights there either.)

So we have, here, a society of drones, so used to buying gas at 12 cents a gallon that they will burn buses and loot supermarkets if the price is raised to 13 cents. Petroleos de Venezuela, the national oil company, is state-owned, and its precious liquid irrigates every facet of life. This has left the civic musculature soggy. They to whom things come too easily become chronically work-shy, even congenitally so.

Let us not forget that Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan strongman, was elected by an overwhelming majority. Why? He promised to fight corruption, for one, which in Venezuela means tapping into the resentment that the little guys who rob the system blind have for the big guys who rob the system blinder; but he also promised to safeguard the Venezuelan way of life, by which he meant that no economic reform would come in the way of Venezuelans enjoying the bounty of their land, whatever this might cost future generations. Petro-welfare forever. ¡Viva petroleo, viva!

Venezuela, and Venezuelans, lives beyond its means. That has been the case for many years. What is new, now, is the depth to which the country's political discourse has plunged under Mr. Chavez.
The man invented a completely new, and hokey, ideology, called Bolivarianism--after Simon Bolivar, "The Lliberator." Bolivar is an icon in Venezuela, and wherever one goes in that country, one sees vast and vacuous slogans, culled from Bolivar's sayings and writings, plastered on billboards. There is a Bolivar cult into which Mr. Chavez has tapped, presenting himself to the country's half-educated masses as a New Liberator.

The ideology he sells as Bolivarian is a mush of sentiment, rhetoric, Marxism and nonsense. Part patriotism, part anti-colonialism, the idea appears to be no more complex than to give Mr. Chavez the chance to invoke The Liberator's name at every opportunity, and to allow him to smear his opponents as "anti-Bolivar." This, in a society as vapid as Venezuela, is akin to a form of political treason.

Not content with charting an economic course that should empty the country's coffers, Mr. Chavez is intent on emptying the national cerebrum of all meaningful content, substituting demagogy for ideology, and theatrical posturing for concrete ideas.

Bolivar himself was a man with few good ideas beyond that of chucking the Spaniards out of "Gran Colombia"--what is today Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Panama. But in liberation, he turned tyrant, and was banished from the area that is present-day Venezuela. Does a similar fate await Mr. Chavez? Perhaps. But the question is, who will take him in? Is there anywhere else like Venezuela in the world?