Presentimiento / Francisco Vera Izquierdo

Premonition


To be honest, I lack so-called prophetic vision. But, just as one doesn’t have to be a strategist to climb onto the sidewalk when a car comes, there exist many things such as the axiom, “A self-evident truth which needs no demonstration.” I knew, then, about the irrational cowardice of Marcos Pérez Jiménez and the intellectual endowments that characterized Romulo Betancourt’s ministers since before their inconceivable actions during the events of 23 de Enero, Costa Rica and la Esquiva.

If things in Venezuela happened according to logic, we would now be under someone other than our actual President. The reaction against puntofijismo played a definitive role in the current leader’s triumph. But to continue with him is to take aspirin after the fever has passed. Besides, he didn’t knock down that system, he was merely there when it fell down. I wasn’t in Venezuela at the time, which is why I have no reason to be regretful; because, had I been here, my vote also would have been for him. Besides, it wasn’t possible to imagine, within a reasonable approaching horizon, what our chubby President and his allies would become.

There is a generally accepted principle in philosophy according to which everything that exists has a name and all that has a name, exists. I have read this concept without completely understanding it, because I find a certain contradiction in the idea that nothingness exists.

But the first element of truth is the truth itself, with its consequential likeliness.

According to this, we could believe in the non-existence of that which is unlikely. And the least one can say now is that what we're enduring has no name.

There have been very few who have deserved to be called rulers in Venezuela. In the XIX century, there was Juan Pablo Rojas Paúl. In the XX, the duo of Eleazar López Contreras and Isaías Medina Angarita, and in the XXI we still haven’t had one.

During the Centennial of Independence a certain Mr. Noaín came to the celebrations as the Argentine representative. The truth of his comment was rejected: “No one is in their place there.” Who knows what he might say now of our rulers. But, most likely, he would think that not only are they out of place but that, instead, their proper place would be, or better yet would have been, a jail.

Herodotus writes that Psammetichus, who wanted to find out which was the oldest language, started from the idea that it would have surged spontaneously and without hearing of another, that it would be the natural language of humans. He took, then, two newborn babies in order to raise them in complete isolation and without ever hearing a single word.

When they began to babble, both infants coincided in calling bread “bexos,” as it is called in Phyrgian, and that language was considered the first. I have not heard of anyone losing sleep over this ignorance in any of the subsequent 28 centuries.

No one has lost sleep over the origin of languages, but they have over words and their meanings. There is an entire science with various branches such as Philology, Etymology, Semantics, etc. A certain literary modesty prevents me from including some discoveries here, not regarding words in general, but at least in reference to the big words. And, to be honest, the most elevated concepts proffered by Chavistas seem to be big words.

For me, the word coup is one of those that could not be uttered in society.

But, after hearing the Vice President himself proffer one of them on television, I believe that the word coup could also be redeemed and that it could cease being a suffocated sinful thought among those in uniform. I don’t want an unconstitutional exit, but the air we breathe makes my position an extravagance.

{ Francisco Vera Izquierdo, El Nacional, 14 June 2004 }