Chávez Archipelago
It seems that Maduro’s words in the National Assembly were redacted by a kind of Ciceronian aspiration, as if to place the clumsy and dyslexic reader in the position of the tribune anguished by the moral health of the republic. There appeared mentions of what any Wikipedia article could have suggested as pillars of classical republican thought, from civic humanism: Aristoteles, Machiavelli... Contaminated of course not so much by the orator’s oceanic ignorance but by the rain of allusions to ramshackle or improperly cited authors, in a typical example of the postmodern hubbub that furnishes the head of the “intellectuals” hired for the occasion.
In the field of intentions, which is in any case what we have to look at, it would have been better to mention directly Robespierre and The Committee of Public Safety; the speech, the occasion, the antecedents, the rhetoric, even the moments of babbling, all of it wants to communicate the beginning of a period of Terror that might substitute the charisma lost and buried as a principle of authority. An authority that is escaping from he who presides de Presidency and that must be reconstituted with internal ends, for recomposing the Chavista cadre, and be strategically directed toward repressive action against political (and non-political) factors that can (and are actually doing so) galvanize the deception, the hangover from the disappeared and broken mirage that the regime’s mafias are trying to snatch for themselves.
One cannot insist enough on the pathological irresponsibility of Mr. Chávez for obstructing all initiatives for institutionalizing his own factors of power and for having propitiated an archipelago of voracities in the form of tribes, clans, families (consanguineous or not) that turned the public into the private and particular patrimony of a few capos. These now look for some form of equilibrium by means of purges and shifts that could be successful, if this is understood as their survival in power.
But there are the elections. And there is something else, what isn’t framed exactly within the political but rather in the end of the world sensation that permeates everyday life. Because of this we infer from what Maduro emitted in the Assembly and in previous actions, in that Red October Plan that has been announced, the matter passes through constructing the regime’s “irreversibility”, that is, to install the message that things will no longer be, effectively, as they were before. Politics give way to the brutal threat of repeating, not just metaphorically as they’ve done up until now but in actuality, the menace of actually existing socialism. The redistributionist and rentier outline would have thus reached its end so as to install an economy of perpetual scarcity in which the only salvation will to to connect oneself to the system of privileges of the government apparatus.
But once again: there are the elections. Turning them into a mere acclamation of Chavismo isn’t possible, there’s not enough human material for that; but creating, with the message of irreversibility and the repressive operations that can be exercised, the toxic atmosphere that might strip it of its political meaning, this might be possible. Because if all that pre-political strength (to give it a name) that one breathes in the weariness and frustration to be found on the street, passes onto the political act (which on this occasion is to vote, and which on other occasions will have another expression), the archipelago is rendered quite compromised, and the measurements of opinion are registering this overwhelmingly. The efficacy of the vote is now measured in another dimension: that of repudiation, and the message that must be given in December is that the only thing that is irreversible is the will to change of a society that doesn’t want to be the property of a caste.
{ Colette Capriles, El Nacional, 10 October 2013 }
Showing posts with label Hugo Chávez. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hugo Chávez. Show all posts
4.12.2013
El chavismo y la memoria subversiva de Jesús / Armando Rojas Guardia
Chavismo and the Subversive Memory of Jesus
In light of the efforts to transform Chavismo into a new type of religion, utilizing and instrumentalizing Christian elements and content, it is a moral imperative for me to distinguish this type of unusual religious expression from genuine Christianity, at least in the manner that many men and women in our country and our time understand it and attempt to live it.
1.
The first thing I need to say is that, as a radio listener and TV-watcher, as a reader of newspapers and an Internet user, for weeks I’ve been feeling a deep nostalgia for modernity and for the critical spirit of Enlightenment thought. The excess of religion, of ritual manifestations, of sacred ceremonies and devotedly homiletic speeches that has abounded in Venezuelan public life for months now turns out to be incompatible with one of the most indispensable conquests of the modern world: the secular State, the total laicism of public affairs. That laicism, which has been an essential characteristic of our life as a republic since 1830 and which therefore has decisively permeated our entire historical character as a nation, is being violently assaulted to a degree none of us could have expected by an avalanche of religious symbology mixed in an indisoluble manner with excrescences of magical thinking. I think that, with the exception of a few Islamic theocracies, this isn’t happening in any other country in the world. The symbolic sobriety and austerity that the modern secularization of public affairs imposes when it comes to approaching the religious fact, has come to be exactly that in Venezuela: a nostalgia.
But the fact is the ethical proposal of Jesus of Nazareth is itself incompatible with religion. An historically indisputable phrase by Christ is: “But go and learn what this means: I desire compassion, and not sacrifice” (Mt 9,13-12,7). There, in that phrase, a devastating critique of religion (sacrifice, worship) is suggested in order to privilege, as an anthropological alternative, solidarity, compassion and human fraternity. The religious project finds its reason for being in “the sacred” (a space, a time, a few utensils, a few rites, a few norms), and in “the sacred” as a counterpoint to “the profane,” to the lay and secular. On the other hand, Jesus’s project operates a radical displacement: the way to access God is not through the sacred, but rather through the profane aspect of our relation with fellow man, the ethical relation of service for others to the point of devotion and forgetting oneself. Christ not only showed us, but he incarnated a way —another one—, unprecedented, of living human religiosity. We know of his critical distancing from the two religious instances that mediated, for the men and women of his time and country, the relation to God: the Temple and the Law. Regarding the first, the gospels never mention that Jesus went to the Temple to pray or to participate in any liturgical ceremony. His conduct was never ritualistic: he didn’t find the Father in the sacred space of the Temple nor in the sacred time of religious worship. He went to the Temple because that’s where people gathered and it was to them he directed his message. Jesus Christ spoke with the Father and of the Father in profane, secular time and spaces of life itself, the daily life of the city and countryside. The only violent action Jesus realized was the one he performed in the Temple (Mk 11,15-19; Mt 21,12-17; Lc 19,45-48; Jn 2,13-22) and his contemporaries judged that action as an “attack” against the Temple itself and everything it represented in the Israelite life of his time. In the Gospel of John (4,20-24) we’re told, as a teaching emanated from Christ himself, that neither sacred space, nor the religious ceremonies that are celebrated within it, constitute the adequate place to find God. He is found when one invokes Him “in spirit and in truth” throughout the concrete secularity of existence. And, with regards to Jesus’s conflict with the Law, he gave no importance to the norms of ritual purity (Mk 7,1-17), to prohibitions about food (Mk 7,18-23), to what is stipulated about fasting (Mk 2,18-22), to the social rejection, also legislated, that fell upon public sinners, who were his friends and shared the table with him (Mk 2,15-17), and upon prostitutes (Mt 21,4-31s); he also dispensed with norms regarding the treatment of and cohabitation with women, a group of whom accompanied him permanently (Lc. 8,1-3), some of them having a bad reputation (Lc 8,2). Finally, Christ’s axiom regarding the Law is the following: man is not made for the law but rather the law is made for man (Mk 2,27).
So, this national waterfall of rituals and political speeches that intend to employ Christian symbolism understood in a “religious” manner, not only attempts against the sane laicism of our life as a republic, that we should do everything possible for it to be the most modern (or postmodern) possible, it’s one of the pivots of what Christianity projects for us as anthropology.
2.
I think nothing and no one is less Christian than the rule of a caudillo and a caudillo. Both probably function in Venezuela and in countries neighboring ours as a funest Hispano-Arab inheritance, although other latitudes have known and also know the political dominance of a supposedly providencial man who presents himself as the galvanizer of a collective mobilization. There are very serious exegetes and theologians who affirm that this was the core of one of the great temptations of Jesus; this seems to be the meaning of one of the tests —the third and decisive one— that he faced in the desert during the preamble of his public activity (Mk 1,12s; Mt 4,8-10; Lc 4,1-13): these texts regarding the temptations constitute a tale, not a historical one, but rather a redactional and symbolic one, that wants to illustrate for us what stalked as the possibility of Jesus’s own consciousness going astray throughout his life. I’m speaking of the temptation of power. But with this crucial characteristic: the temptation of power in order to accomplish good deeds. It’s well-known that Israel awaited a political messiah, a warrior who was going to completely do away with the opprobrium and secular oppression of the country and its culture. The four canonical gospels explicitly indicate to us that all of Jesus’s close disciples thought, and they continued to believe it until the very moment of the passion, that Christ incarnated that political messianism, based on power and on the human triumph. After the miracle of the multiplication of bread (Mt 14,13-23; Mk 6,30-46; Jn 6,1-15), the enthusiastic multitude thought that Jesus was the awaited political messiah (Jn 6,4) and, in consequence, they wanted to proclaim him king. Jesus then retires “once again to the mountain, alone” (Jn 6,15). The disciples who identified with the popular enthusiasm didn’t want to lose the occasion for Christ to be proclaimed a political king. This is why both Matthew and Mark point out that Jesus had to “force them” (anagkáso) to get on the boat to leave that place (Mt 14,22; Mk 6,45).
That was the temptation I was referring to: the temptation of power. And it’s a temptation that, as I’ve said, can be clothed in a false consciousness: it is power, yes, but in order to transform it into a factor that multiplies good. And Jesus rejects that specific temptation from an impregnable conviction that he never ceased to explain to his closes followers, those he thought were particularly apt to understand it: the path to power and privilege leads one to keep a “reasonable” coexistence with the agents and factors that organize in this world the suffering and oppression of mankind. Society is not transformed from above (from power and fame) but rather from below (from the unarmed solidarity with those crucified throughout history) (Cf. Mt 16,22; Mk 8,33). From this conviction emerges an implacable denunciation of political power: “You know (...) that those who hold sway as rulers dominate nations as though they were their owners and the powerful impose their authority. This will not be the case amongst you, but rather if any of you want to grow you should become a servant to others” (Mk 10,42-43). And what also emerges is an enormous freedom facing him, facing power: when Jesus is told that Herod —who was the king of Galilee and thus the political chief of the region of Israel to which Jesus belonged— wanted to kill him (Lc 13,31) he tells them: “Go and tell that fox (...) that there is no room for a prophet to die outside Jerusalem” (Lc 13,32). In the Jewish culture of that time the “fox” was considered the animal that didn’t represent anything. Thus, it was as though he were saying: “Go and tell nobody...” And this was the king!
I’m not going to waste my possible reader’s time abounding the obvious: just as Jesus was a layman, not a priest or a professional theologian (as the so-called “lettered men” and scribes were) he didn’t want to be a caudillo. Despite his ascendance among the most impoverished masses of Israel he didn’t want to instrumentalize them with a political objective because for him God was not mediated by power, not any type of power, only by love (that prostituted but essential word). We all know what finally happened: he was assassinated as a “blasphemer” and “political criminal” by the civilian, military and religious authorities of his time. The masses he didn’t want to instrumentalize left him on his own. Completely alone, this man of unpronounceable innocence, tortured and executed as though he were a criminal and a dangerous revolutionary by institutional power, by the intellectual orthodoxy and their henchmen, had already warned his followers one day —those back then and those today—: “See how I’m sending you out as sheep among wolves: therefore be as cautious as snakes and as innocent as doves. But be careful with people, because they will take you to court, they will whip you in the synagogue and they will lead you in front of governors and kings for my cause; thus they will give testimony...” (Mt 10,16-18). Jesus did not live for the cross; when the dynamics of reality imposed it on him, he accepted it and assumed it, transforming it into an option of love, that is, an affirmation of life. This execution, this assassination carried out for religious and political reasons, that infamously crowned a life consumed by disinterested service to others, was left forever transformed into a forceful requisition, in the deepest and most intimate denunciation of any type of power, no matter how much it might try to be canonized.
From the Gospel we Christians inherit a radical suspicion regarding the pretensions of leadership, of important positions, of the supposedly majestic, dazzling aura that seems to surround political and social triumph. If anyone had any doubts whether president Chávez was a caudillo of the most rancid and sad Latin American lineage, observe what they want to do with his passage through history: Chávez ascending into the sky, Chávez enthroned in the altar of a chapel in the 23 de Enero zone of Caracas (called the “Chapel of San Hugo Chávez”), Chávez multiplied in stamps sold at the entrance of churches and plaster busts that, it’s been said, people seek out so they can pray to him in the intimacy of their home, Chávez the second Simón Bolívar, Chávez the new liberator, Chávez the Redeemer, Chávez the “Christ of the poor.” All this would be amusing if it weren’t tragic. Because it’s a matter of an inextricable mixture of magical credulousness and naiveté for many with a deification, a mythologizing, a sacralization orchestrated by those in power. Biblically speaking, it is simply said, an idolatry. From the Christian point of view, it doesn’t make sense. We Christians believe that there has only been, only is and only will be a single messiah. And a crucified messiah. And crucified means that the “utopian” (in the sense Ernst Bloch uses) radical brotherhood of human relations, which is the central tenet of Christianity, can only be realized from the “utopia” of the cross: the total failure implied by the last scream of Jesus’s agony, abandoned by one and all, and which expresses God’s solidarity with history’s humiliated and offended, not from the majesty of power that uses the poor as instruments in order to dominate them —turning them into objects of political marketing— but rather from a solidarity that is defenseless, forsaken and left out in the open air alongside them. The failure of the cross is a counterweight to the heroic-promethean image that we create of the messiah. It doesn’t display any epic traits. The death of Jesus was not that of Socrates, parsimoniously drinking hemlock, accompanied by disciples and friends. His was wrapped in signs of a profound fright: an authentic sense of being horrified by suffering, torture, solitude and death itself which inevitably also seemed to him like the cause and mission of his life.
That identification of Chávez and Christ, being an idolatry and not making sense, was propitiated in more than one aspect by Chávez himself. He never tired of proclaiming that he obeyed the “first and greatest socialist in history.” In vain people responded that this affirmation contained an unforgivable anachronism: Jesus was not a socialist just like he wasn’t an aviator: socialism implies a theory of political, social and economic organization dating from the 19th century, that is, a considerable temporal distance from Christ’s life. It was useless. Until the end of his existence Chávez continued to believe and proclaim this nonsense. As it’s also nonsense, but this time it’s an absurdity that is dangerous because of its political consequences, to affirm —as is being done now by the supposed emulator of the deceased president— that “socialism is the kingdom of God on earth.” Regarding this statement, the following precisions turns out to be necessary: that “utopian” dream (in the worst sense, the etymological one, of the word: “there is no such place”) is found in its own way in Plato’s Republic, in the visionaries of the Fifth Monarchy, in the Medieval apocalyptics, in the anabaptists, in the Puritan theocrats, in the religious sectors of the anarchist movement: all those who have not believed and don’t believe —I’m citing George Steiner almost from memory— in the constitutive fallibility of man, in the permanent imperfection of the mechanisms of power, in the presence of inhumanity and evil within man’s existential condition and his historical achievements. They have believed and believe that the “civitas Dei” should be built now on earth and that a certain fanatical rigor at the service of the revolutionary ideal is indispensable: from there to sustaining that the ends justify the means and that some dose of political terror becomes necessary to obtain the edenic objective of the suppression of all oppression, there’s no more than a step or two.
The Kingdom of God, considered biblically, is a reality whose plenitude is meta and transhistorical, when God, as Paul of Tarsus says,“is in all things.” It is the responsibility of us human beings to progressively and always partially or in an unfinished manner draw closer to that plenitude, organizing the dynamics of history in such a manner that it reach closer to it. Someone might not like the appellative Kingdom of God. Many years ago a friend told me that we Christians should speak, not of the Kingdom but of the Republic of God. To make things clear, I invite the reader to remember that the first poetry collection by Ramón Palomares is titled El reino [The Kingdom]. And the Kingdom of God is a mythopoetic designation to allude to a goal —the sovereignty of God as a fraternal house of human abandonment, a definitive house that is he himself made presence among us— and that indeed we should make an effort to begin constructing here and now, always and at every moment under the threat of those powers that, according to the Gospel of Lucas (22,25), “take away liberty and make themselves be called benefactors” and which are money and the political and religious powers. From the future that goal acts as a constant critical instance that interpolates and questions our always limited and partial achievements, impeding the history and society we build from not remaining open, convening us for the ontological appointment to which we have been called at birth: “It will dry the tears from your eyes. There will no longer be death nor shame nor weeping nor pain. All the ancient things have passed” (Ap 21,4).
To pretend that this ontological convocation will be realized by socialism constitutes, to say the least, a senseless act: “The Kingdom of God should be understood as the Kingdom of Man: this is the theology of totalitarian utopias.” (George Steiner)
Armando Rojas Guardia Venezuelan poet, critic and essayist who played a fundamental role in the foundation of the literary group Tráfico, and who has published numerous collections of poetry and essays, among them Del mismo amor ardiendo (1979), Yo que supe de la vieja herida (1985), Poemas de Quebrada de la Virgen (1985), Hacia la noche viva (1989), "La nada vigilante" (1994) and El esplendor y la espera (2000).
Translator’s note: Armando Rojas Guardia lived at the poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal’s spiritual community Solentiname in Nicaragua during the 1970s.
{ Armando Rojas Guardia, Prodavinci, 2 April 2013 }
In light of the efforts to transform Chavismo into a new type of religion, utilizing and instrumentalizing Christian elements and content, it is a moral imperative for me to distinguish this type of unusual religious expression from genuine Christianity, at least in the manner that many men and women in our country and our time understand it and attempt to live it.
1.
The first thing I need to say is that, as a radio listener and TV-watcher, as a reader of newspapers and an Internet user, for weeks I’ve been feeling a deep nostalgia for modernity and for the critical spirit of Enlightenment thought. The excess of religion, of ritual manifestations, of sacred ceremonies and devotedly homiletic speeches that has abounded in Venezuelan public life for months now turns out to be incompatible with one of the most indispensable conquests of the modern world: the secular State, the total laicism of public affairs. That laicism, which has been an essential characteristic of our life as a republic since 1830 and which therefore has decisively permeated our entire historical character as a nation, is being violently assaulted to a degree none of us could have expected by an avalanche of religious symbology mixed in an indisoluble manner with excrescences of magical thinking. I think that, with the exception of a few Islamic theocracies, this isn’t happening in any other country in the world. The symbolic sobriety and austerity that the modern secularization of public affairs imposes when it comes to approaching the religious fact, has come to be exactly that in Venezuela: a nostalgia.
But the fact is the ethical proposal of Jesus of Nazareth is itself incompatible with religion. An historically indisputable phrase by Christ is: “But go and learn what this means: I desire compassion, and not sacrifice” (Mt 9,13-12,7). There, in that phrase, a devastating critique of religion (sacrifice, worship) is suggested in order to privilege, as an anthropological alternative, solidarity, compassion and human fraternity. The religious project finds its reason for being in “the sacred” (a space, a time, a few utensils, a few rites, a few norms), and in “the sacred” as a counterpoint to “the profane,” to the lay and secular. On the other hand, Jesus’s project operates a radical displacement: the way to access God is not through the sacred, but rather through the profane aspect of our relation with fellow man, the ethical relation of service for others to the point of devotion and forgetting oneself. Christ not only showed us, but he incarnated a way —another one—, unprecedented, of living human religiosity. We know of his critical distancing from the two religious instances that mediated, for the men and women of his time and country, the relation to God: the Temple and the Law. Regarding the first, the gospels never mention that Jesus went to the Temple to pray or to participate in any liturgical ceremony. His conduct was never ritualistic: he didn’t find the Father in the sacred space of the Temple nor in the sacred time of religious worship. He went to the Temple because that’s where people gathered and it was to them he directed his message. Jesus Christ spoke with the Father and of the Father in profane, secular time and spaces of life itself, the daily life of the city and countryside. The only violent action Jesus realized was the one he performed in the Temple (Mk 11,15-19; Mt 21,12-17; Lc 19,45-48; Jn 2,13-22) and his contemporaries judged that action as an “attack” against the Temple itself and everything it represented in the Israelite life of his time. In the Gospel of John (4,20-24) we’re told, as a teaching emanated from Christ himself, that neither sacred space, nor the religious ceremonies that are celebrated within it, constitute the adequate place to find God. He is found when one invokes Him “in spirit and in truth” throughout the concrete secularity of existence. And, with regards to Jesus’s conflict with the Law, he gave no importance to the norms of ritual purity (Mk 7,1-17), to prohibitions about food (Mk 7,18-23), to what is stipulated about fasting (Mk 2,18-22), to the social rejection, also legislated, that fell upon public sinners, who were his friends and shared the table with him (Mk 2,15-17), and upon prostitutes (Mt 21,4-31s); he also dispensed with norms regarding the treatment of and cohabitation with women, a group of whom accompanied him permanently (Lc. 8,1-3), some of them having a bad reputation (Lc 8,2). Finally, Christ’s axiom regarding the Law is the following: man is not made for the law but rather the law is made for man (Mk 2,27).
So, this national waterfall of rituals and political speeches that intend to employ Christian symbolism understood in a “religious” manner, not only attempts against the sane laicism of our life as a republic, that we should do everything possible for it to be the most modern (or postmodern) possible, it’s one of the pivots of what Christianity projects for us as anthropology.
2.
I think nothing and no one is less Christian than the rule of a caudillo and a caudillo. Both probably function in Venezuela and in countries neighboring ours as a funest Hispano-Arab inheritance, although other latitudes have known and also know the political dominance of a supposedly providencial man who presents himself as the galvanizer of a collective mobilization. There are very serious exegetes and theologians who affirm that this was the core of one of the great temptations of Jesus; this seems to be the meaning of one of the tests —the third and decisive one— that he faced in the desert during the preamble of his public activity (Mk 1,12s; Mt 4,8-10; Lc 4,1-13): these texts regarding the temptations constitute a tale, not a historical one, but rather a redactional and symbolic one, that wants to illustrate for us what stalked as the possibility of Jesus’s own consciousness going astray throughout his life. I’m speaking of the temptation of power. But with this crucial characteristic: the temptation of power in order to accomplish good deeds. It’s well-known that Israel awaited a political messiah, a warrior who was going to completely do away with the opprobrium and secular oppression of the country and its culture. The four canonical gospels explicitly indicate to us that all of Jesus’s close disciples thought, and they continued to believe it until the very moment of the passion, that Christ incarnated that political messianism, based on power and on the human triumph. After the miracle of the multiplication of bread (Mt 14,13-23; Mk 6,30-46; Jn 6,1-15), the enthusiastic multitude thought that Jesus was the awaited political messiah (Jn 6,4) and, in consequence, they wanted to proclaim him king. Jesus then retires “once again to the mountain, alone” (Jn 6,15). The disciples who identified with the popular enthusiasm didn’t want to lose the occasion for Christ to be proclaimed a political king. This is why both Matthew and Mark point out that Jesus had to “force them” (anagkáso) to get on the boat to leave that place (Mt 14,22; Mk 6,45).
That was the temptation I was referring to: the temptation of power. And it’s a temptation that, as I’ve said, can be clothed in a false consciousness: it is power, yes, but in order to transform it into a factor that multiplies good. And Jesus rejects that specific temptation from an impregnable conviction that he never ceased to explain to his closes followers, those he thought were particularly apt to understand it: the path to power and privilege leads one to keep a “reasonable” coexistence with the agents and factors that organize in this world the suffering and oppression of mankind. Society is not transformed from above (from power and fame) but rather from below (from the unarmed solidarity with those crucified throughout history) (Cf. Mt 16,22; Mk 8,33). From this conviction emerges an implacable denunciation of political power: “You know (...) that those who hold sway as rulers dominate nations as though they were their owners and the powerful impose their authority. This will not be the case amongst you, but rather if any of you want to grow you should become a servant to others” (Mk 10,42-43). And what also emerges is an enormous freedom facing him, facing power: when Jesus is told that Herod —who was the king of Galilee and thus the political chief of the region of Israel to which Jesus belonged— wanted to kill him (Lc 13,31) he tells them: “Go and tell that fox (...) that there is no room for a prophet to die outside Jerusalem” (Lc 13,32). In the Jewish culture of that time the “fox” was considered the animal that didn’t represent anything. Thus, it was as though he were saying: “Go and tell nobody...” And this was the king!
I’m not going to waste my possible reader’s time abounding the obvious: just as Jesus was a layman, not a priest or a professional theologian (as the so-called “lettered men” and scribes were) he didn’t want to be a caudillo. Despite his ascendance among the most impoverished masses of Israel he didn’t want to instrumentalize them with a political objective because for him God was not mediated by power, not any type of power, only by love (that prostituted but essential word). We all know what finally happened: he was assassinated as a “blasphemer” and “political criminal” by the civilian, military and religious authorities of his time. The masses he didn’t want to instrumentalize left him on his own. Completely alone, this man of unpronounceable innocence, tortured and executed as though he were a criminal and a dangerous revolutionary by institutional power, by the intellectual orthodoxy and their henchmen, had already warned his followers one day —those back then and those today—: “See how I’m sending you out as sheep among wolves: therefore be as cautious as snakes and as innocent as doves. But be careful with people, because they will take you to court, they will whip you in the synagogue and they will lead you in front of governors and kings for my cause; thus they will give testimony...” (Mt 10,16-18). Jesus did not live for the cross; when the dynamics of reality imposed it on him, he accepted it and assumed it, transforming it into an option of love, that is, an affirmation of life. This execution, this assassination carried out for religious and political reasons, that infamously crowned a life consumed by disinterested service to others, was left forever transformed into a forceful requisition, in the deepest and most intimate denunciation of any type of power, no matter how much it might try to be canonized.
From the Gospel we Christians inherit a radical suspicion regarding the pretensions of leadership, of important positions, of the supposedly majestic, dazzling aura that seems to surround political and social triumph. If anyone had any doubts whether president Chávez was a caudillo of the most rancid and sad Latin American lineage, observe what they want to do with his passage through history: Chávez ascending into the sky, Chávez enthroned in the altar of a chapel in the 23 de Enero zone of Caracas (called the “Chapel of San Hugo Chávez”), Chávez multiplied in stamps sold at the entrance of churches and plaster busts that, it’s been said, people seek out so they can pray to him in the intimacy of their home, Chávez the second Simón Bolívar, Chávez the new liberator, Chávez the Redeemer, Chávez the “Christ of the poor.” All this would be amusing if it weren’t tragic. Because it’s a matter of an inextricable mixture of magical credulousness and naiveté for many with a deification, a mythologizing, a sacralization orchestrated by those in power. Biblically speaking, it is simply said, an idolatry. From the Christian point of view, it doesn’t make sense. We Christians believe that there has only been, only is and only will be a single messiah. And a crucified messiah. And crucified means that the “utopian” (in the sense Ernst Bloch uses) radical brotherhood of human relations, which is the central tenet of Christianity, can only be realized from the “utopia” of the cross: the total failure implied by the last scream of Jesus’s agony, abandoned by one and all, and which expresses God’s solidarity with history’s humiliated and offended, not from the majesty of power that uses the poor as instruments in order to dominate them —turning them into objects of political marketing— but rather from a solidarity that is defenseless, forsaken and left out in the open air alongside them. The failure of the cross is a counterweight to the heroic-promethean image that we create of the messiah. It doesn’t display any epic traits. The death of Jesus was not that of Socrates, parsimoniously drinking hemlock, accompanied by disciples and friends. His was wrapped in signs of a profound fright: an authentic sense of being horrified by suffering, torture, solitude and death itself which inevitably also seemed to him like the cause and mission of his life.
That identification of Chávez and Christ, being an idolatry and not making sense, was propitiated in more than one aspect by Chávez himself. He never tired of proclaiming that he obeyed the “first and greatest socialist in history.” In vain people responded that this affirmation contained an unforgivable anachronism: Jesus was not a socialist just like he wasn’t an aviator: socialism implies a theory of political, social and economic organization dating from the 19th century, that is, a considerable temporal distance from Christ’s life. It was useless. Until the end of his existence Chávez continued to believe and proclaim this nonsense. As it’s also nonsense, but this time it’s an absurdity that is dangerous because of its political consequences, to affirm —as is being done now by the supposed emulator of the deceased president— that “socialism is the kingdom of God on earth.” Regarding this statement, the following precisions turns out to be necessary: that “utopian” dream (in the worst sense, the etymological one, of the word: “there is no such place”) is found in its own way in Plato’s Republic, in the visionaries of the Fifth Monarchy, in the Medieval apocalyptics, in the anabaptists, in the Puritan theocrats, in the religious sectors of the anarchist movement: all those who have not believed and don’t believe —I’m citing George Steiner almost from memory— in the constitutive fallibility of man, in the permanent imperfection of the mechanisms of power, in the presence of inhumanity and evil within man’s existential condition and his historical achievements. They have believed and believe that the “civitas Dei” should be built now on earth and that a certain fanatical rigor at the service of the revolutionary ideal is indispensable: from there to sustaining that the ends justify the means and that some dose of political terror becomes necessary to obtain the edenic objective of the suppression of all oppression, there’s no more than a step or two.
The Kingdom of God, considered biblically, is a reality whose plenitude is meta and transhistorical, when God, as Paul of Tarsus says,“is in all things.” It is the responsibility of us human beings to progressively and always partially or in an unfinished manner draw closer to that plenitude, organizing the dynamics of history in such a manner that it reach closer to it. Someone might not like the appellative Kingdom of God. Many years ago a friend told me that we Christians should speak, not of the Kingdom but of the Republic of God. To make things clear, I invite the reader to remember that the first poetry collection by Ramón Palomares is titled El reino [The Kingdom]. And the Kingdom of God is a mythopoetic designation to allude to a goal —the sovereignty of God as a fraternal house of human abandonment, a definitive house that is he himself made presence among us— and that indeed we should make an effort to begin constructing here and now, always and at every moment under the threat of those powers that, according to the Gospel of Lucas (22,25), “take away liberty and make themselves be called benefactors” and which are money and the political and religious powers. From the future that goal acts as a constant critical instance that interpolates and questions our always limited and partial achievements, impeding the history and society we build from not remaining open, convening us for the ontological appointment to which we have been called at birth: “It will dry the tears from your eyes. There will no longer be death nor shame nor weeping nor pain. All the ancient things have passed” (Ap 21,4).
To pretend that this ontological convocation will be realized by socialism constitutes, to say the least, a senseless act: “The Kingdom of God should be understood as the Kingdom of Man: this is the theology of totalitarian utopias.” (George Steiner)
Armando Rojas Guardia Venezuelan poet, critic and essayist who played a fundamental role in the foundation of the literary group Tráfico, and who has published numerous collections of poetry and essays, among them Del mismo amor ardiendo (1979), Yo que supe de la vieja herida (1985), Poemas de Quebrada de la Virgen (1985), Hacia la noche viva (1989), "La nada vigilante" (1994) and El esplendor y la espera (2000).
Translator’s note: Armando Rojas Guardia lived at the poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal’s spiritual community Solentiname in Nicaragua during the 1970s.
{ Armando Rojas Guardia, Prodavinci, 2 April 2013 }
3.19.2013
Cuando el libro solo sirve para apuntalar una mesa coja / Israel Centeno
When the Book Only Serves to Hold Up An Uneven Table
The State publishing houses, although they incorporated a few independent voices, became institutions of governmental propaganda
Hugo Chávez came to power 14 years ago with a political project that in the name of inclusion systematized the exclusion of anyone who did not enroll in the “revolutionary project.” This did not leave out the cultural spectrum. The period that preceded Chávez’s government, with all its mistakes that can be pointed out, specifically in the editorial sector, was diverse and inclusive. One could find the most plural currents of thought and the promotional and informational platform treated them with a transcendent vision.
In order to understand the topic of Venezuela, we must note that the country lives off its petroleum rent. The State monopolized, since before the Chávez era, the book industry along with many other things. What happens when the State comes undone in the government, or is mixed or fused into it? It begins to demand in exchange first solidarity and then unconditional allegiance to the political project incarnated by the government.
If it’s true that before Hugo Chávez the policies of the State could alienate the production and distribution of the book, since 1998 up to now, the state of the politics, that is, the ideology, propaganda and an excessively populist and authoritarian sense of Chávez’s project, demanded to subordinate any of these disciplines to the Bolivarian project.
In the name of the people’s inclusion the people were excluded from the possibility of contrasting an ample catalog, and of authors of being part of it and enriching it. The State publishing houses, while they kept up appearances by incorporating a few independent voices, created ideological strategies, made their production biased and turned themselves into institutions of governmental propaganda.
I have heard the argument that the book sector grew, that we now have a national printing press, a literary agency, a book distributor and an organization for the promotion of the book. With the return of the independence of powers and if a serious comptroller’s office were to look into these institutions, more corruption than benefits would be revealed.
The International Book Fair (FILVEN), which had seven editions before Chávez, and in which I had the honor to work, was impoverished in its offerings, year after year we saw it become a monochrome fair, similar to the one put on in Havana.
The prestigious Rómulo Gallegos literary prize maintained its quality, but a condition was added to the verdict: it’s preferable, underlined, that the author be someone from the left.
Many things survived despite it all, maybe we can glimpse a positive aspect. Some literary biennials were able to maintain their independence. It’s worth noting the Mariano Picón Salas Biennial in Mérida. Others were swept out of the country, like the José Rafael Pocaterra Biennial of Valencia. The Venezuelan author found himself forced to knock on the doors of publishing houses outside the country. Independent editorial projects that have had to struggle against the obstacles the governmental control of access to dollars has imposed: a lack of materials and higher printing costs.
Critical spaces were closed.
There were no critiques without consequences.
We could say that this inclusive project that ended up excluding the plurality of authors and readers who seek a universality of ideas had a positive effect: it made the artist and the author reflect on how corrosive absolute dependence on the State can be and it moved them, perhaps touching their core survival instinct, to go out into the world and struggle for a space beyond the official orbits, to put forth editorial projects and to reinvent themselves in order to stay afloat.
Despite the propaganda and the effect caused by the free distribution of multitudinous editions of certain classic works, today no one can affirm this wasn’t populist squandering: those books ended up serving the most unusual functions without promoting reading. For the promotion of reading, one needs a coherent strategy that is sustained over time, alongside the inclusion of the amplitude of signifiers of human thought.
During these 14 years we saw revenge, an exhibition of resentments, a great deal of noise and “revolutionary” propaganda.
Israel Centeno (Caracas, 1958) is a novelist and editor. He has published the novel Hilo de cometa (Barcelona: Editorial Periférica).
{ Israel Centeno, El País, 13 March 2013 }
The State publishing houses, although they incorporated a few independent voices, became institutions of governmental propaganda
Hugo Chávez came to power 14 years ago with a political project that in the name of inclusion systematized the exclusion of anyone who did not enroll in the “revolutionary project.” This did not leave out the cultural spectrum. The period that preceded Chávez’s government, with all its mistakes that can be pointed out, specifically in the editorial sector, was diverse and inclusive. One could find the most plural currents of thought and the promotional and informational platform treated them with a transcendent vision.
In order to understand the topic of Venezuela, we must note that the country lives off its petroleum rent. The State monopolized, since before the Chávez era, the book industry along with many other things. What happens when the State comes undone in the government, or is mixed or fused into it? It begins to demand in exchange first solidarity and then unconditional allegiance to the political project incarnated by the government.
If it’s true that before Hugo Chávez the policies of the State could alienate the production and distribution of the book, since 1998 up to now, the state of the politics, that is, the ideology, propaganda and an excessively populist and authoritarian sense of Chávez’s project, demanded to subordinate any of these disciplines to the Bolivarian project.
In the name of the people’s inclusion the people were excluded from the possibility of contrasting an ample catalog, and of authors of being part of it and enriching it. The State publishing houses, while they kept up appearances by incorporating a few independent voices, created ideological strategies, made their production biased and turned themselves into institutions of governmental propaganda.
I have heard the argument that the book sector grew, that we now have a national printing press, a literary agency, a book distributor and an organization for the promotion of the book. With the return of the independence of powers and if a serious comptroller’s office were to look into these institutions, more corruption than benefits would be revealed.
The International Book Fair (FILVEN), which had seven editions before Chávez, and in which I had the honor to work, was impoverished in its offerings, year after year we saw it become a monochrome fair, similar to the one put on in Havana.
The prestigious Rómulo Gallegos literary prize maintained its quality, but a condition was added to the verdict: it’s preferable, underlined, that the author be someone from the left.
Many things survived despite it all, maybe we can glimpse a positive aspect. Some literary biennials were able to maintain their independence. It’s worth noting the Mariano Picón Salas Biennial in Mérida. Others were swept out of the country, like the José Rafael Pocaterra Biennial of Valencia. The Venezuelan author found himself forced to knock on the doors of publishing houses outside the country. Independent editorial projects that have had to struggle against the obstacles the governmental control of access to dollars has imposed: a lack of materials and higher printing costs.
Critical spaces were closed.
There were no critiques without consequences.
We could say that this inclusive project that ended up excluding the plurality of authors and readers who seek a universality of ideas had a positive effect: it made the artist and the author reflect on how corrosive absolute dependence on the State can be and it moved them, perhaps touching their core survival instinct, to go out into the world and struggle for a space beyond the official orbits, to put forth editorial projects and to reinvent themselves in order to stay afloat.
Despite the propaganda and the effect caused by the free distribution of multitudinous editions of certain classic works, today no one can affirm this wasn’t populist squandering: those books ended up serving the most unusual functions without promoting reading. For the promotion of reading, one needs a coherent strategy that is sustained over time, alongside the inclusion of the amplitude of signifiers of human thought.
During these 14 years we saw revenge, an exhibition of resentments, a great deal of noise and “revolutionary” propaganda.
Israel Centeno (Caracas, 1958) is a novelist and editor. He has published the novel Hilo de cometa (Barcelona: Editorial Periférica).
{ Israel Centeno, El País, 13 March 2013 }
3.14.2013
¿Qué literatura tras Chávez? / Gustavo Guerrero
What Literature After Chávez?
A couple days ago, Beatriz Lecumberri, the author of La revolución sentimental (2012) —undoubtedly one of the fairest and best informed works of journalism on Venezuela’s recent history— wrote in this same newspaper: “Chávez, over the years, also continued to leave an important part of the citizenry outside his project for the country. With me or against me. And political exclusion substituted social exclusion.”
Literature has not been an exception to these discriminatory practices. Today there is an abundance of testimonies of the gap they have created among many writers and people within the world of letters. More so considering that, before the arrival of Chávez to power, the world of Venezuelan literature, as visitors from abroad would notice with surprise, was a very small space, civil and familiar. Under the protective shade of our oil-producing State, the struggles for symbolic capital were basically resolved through aesthetic positioning and the distribution of administrative positions and national prizes, without the ideological positions of individuals disturbing a certain climate of respect and cordiality. Many of the current directors of Chavista cultural institutions and many of their current opponents were thus able to share, for many years, identical benefits and they enjoyed relatively balanced dealings.
The radical nature of how things change starting in 1998 modifies within a few years this relatively strange landscape in Latin America. Towards 2006, the novelist Ana Teresa Torres can’t avoid confirming it: “Today, at the principal activities organized by the government (writers conferences, book fairs, poetry festivals) and the international events with official invitations for Venezuela, the only required writers are ones aligned with the government, almost always the ones who form part of the bureaucratic payroll. Opposition writers publicly denounce that their participation has been excluded; others, the majority, exclude themselves voluntarily and their absence is notorious in the events and celebrations of government-aligned writers (and vice-versa). National prizes tend to orbit suspiciously among the unconditional ones...”
I don’t think that, in the seven years that separate us from the Torres citation, the discriminatory drift has ceased or diminished. But one of the collateral effects it has produced, has been to push many authors to go in search of other instances of intellectual and literary legitimation and, in particular, that decisive instance of readers. As opposed to what would happen about 20 or 30 years ago, today their numbers have increased with the reading campaigns and moreover today their interest continues to grow for everything that Venezuelan literature might be able to say about the country. Not in vain have some spoken of, until about two years ago, a small fiction boom that was related to the double conjunction highlighted by the development of the editorial market and the educational policies of the government. Authors such as Alberto Barrera Tyszka, Federico Vegas or Francisco Suniaga, for example, today enjoy en independence that allows them the dissemination of their novels among an important group of readers and they are not subject, like others, to only depending on the institutional acknowledgment of the cultural apparatus of the State.
The few attempts that have been made up until now to reunify the field and reconcile the writers from both factions have been unsuccessful. Thus, the II Internacional Encounter of Fiction Writers in Venezuela organized by the Ministry of Popular Power for Culture last November ended with an exchange of accusations and an open confrontation between opposition novelists, such as Gisela Kozak, and Chavista figures, such as Carlos Noguera and Humberto Mata.
However, no one is unaware that sports and culture have traditionally been privileged circles for minimizing differences and negotiating consensus in situations of extreme political polarization. If the fervor for the national soccer team, the Vinotinto, continues to be one of the few factors capable of gathering Venezuelans together, it isn’t naive to think that sooner or later literature might be able to open one or another space for dialogue. Because there is nothing more urgent in a divided country, full of hatred and where weapons circulate in large quantities.
A la pregunta ¿qué literatura después de Chávez?, la respuesta, en la coyuntura actual, es, pues, una que busque afanosamente las palabras, las narrativas y los símbolos que nos devuelvan a todos el respeto, la sensatez, la tolerancia y el espíritu crítico; una que cree las condiciones mínimas para restablecer los vínculos comunitarios en una nación hecha pedazos.
To the question “What literature after Chávez?”, the answer, at the current juncture, the answer is one that might laboriously seek the words, the narratives and the symbols in order to give us back respect, common sense, tolerance and the critical spirit; one that creates the minimal conditions for reestablishing community ties in a nation that has been torn to pieces.
Gustavo Guerrero is Editorial Consultant for Latin America at the publishing house Gallimard in Paris.
{ Gustavo Guerrero, El País, 13 March 2013 }
Venezuelan citizens wait to receive a free copy of Don Quixote, Caracas, 2005./EFE
A couple days ago, Beatriz Lecumberri, the author of La revolución sentimental (2012) —undoubtedly one of the fairest and best informed works of journalism on Venezuela’s recent history— wrote in this same newspaper: “Chávez, over the years, also continued to leave an important part of the citizenry outside his project for the country. With me or against me. And political exclusion substituted social exclusion.”
Literature has not been an exception to these discriminatory practices. Today there is an abundance of testimonies of the gap they have created among many writers and people within the world of letters. More so considering that, before the arrival of Chávez to power, the world of Venezuelan literature, as visitors from abroad would notice with surprise, was a very small space, civil and familiar. Under the protective shade of our oil-producing State, the struggles for symbolic capital were basically resolved through aesthetic positioning and the distribution of administrative positions and national prizes, without the ideological positions of individuals disturbing a certain climate of respect and cordiality. Many of the current directors of Chavista cultural institutions and many of their current opponents were thus able to share, for many years, identical benefits and they enjoyed relatively balanced dealings.
The radical nature of how things change starting in 1998 modifies within a few years this relatively strange landscape in Latin America. Towards 2006, the novelist Ana Teresa Torres can’t avoid confirming it: “Today, at the principal activities organized by the government (writers conferences, book fairs, poetry festivals) and the international events with official invitations for Venezuela, the only required writers are ones aligned with the government, almost always the ones who form part of the bureaucratic payroll. Opposition writers publicly denounce that their participation has been excluded; others, the majority, exclude themselves voluntarily and their absence is notorious in the events and celebrations of government-aligned writers (and vice-versa). National prizes tend to orbit suspiciously among the unconditional ones...”
I don’t think that, in the seven years that separate us from the Torres citation, the discriminatory drift has ceased or diminished. But one of the collateral effects it has produced, has been to push many authors to go in search of other instances of intellectual and literary legitimation and, in particular, that decisive instance of readers. As opposed to what would happen about 20 or 30 years ago, today their numbers have increased with the reading campaigns and moreover today their interest continues to grow for everything that Venezuelan literature might be able to say about the country. Not in vain have some spoken of, until about two years ago, a small fiction boom that was related to the double conjunction highlighted by the development of the editorial market and the educational policies of the government. Authors such as Alberto Barrera Tyszka, Federico Vegas or Francisco Suniaga, for example, today enjoy en independence that allows them the dissemination of their novels among an important group of readers and they are not subject, like others, to only depending on the institutional acknowledgment of the cultural apparatus of the State.
The few attempts that have been made up until now to reunify the field and reconcile the writers from both factions have been unsuccessful. Thus, the II Internacional Encounter of Fiction Writers in Venezuela organized by the Ministry of Popular Power for Culture last November ended with an exchange of accusations and an open confrontation between opposition novelists, such as Gisela Kozak, and Chavista figures, such as Carlos Noguera and Humberto Mata.
However, no one is unaware that sports and culture have traditionally been privileged circles for minimizing differences and negotiating consensus in situations of extreme political polarization. If the fervor for the national soccer team, the Vinotinto, continues to be one of the few factors capable of gathering Venezuelans together, it isn’t naive to think that sooner or later literature might be able to open one or another space for dialogue. Because there is nothing more urgent in a divided country, full of hatred and where weapons circulate in large quantities.
A la pregunta ¿qué literatura después de Chávez?, la respuesta, en la coyuntura actual, es, pues, una que busque afanosamente las palabras, las narrativas y los símbolos que nos devuelvan a todos el respeto, la sensatez, la tolerancia y el espíritu crítico; una que cree las condiciones mínimas para restablecer los vínculos comunitarios en una nación hecha pedazos.
To the question “What literature after Chávez?”, the answer, at the current juncture, the answer is one that might laboriously seek the words, the narratives and the symbols in order to give us back respect, common sense, tolerance and the critical spirit; one that creates the minimal conditions for reestablishing community ties in a nation that has been torn to pieces.
Gustavo Guerrero is Editorial Consultant for Latin America at the publishing house Gallimard in Paris.
{ Gustavo Guerrero, El País, 13 March 2013 }
3.10.2013
La violencia que somos / José Delpino
Our Intrinsic Violence
Are we keyboard citizens? Or citizens made of slogans? I write words in a republic made of air founded in a plague. Of people who know how to get away with things. Standing tall and completely lost. Exalted. A Rafael Cadenas, less Zen, more Tabla Redonda than the one today, might have told us we are snake eaters. I don’t know, but the list of people I love and fear —and I’m not referring to any specific social class, nor to any political faction as a source of that fear—, the list of those people I can’t distance myself from, doesn’t give me a sum of homeland, nor of the people or anything. Despite that, their tangible presence is not diminished and it’s not as though there aren’t rivers of consciousness that move through their ruptures.
Maybe I’m mistaken: I don’t feel optimistic. I hope I’m wrong, but this is a country of numerary strangers. And yes, sometimes the sensation of a mass joined together that runs through it is emotive, exalted. Yesterday the 6th of March I saw it, I walked through it, I tried to become a part of it, I was successful to a certain point, I was able to enter its endless preserve of emotions, consciousnesses and slogans. But I remained more or less silent. Something very big changed in Venezuela and I don’t know yet what the 5th and 6th of March mean yet amid this process I’m living alongside all of you since my childhood, since the late 1980s, to be exact. I can’t deny it, something really big changed in Venezuela. We aren’t in 1989 anymore, nor in 1999, but eventually, no matter who wins the upcoming elections, I don’t think we’re going to be left in the hands of responsible politicians, ones prepared for the mountain of sweat this country requires. I hope I hope I’m mistaken again and these lines are a series of pessimistic errors. I feel somber but also moved, upset. I hope we never embalm these days and that from them we understand something more than intelligent cynicism and wild and visceral slogans.
There’s so much day to day work to be done in this place, in this we insist on calling homeland or country, or whatever it might be, and not leave what must be done in no one’s hands; what must be done but beyond the bubbles, beyond what we naively call “politics,” further on, toward an encounter with various possible and strictly necessary “us” (and “them”) that we have yet to conceive. Possible “us” that we don’t imagine as so pure, dear compatriots of the absent homeland; and at least that way, I feel it’s absent, my unknown brothers from all factions. To the degree that we understand that politics is everything we might be able to survive as a country, as a homeland. Politics is to act in everything but it’s not just emotion and slogans, nor is it the technocracy of elites, intellectual hyperawareness, or delivery benefactor State.
Chávez was, Chávez is a necessary wound, though I don’t plan on idolizing him, nor did I ever, nor will I ever. We have to understand that, I think. And I know that I sound dogmatic, but I’d wager everything on that phrase. Chávez was, Chávez is a necessary wound. A living wound. Highly beloved by many. But yes, also, precisely because that wound is something living and being here among us, lovers or detractors, distanced, impassioned or ill-gotten opportunists, we have to understand that life and politics are more than just leaders who save us from something —or who protect us for altruistic purposes—. My syntax is fucked up writing this down, because it hurts me. I have to correct these lines over and over. The hurdles insist, even though I “correct them.” Or maybe they’re visible. The slogans cover them up pretty effectively: the errors, the hurdles and, finally, the disgraceful things. Chávez’s death hurt me and still does, and I was with the people who follow him (and others who don’t) yesterday the 6th of March in the street around Los Ilustres. And I was there and it hurts, not because I follow Chávez, or idolize him or anything like that, but because all of this from our recent history (1989-2013) has been since his arrival and just a little bit before that a necessary wound, a ritual violence —surprisingly contained considering what it could have been—, a ritual violence over a sick nation, so sick. Chávez is in a certain manner a manifestation of that wound. I don’t cry for him but it hurts me, and if had hate —which he did—, I don’t plan on repaying it now with more hate. I prefer to repay it, and collect, with other actions that have nothing to do with hate, but neither with idolatry. I don’t think I’m better because of that, but I think it’s necessary and it comes out like that. I never hated the guy. At least not completely, not without profound doubts.
I can’t think all this in any other way. At least now: the death of Chávez and the history that marks backwards.
My face is sunburnt from spending March 6th on the street. I was with Oriette, it was her idea to go, not mine. I hadn’t thought about it. I wanted to remain on the margins, but she insisted, I’ll never know exactly why. It was like an instinct and I decided to. I ended up appropriating her idea for myself during that transit through the streets as soon as we head there. I don’t regret trying to be a part of the goodbye ritual or the birth or whatever so many have called it. Chávez’s death hurt me and in that measure I join in mourning with those who love him, without expecting them to love me. I don’t love Chávez. I live him like a country’s wound, a necessary wound. That is, not as a necessary caudillo. There’s a difference. Chávez wasn’t just a caudillo or an authoritarian or charismatic leader. He was also something else.
My face is sunburnt and that reminds me that I’m not sure if we’ve understood that we’re a country crossed by violence within and from all of us, and that we have to see how we assume this so that it won’t explode soon. We’ve grown in number by many, and in other ways, under the protection of petroleum since the beginning of the 20th century: a token played with a great deal of sweat, much hard work and blood and bone sacrifices —there you have my deceased grandfathers who worked so hard for the petroleum industry, one in the Amuay refinery, the other in a towboat at the Lagoven refinery—. Petroleum has also been a token played with great improvisations and excessive confidence placed on infinity, with excessive looting. One of my grandfathers, the one on the boat, also had sunburnt, tanned, forever tanned skin. Under the protection of petroleum we have postponed violence many times, but it’s always been there, in all these generations that precede us.
Chávez ritualized the violence and the tragedy of a sick country, of a country that has outgrown the clothes it ordered for itself. (We sometimes forget he was a professional from the Military Academy, an officer, sown by this era.) Chávez ritualized the violence and the tragedy of a sick country. Chávez made it a voice, that tragedy and that which day by day was more excluded. He gave it a meaning and he contained it. (It would also be good to think about what president Rafael Caldera did.) When I think like that I don’t forget that in these years there has been a great deal of physical violence. Many deaths. Many bullets. Many criminals. But I think you’d have to be crazy to blame Chávez for all those deaths. Let’s not fool ourselves regarding an extremely complex situation. Think about it. And it’s true, one can’t simply forget all the retaliations, the black lists, the persecutions, the insistence on not understanding the other as anything beyond a ghost enemy. The other faction, to which I belong, also has an account. Let others say if I participate in it.
It hurts me that he’s died, with all his faults, his great errors. Maybe he could have helped a little more in that ritual task that I’m talking about; as president or whatever his role might have been. I think his life was the best option. But he’s gone. Some people hoped for his death, we can’t hide that fact, but I wish Chávez had beat that cancer. Today some people celebrate. They are naive, and quite sadly naive. Let’s not create false ideas. I’m sure (and I say it with conviction) that the majority of those of us who aren’t with Chávez are disgusted by that notion of going around hoping someone dies. I don’t want hate to be repaid with hate, but I don’t want to turn the other cheek. The Chavista brothers, their leaders, should think too: the millions, I repeat, the millions of us who aren’t with Chávez are something more complex than what some people want to believe, or make others believe. We’re much more than knaves of the empire or a traitorous mush. That’s all a false specter to avoid looking at what’s right in front of you. You should take advantage of these days to think about it, Chavista brothers: what is the collective image of us that you’re going to create for these years? Are you simply going to look through slogans at those millions of us who don’t follow Chávez and don’t idolize him, just because you are millions? There are hatreds among you as well. Do you plan on justifying them all with a clean moral wand?
Yes. Chávez’s death hurt me. His agony hurt me. And I join you in mourning. He’s gone. His laid out body can no longer return, nor his mind or ritual cunning to be truly present among us. His particular and unrepeatable ritual violence over us cannot return. And we, all of us who remain here while we can, what will we do? What do we want to do with the country he leaves us and with our innate violence. The more we pronounce from all corners and factions (from all corners?), separately, the word “unity,” what I notice the most is an immense generalized obstacle against meeting and knowing about the other, the different one; I’m not a judge, nor am I a leader. But if that’s all we do, you should know we’re fucked, fellow citizens from both factions. This matter of national unity is laughable but also frightening, suspicious, paranoid. It’s not a matter of forgetting our differences, our irreconcilable points, the skirmish in order to be a country. We will have to think deeply about our innate violence.
If we don’t move beyond the slogan at the tip of our nose, the illusion of saving the world, and if we don’t escape the precariousness of the locks and gates, or from the glance over our shoulder toward the one we might consider inferior or a spoiled brat, none of that will save this petroleum mine, this massive quantity of drinking water that we are, this vast earth of exalted numeraries, more violent that we’re willing to believe ourselves. Nothing will save us. Nor can we remain expectant, repeating our usual gestures, watching TV, writing on these networks and praying to the god of the State or the vote, or of cynicism, or of the easy chair. We need to have the new elections, but no matter who wins they won’t save us.
We have to exist as a collective, as collectives, strong and receptive in our differences and our efforts, without stupidly pretending to annul them with a utopian unity, we have to exist well above the “politicians” and the leaders fate has given us, that so much history has left us in its wake, on the streets. They won’t really make this thing walk. It’s the work of ants, the politics of one brick at a time, and the daily encounter with difference that can create something good for the years ahead and to serve as a ground and a demand against so many leaders who are willing to lose wander off. The years ahead will be hard, we should know. If we aren’t strong and don’t acquire a consciousness of bricks, and ants and streets, then reds, blues, yellows, whites or blacks, mature or not, blinded by our own supposed glorified virtue, or naive believers in false freedom and tolerance, what we’ll end up doing is selling off not a country but an oil field of a country to the first person who walks by, with treaties, accounts and investments, believing in stories of progress or stories of anti-imperialist slogans. Let’s not be foolish, please. A country can be sold in many ways. And we can’t pretend we don’t know this in the meantime. And we have been experts in selling it off throughout our history. In selling many things. Violence won’t save us from selling off this desired earth that we are, full of numerary people.
Miguel (my father), Rita (my mother), Gustavo, Ernesto, Eduardo, Camilo and many others I know, who followed and follow Chávez, are my brothers on this earth we were given, they have first and last names and they aren’t something abstract; the people I was with on the street today —some of them knew that Oriette and I weren’t Chavistas, they realized it—, none of them are an abstract people. All of them, even though we might not ever agree, are my brothers. (I cling to that word though it might be precarious.) I don’t know if we’ll be able to escape even from a certain verbal violence, or from certain partial violence, but they’re my brothers. I want to cling to that. Not agreeing can also be a motor and a wealth, if we know how to take advantage of it: political systems of factions and parties in “consensus” can sometimes be the most sterile thing in the world.
We have to be different, but without glorifying ourselves. I write this at dawn on March 7th and I hope the future dawns will be good; and not because violence might wake us at dawn. The worst thing that could happen to us is to turn the one who’s different into a spectral enemy. Specters can number in the millions. And to stand on the ground. Ideas, surely, and perhaps happily they definitely won’t die.
{ José Delpino, Autopista Inmóvil, 7 March 2013 }
Are we keyboard citizens? Or citizens made of slogans? I write words in a republic made of air founded in a plague. Of people who know how to get away with things. Standing tall and completely lost. Exalted. A Rafael Cadenas, less Zen, more Tabla Redonda than the one today, might have told us we are snake eaters. I don’t know, but the list of people I love and fear —and I’m not referring to any specific social class, nor to any political faction as a source of that fear—, the list of those people I can’t distance myself from, doesn’t give me a sum of homeland, nor of the people or anything. Despite that, their tangible presence is not diminished and it’s not as though there aren’t rivers of consciousness that move through their ruptures.
Maybe I’m mistaken: I don’t feel optimistic. I hope I’m wrong, but this is a country of numerary strangers. And yes, sometimes the sensation of a mass joined together that runs through it is emotive, exalted. Yesterday the 6th of March I saw it, I walked through it, I tried to become a part of it, I was successful to a certain point, I was able to enter its endless preserve of emotions, consciousnesses and slogans. But I remained more or less silent. Something very big changed in Venezuela and I don’t know yet what the 5th and 6th of March mean yet amid this process I’m living alongside all of you since my childhood, since the late 1980s, to be exact. I can’t deny it, something really big changed in Venezuela. We aren’t in 1989 anymore, nor in 1999, but eventually, no matter who wins the upcoming elections, I don’t think we’re going to be left in the hands of responsible politicians, ones prepared for the mountain of sweat this country requires. I hope I hope I’m mistaken again and these lines are a series of pessimistic errors. I feel somber but also moved, upset. I hope we never embalm these days and that from them we understand something more than intelligent cynicism and wild and visceral slogans.
There’s so much day to day work to be done in this place, in this we insist on calling homeland or country, or whatever it might be, and not leave what must be done in no one’s hands; what must be done but beyond the bubbles, beyond what we naively call “politics,” further on, toward an encounter with various possible and strictly necessary “us” (and “them”) that we have yet to conceive. Possible “us” that we don’t imagine as so pure, dear compatriots of the absent homeland; and at least that way, I feel it’s absent, my unknown brothers from all factions. To the degree that we understand that politics is everything we might be able to survive as a country, as a homeland. Politics is to act in everything but it’s not just emotion and slogans, nor is it the technocracy of elites, intellectual hyperawareness, or delivery benefactor State.
Chávez was, Chávez is a necessary wound, though I don’t plan on idolizing him, nor did I ever, nor will I ever. We have to understand that, I think. And I know that I sound dogmatic, but I’d wager everything on that phrase. Chávez was, Chávez is a necessary wound. A living wound. Highly beloved by many. But yes, also, precisely because that wound is something living and being here among us, lovers or detractors, distanced, impassioned or ill-gotten opportunists, we have to understand that life and politics are more than just leaders who save us from something —or who protect us for altruistic purposes—. My syntax is fucked up writing this down, because it hurts me. I have to correct these lines over and over. The hurdles insist, even though I “correct them.” Or maybe they’re visible. The slogans cover them up pretty effectively: the errors, the hurdles and, finally, the disgraceful things. Chávez’s death hurt me and still does, and I was with the people who follow him (and others who don’t) yesterday the 6th of March in the street around Los Ilustres. And I was there and it hurts, not because I follow Chávez, or idolize him or anything like that, but because all of this from our recent history (1989-2013) has been since his arrival and just a little bit before that a necessary wound, a ritual violence —surprisingly contained considering what it could have been—, a ritual violence over a sick nation, so sick. Chávez is in a certain manner a manifestation of that wound. I don’t cry for him but it hurts me, and if had hate —which he did—, I don’t plan on repaying it now with more hate. I prefer to repay it, and collect, with other actions that have nothing to do with hate, but neither with idolatry. I don’t think I’m better because of that, but I think it’s necessary and it comes out like that. I never hated the guy. At least not completely, not without profound doubts.
I can’t think all this in any other way. At least now: the death of Chávez and the history that marks backwards.
My face is sunburnt from spending March 6th on the street. I was with Oriette, it was her idea to go, not mine. I hadn’t thought about it. I wanted to remain on the margins, but she insisted, I’ll never know exactly why. It was like an instinct and I decided to. I ended up appropriating her idea for myself during that transit through the streets as soon as we head there. I don’t regret trying to be a part of the goodbye ritual or the birth or whatever so many have called it. Chávez’s death hurt me and in that measure I join in mourning with those who love him, without expecting them to love me. I don’t love Chávez. I live him like a country’s wound, a necessary wound. That is, not as a necessary caudillo. There’s a difference. Chávez wasn’t just a caudillo or an authoritarian or charismatic leader. He was also something else.
My face is sunburnt and that reminds me that I’m not sure if we’ve understood that we’re a country crossed by violence within and from all of us, and that we have to see how we assume this so that it won’t explode soon. We’ve grown in number by many, and in other ways, under the protection of petroleum since the beginning of the 20th century: a token played with a great deal of sweat, much hard work and blood and bone sacrifices —there you have my deceased grandfathers who worked so hard for the petroleum industry, one in the Amuay refinery, the other in a towboat at the Lagoven refinery—. Petroleum has also been a token played with great improvisations and excessive confidence placed on infinity, with excessive looting. One of my grandfathers, the one on the boat, also had sunburnt, tanned, forever tanned skin. Under the protection of petroleum we have postponed violence many times, but it’s always been there, in all these generations that precede us.
Chávez ritualized the violence and the tragedy of a sick country, of a country that has outgrown the clothes it ordered for itself. (We sometimes forget he was a professional from the Military Academy, an officer, sown by this era.) Chávez ritualized the violence and the tragedy of a sick country. Chávez made it a voice, that tragedy and that which day by day was more excluded. He gave it a meaning and he contained it. (It would also be good to think about what president Rafael Caldera did.) When I think like that I don’t forget that in these years there has been a great deal of physical violence. Many deaths. Many bullets. Many criminals. But I think you’d have to be crazy to blame Chávez for all those deaths. Let’s not fool ourselves regarding an extremely complex situation. Think about it. And it’s true, one can’t simply forget all the retaliations, the black lists, the persecutions, the insistence on not understanding the other as anything beyond a ghost enemy. The other faction, to which I belong, also has an account. Let others say if I participate in it.
It hurts me that he’s died, with all his faults, his great errors. Maybe he could have helped a little more in that ritual task that I’m talking about; as president or whatever his role might have been. I think his life was the best option. But he’s gone. Some people hoped for his death, we can’t hide that fact, but I wish Chávez had beat that cancer. Today some people celebrate. They are naive, and quite sadly naive. Let’s not create false ideas. I’m sure (and I say it with conviction) that the majority of those of us who aren’t with Chávez are disgusted by that notion of going around hoping someone dies. I don’t want hate to be repaid with hate, but I don’t want to turn the other cheek. The Chavista brothers, their leaders, should think too: the millions, I repeat, the millions of us who aren’t with Chávez are something more complex than what some people want to believe, or make others believe. We’re much more than knaves of the empire or a traitorous mush. That’s all a false specter to avoid looking at what’s right in front of you. You should take advantage of these days to think about it, Chavista brothers: what is the collective image of us that you’re going to create for these years? Are you simply going to look through slogans at those millions of us who don’t follow Chávez and don’t idolize him, just because you are millions? There are hatreds among you as well. Do you plan on justifying them all with a clean moral wand?
Yes. Chávez’s death hurt me. His agony hurt me. And I join you in mourning. He’s gone. His laid out body can no longer return, nor his mind or ritual cunning to be truly present among us. His particular and unrepeatable ritual violence over us cannot return. And we, all of us who remain here while we can, what will we do? What do we want to do with the country he leaves us and with our innate violence. The more we pronounce from all corners and factions (from all corners?), separately, the word “unity,” what I notice the most is an immense generalized obstacle against meeting and knowing about the other, the different one; I’m not a judge, nor am I a leader. But if that’s all we do, you should know we’re fucked, fellow citizens from both factions. This matter of national unity is laughable but also frightening, suspicious, paranoid. It’s not a matter of forgetting our differences, our irreconcilable points, the skirmish in order to be a country. We will have to think deeply about our innate violence.
If we don’t move beyond the slogan at the tip of our nose, the illusion of saving the world, and if we don’t escape the precariousness of the locks and gates, or from the glance over our shoulder toward the one we might consider inferior or a spoiled brat, none of that will save this petroleum mine, this massive quantity of drinking water that we are, this vast earth of exalted numeraries, more violent that we’re willing to believe ourselves. Nothing will save us. Nor can we remain expectant, repeating our usual gestures, watching TV, writing on these networks and praying to the god of the State or the vote, or of cynicism, or of the easy chair. We need to have the new elections, but no matter who wins they won’t save us.
We have to exist as a collective, as collectives, strong and receptive in our differences and our efforts, without stupidly pretending to annul them with a utopian unity, we have to exist well above the “politicians” and the leaders fate has given us, that so much history has left us in its wake, on the streets. They won’t really make this thing walk. It’s the work of ants, the politics of one brick at a time, and the daily encounter with difference that can create something good for the years ahead and to serve as a ground and a demand against so many leaders who are willing to lose wander off. The years ahead will be hard, we should know. If we aren’t strong and don’t acquire a consciousness of bricks, and ants and streets, then reds, blues, yellows, whites or blacks, mature or not, blinded by our own supposed glorified virtue, or naive believers in false freedom and tolerance, what we’ll end up doing is selling off not a country but an oil field of a country to the first person who walks by, with treaties, accounts and investments, believing in stories of progress or stories of anti-imperialist slogans. Let’s not be foolish, please. A country can be sold in many ways. And we can’t pretend we don’t know this in the meantime. And we have been experts in selling it off throughout our history. In selling many things. Violence won’t save us from selling off this desired earth that we are, full of numerary people.
Miguel (my father), Rita (my mother), Gustavo, Ernesto, Eduardo, Camilo and many others I know, who followed and follow Chávez, are my brothers on this earth we were given, they have first and last names and they aren’t something abstract; the people I was with on the street today —some of them knew that Oriette and I weren’t Chavistas, they realized it—, none of them are an abstract people. All of them, even though we might not ever agree, are my brothers. (I cling to that word though it might be precarious.) I don’t know if we’ll be able to escape even from a certain verbal violence, or from certain partial violence, but they’re my brothers. I want to cling to that. Not agreeing can also be a motor and a wealth, if we know how to take advantage of it: political systems of factions and parties in “consensus” can sometimes be the most sterile thing in the world.
We have to be different, but without glorifying ourselves. I write this at dawn on March 7th and I hope the future dawns will be good; and not because violence might wake us at dawn. The worst thing that could happen to us is to turn the one who’s different into a spectral enemy. Specters can number in the millions. And to stand on the ground. Ideas, surely, and perhaps happily they definitely won’t die.
{ José Delpino, Autopista Inmóvil, 7 March 2013 }
2.18.2013
Épica para el más acá / Israel Centeno
An Epic for the Here and Now
The not-dead comandante will ascend to immortality, he will be seated beside the Liberator father and will govern the earth. His kingdom was never of this world.
The Great Question
From the moment when Hugo Chávez established his conspiratorial lodge under the shadow of the mythical samán tree in Güere, he plotted to articulate and make the assault on power effective, he already had the consciousness of a founder of religions: he needed to go beyond it and transcend himself in the direction of the eternal exercise of power by means of faith.
Why is it that the lieutenant colonel comandante and only and unquestionable leader of the Bolivarian revolution, when he had before him the medical reports that revealed that his life expectancy was very limited, why didn’t he retire to seek peace and intimacy in his final months, saving his country and the people he loves so much, not just the confusion, but more division and the deepening of hatreds, instead of an onerous and useless electoral campaign that was won for the benefit of his death?
What matters is the people and Hugo Chávez has always said that he is the people. There is no room for any other interpretation. His glory and triumph over death are the triumph of the disinherited people, etcetera.
The president’s final electoral campaign had as its objective to reaffirm himself as a power that he would continue to wield in any manner as long as he lived, a matter already guaranteed by the collapse of State institutions and the submission of all public powers.
Viviremos
This was the exclamative slogan of his final campaign. Insensitivity? No, subtlety. We will live, despite death. After death. Here and now or beyond, We Will Live.
That’s what it was about.
Subtlety.
The core of the discourse of he who now dilates his step toward glory has been expressed at every moment by the immortality of his project, in other words in He himself. His discourse is religious and the huge audience of his telenovela required sacrifice, passion and even death.
Right now, Chávez the heart of the people, agonizes.
Or he’s dying.
Or he’s already dead.
Or he returns ready for the altars.
The Dogma of Consubstantiation
In Venezuela the truth doesn’t exist, dogmas of faith (and speculations) exist.
The medical reports emitted by bureaucrats have to be believed as dogmas of faith (and at the same time as speculations, a portal towards another chapter of a metaphysical telenovela).
But something is rotten in that Cuban sea of happiness. A dense fog has covered the presidential entourage in the tropics, with circles corrupted by counter-information and military intelligence, geopolitics, the destiny of all the possible etceteras are mixed in the aseptic rooms of a bunker transformed into an intensive care unit. The caudillo, intubated or not, no longer belongs to himself, now he is led by his political engineers toward the consummation of his epic. The light at the end of the tunnel appears: there’s life after death. Keyword: Viviremos.
The personal project, after drinking from the cup at his Gethsemane, moves at the speed of a cruise ship amidst a Cuban Venezuelan melodrama, the avatar begins to feel the omnipresence of his new divine reality. He will suspend his life above the absence of truth hanging in limbo and when he crosses that limbo he will become a myth. He is about to create wonders. That could make him feel very happy, notes one of his scriptwriters.
It’s been hard work. Two years of diligently weaving the plot toward the consubstantiation of Chávez the son into father Bolívar: Chavismo is a religion and Chávez is the God incarnate, who will rise to sit beside the eternal Bolívar. He would have told Fidel: “Father, take this cup from me.” Oh, sorry. It was to Bolívar.
All of this seems to have been created by the mad mind of a radio soap opera scriptwriter from the nineteen-fifties, an ambitious task of political engineering insistent on the execution of fatality’s script, momentum. That’s what political intelligence is about, a naive voice from the guilty First World left might note, interpreting the momentum. Another might answer him: it’s actually a matter of consecrating the hero’s otherworldly glory.
Let’s Observe Another Subtlety:
Hugo Chávez, as always and against all logic, has borne his tragicomedy throughout the ordeal. Things seem to fit into a Holy Week soap opera where all pacts of verisimilitude have been violated. He insisted on profaning Simón Bolívar’s tomb to obtain his DNA, under the pretext of proving he died from poisoning. The only thing obtained from that, and this is crucial, was a portrait with features that made Chávez seem physically similar to the Divine Bolívar. This portrait (after death?) will have the same symbolic meaning of the cross. In that face, the lieutenant colonel comandante draws his own sign and validates his prophecy regarding his own eternity. There’s no doubt that this portrait, regardless of the outcome, will become a relic that will hang from the necks of his believers.
From the first reveilles of his revolution, his project seemed to gravitate toward the will to die in power. One life wasn’t enough to change the destiny of a people. But drawing near the end of this season of the revolutionary soap opera, things go beyond the grave, and there we see him astride the caudillista tradition of Spanish literature, The Song of My Cid, he could ride on Bolívar’s horse and inside Santa Evita’s corset: soaking up Christian eschatology.
In order to rise to heaven
You need
A big ladder and another little one
The not-dead comandante will ascend to immortality, he will be seated beside the Liberator father and will govern the earth. His kingdom was never of this world. And we can almost hear the comandante master tell his apostles: “Ramírez, Diosdado, Maduro: upon this army, this Petro-State-PDVSA and this Party, you will build my church.”
“Heaven and earth will pass, but not my words.”
Marxists have always been amazed by the virtues of scientific materialsim to establish religions, but never before have they reached this degree of maximum perfection.
In this season of the Bolivarian tragicomedy’s new chapters Chávez the miraculous will appear wandering all over the world, making the left and the mute speak in tongues; performing miracles. And we’ll be able to read post-Chávez as a Chávez who never left, who remains in the omnipresence of popular divinity. His vicars and his church will be the guardians of the process and the faith.
The dogma won’t take long to be consolidated. And Power will continue to be wielded by his ineffable spirit.
It’s a shame that many see Chávez’s illness as a fortunate punishment, a fortunate political crossroads, the possibility of regaining the paths of modernity. They forget that illness is not a punishment. And above all they forget that Hugo Chávez’s exit from the scene will not be political: it will be religious. Here, life and death do not exist. And all of this will guarantee the well-known manipulations of his “spiritual strength” for his persistence as a reality and as a myth. What’s worse: Chávez’s vicars on earth will remain intact, with the Petro-State at their feet: fascist militarism, the populist and rentier culture of the Venezuelan and a dramatic absence of institutions.
Israel Centeno is a Venezuelan writer, author of the novel Calletania (Madrid: Editorial Periférica).
{ Israel Centeno, El País, 18 February 2013 }
The not-dead comandante will ascend to immortality, he will be seated beside the Liberator father and will govern the earth. His kingdom was never of this world.
The Great Question
From the moment when Hugo Chávez established his conspiratorial lodge under the shadow of the mythical samán tree in Güere, he plotted to articulate and make the assault on power effective, he already had the consciousness of a founder of religions: he needed to go beyond it and transcend himself in the direction of the eternal exercise of power by means of faith.
Why is it that the lieutenant colonel comandante and only and unquestionable leader of the Bolivarian revolution, when he had before him the medical reports that revealed that his life expectancy was very limited, why didn’t he retire to seek peace and intimacy in his final months, saving his country and the people he loves so much, not just the confusion, but more division and the deepening of hatreds, instead of an onerous and useless electoral campaign that was won for the benefit of his death?
What matters is the people and Hugo Chávez has always said that he is the people. There is no room for any other interpretation. His glory and triumph over death are the triumph of the disinherited people, etcetera.
The president’s final electoral campaign had as its objective to reaffirm himself as a power that he would continue to wield in any manner as long as he lived, a matter already guaranteed by the collapse of State institutions and the submission of all public powers.
Viviremos
This was the exclamative slogan of his final campaign. Insensitivity? No, subtlety. We will live, despite death. After death. Here and now or beyond, We Will Live.
That’s what it was about.
Subtlety.
The core of the discourse of he who now dilates his step toward glory has been expressed at every moment by the immortality of his project, in other words in He himself. His discourse is religious and the huge audience of his telenovela required sacrifice, passion and even death.
Right now, Chávez the heart of the people, agonizes.
Or he’s dying.
Or he’s already dead.
Or he returns ready for the altars.
The Dogma of Consubstantiation
In Venezuela the truth doesn’t exist, dogmas of faith (and speculations) exist.
The medical reports emitted by bureaucrats have to be believed as dogmas of faith (and at the same time as speculations, a portal towards another chapter of a metaphysical telenovela).
But something is rotten in that Cuban sea of happiness. A dense fog has covered the presidential entourage in the tropics, with circles corrupted by counter-information and military intelligence, geopolitics, the destiny of all the possible etceteras are mixed in the aseptic rooms of a bunker transformed into an intensive care unit. The caudillo, intubated or not, no longer belongs to himself, now he is led by his political engineers toward the consummation of his epic. The light at the end of the tunnel appears: there’s life after death. Keyword: Viviremos.
The personal project, after drinking from the cup at his Gethsemane, moves at the speed of a cruise ship amidst a Cuban Venezuelan melodrama, the avatar begins to feel the omnipresence of his new divine reality. He will suspend his life above the absence of truth hanging in limbo and when he crosses that limbo he will become a myth. He is about to create wonders. That could make him feel very happy, notes one of his scriptwriters.
It’s been hard work. Two years of diligently weaving the plot toward the consubstantiation of Chávez the son into father Bolívar: Chavismo is a religion and Chávez is the God incarnate, who will rise to sit beside the eternal Bolívar. He would have told Fidel: “Father, take this cup from me.” Oh, sorry. It was to Bolívar.
All of this seems to have been created by the mad mind of a radio soap opera scriptwriter from the nineteen-fifties, an ambitious task of political engineering insistent on the execution of fatality’s script, momentum. That’s what political intelligence is about, a naive voice from the guilty First World left might note, interpreting the momentum. Another might answer him: it’s actually a matter of consecrating the hero’s otherworldly glory.
Let’s Observe Another Subtlety:
Hugo Chávez, as always and against all logic, has borne his tragicomedy throughout the ordeal. Things seem to fit into a Holy Week soap opera where all pacts of verisimilitude have been violated. He insisted on profaning Simón Bolívar’s tomb to obtain his DNA, under the pretext of proving he died from poisoning. The only thing obtained from that, and this is crucial, was a portrait with features that made Chávez seem physically similar to the Divine Bolívar. This portrait (after death?) will have the same symbolic meaning of the cross. In that face, the lieutenant colonel comandante draws his own sign and validates his prophecy regarding his own eternity. There’s no doubt that this portrait, regardless of the outcome, will become a relic that will hang from the necks of his believers.
From the first reveilles of his revolution, his project seemed to gravitate toward the will to die in power. One life wasn’t enough to change the destiny of a people. But drawing near the end of this season of the revolutionary soap opera, things go beyond the grave, and there we see him astride the caudillista tradition of Spanish literature, The Song of My Cid, he could ride on Bolívar’s horse and inside Santa Evita’s corset: soaking up Christian eschatology.
In order to rise to heaven
You need
A big ladder and another little one
The not-dead comandante will ascend to immortality, he will be seated beside the Liberator father and will govern the earth. His kingdom was never of this world. And we can almost hear the comandante master tell his apostles: “Ramírez, Diosdado, Maduro: upon this army, this Petro-State-PDVSA and this Party, you will build my church.”
“Heaven and earth will pass, but not my words.”
Marxists have always been amazed by the virtues of scientific materialsim to establish religions, but never before have they reached this degree of maximum perfection.
In this season of the Bolivarian tragicomedy’s new chapters Chávez the miraculous will appear wandering all over the world, making the left and the mute speak in tongues; performing miracles. And we’ll be able to read post-Chávez as a Chávez who never left, who remains in the omnipresence of popular divinity. His vicars and his church will be the guardians of the process and the faith.
The dogma won’t take long to be consolidated. And Power will continue to be wielded by his ineffable spirit.
It’s a shame that many see Chávez’s illness as a fortunate punishment, a fortunate political crossroads, the possibility of regaining the paths of modernity. They forget that illness is not a punishment. And above all they forget that Hugo Chávez’s exit from the scene will not be political: it will be religious. Here, life and death do not exist. And all of this will guarantee the well-known manipulations of his “spiritual strength” for his persistence as a reality and as a myth. What’s worse: Chávez’s vicars on earth will remain intact, with the Petro-State at their feet: fascist militarism, the populist and rentier culture of the Venezuelan and a dramatic absence of institutions.
Israel Centeno is a Venezuelan writer, author of the novel Calletania (Madrid: Editorial Periférica).
{ Israel Centeno, El País, 18 February 2013 }
1.15.2013
Venezuela posorwelista / Israel Centeno
Post-Orwellian Venezuela
A hyper analyzed reality reverberates and generates all kinds of noise; a racket with few possibilities of harmonious articulation of something true. Illness and death are common topics in our nature, but reading them within the Venezuelan context, determined by caudillismo and the tensions produced by political polarization, imposes an unscrupulous glance. The countersign remitted from the revolution’s political command seems to be, sow the speculative rumor in order to reap victories.
There exist many readings of the comandante-president’s illness. Its possible consequences and the conclusion of the condition that afflicts him, determine the log of political dialectics with the most varied of interpretations; each one seems more creative than the next; disproportionate, distant, ironic, sarcastic; all the rhetorical figures have been invoked, all the winks and the annoyance of an oscillating and recurring language used for addressing the core of the situation. What situation? What illness? What truth are we seeking? Those who follow the topic of Hugo Chávez’s sanctification navigate through all the contradictions contemplated by dialectical materialism —paradox—. They’re assaulted by an embarrassing certainty when they try to answer the anxieties expressed in the questions everyone formulates: we lack the phenomenological elements to ponder a little something: in plain Spanish, a simple pathology exam and a medical report confirmed by a doctor, in order to establish the truth. But for a while now, truth in Venezuela is a misplacement closer to morbid gossip than to facts.
The Government’s information organisms play the role of a great disinformation machine, whose only objective is to dilute and disperse any possibility of constituting an event without any ambiguities. The murder of truth is a propagandist’s first objective; to plant ideas and make the masses act in accordance with the scenarios prefigured by the political —religious?— operators, an end. The Ministry of Popular Power for Communication and Information thus ends up becoming the Ministry of Popular Power for Disinformation and Propaganda.
The strategic, or dramatic, line seems to be to raise the volume on the suffering, agony and probable death of the comandante president, mixing the different layers of reality manipulated by the Government’s immense propaganda infrastructure, employing the vicious totalitarian habits used by other experiences towards the end of preserving power for the faith of the parishioners and even for those who call themselves heretics; to create Chinese shadows, marvels, melodramas and above all blending until homogenization an awaited product that has been worked and desired by the Chavista status quo. The use and abuse of television, radio, mandatory national broadcasts, communicational guerrillas, civic-military concentrations and the dramatic exposition of the contradictions among the spokesmen of The Party in the social media, all of this has a predictable political-religious end very far removed from the expected informative function.
An autocratic government that has become the owner of all the institutions of the State does not inform, does not speak the truth; no one in its milieu enjoys the liberty of expressing himself spontaneously; moreover, the disappearance and the rumors about the illness, death and possible resurrection of the leader, though they might seem like a paranoid hyperbole by Orwell, are manipulated by the leader from whatever limbo he might find himself in today, now and always. Augmenting the static and the versions to be found regarding an event serves a single purpose: to contaminate, as is the custom, any situation that might be moderately acceptable. And its objective is to displace the national interest toward wherever might be deemed necessary and convenient by the revolution, the new Church, and the vicars of Chávez on earth.
Israel Centeno is a Venezuelan writer, author of the novel Calletania (Madrid: Editorial Periférica).
{ Israel Centeno, El País, 14 January 2013 }
A hyper analyzed reality reverberates and generates all kinds of noise; a racket with few possibilities of harmonious articulation of something true. Illness and death are common topics in our nature, but reading them within the Venezuelan context, determined by caudillismo and the tensions produced by political polarization, imposes an unscrupulous glance. The countersign remitted from the revolution’s political command seems to be, sow the speculative rumor in order to reap victories.
There exist many readings of the comandante-president’s illness. Its possible consequences and the conclusion of the condition that afflicts him, determine the log of political dialectics with the most varied of interpretations; each one seems more creative than the next; disproportionate, distant, ironic, sarcastic; all the rhetorical figures have been invoked, all the winks and the annoyance of an oscillating and recurring language used for addressing the core of the situation. What situation? What illness? What truth are we seeking? Those who follow the topic of Hugo Chávez’s sanctification navigate through all the contradictions contemplated by dialectical materialism —paradox—. They’re assaulted by an embarrassing certainty when they try to answer the anxieties expressed in the questions everyone formulates: we lack the phenomenological elements to ponder a little something: in plain Spanish, a simple pathology exam and a medical report confirmed by a doctor, in order to establish the truth. But for a while now, truth in Venezuela is a misplacement closer to morbid gossip than to facts.
The Government’s information organisms play the role of a great disinformation machine, whose only objective is to dilute and disperse any possibility of constituting an event without any ambiguities. The murder of truth is a propagandist’s first objective; to plant ideas and make the masses act in accordance with the scenarios prefigured by the political —religious?— operators, an end. The Ministry of Popular Power for Communication and Information thus ends up becoming the Ministry of Popular Power for Disinformation and Propaganda.
The strategic, or dramatic, line seems to be to raise the volume on the suffering, agony and probable death of the comandante president, mixing the different layers of reality manipulated by the Government’s immense propaganda infrastructure, employing the vicious totalitarian habits used by other experiences towards the end of preserving power for the faith of the parishioners and even for those who call themselves heretics; to create Chinese shadows, marvels, melodramas and above all blending until homogenization an awaited product that has been worked and desired by the Chavista status quo. The use and abuse of television, radio, mandatory national broadcasts, communicational guerrillas, civic-military concentrations and the dramatic exposition of the contradictions among the spokesmen of The Party in the social media, all of this has a predictable political-religious end very far removed from the expected informative function.
An autocratic government that has become the owner of all the institutions of the State does not inform, does not speak the truth; no one in its milieu enjoys the liberty of expressing himself spontaneously; moreover, the disappearance and the rumors about the illness, death and possible resurrection of the leader, though they might seem like a paranoid hyperbole by Orwell, are manipulated by the leader from whatever limbo he might find himself in today, now and always. Augmenting the static and the versions to be found regarding an event serves a single purpose: to contaminate, as is the custom, any situation that might be moderately acceptable. And its objective is to displace the national interest toward wherever might be deemed necessary and convenient by the revolution, the new Church, and the vicars of Chávez on earth.
Israel Centeno is a Venezuelan writer, author of the novel Calletania (Madrid: Editorial Periférica).
{ Israel Centeno, El País, 14 January 2013 }
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