Peter Krupa

Someone named David Rieff gives us his analysis this morning in the New York Times Magazine of what Hugo Chavez means for the world. It’s a piece that leaves one dry-heaving, wading lost and half blind in a bog of post-Cold War, red-diaper-baby horseshit.

In the piece, Rieff riffs on the possibility of Chavez unifying the forces of anti-Americanism in the world and becoming the “next Castro,” as if that were unlikely yet quirkily attractive. “Quixotic,” he calls it.

His shit-eating, navel-gazing analysis, however, completely ignores what it means for people when Chavez and Castro and their ilk decide to dream the impossible dream: It means families get split up, and people have to leave their homelands when their economies are swamped by bad policy and oppression.

He and other arm-chair analysts get paid to opine while stroking their chins, but they repeat the same garbage about Latin America’s “left-wing surge” that “continues unabated.” I’m sorry, but that’s so 2005. The supposedly unabated left-wing surge has certainly abated, in the sense that its two biggest members - Lula’s Brazil and Kirchner’s Argentina - have decided they don’t want any part in the authoritarian isolationism that the wack-os like Chavez are touting.

Today, Brazil is one of the world’s hottest markets for foreign investment. Brazil makes cars. It sells agriculture products. It has its own fucking aerospace industry. Meanwhile, in Venezuela, the local currency is inflating in double digits - the highest rate in the region - and government regulation restricts dollar purchases. Middle class Venezuelans are finding themselves on the horns of a nasty dilemma: Get out now and get screwed, or get out later and get screwed.

The question someone who cares about people should be asking is, how long until Chavez’s overheated and unsustainable model of government collapses? And when it does, how many peoples’ lives is it going to ruin?