[NYTr] An Engaged Political Culture in Venezuela

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Ed Pearl

ZNet - Sep 14, 2007
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2007-09/14peters.cfm


An Engaged Political Culture in Venezuela

By Cynthia Peters

At a little stand off an uneven road switchbacking its way up and down
the Andean mountains, we stopped for a thick, syrupy sweet cafecito. It
comes in a tiny, two-swallow sized cup, providing just the right hit of
caffeine to keep us alert on the blind curves, which paradoxically are
as numbingly repetitive as they are perilous. The two Venezuelans we
met there, also on a coffee break, struck up a conversation. We talked
amiably for a few minutes about their work bringing potable water to
nearby villages, their thoughts about the Chavez government, and the
role of grassroots advisory boards ("consejos comunales") in
determining what projects the government will pursue in which
communities.

"What about Chavez's push towards socialism?" I asked them.

"Socialism is about sharing," one of them answered. "If I have three
shirts, and you have none, I should at least give you one of mine."

By Venezuelan standards, it wasn't a particularly remarkable
conversation. We had many others like them - some quite favorable
toward the country's revolutionary turn, and others less so. But for
those of us accustomed to U.S. political culture, where so many
citizens are so fatalistic about being able to play a meaningful role
in society, the conversation was indeed remarkable.

It's not that people in the U.S. don't care about their communities and
imagine ways to share what they have. My uncle, a conservative,
church-going North Carolinian with a portrait of George Bush on his
fridge and a son-in-law in Falujah, has made himself personally
responsible for a stretch of highway near his home. Every few days, he
walks the length of it picking up trash. "Mostly it's cigarette butts,"
he says, and he can't believe the never-ending supply of them. But he
doesn't mind. He wants to do his part. He's happy to do his part. "You
got something else in mind?" he asks me. "You think there's something
else I could do to make a difference - especially when you've got all
those corporations keeping the politicians in their pockets?"
Collecting cigarette butts may not exactly be engaging work, but
apparently it is no where near as coma-inducing as attempting to parse
yet another sound bite from another candidate that sounded just like
the previous one from the other candidate from the other party!

That's the U.S. political culture in a nutshell. It feels more engaging
to free a stretch of highway from tiny bits of litter than it does to
participate in the political process. Not so in Venezuela. "One thing
you can say about Chavez," said one middle class Venezuelan named
Ramon, "is that he's got everyone thinking about politics."

"But I don't like him," he added. "I voted for him at the beginning
because I wanted to get rid of the old regime, but now he's gone too
far. He's scaring away the middle class. He wants to take away our
property. We've worked hard for what we have."

We met this man, who runs his own business distributing fly and mosquito
repellent, at a restaurant in the beach town, El Playon, filled with
Venezuelan tourists enjoying one of the last weeks of vacation. During
an hour-long conversation, he let us know that he agrees in principle
with socialism. He feels grateful that Chavez is a strong international
voice against the Bush agenda. But he feels Chavez has become a
dictator. His ministers wear Rolexes and drive fancy cars. And,
besides, if the poor would just work harder, they could enjoy all the
same privileges as the middle class.

It should not, objectively, be easier for a poor man to give up one of
his three shirts than it is for a wealthy man to give up a portion of
his much larger economic cushion. But the wealthy man has worked very
hard to justify his unequal access to comforts. He'd rather construct
an elaborate ethic that helps him feel that he deserves what he has,
rather than acknowledging the insecurity that goes with luck.

This was perhaps the most significant lesson for my two daughters, who
traveled with their dad and me to Venezuela during the last week of
August - the pure dumb luck that makes them comfortable while so many
others in the world are left without even the most meager comforts.
They were acquainted with statistics about income inequality. They had
heard that the vast majority of the people on the planet live on the
equivalent of one or two dollars a day. But they had never seen mile
after mile of shanty towns, built out of mud and brick and pieces of
bill board scavenged from the side of the highway. It's challenging to
hold the cruel facts of it in your mind without succumbing to some
ideology that says all is the way it should be.

"It's too bad the middle class is so alienated," says a street market
vendor named Adriana whom I met in Merida. "They have a lot to gain
from this process because they have some education, they're used to
expressing themselves and being heard. They could bring their ideas to
the "consejos comunales."

"Consejos comunales" translates as "communal advice." Adriana explained
it to me this way: "Before, the government would come into our
communities with their own agenda. They might come and repair the road,
for example. The bigger problem in that community might be access to
potable water, but there was no way to express that to the government.
With consejos comunales, we have a way to get together and determine
our priorities at the local level and then communicate those priorities
to the government."

On the two Sundays that we were in the country, we tuned into Chavez's
afternoon-long radio show, which he seems to use to build momentum for
his policies, and during which he reveals himself to be part
motivational speaker, part preacher, and part popular educator.
Whatever you think of his views, he comes across as smart, energetic,
anxious to learn, and confident enough to truly interact with people.
I'm sure there are plenty of background people orchestrating the show,
but there are a lot of unpolished moments, and there is a clear absence
of "handlers." Unlike most U.S. politicians, Chavez puts himself in
front of the public without a script.

During one segment, Chavez used an extensive interview with fishermen
and workers in a fish processing plant as a way to explain how
socialism works. His technique was to get the fisherman talking about
what aspects of their work were socialist. He skillfully wove their
comments into his own elaboration of the meaning of socialism,
sometimes sounding like a patient teacher, other times lapsing into the
cadence of a preacher.

During another segment, he devoted the time to talking about corn. He
waxed poetic talking about the nutritional properties of corn, the fact
that it has been sown in Latin American since hundreds of years before
Christ, and noting the role of human beings in the planting and
harvesting of this staple crop. He interviewed farmers, consumers,
workers in a corn processing plant. He wanted to know about where they
got their seeds, how many varieties they planted, and what they had
learned from their decades of experience. He seemed genuinely
interested in integrating their knowledge with his. It's a common
outcome of human conversation - that two people or a group should
exchange perspectives and come out more knowledgeable and more
conscious than they were before. But between a president and a corn
farmer, this type of exchange is unheard of (at least in my experience).

He spoke at length with a manager about why a certain plant was
functioning at only an 80% capacity. And he didn't accept easy answers.
At one point, it was clear he had a pencil and paper out. He was
calculating the plant's volume in tons and figuring out percents and
posing questions about the impact an increase in functionality would
have - not a trivial question in a country where so many people are
hungry.

As radio, it wasn't superb. (You could hear paper being sorted and you
could imagine the calculations happening.) But for a North American
like me, working to tune in to the political culture, it was stunning.
A president was having a seemingly unscripted moment during which he
prompted a plant manager to actually think on his feet - about
something that mattered to the least privileged in the country.

He also brought onto the show a boys baseball team that was heading
into a championship game. He spoke with each child about the position
he played and encouraged them to play their best. At other moments, he
reminisced about learning how to plant corn from his grandmother. "See,
my hands still know how to do it," he said to the live audience as he
demonstrated his grandmother's technique. Again, not good radio by U.S.
standards, but he doesn't seem concerned about filling the airtime as
much as he does about communicating with people on multiple levels.

There is a subtle but key quality in this style of communicating. That
is, it involves listening. Chavez has clear ideas about what he wants
for his country. But his vision includes popular participation, and his
style on the radio show modeled a dynamic between "leaders" and
"citizens" that assumes the populace to be part of the process - not an
obstacle to the process.

Granted, there is such a thing as paternalistic listening, where the
listener adopts the proper posture and nods a lot and then proceeds to
do exactly as he had planned beforehand. And Chavez did not exactly
include opponents or debaters in his show. I would have been interested
in hearing how he dealt with those exchanges, but the country is not
exactly deprived of opposition opinion given that every day, the
mainstream media features anti-Chavez headlines, parodies, and attacks.

It's risky to romanticize any leader. Leaders are prone to corruption.
But it's also important to keep some perspective. Preaching about
socialism while flaunting expensive watches and fancy cars (assuming
what Ramon said is true), is hypocritical, but it is corruption on an
entirely different scale than what you see in the U.S. Here we have a
president who claims to be fighting for democracy in Iraq, when in
fact, he is occupying the country illegally while he enriches defense
contractors (who destroy the place) and construction contractors (who
get paid to rebuild it). That is hypocrisy on a scale that is almost
too difficult to grasp (unlike the Rolex, which ironically causes more
ire by virtue of the fact that it is comprehensible).

Meanwhile, what do I hear from Bush upon our return to the U.S.? "We're
kicking ass in Iraq," he is quoted in the Boston Globe as saying to the
Australian prime minister. Not only is it a blatant lie, it is
inexcusable macho posturing in the face of an all-out tragedy for the
Iraqi people, as well as many Americans, whose lives have been
destroyed by the war.

Back in Miami at the end of our trip, we talked about how we would miss
the lively culture of political participation we had learned about in
Venezuela. We would miss the president who eschewed sound bites and
talked and listened deeply about things that matter. We would miss the
thoughtful political discussions you could have with workers at the
roadside coffee stand.

As if on cue, my 11-year old noticed a key way we create community and
share ideas in the U.S. She pointed at her Starbucks cup, which had a
David Copperfield quote on it about how the most important thing in
life is to stop saying "I wish," and to start saying "I will."

Back in the states, with a president who acts like a drunk fraternity
brother, directives about pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps coming
at us from the sides of to-go coffee cups, and an uncle who makes his
presence felt on the shoulder of a lonely North Carolina highway, we'll
remember the existence of another model in Venezuela.