I’m a Little Sad about Hugo Chávez and I’m Not Afraid to Admit It

“While I don't approve of everything that Chavez said or did, he at least worked to improve his citizens' standard of living instead of selling them out. You can't help but respect that.”

~ Will Kraft, on the Internet

Hugo Chávez, the populist President of Venezuela since 1999, died yesterday after a two-year battle with cancer and I’m a little sad about this.

I know some people think Chávez, just 58, was a jerk, an anti-Semite and a foe of the United States. I don’t. My understanding is that the guy had a big heart, an unwavering commitment to his country and a huge set of you-know-whats. You can’t help but respect that.

I’ve never been to Venezuela, the urbanized country on the northern coast of South America that has some of the largest oil and natural gas reserves in the world. But I’ve read about Chávez because I had a brief fascination with Brazil, Venezuela’s neighbor to the south. Some say he made life better for poor Venezuelans – poverty dropped from 71 to 21 percent during his tenure and the percentage of malnourished residents dropped from 21 percent in 1998 to just five percent today – and others insist the country’s gains in the areas of education, health and poverty were inevitable in spite of his policies.

I think the truth is that he was a flawed but talented leader who refused to march to the beat of my country’s drum so he was labeled an unscrupulous dictator by the corporate powers that determine what we’re told. (And no, I’m not wearing any tin foil as I write this.) Anyone who is as reviled as Chávez was by American politicians is probably in actuality not that bad a fellow.

Click here to read a disappointing piece at ThinkProgress.org entitled, “Why Democrats Shouldn't Eulogize Hugo Chávez.”

What I like about Chávez is he wasn’t afraid to call it like he saw it. In the fall of 2006, he delivered a speech to the United Nations General Assembly the day after Dubya addressed the same crowd and said, “The Devil came here yesterday and it smells of sulfur still.” (He called President Obama a “clown” in late 2011 but had referred to him as an “intelligent man” in 2009 so I’m giving him slack.) He also called our 43rd president a “donkey,” defined himself as “anti-imperialist” and “anti-capitalist,” presided over a nation that offered universal health care to its people and hung out with the leaders of Libya, Iran, Iraq, Nicaragua and Cuba.

Gee, I can’t imagine why this nation’s puppeteers and media overlords would develop a negative attitude about an independent guy like Hugo Chávez.

I know why Jewish folks weren't his fans. For one thing Venezuela is 92 percent Roman Catholic. As referenced above, Chávez counted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – Israel’s Enemy Number One – among his friends. And he said in December of 2005 that “a minority has taken possession of all of the wealth of the world” which some interpreted as thinly-veiled anti-Semitism. (He also famously accused his opponents of being “poisoned by those wandering Jews.”)

Maybe if I were Jewish, I’d hold a different opinion about the guy. But I’m not entirely comfortable with the sway Israel holds over my country’s foreign policy – and with the fact that the U.S. provides Israel with $8.5 million in military aid each day – especially as it relates to the Israel/Palestine conflict.

I remember Chávez offering to help Hurricane Katrina victims back in 2005 – faster than the U.S. government, in fact – and saying he would provide free home heating oil to low-income Americans in East Coast states during a cold spell in 2007. Contrary to what you may have heard about this “tin-pot tyrant,” Venezuela under Chávez regularly held fair, certified elections and he was elected each time with over 60 percent of the popular vote despite vigorous campaigns against him. (When the topic of smooth, fair elections arises, the U.S. should probably keep its head down and its mouth shut anyway.)

Sure, Venezuela experienced economic challenges (including a banking crisis in 1994), has been deemed “corrupt” and has a high homicide rate and a drug trafficking problem. But Hugo Chávez brought subsidized food and free health clinics to long-neglected slums – and that alone warrants kind words on the occasion of his passing.

I don’t hear many folks in Washington talking about doing that here now.

Rest in peace, Mr. Chávez.

Sources: CNN.com, FoxNews.com, ThinkProgress.org, CBSNews.com, IfAmericansKnew.org, Reuters.com.

Ta Da

Revolution - The Beatles

Hello, My Name is Hamza al-Khateeb

Hamza al-Khateeb

I was wasting time in Facebook yesterday when I stumbled upon a group entitled, “We Are All Hamza Alkhateeb.” Since I had never heard of this person, I checked it out and learned that 1) Hamza was a 13-year-old boy who was tortured and murdered by the Syrian regime in Daraa in the spring of 2011, 2) his name has become a rallying cry for opponents of the Syrian government, and 3) the group’s photo album contains a number of graphic and disturbing images depicting the suffering of civilians – especially children – caught up in the Syrian uprising that began on my birthday, March 15, in 2011.

I asked Anita what she knew about this part of the so-called “Cradle of Civilization” and she replied, “Only what I’ve heard on NPR which is that the Syrian government is getting weapons from Russia and fighting rebels and protesters in the streets and slaughtering innocent civilians. It’s been going on for a long time.”

I’ve got to listen to NPR more often because all I knew was that civil war had broken out. I knew nothing about the Houla massacre during which 108 people were killed, including 34 women and 49 children. I wasn’t aware that people were being “summarily executed” or that the United Nations Human Rights Council formally condemned the Syrian government or that the Free Syrian Army, the main opposition group, is comprised of defectors from the regular Syrian Army who want to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and end five decades of Ba’ath Party rule.

I also didn’t know that the state of human rights in Syria has long been the subject of harsh criticism from internal and external sources, or that President Obama signed an executive order in May of 2011 imposing sanctions on the al-Assad government in the hope that it would “end its use of violence against its people and begin transitioning to a democratic system that protects the rights of the Syrian people."

If the grim statistics provided by the Facebook group administrators are correct, 4,349 children, 3,567 women and 7,014 rebel soldiers have been “martyred” since March of 2011. An estimated one million people have been arrested, more than 60,000 are missing and over ten million are homeless and displaced.

I'm not going to repost the photos of the mutilated corpses of kids wrapped in burial shrouds, their family members beside themselves in obvious, overpowering grief. I don’t want to be accused of disseminating unsubstantiated propaganda or turning people off with sanctimonious overkill. I just thought I’d share what I’ve recently learned with readers who may think the biggest news is that legless Olympian Oscar Pistorius shot his pretty girlfriend, Kellie Pickler’s going to be on “Dancing with the Stars” or a satirical website named after a vegetable called nine-year-old actress Quvenzhané Wallis a c-word. The parents of at least 4,349 little girls and boys in Syria – including Hamza al-Khateeb – beg to differ.


Click here to read “Children suffer horrific injuries as Syrian forces target civilians,” February 6, 2013.

Up Against the Wall

Anita Baker - Sweet Love (live)

Sunday poetry

At The Padre Hotel In Bakersfield, California

It's Saturday night, and all the heterosexuals
in smart little dresses and sport coats
are streaming into what we didn't know
was the hoppingest spot between Las Vegas and LA.
Janet and I are in jeans and fleece - not a tube of lipstick
or mascara wand between us. Grayheads:
a species easy to identify without a guidebook,
the over-the-hill lesbian couples of the Pacific Northwest.
Janet's carrying our red-and-white cooler with snacks for the road
across the marble tile of the Art Deco lobby
when we turn and see the couple
entering through the tall glass doors, slicing
through the crowd like a whetted blade. The butch
is ordinary enough, a stocky white woman
in tailored shirt and slacks, but the confection -
no, the pièce de résistance - whose hand she holds
is of another genus entirely.
Her burnt-cinnamon skin, her gold gown
spread like icing over a cake.
And her deep décolletage, exposed enough for open-heart surgery.
She's a yacht in a sea of rowboats.
An Italian fountain by Bernini.
She's the Statue of Liberty. The Hubble Telescope
that lets us gaze into the birth of galaxies.
O, may they set that hotel room ablaze, here
in this drab land of agribusiness and oil refineries,
outdoing Pittsburgh as the top polluted city in the nation. May they trash it
like rock stars, rip up the 300-thread-count sheets,
free the feathers from the pillows.
And may that grand femme be consumed
right down to the glitter on her sling-back, four-inch stilettos
and whatever she's glued on her magnificent skin
to keep the plunge of that neckline from careening clear off the curve.

~ Ellen Bass