Defeated by trash

This week has been very hectic for me as I am trying to tighten all loose ends before vacation time. Unfortunately I do not get to chose my break time and like many Venezuelans I am subject to what the business decides. Many just close for up to 4 weeks in mid December as the country basically shuts up, much worse than some European countries in Summer.

Fortunately I did get some help such as following Miguel adventures at WizBang, or Weil copying my ideas :)

Today Milagros Socorro, who has been absent for too long from this page, has a stupendous article. Actually, I have been so impressed by its first reading that I think I have lost my objectivity in trying to talk about it. Maybe it is a trash article after all.

At any rate, Milagros Socorro uses the trash metaphor to trash, literally, the trashy ideology of chavismo. Her articles was inspired on some of Chavez declarations a few days ago when he bemoaned the amount of trash seen everywhere in Venezuela, worse than ever, after now 7 years in office.

… the president must admit that the trash that threatens to defeat him and his government is the ideological trash: the rhetoric over which float corruption, inefficiency, wasting of our resources and the exclusion of a large section of Venezuelans.

Let's remember that 85% of Venezuelans 10 days ago could not vote for Chavez, or could not be bothered supporting him again. Indeed, trash drowns people will.

Now Chavez orders the environment minister to look for the best technology in the World for street dirt, within realizing that the electoral power [CNE] disposes, allegedly, of the most modern gadgets on voting matters; and yet, nevertheless, this shinny hardware- bought expensive retail- has not been able to confer to the voting act the blood that gives it life, which is transparency and trust. Again the ideological trash and its twin, the need to remain in office at all cost, demoted the arrogance of technology in becoming the solution of a vital matter. It is thus clear that as long as a country is driven from ideological trash, there will be no technology, no excessive spending or good periodical intentions that will graze the lowering of its problems

Ms. Socorro muses at how other countries citizens that generate so much more garbage than Venezuelans can have clean cities. A municipal problem in all countries. And she muses at how Bernal was sat back in office last year when Chavez already bitterly complained about how dirty Caracas had become under Bernal. Did he really expect that Bernal would finally have learned how to pick up trash?

Each time that trashes reaches his neck Chavez entangles himself in his discursive detritus. On this occasion at Tia Juana [locale of that particular Chavez speech] he invited the populace to give the example and collaborate. But he passes the buck, as if he had nothing to do with the mega problem.

“When I leave in a car with my caravan – he said, by the way, with the tone of Pu Yi leaving the Forbidden City – I see people in the street throwing cigarette butts, cans and wrappers, and even in front of children. That cannot be”. And it is true that it cannot be. But he says nothing of the mayors who, in spite of spending enormous sums on misplaced emergency plans, virtual operations and illusory propaganda on a “clean city”, fail the citizenry and force it to wade in excrement!

This can thrown by the citizen because there is no reason for it to not do so –since there is no educational policy nor repression that would induce him to refrain from pigging the streets – is the demonstration, multiplied, as we know, to nausea, that we are adrift, invaded by ideological junk; and that, certainly, trash can end up drowning those who, far from suppressing it, lavish it.

It is difficult to make justice to this article in translation. I did not try it. But I trust that the metaphor used by Ms. Socorro is clear for all. Garbage in, garbage out. Last Sunday, and more and more everyday, 80% of Venezuelans do not want anymore of ideological trash.

Meanwhile, today Chavez was spreading some more trash in Brazil. While been awarded some shinny junk hardware. He has enough trash for all around.