Back from The Empire

And thus ended my visit to the modern day Evil Empire, which I found to be still the land of plenty, compared to the land of scarcity that Venezuela is fast becoming. But more on a later date.

If in last post I was impressed by the comparison between a Publix and an Exelsior Gama, the finest of Venezuelan grocery stores, I was struck, for this post, once again by the difference between book prices. One airport I love to make connections is Atlanta: plenty of bookstores to browse through while you wait for your next plane. Oh! They are not Barnes and Noble, nor one of those great independent bookstores where I used to spend more than one rainy winter evening, but still, for the hurried traveler that cannot afford the luxury of a lengthy visit to a good bookstore, the Atlanta complex is a reasonable succedanea. The vast variety of good soft cover books (I hate paper backs and I cannot afford hard cover) is truly great. No matter what your interests are or your political leanings lead, you can always find something between 15 and 30 USD.

Now this is truly wonderful. In Venezuela you can go to what is perhaps the best retail bookstore chain, Libros Tecnicos Tamanaco, and you will not find the choice nor the price. In fact any recent or noteworthy book will set you off at the very least 40 000 bolivares, or 20 USD at the official rate. Plus 14% tax of course. In fact I my average bill is 60 000, 30 USD per book, and books that I must read more than wanting to read. The problem in fact is that the Venezuelan per capita income is in the 5000 whereas the US per capita is several folds higher. In Venezuela, let’s face it, reading is a luxury. The poor will have to settle for books “generously” given by the revolution and which are little more than pamphlets, except Don Quichotte, an unreadable Spanish for most in Venezuela, but a massive propaganda undertaking that did work overseas. Nobody of course has inquired as to how many of the given copies were actually read (the ones distributed were with the Saramago prologue as Vargas Llosa official anniversary edition was not acceptable to the Revolution).

But I digress. What I wanted to share with the devoted readers of this blog was my mundane choice of books. I did get 5 books, but will only name three. I did get the last Camille Paglia, my favorite iconoclast and un-PC writer, who had the great idea to publish the text comment class on poetry that she teaches. “Burn, Blow, Break” is a whole bunch of great poems with a no more than 4 page commentary each as to their cultural value and meanings and symbols and you name it. I highly recommend it as it is a perfect travel companion that you can read stop and go.

The next book on the list will be Fouad Ajami “The Dream Palace of the Arabs”. I suppose that seeing how Iran is falling deeper and deeper into obscurantism and faster and faster into alienating the rest of the world while ignoramus Chavez tags along, I should refresh my knowledge of Islamic matters. Something that I am sure Chavez is doing diligently, though perhaps not with the right books, rather with the right pamphlets like those he emits in Venezuela for his own brand of fundamentalism.

Finally, something which I am sure to savor immensely is Joseph Ellis “Founding Fathers”. This is a portrait of some of the men who made the US and set the foundation for the most successful democracy to date, whether people like it or not being irrelevant. For all of its flaws, their work allowed the US to survive Independence, Civil War, two World Wars, the Great Depression, and it will survive Bush and Iraq as it survived Clinton and Monica. By the way, some of these critics are delighted to remain in the US and would not dream for a second to move to Venezuela or Cuba or Zimbabwe or Iran or Iraq pre-Saddam. As I read this book I will keep in mind the faces of those who would love to see themselves as founding fathers of the bolibananarian republiquette. Let’s see for fun: Franklin = Miquilena? Washington = Chavez? Madison = Maduro? Burr = Varela? Hamilton = Diosdado? Bwahahahahahah! Not a single one of these bolibananarians can even understand the “We the People”, and boy, they do gargles with the P word!