socialism… recycled
even with the loonie at par…
Canadians: Wouldn’t it be nice to continue to live in a country where getting a bill for $336,000 for getting your baby born is unheard of and thus newsworthy?
“perhaps the oil companies know something the rest of us don’t”
This is a) persuasive and b) terrifying.
Look, I’ll admit that I’ve been a terrible Iraq War resister to date. A few marches, a lot of shouting at the television, and tons of bad conscience. I’m sure that my poor performance has something to do with the ambiguity of the situation that’s run from start to finish. This doesn’t excuse anything, but it is, I’m sure, the reason why I’ve been so horrible on this front. But… Venezuela is not ambiguous. If Bush invades / organizes another coup / pulls something else unexpected out of his sleeve, I hope that I have the wherewithall to do more than grumble and search for alternative news sources on the internet. The crime in this case would having nothing to do with closing television stations, although that is obviously what we”d be told, and everything to do with being a democratically elected socialist bent on the nationalization of natural resources.
Let’s hope not. But we’re heading into electoral season insanity, when all bets are off on what sort of endruns the current administration might attempt either to bring the base back into the fold or to strike a final, desperate blow on the way out against the forces of collectivism…
socialist melodramaticism
You’ve heard about what is going on in Venezuela with the tv stations, yes? (The link there is not an endorsement… Too tired to sift through to find a fair report…) But did you notice this?
Radio Caracas’ soap operas such as The Ex and My Cousin Ciela are popular, regularly attracting more than 50 per cent of Venezuelan viewers.
Two opinion polls have shown that more than 70 per cent of Venezuelans, including many of Mr Chávez’s own supporters, are opposed to the decision not to renew the licence. Arturo Sarm-iento, a Caracas businessman who runs Telecaribe, an independent regional television station, and supports the government’s policy, admits the measure will “have a huge political cost”.
[...]
A public-service channel, Venezuelan Social Television (Teves), is to replace RCTV. [...] Elsewhere in the world, with few exceptions public-service stations have not won a sterling reputation for slick popular programming. Lil Rodriguez, the channel’s new president, hardly encouraged optimism when she announced last week that “we don’t intend to make Teves really boring”.
Teves is planning to develop its own soap opera based on the lives of Simón Bolívar, Venezuela’s nat-ional hero, and Manuela Sáenz, one of his lovers, but until that is ready viewers will have to make do with a range of cooking, travel, music, opinion and other documentary shows, as well as an opinion programme.
One hell of an article, there waiting for someone to scoot down to Caracas and write, about the emergence of a new sector of socialist mass aesthetic form. I’d for one would love to know what comes of it, and what goes into it…
Here’s the question: say you were a socialist head of state of wherever you currently live, and had decided to pull network X off of the air and replace it with Your Own Social Television Network. What programming would you schedule as not to make it “really boring”? Mine would feature, of course, lots of ads without products, but I’m still thinking about what would provide the filler stuff, the actual shows, that folks would skip over with their TiVos to get back to the publicités…
21st century socialism
Nice to see this article on Chávez and Venezuela over at Open Democracy…. Not only has some actual numbers that contradict the hand-waving generalizations that you see in the NYT about discontent and authoritarianism, but a clearer and more assertive explanation of the political structure there than I’ve seen before:
The acceleration of the Bolivarian project - in both ideological and organisational terms, has fuelled concerns over the deepening of the government’s authoritarian tendencies. Established cynics in the media, who have seen leftwing ideals rise and fall, and opponents in the anti-Chávez movement have been quick to point to a frightening new twist in the evolution of the Chávez government. This is seen to be represented by the recent granting of decree powers to President Chávez, the move to extend state control over key sectors of the economy and the debate over the formation of the PSUV.
However, it is at this point that the delineation between popular perceptions of democracy on the ground in Venezuela, and “elite” perceptions, articulated by the media and US “democracy-promotion” groups are revealed. There is widespread popular support for this new trajectory in Venezuelan politics. The creation of the PSUV is seen to be in line with the demands of grassroots groups to have more influence within the organisational framework of the Boliviarian project, while Chávez’s use of decree powers to revise the institutional structures of the state responds to grassroots pressure for more influence, power and resources at the community level. Put simply, many Venezuelans think they are getting more and better democracy through “21st-century socialism”, not less.
those were the days
First paragraph of a nice piece on Régis Debray from the Independent:
Do all lives lead to and spring from a single moment? An illustration: it’s 1964, and Che Guevara, in the gardens of the Cuban Embassy in Algiers, interrupts a game of chess to flick through Sartre’s review Les Temps Modernes. He comes to an essay on urban and rural guerrilla movements written by a 23-year-old graduate of the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. Guevara has a translation forwarded to Fidel Castro, who invites its author, then teaching philosophy in drab Nancy, eastern France, to Havana. The young man accepts, and so begins a journey from Cuba to the Bolivian jungle, to Allende’s Chile, even to the Elysée Palace.
(via 3quarks)
portenos
From opendemocracy on football and politics in Buenos Aires:
Football provided Hector with enough fulfilment to enable him to overcome the disenchantment he felt toward his club because of corruption. At first glance, Hector’s response seems based on a dual, perhaps incoherent, set of standards: one applicable only to football and based on individual norms of personal fulfilment, the other applicable only to politics and based on public standards of accountability. But his response makes considerable sense in the context of Buenos Aires’s football traditions and recent crisis of representation.
