Caracas Chronicles

Quico says: What I think we’re witnessing is the final collapse of common sense on all sides in Venezuela. But especially on our side.

After years of swearing up and down that the vote was not secret, that the captahuellas would let the government know who you had voted for and that, in any case, all elections were rigged, Globovision and the oppo leadership turn on a dime and swear up and down that the captahuellas are harmless. Not that they admit that before they were wrong, or lying manipulative pricks, not that they explain what has changed to make it so that last year the vote was not secret but today it is. Heavens no! Assertion is argument enough. Eastasia has always been at war with Eurasia…

Suddenly, voters’ “fear” is treated as some mysterious entity: everyone pretends like it’s just a weird idea people got in their heads for no reason at all. No one, not one of the people who spent years spitting skyward, entrenching this idea firmly in opposition minds, is willing to step forward to take responsibility. Instead, they bemoan the stupid voters who threaten Rosales’s victory by being, inexplicably, afraid, and hint darkly that the whole secrecy-of-the-vote cannard was a nefarious government plant.

And the hardcore oppo NDroots BUYS IT. That’s the part that gets me…

The government publishes fake or manipulated polls. The opposition publishes fake or manipulated polls. Both sides accuse the other of doing so, but partisans in neither take ten seconds to consider that perhaps, just perhaps, both sides are at it.

Both sides’ leaders imagine themselves locked in a struggle that transcends petty little concerns like minimum honesty or basic integrity. Both sides’ followers fail comprehensibly to consider what a bunch of bastards the people leading them truly are.

This entire juggernaut pushes inexorably forward towards the Nth disaster. The voices in Aporrea and ND feed off of each other’s discombobulated extremism. Two hive minds, equally entrenched in their own certainties, equally obdurate in their refusal to compromise with the world as it is, with its ironies, complexities, bitter truths and daily betrayals.

To demand honesty from your own side is to call into question your bona fides. Reflection is appeasement.

Only one thing is clear to me at this point – and it does not bode well: Chavez and JVR are smarter, more ruthless, and much more effective than Ravell and Granier. Their shocking cynicism is at least crown with the only attribute that seems to matter to anyone these days: effectiveness. Draw your own conclusions.