Caracas Chronicles

Weil says:I liked this image a lot in simply because it shines a spotlight on the key to understanding Venezuela’s current reality: the delirious, rampant mismatch between official discourse and reality.

If I’m going to get really picky about it, though, I guess what I don’t like is the implication that some big dust-up is imminent, that the incompatibility between a discourse careening forever leftward and a reality on an unstoppable rightward trajectory is somehow unsustainable.

Venezuela’s tragedy is, precisely, that it is sustainable, because there’s always enough oil money around to paper over the incoherences the mismatch engenders and prevent an ultimate crash. So I think the cartoon would’ve been even better if he’d drawn the two trains running along parallel tracks, or along the same track, but pulling away from one another.

Still, in Venezuela today, the discourse-reality mismatch is the story. Anything that helps focus attention on it is all to the good.