For techies only: That problem of Netscape users not being able to see this log? Solved, thanks to skilled detective work by David Wheaton. If any of you are planning to set up a weblog on Blogger.com, be sure to name it "weblog.html" instead of just "weblog." That way everybody can read it. Whew! Thanks, David.

Venezuela: The solution?

After reading the note below, my journalist colleague Maria Trombly asks, quite sensibly, "So what's your solution? ... you outline the conflict, the three sides, etc... So what is to be done?" Here's my response:

Maria -- It's not for us to solve. Venezuelans will have to work it out. Any stable settlement will have to take into account several conflicting interests.

What I think would be best for most Venezuelans, and for developing the country to provide more opportunities to its citizens, would be some form of the oil law reforms that the Chávez government is trying to enact, but with stronger guarantees of independent management so that neither this nor future governments will fiddle with oil revenues to enrich themselves. Especially, the reform to collect royalties on sales (easy to calculate -- how many barrels at what price) rather than as at present, as taxes on profits (easy to manipulate) makes a lot of sense. It's resisted by PDVSA executives, though, for obvious self-interested reasons.

Venezuela's three struggles

Chávez wins some, loses some-- This is why the Venezuelan conflict is so confusing: There are at least three different kinds of conflict going on, and the good guys in one or two of them are not always the good guys in the other one or two. First and most obviously to observers on the street, there's the ethnic-cum-class conflict that Amy Chua wrote about yesterday (see below, Venezuela: Privilege and ethnicity). In that one, Chávez has consistently been on the side of the pardos, the darker ones, and the humbler masses who've been excluded from the riches brought by oil from the very beginning. That makes him and his followers the good guys, in my book.

Second, there is a struggle to regain a greater share of the oil wealth for the Venezuelan nation. This has been the main objective of the oil reform Ch?vez has been insisting on. Here it's a little trickier figuring out who are the good guys. Since the so-called Oil Opening of the 1990s, the executives of the state oil company, PDVSA, have been running it almost as an autonomous enterprise, independent of the government. Given that past governments were notoriously corrupt (Pres. Carlos Andrés Pérez was a particularly conspicuous example), that wasn't altogether a bad thing; given that the PDVSA executives themselves were, if not corrupt, at least self-serving, then it wasn't such a good thing either. The net result was that very little of the oil revenue was available for development of things like infrastructure and public services that would benefit the masses of the people. On the whole, I think the Chávez backed reforms are a necessary and good thing.

Third, there is a struggle for political control, not just of PDVSA but of all the institutions. Here is where Chávez committed the "blunders" that Amy Chua and others talk about. As Luis Lander and Margarita López-Maya pointed out in an insightful article (NACLA Report on the Americas, July/August 2002), one of these blunders was signing the reform into law without extensive public debate. "This made it difficult for the common citizen to identify the competing interests involved," they write. "Further, during the three years of his administration, President Chávez has designated five different presidents of PDVSA... So the directors of the company feel insecure, unstable and ill-at-ease, and with some reason."

He finally got it right, it seems, with his sixth PDVSA president, Alí Rodríguez. But Chávez's "Bolivarian Republic" continues to waver between populist generosity and reckless bull-headedness (as seen in his relations with the Caracas mayor and police force). This is the problem with basing your political philosophy on a 200-year old military aristocrat, as I pointed out in my essay on "Bolivarian Democracy."

Weblog problems--I've just discovered from a couple of friends that this weblog cannot be viewed as intended on Netscape 7.01 (or earlier versions, apparently) ; it comes up fine in Internet Explorer 5. I studied the template (you can see it too, if you view "source"), but I haven't been able to figure out why. When I looked for Netscape "help" I discovered I'd have to pay $29.00 for a phone call, with no guarantee. But then, checking out "weblog troubleshoot* Netscape" on Google, I saw a report that they had only 3.4% of the users, so I'm not going to give this problem any more time. Too bad, guys (my Netscape-using friends); you won't be able to see this message. Maybe this is an example of why Netscape usage has plummeted. It used to be by far my favorite browser.

Galicia: An underreported disaster

My usual accomplice and I were in Spain as the thick "black tide" of petroleum oozed over the world's richest seafood beds, on the coast of Galicia. We were on the opposite coast, the Costa del Sol facing the Mediterranean, but reading of the battle against the disaster by fishermen, women's brigades, foreign volunteers and far too few Spanish navy and army personnel (the Spanish government's response was late and inadequate, stirring the usually quiescent Gallegos to angry demonstrations). Here are photos taken by some of the "galegos" involved in the struggle. For more images and a note on the coverage, see Eva Domínguez's story from Poynteronline.

Venezuela: Privilege and ethnicity

On the op-ed page of today's The New York Times, Amy Chua writes that "there is also an ethnic dimension to Venezuela's crisis." The strikers don't represent the country's exploited working class so much as a very privileged group of wage-earners who think they deserve special privileges because they are white. The Ch�vez government has committed several blunders, she says (without specifying what they were), but "[t]he coup against Mr. Ch�vez last April was a classic effort by a market-dominant minority to retaliate against a democratically elected... government threatening its power."

This is an argument that I intend to develop as I continue the series on my website, "Venezuela: Background of the Conflict." Part I, from the first oil exports to the death of Juan Vicente G�mez (1917-1935), and Part II, taking us up to the revolution of 23 January 1958, are up and viewable. I welcome comments.

Vagina Dialogue

For me, the most memorable scene in Pedro Almodóvar's wonderfully kooky, sentimental "Hable con ella" -- "Speak to Her" -- is the vagina. Not the real vagina of the comatose girl whom the nurse Benigno massages lovingly, but the huge, hoky inflated rubber vagina in the black-and-white silent movie (invented for this film), "El amante menguante" -- "The Shrinking Lover." The lover, shrunk down to the size of a man's middle finger, first clambers all over the lovely breasts of his sleeping girlfriend, then slips between her thighs to peer into the dark mysterious opening. After some nervous, excited probing, he strips off his skivvies and plunges in. Ah! And there he disappears! It was great fun to see the literalization of this common male fantasy -- I mean, guys, Almodóvar and I aren't the only ones to have such dreams, are we?

Unlike some of Almodóvar's other films -- "Mujeres al borde de la histeria," to cite one of the most hilarious -- "Speak to Me" is not really about women at all, but of the effects of women on men. In particular, it's about how two men -- Benigno and the Argentine travel writer, Marco -- can communicate with each other only through their relations to women who can't respond. It's almost the opposite of Eve Ensler's funny and effective concept in "Vagina Monologues," where the vaginas do the talking. Here, it is the men talking to each other through the vagina. Yes, Almodóvar is on to something here. We guys do often relate to each other in this indirect way. Maybe because we're too shy to talk to each other, we have to tell each other to "Speak to Her."

The clashes in Venezuela come out of a long history of struggle. Here I offer the first installment of my explanation of that history: Venezuela: Background of the Conflict (Part I).

Thanks to Fimoculous, I discovered two great, deep-thinking sites. On literature, check out Moby Lives. And for plunging deeper yet into philosophical questions, try the mysteriously-named wood s lot.

To get ideas for this 'blog, I just checked out Fimoculous's 2002 choices.
http://www.fimoculous.com/calendar-search.cfm?month=12&day=30&year=2002