Chavez 21st-Century social vision! My oh my!

Sir, if Mugabe’s Zimbabwe had Venezuela's oil, would he perhaps also be associated with a “vision” of “21st-century socialism”? When writing about Chavez promoting his vision, don’t forget that we Venezuelan citizens would all be much happier if indeed Chavez really had a vision, of any sort? Then we would at least know where we were heading, and what to do about it. What we now have is just plain confusion, ineptitude and corruption financed by the mother of all oil curses, and that is as far away from a vision as you could possibly be. To really understand the Chavez phenomenon you need to think of him as the most fabulous stand-up improvisators ever; performing in front of an audience with an immense and justifiable appetite for hopes about a better future; and finally drawing most of his material from the traditional anti-Americanism tree, and which as you know has lately been able to provide unusually much energy for its parasites to munch on. Under such favorable conditions, can you doubt Chavez’s success?

Outside “objective” observers though, like FT, would also do good to also reflect upon the media’s huge capacity of inadvertently advancing the voice of figures like Chauncey Gardiner in Jerzy Kosiński’s Being There. Chavez is a haunted man, running ever faster forward and, any day now, the majority of his followers are going to suffer an immense deception. Honestly, they don’t need or deserve that.