Opening veins at the American summit
Whack-job wannabe dictator Hugo Chavez of Venezuela played to the cameras at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad over the weekend by walking around the conference table to present President Obama with a book.
It was the hugely influential Marxist-tinged history of everywhere south of here called "Open Veins of Latin America" by Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano, first released in 1971.
Obama was criticized, natch, by the knee-jerk crowd for even accepting the volume from the hideous tin-pot megalomaniac.
Natch as well, the president had the right comeback: "It was a nice gesture ... I'm a reader."
Overnight, the (in this country) obscure tome catapulted from 54,295th on the Amazon hit parade to No. 2, with a bullet.
I've had a copy on my shelves for ... let's see, I got my master's degree in 1982, so 27 years. Somewhat crazily for a business school, the Latin American historian on the faculty at the international-themed Thunderbird was John Conklin, a left-leaning liberal and a wonderful, sentimental, scholarly man who had all of us who took the summer semester in Guadalajara down to his lakeside home at Chapala south of town for beer parties on the weekends. In my Mexican history class with John at the Glendale, Ariz. campus, he'd assigned "Open Veins," and it was a hell of a read for a class full of folks who were planning on going into the import-export biz south of the border, not getting all soppy about the poor and oppressed down there. But they had to read it -- along with what turned into one of my favorite books of any type I've ever read, Octavio Paz's indispensable study of the Mexican psyche, "Labyrinth of Solitude" -- anyway.
In it we learned how the combination of an Iberian tradition of oligarchies and militarism, the lay of the land -- the jungles, the mountains, the rivers -- of the region, the lack of a middle class and centuries of norteamericano indifference and complicity led to nations run by plutocracies rather than anything resembling democracy.
Just because it was written by a leftie historian didn't mean that it doesn't hold truths. It's propaganda, absolutely -- and yet the tragic story it tells is partly our fault. I'll bet Obama gives it a critical read. And we'd all do better by broadening what comes to rest on our bedside tables.
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