politik

yesterday a friend told me that she was in love with hugo chávez.

my mental image is a man jumping up and down, exclaiming "bush is the devil!" the same man, in fact, who recently eliminated constitutional term limits for his post. a small, red warning sign to me at least, for potential abuse and corrupción.

but i just raised my eyebrows and asked, "¿por qué?"

thus began a long night about socialism, capitalism, media biases and manipulation. yay hooray for politics.

i think latin america has a socialist slant because the socioeconomic distribution is an equilateral triangle--that is, an equilateral triangle so long as you grab an axe and whack away the middle until you're left with a small cone resting atop a wide, trapezoidal base. and if you meander through history you see the scars left by the few rich capitalists who became greedy, hoarding mountains of cookie jars when the majority had nothing more than a few chips a hoy crumbs.

so that's latin america in a nutshell: a small number have-lots and the rest have-nots. hence, you get anti-imperialist sentiments and admiration for socialists like fidel castro, che guevara (of course), trotsky and ho chi minh.

it's funny though. when i asked my friend what she thought about mao zedong and china, she was like, no no, that's different. as if to say, that's not socialism.

there was a quote in 'the world is flat' about how "communism has a way of making everyone equally poor; capitalism has a way of making everyone unequally rich." though i'm not a fan of friedman, it's not a bad quote.

one of my supervisors here is a socialist. it kind of makes sense though. as a health researcher working in a country with many poor people, he is the so-called natural attorney to the poor and so has leftist leanings. he once described his admiration for the cuban health care system and if you look at the data, it's pretty impressive. china also successfully eradicated a number of STDs back in the day. but would americans who fight for social justice also espouse such political ideals? doctors in argentina don't make that much money and i think it's because the health and education systems are socialized. they have my respect when i think of how it wasn't the financial incentives that drove them into this line of work. i wonder how many doctors you would lose in other countries if you made their salaries the same as an elementary school teacher.

but i think at the end of the day, how you view socialism or capitalism is pretty dependent on where you grew up. there's a cuban guy here who grew up with "too much equality" and so escaped to buenos aires because he wanted "mis propios cosas, un auto, un ipod."

ah well, who knows. i have no interesting or definitive conclusions about hugo chavéz, socialism or capitalism. fear not though, our conversation was not in vain--i learned a new spanish word:

aburrguesarse.

it must come from the word "burgher" (not to be confused with 'burger'), but i think it's also related to "bourgeoisie." therefore since it's a verb, its english translation would be: bourgeoisie-ify.

so if we go out and you order a fair trade low-fat frappa-mocha-soy-latte with no foam from your yuppie emo cafe, i can say to you:

te aburrguesas = you are bourgoisiefied.

haha. anyway, i end with a photo:



three months from now marks twenty years.