Exhibit A is Campbell. Though better known for her taste in shoes than for her opinions about Latin American economics, she nevertheless turned up in Caracas last week gushing about the "love and encouragement" Chávez pours into his welfare programs. Wearing what a Venezuelan newspaper called "a revolutionary and exquisite white dress from the prestigious Fendi fashion house," she praised the country for its "big waterfalls." Not surprisingly, Campbell did not mention the anti-Chávez demonstrations held in Caracas the week before her visit; proposed constitutional changes designed to let Chávez remain in power indefinitely; or Chávez's record of harassing opposition leaders and the media.
But then, that wasn't the point of her visit, just as it wasn't the point when actor Sean Penn, a self-conscious "radical" and avowed enemy of the American president, spent a whole day with Chávez. Together, the actor and the president toured the countryside. "I came here looking for a great country. I found a great country," Penn declared. Of course he found a great country! Penn wanted a country where he would win adulation for his views about American politics, and the Venezuelan president happily provided it.
In fact, for the malcontents of Hollywood, academia and the catwalks, Chávez is an ideal ally. Just as the sympathetic foreigners whom Lenin called "useful idiots" once supported Russia abroad, their modern equivalents provide the Venezuelan president with legitimacy, attention and good photographs. He, in turn, helps them overcome the frustration Reed once felt--the frustration of living in an annoyingly unrevolutionary country where people have to change things by law. For all of his brilliance, Reed could not bring socialism to America. For all of his wealth, fame, media access and Hollywood power, Penn cannot oust George W. Bush. But by showing up in the company of Chávez, he can at least get a lot more attention for his opinions.
Something about Applebaum’s point bugs me. I think that it is the fact that she makes an overgeneralization or rather an oversimplification in order to delegitimize a point of view, which she doesn’t like or simply finds ridiculous. I’m not an admirer of Hugo Chávez and I don’t buy his rhetoric. However, he is able to be inauthentic and to claim to be a believer in social justice precisely because people like Applebaum don’t understand that when people don’t trust America’s goodness, they are willing to believe anybody who takes on the metal of anti-Americanism, by claiming to be fighting evil and imperialism. Just to take the issue of waterboarding and torture, how can someone who loves America justify the idea that the country as great as America whose ethics is epitomizes by Atticus Finch can believe that it is acceptable to torture to survive? The point is that there are always going to be politicians such as Chávez who try to be holier than thou and accuse the US to be the evil empire, what is worrisome is when they are able to become more credible than the leader of the free world.
Comments