SINCE he was taken the trouble to die, I suppose we must say a few words about Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan demagogue. His questionable accomplishments are greatly venerated by our leftish lunatic fringe although, here at the Mahogany Ridge, we're in two minds as to whether he really was a dictator in the classic Latin American mold.
True, Chávez observed the procedures of representative democracy. The country held multi-party elections on a regular basis. But he was able to rule by decree, and was thus able to introduce alarming changes to the economy, including the oil industry and the agricultural sector, with little or no public debate. Political opponents were persecuted; those not imprisoned were forced into exile.
There is consensus, then, that he was no democrat and, had he not succumbed to cancer, Chávez may well have blossomed into a full-blown rat-bag.
Still, he was a hero to many of Venezuelan's dispossessed - even though his populist social programmes were largely failures. The seizure of millions of hectares of farmland, often with little or no compensation, left a country that once produced its own basic foodstuffs now having to import them. Typical of oil-rich countries, it is one of the most socially unequal in the world, with a large number of its citizens living in some of Latin America's worst slums.
It is also incredibly violent. Crime, particularly kidnapping, has soared under Chávez. An estimated 155 000 people have been murdered since his inauguration as president in 1999. According to one NGO, the Venezuelan Violence Observatory, the death toll for last year alone was almost 22 000. In the pre-Chávez era, it was about 4 500 violent deaths per year.
To our hard of thinking, this murderous spike could be the enemy's handiwork. That, at least, is the opinion of Julius Malema, who visited Venezuela in 2010 on some business related to the 17th World Festival of Youth and Students fiasco. In his message of condolence to the people of Venezuela, Chávez Lite noted that his hero certainly had "massive resistance from rented imperialist puppets" in this regard. But, stout boy that he is, Malema has nevertheless recommitted himself to "the total onslaught against imperialism and imperialist masters, their corporations and puppets."
It's worth noting that, unusually for a narcissist, Chávez needed help with his wardrobe, and would often appear in public wearing crap pullovers of the sort knitted by batty aunts and doled out on birthdays. Nothing said "I'm with the people" quite like wearing the clothes nobody else wanted.
The beret's reappearance as the headgear of choice among our economic liberation forces could also be traced back to Malema's Caracas jaunt - although, perhaps because he actually had been in the military, Chávez was able to pull it off with a certain oafish panache. Whereas Julius just did the oafish.
As a clown, though, Chávez had the bigger audience, what with him being the president of a country with massive oil reserves. Television stations were compelled to carry his speeches, in which he would ridicule his opponents.
His most comic turn, though, was on an international stage. In 2006, at the United Nations, he called George W Bush the devil and, hilariously, complained that the podium reeked of sulphur after the US president had finished his speech.
Now comes news that, in Caracas, there are plans to have Chávez embalmed and displayed in the military barracks where he plotted a failed coup in 1992; according to acting president Nicolas Maduro, he would be preserved "like Ho Chi Minh, Lenin and Mao" and kept in a glass casket to be seen "for eternity".
This should please Chávez' many enemies, as they could now drop in on him at any time and reassure themselves that he was still very much dead.
However, a word of warning about embalming. I was in Beijing some years ago and wanted to see Mao Zedong's mausoleum on Tiananmen Square. It was said to be a rather surreal experience. Every morning, Mao's corpse, draped with a red flag within a crystal coffin, would rise mechanically from a freezer.
But this particular morning the mausoleum was shut for maintenance. Rumour quickly went around our party that Mao's left ear had fallen off again. It was said that his embalming was a little shoddy - he had been prepared by the same Vietnamese technicians who had worked on Ho - and that, from time to time, his ear needed to be stitched back on again.
Fitting, I suppose, for a man who wouldn't listen to reason, although it was probably for the best that the mausoleum was closed - I tend to be disrespectful at such times.
This article first appeared in the Weekend Argus.
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