The Morality of the Barrel

A Venezuelan Comedy in Three Acts and One Petrodollar

THE MORALITY OF THE BARREL
A Venezuelan Comedy in Three Acts and One Petrodollar
By Dr. Nelson Jorge Mosco Castellano

There are few things in this world as fatal as untimely sincerity, unless it is ideological consistency.
Fortunately, the tropics and certain continental dictatorships have always been generous in producing statesmen who understand politics not as an exercise in moral geometry, but as a beautiful and malleable work of theater.
Consider the late and beloved Groucho, that philosopher in a trench coat with a geometrical mustache who warned, with impeccable grace, about the inconvenience of having fixed principles.
Groucho believed his famous quip was a private joke for a Broadway audience, never suspecting that the highest circles of the Caribbean would adopt it as a manual of institutional governance.

Act I: From the Manifesto to the Menu
For years, the official script demanded the scenery of a barricade: fiery rhetoric against the imperialist demon, rejection of foreign capital, and sovereignty shouted from the balconies of the barracks. Socialism seemed to have arrived in the twenty-first century, but it had not.
The most naïve spectators —those endearing beings who still believe in the literature of pamphlets and religiously salute the leader in military uniform— applauded revolutionary purity.
But realism has the unpleasant habit of interrupting performances.
When pantries are empty and creditors come knocking with the forcefulness of an English tax collector, socialist convictions begin to lose their chromatic appeal.
It is then, when the rhetoric of liberation falls into “El Helicoide,” which went from shopping center to slaughterhouse before it was even inaugurated, that pragmatic versatility enters the stage.

Act II: The Great Barter
By the grace of a tactical shift administered with a certain degree of forcefulness by a “Trumpy” negotiator, the scene lights up with corporate neon.
The once indomitable leader, now with a judicial agenda understandably occupied by courts overseas, discovers that anti-imperialism is a bourgeois luxury that cannot be deposited in a Swiss bank.
Meanwhile, the heiress to the ideological verb —the “presirvienta,” Lust dixit— stars in the century’s most elegant metamorphosis: she trades the poncho of radical Chavismo for the tailored suit of commercial diplomacy and begins releasing dissidents little by little, those who were once political prisoners.
What a marvel of political plasticity! To move from the barricade-style “narco-dictatorship” to a prosperous and civilized market-oriented “petro-dictatorship,” supervised by its own adversaries, is undoubtedly a triumph of administratively flexible talent over modesty.
Oil, that thick and vulgar liquid, has the magical property of purifying terrorist records and dissolving anti-system speeches in the blink of an eye.

Act III: The Final Applause
After all, who are we to criticize a government that prefers the dividends of a good oil contract to the suffering demanded by doctrinal purity?
Contracts are signed in ink; history, by contrast, is written in cynicism.
The agreement with “imperialism” is celebrated with the sobriety of great corporate conglomerates.
The old comrades of the past, who came promising the “new socialism,” once again discover that it exhausts even the last petrodollar. They discover that the homeland was nothing more than an industrial asset subject to debt restructuring.
And the public, from the stands, watches the final spectacle: twenty-first-century socialism transformed into excellent business for corporations and an endearing anecdote for the archives of cynics.
Those who once carried the book of the good, unwavering union fighter, and congratulated the fallen dictator, remain silent.
As old Groucho might well have said: these were our principles… but, frankly, the barrel trades much better when extracted by those who know business best.

Ideological flexibility
Oil and pragmatism
Cynicism of power

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