Michael Rowan
Special for El Universal

Hugo Chavez is imposing lots of change on Venezuela. He's changed the clock by thirty minutes, the currency by three zeros, the preference for the color red, the name of the country, the permissible names of the newborn (beware of names that sound gringo), the national holiday (to celebrate a bloody coup attempt), the history school curriculum (to celebrate a revolution that never happened), the counting method (for calculating poverty, unemployment, inflation, murders, votes) and the direction of the horse on the national shield (he now faces left).

Chavez's changes are not only cosmetic. They include changes generally for the worse that Venezuelans are experiencing in housing, jobs, security, food, education, health, property, and commerce. More alarming, they include a new national enemy (the evil empire), lots of modern weapons for military adventures, a huge popular reserve that is politically bent, warlike actions with Guyana and Colombia and warlike words in defense of Iran and Bolivia, all inspired by the jingoism of the political salute, "fatherland, socialism or death."

These changes are contradicted by exporting an unprecedented $35 billion of oil to, and importing $12 billion of consumer goods from the enemy empire; selling the empire's dollars which are weak in the world except in Venezuela where they buy three times as much as the strong bolivar; exorcising the Roman Catholic Church while claiming Jesus is a Bolivarian socialist; loving baseball and trips to Orlando while hating Florida; and excoriating the bourgeoisie except the savage-capitalist socialists known as the bolibourgeoisie.

More contradictions include criticizing the empire's violence while harboring the worst homicide rate in the Americas and lambasting the empire's treatment of prisoners while a record 800 Venezuelan prisoners were murdered in the last two years. But the most outrageous crap of all is spending or committing $110 billion to knock the empire to its knees in a way that Osama bin Laden never could, thus proving that the heavenly paradise imagined by the revolution is the way to go for the 6,500,000,000 people on earth Chavez wants to impress - that is pure crap.

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