Professional Documents
Culture Documents
D
uring the intoxicatingly, capitalistically-maverick
Judeo-Christian democratic years (1974-1982) when
some Venezuelans binged on the lucre culled from
the exorbitantly high prices ($40.00!) of their liquid gold, I
curried favour in an affinity with high governmental
functionaries. Venezuela was in the pink of graft and
corruption and Caracas was their capital. A time when all,
except Venezuela’s poor, were drunk on spending and
buying. All you needed was a telephone, a telex machine,
and a rented room—your mini “office.” People were
importing and exporting unrestrainedly. Whisky, cars,
electronic equipment, clothes—even two snow ploughs! If
you named it, you could buy it. Venezuelans were so “rich,”
they qualified to take out billion dollar loans in the
DisUnited States and Europe which they still have not been
able to pay back. The feverishness was so overstated, my
friend Fernando, a government official, came running into
my office one morning at the Ministerio de Informacion y
Turismo brandishing a copy of El Nacional with the new,
higher posting of a barrel of Venezuelan petroleum, then
blurted out—his eyes flooded with tears—for all, including
me, within ten kilometres, this squawk in Spanish: “We’re
going to fuck you gringos for good!” Fernando could not
forgive and forget—as millions of his compatriots—the
decades of exploitation suffered under the thumb of
despotic foreigners. His hate was such that when I asked
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him, to calm him down, how he was going to go about
“fucking” the gringos, he retorted: “We don’t know yet,
but you can be sure we’ll do it, gringo!” Little did we know,
at that time, a Hollywoodish actor was waiting in the wings
of the White House soon to play his most eminent role, soon
to bring down the curtain on the Venezuelan bacchanalia of
the late 1970s and early 1980s.
I
know a man in Prato, Italy not far from where I live who
is particularly interested in his “image” and how it is
perceived by others. And I would like to tell you about
him.
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inform certain callers that he is out of town. He is twenty
seven years old, uses Valium drops to calm his nerves, and
is under doctor’s care for an ulcer. If you look at the left
arm of his huge, expensive leather desk chair, you will see
that it is worn through to the “bone” from his nervous hand
rubbings. And he has told me, kidding of course, at least
three times—Freudian-slipping all the way—the following:
“If I don’t go crazy, I’ll go to jail!” (Kidding, of course!)
Naturally, he dresses to kill. Elegance is all around him. If
you enter his place of work, you will be impressed
immediately with an inordinate amount of framed pieces of
paper which—with the exception of one oil painting of his
beautiful, childless wife—are dedications to him for some
honour or other, for some diploma from one university or
other, for some seminar or other he has frequented.
Although he never went to university in his own country, he
has testaments to his scholarly savoir faire from many
institutions that seem at first to be reputable and of an
inestimable quality. All of these certificates are, as might
be expected, framed in very elegant, costly wooden borders
which enclose them. You would be fixed deeply.
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Switzerland, and they proclaim that this twenty-“sevenish”
someone has studied for not only the Master of Business
Administration, but still—hold on!—another Doctor of
Philosophy in Economics! (To date: MA, PhD, MBA, PhD!)
Are you counting with me?
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Our heavily-“degreed” perpetual student, ever on the
march to nail another “HONOUR” to his wall to impress his
clients, has larceny at heart. If he is to be a purloiner, he is
going to be the best of sharks. His determination and verve
would move you. If it is everybody’s business to steal, he
will do it better. He is an artist. He does what he does
because he loves its labour for its own sake. (Cannot we, at
least, admire him for this?) And the joy he affords his dear
mother and father, as he sits next to them at Mass every
Sunday morning in his parish’s almost empty church, cannot
be computed in Earthly terms.
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