The Middle Finger

By Adriaan van Ginkel

Well, well, well. My move of last Sunday, partly intended to see how quickly the uniformed hordes toting Kalashnikovs would run up the stairs and crash through my apartment’s door to put yet another “CIA-paid troll” (as an American leftist activist lovingly called me last weekend on the social media) behind bars, has apparently had no effect yet. CIA-paid, yeah right. There are worse jokes than that. Maybe the Venezuelan authorities aren’t so fluent in English, or maybe my backward-running prose has their heads reeling. 

Anyhow, I feel relieved for now. After having said what I wanted to say last Sunday, and still being able to entertain you yet again with another of my letters, I promise you that from now on, you will read my Venezuelan adventures “in the raw”. I won’t insult any politician or minister or president, or any person unlucky enough to wake up the irony in me. But I plan to transform this news brief into a dialogue between you and me. I invite you to write to me, leave some comment on my blog, call me nice or troll or whatever. But I hope that my blog will provide you with an open window to Venezuelan life.

What is this week’s theme? The middle finger. Rude? Nay. It’s another way of saying exactly what is wrong with this country. Although Venezuelans, as I have described it in my Miss BBQ -brief some weeks ago, see themselves as buena gente, good folk - cheerful, boisterous, loud-mouthed, party going, joking and life-loving - it’s an entire different story when you try to discover some third dimension within their firecracker personalities. Generally speaking, there is very little depth in the typical Venezuelan, sorry to say. If you like people whose reactions are primary, i.e. they react the way they feel without thinking twice or counting to ten, then Venezuela could be a place for you. 

Of course there are many “untypical” rational exceptions, sensible careful persons (regardless of their background) who think thrice before pulling your mother into the argument. But most just don’t. And since I’m busy completing my tenth year here, I guess I have the right to hold an opinion about this country and the inhabitants. You are free in your own opinion of course, but this is my space. If you disagree with me and want to cross swords, start your own blog. En garde!

Now, what has the middle finger to do with all this? It’s what I WISH the Venezuelan would show defiantly at the ink-black clouds over their country’s head, and at all the problems ruining their lives. Because although the flamboyant Venezuelans say they don’t care about the disaster unfolding in their lush tropical country, they DO care and worry. Men worry and drink too much, women are over concerned with appearances, and the enormous national consumption of erection-enhancing drugs points to an unhealthy stress living among Venezuelan males, afraid of losing “it” and an unhappy wife as well to another guy. 

Many of my neighbors get up at 3 AM, jump into their cars at 4 AM with their sleeping children in the back – dressed up in their school uniforms – and try to arrive on time to drop their exhausted offspring at school before 7 AM and get themselves behind their bad-paying desks before 8 AM, before infernal traffic makes that impossible. People who don’t own cars (and that number is growing) depend on a mediocre to almost-absent public transport that converts trips into daily odysseys. Offices close down at 4 PM, but my neighbors start arriving home between 7 and 8 PM – all because of the traffic jams clogging all Caracas into a daily infarct – giving them only one or two hours of dining and preparing themselves for bed before another day starts with alarm clocks ringing away at 3 AM. Weekends are spent sleeping or watching movies. Not a way of unloading stress and frustration, on the contrary. And to add to the stress, getting home after dark nowadays means exposing yourself and your loved ones to rampant criminality. It happened to some of my neighbors, fortunately without loss of lives.

Do you really think living in the tropics is all leisure in eternal summers and drinking cocktails on the beach? Think again.

Excessive promiscuity is yet another symptom of unloaded stress and frustration. Don’t let yourself be fooled by macho arguments. I’ve clearly noticed that chasing women here is not so much a leisurely machista pastime as well as a desperate attempt to shove aside the frustrations of daily life. Some do liquor, others do food, and still others other do women. I haven’t noticed that Venezuelan women are as promiscuous as men. My theory is that is has to do with upbringing and their way of controlling men through their beauty, the classical winding around one’s finger. Something that very few men can ever achieve here, unless you are called Brad Pitt.

Showing the middle finger would surely unload a lot of stress here. If Venezuelans knew how to unload their stress and aggression without resorting to unhealthy methods like the ones I described earlier, things would look a lot better here. The motto “Life Is Beautiful” is not applied here, sadly. When I see how people unload their tons of built-up frustrations on their children, pets, or animals on the streets by running them over intentionally, I ask myself: what is wrong with these people? Why don’t they find a way of just caring for the really important things in their lives and let all other just go? Why accept the ridiculous fact of your children having to be at school before 7 AM, even when they are at kindergarten age? Why accept losing every day of your life in senseless traffic jams just like that? Why consent with working for really miserable wages and letting yourself be abused by managers whose ideas of motivating employees go back to the Neolithic? Why adapt yourself to the spiral of deadly criminality that has transformed Venezuela into a little hell? Why not choose for life? Do they care so little for it? 

Venezuelans think that the proper way to deal with the crushing weight of stress is to crack jokes and play the happy carefree clown all the time. From what I’ve witnessed, they are dead wrong. The more they are trying to act as if nothing is happening, the worst the situation gets. I’m no psychologist, but I see some very toxic dynamics in this way of thinking. 

And of course, how could we not speak about what these dynamics do to political life? 80% of the population thinks the country is going in the wrong direction and most point at the incumbent president – the one with the moustache – as the main culprit for expensive beer, unpayable meat and unobtainable milk, soap, deodorant and maize meal. But I personally think it’s so easy to blame the guy or girl at the front for everything. I’m no friend of president Maduro, but I have to be fair at this point. 

Let’s not forget that Chávez and Maduro came to the presidency in a democratic way. Election after election confirmed the enthusiasm of the majority of Venezuelans for the revolution that would bring them wagonloads of cheap beer, more meat than you can put on all barbeques, and all the milk you could gulp down in your lifetime. When I first came to Venezuela, I was surprised at the enormous quantity of obese people waddling about. I like a good steak, but I was unpleasantly surprised at the sight of true human carnivores pushing incredible quantities of meat into their faces. There is no other way of describing it from my point of view. Venezuela still holds the second place in the world in consuming pasta right after Italy, did you know that? And of course, back in those golden olden days, life was really payable for most people here. Look at it now.

Poverty is reclaiming lost ground all over the country. And people are very unhappy and dissatisfied, not as much with the crackdown on democratic rights that is taking place right now, but with what they see as “broken promises”. The Chavist government promised a lot of things but doesn’t deliver now. And empty stomachs and receding waist lines make people here very unhappy. Tragically, it’s essentially only that what makes Venezuelans unhappy. The mental connection between scarcity, bad government and better administration is not made. Because most people, as I described it, are already drowning in everyday frustrations and dealing with them in the wrong way. In my country, there is a saying for it: looking at so many trees, they don’t see the forest anymore. 

Yesterday, in San Cristóbal, a 14-year-old scholar was shot pointblank in the head by a trigger-happy policeman during a demonstration. The boy was unarmed, and while breaking free from a scuffle with the police and running away – he was turning his back on the policeman with the shotgun – the policeman aimed and shot the boy in the head. Now, if that had happened in the US for example, the next thing would have been bloody riots. But except from some apologies by the president on TV and the announcement that “steps” would be taken against that killer in police uniform, the country isn’t stirred at all. Everyone is horrified for a while, but then shakes off the thought and go about bearing their unbearable lives.  

And this indifferent way of reacting to so much horror is deeply disturbing. Why don’t people react in a humane way to this inhumanity, this brutality? They should go out on the streets, poor and rich, Chavist, non-aligned and opposition, and demand justice for that single heinous crime representing all other crimes. And show their middle fingers to everything that is turning their daily lives into a horror movie, and shout: enough is enough. 

The day this happens will be a great day, because then the Venezuelan people will have understood that, instead of accepting all horrors and bad things as inevitable, they can change the course of history together, in a constructive way. Shouting insults at some guy at the front doesn’t turn around the boat, nor do coups or senseless violence. Toxicity will only generate more toxicity. 

I guess I’m an optimist, because I know that the Venezuelan has that inner force that will one day push them to true greatness and unity. Till then, we’ll have to wait till Venezuela awakes from its Snow-white slumber.  

Have a great week and till next Wednesday!

© Adriaan van Ginkel 2015