NYT article on Bolivar exhumation

A friend sent me this article recently on the exhumation of Simon Bolivar's corpse in Venezuela. Here are some reflections it prompted in me:

Here in Colombia the current president hands over power to his new ultra-right-wing successor on August 7th. It was looking like Uribe was determined to start a nice little war with Venezuela before leaving power. He was accusing them of "harboring" insurgent groups, offering as evidence photos of guerrilla camps presumably in Venezuela. This is pretty silly, considering that those groups have been operating for 40 years in Colombia, and we're not accusing ourselves of complicity in their being here. What was most amazing was that Chavez, who usually is the first to talk a lot of belligerent jive, was actually sort of reserved and conciliatory. I think he was concerned that this time an outgoing Uribe might actually be crazy enough to carry through on military threats.

So all this is to say that the Venezuelan Bolivar exhumation hasn't been dominating headlines here, and I don't think it was that big of a deal in Chavez's normal mediatic carnival of a country either. That's why the NYT article kind of pissed me off. I actually wonder if the exhumation is akin to the DNA tests done a few years back on Jefferson and Sally what's-her-face, his slave lover. That was a legitimate scientific affair with social and political interest and implications. I'm sure that some anti-US cleric in Iran or Pakistan could have seized on it and spun the story to make it seem like our government was fixating us on sordid colonial love affairs and macabre exhumations to distract us from our society's decadence and our stubborn turning away from the prophet Muhammad!

Anyway, that's why I was disappointed. Given all the spin coming from every side when you read about Venezuela, it's always harder to discern what's really going on in the country than to see the ideological bent of the author. Either the country is a thriving socialized paradise, a brave answer to the cruel neoliberal world order, or it's a decadent, corrupt regime whose every action is determined by a cynical political calculus. I suspect it's not quite either of those, but I don't know where I can turn to get a fair picture of the reality there. And that's why it's disappointing that the US's foremost news source can't get beyond the circus of Chavez's media events, or the hackneyed insistence that everything is just a political maneuver, to tell me something about what's going on.

All that said, I did enjoy the article as a quirky piece, and I like my friend's reflections on Napoleon's use of Egyptian artifacts to entertain the masses and bolster his legitimacy. I also recall that in apothecary shops the world over Egyptian and other mummy powder was sold as medicine. Imagine if we could combine that thinking with the new DNA cloning technologies, and mass produce Bolivar powder for its medicinal qualities. We could probably even market it as an erection enhancer, because it seems like everyone's got a hard-on for Bolivar!