Open Ignorance of Gringo-America

Whether you like Hugo Chávez or not, you have to give him some credit on this one. He has exposed Barack Obama, emissary of hope, as a straight-up Gringo. In the middle of a meeting with Latin American heads of state, Chávez got out of his seat, and with cameras flashing, he gave him a copy of Eduardo Galeano's "Open Veins of Latin America." While it was clearly a move designed to embarrass Obama, neither the president nor his handlers were able to manage an equally clever response.

Maybe that's because when it comes to Latin America, the less said the better. Neither The New York Times nor NBC News, two of the bastions of the "liberal media" establishment, had anything to say about the significance of the book, which is a painstakingly crafted account of the exploitation of Latin America by the U.S. and Europe. The NBC Nightly News report on the incident filed by Chuck Todd, rumored to be on the verge of getting his own show, didn't even mention the title of the book (Journalism 101?). An AP report suggested that Obama may not read the book because of his "crowded night stand." "I think it's in Spanish, so that might be a tad on the difficult side," said White House portavoz Robert Gibbs.

Sure, if you zoom in on the above photograph, it's fairly clear that the edition Chávez gave Obama was the Spanish one, "Venas Abiertas de América Latina." But the English translation of this 35-year-old text, (called obscure by CNN.com) widely assigned in universities all over the U.S. since its publication, is ridiculously easy to obtain--while much has been made that it's #2 on amazon.com as I write this, Galeano is a star in North America.

Obama, who had never been anywhere in Latin America (unless you count Puerto Rico, which was absent from the agenda, elided by the fuss over Cuba despite this announcement that the U.S. was going to begin to "re-evaluate" the enchanted island's status beginning in mid-May) until last week, believed that Chávez had given him one of the Venezuelan president's own books. "I was going to give him one of mine," Obama said.

So, the leader of the free world is assuming here that anyone who gives him a book is automatically just engaged in self-promotion, and he had missed the chance to self-promote back. This is what must have been front-and-center on his mind, since he had recently disclosed that the bulk of his income from 2008 was attributable from sales of "one of mine."

There's little left to say but, "Que gringería!" (Pardon my temporary inability to figure out how to put an upside-down question mark into this blogger interface.) It's obvious that any serious discussion of Latin America's role in the world economic system is so subversive to GringoAmerica's project of liberal democratic benevolence that even an administration as seemingly enlightened as this one can't help but come off decidedly Bush-like.

As my tocayo Evo put it so eloquently to Obama, "I can see publicly that there has been a change, that you've learned--but the actions on the ground of your people in my country are no different."