Getting roaring drunk on Good Friday would be near blasphemy, but to share a jar on Easter? It's just part of a festivity, part of the celebration. Unless your dictator is as dry as the desert, of course, and then there'll be no drinking at all.
Hugo Chavez makes so many decrees, taking over and nationalizing and rattling his rusty little saber, that the average Venezuelan pays little heed to his rants. Take the recent Holy Week, the run up to Easter, and the days following. Bars and liquor shops and vendors were all told that the sale of alcohol was to be suspended, supposedly to curtail drunken driving. Of course, all the law-abiding folks did as they were told and....were served alcohol in coffee cups and no bottles were left in the open at the high-end restaurants that the wealthy patronize. How does one say "speakeasy" en espanol?
Considering the fact that Venezuelans are the biggest beer drinkers around, to tell them they couldn't drink was quite the Easter joke. Bars in the center of Caracas, in the more run-down neighborhoods, did a thriving business, packed to the rafters with festive boozers knocking back a brew or two. In the slums of Caracas, where the law does not extend its strong arm, no one paid any attention to the ban. Bars remained open so that the locals could enjoy their Easter holiday.
Considering the runaway success of Prohibition in the US back in the Twenties, this comes as no surprise. That the decree of the almighty Chavez was ignored by the people of Venezuela, however, gives a pretty clear indication of the limits of his power. It's the poor people who put him in office, it's the poor people who continue to vote him back into office, and it's the poor people who can get away with drinking in the dry season.
And the result of the drinking ban on safe driving? Officially it was a brilliant success, but the opposition claims that there were just as many traffic fatalities as ever. Did anyone look at liquor sales? You can be sure that they were up.
4 comments:
I've been reading your blog randomly, thoroughly enjoying myself in the process. I read your references to Miss Snark -- do you comment there as another "anon"? -- and your posts mentioning Frank McCourt.
What did you think of Angela's Ashes ?
What do you write? Fiction? A genre? Short stories, books or both? Have you been published?
[Word verification: "clarbs." Must be calorie-dense carbs.]
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I'm more of a lurker than a commentator. As for my writing, it's more literary than commercial, mostly fiction because the non-fiction takes too long to research (five years and counting on a biography).
Short stories are on submission to get a publishing credit, which one has to have to get a literary agent to consider the novel, but then again I need a publishing credit to get accepted by the literary journals. Or an MFA in a pinch, which I also don't have.
That's a circuitous route to publication, but we don't want idle hands to become the devil's workshop so.
About Angela's Ashes -- I'm of the lace curtain variety of Irish, and Frank McCourt's of the shanty type, so I've got some ingrained prejudices.
Profoundly depressing story, wasn't it?
Profoundly depressing story, wasn't it?
'Twas very sad, indeed. I bought it having heard that it was "humorous." I wrote The Curse of the Happy Childhood about my experience in trying to understand how anyone could find humor in the book. To this day I still hear how humorous it's supposed to be. Go figure.
But I was very moved by it, so much so that I wrote another story, titled Sometimes Irish, for a contest Story Magazine had. (Write a short story which includes a famous person.) I didn't win. I'm still trying to smooth out and move along its beginning.
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