‘Venezuela’s Maduro is breaking through all red lines. Time to respond.” That was the heading over a Washington Post editorial, and an excellent editorial it is. It tells us several things, including this: Nicolás Maduro, the dictator of Venezuela, has “barred María Corina Machado, the most popular opposition leader, from running.” Running for what? The presidency. (Maybe there should be quotation marks around that word: “presidency.”)
Why dictators feel the need to stage an election is sometimes mysterious. But they do. Some like a fig leaf.
Ms. Machado, says the Post, has “designated a stand-in candidate, Carina Yoris Villasana, a little-known 80-year-old philosophy professor, widow and grandmother.”
I had a memory of 1996 and the red-hot “presidential” “election” in the Palestinian Authority. A headline from the Washington Post on January 18 that year reads, “Grandmother Is Arafat’s Sole Opponent.”
The report, by Daniel Williams, begins,
It would have been a nightmarish day for any candidate, not to mention one who is given virtually no chance of winning.
Samiha Khalil, the grandmother who is Yasser Arafat’s sole opponent in Saturday’s Palestinian presidential election, held a rally today in a Jerusalem theater. Rain and confusion over the hour — was it supposed to start at 3 p.m. or 4? — apparently kept the crowd down, and far more foreign journalists than voters showed up.
One key to winning elections is to pick your opponents very, very carefully. In 2018, General Sisi, in Egypt, picked an opponent who actually endorsed him. Endorsed Sisi, that is. The voters “returned” Sisi to “office” with 98 percent of the vote. Obliging of them.
Incidentally, the grandmother Khalil got 11.5 percent in the PA.
• A report by Isabel Debre of the Associated Press is highly interesting — for it involves some of the outstanding issues of our time (or any time?). The report was filed from Buenos Aires. Listen:
For decades, Argentines could count on coming together April 2 around a steadfast claim to the islands they know as the Malvinas and — at least until recently — expect their president to share that conviction.
But President Javier Milei on Tuesday continued his struggle to navigate nationalist sensitivities around the archipelago, which Britain controls and most of the world refers to as the Falkland Islands.
The right-wing leader has shown more interest in boosting trade with the British than lambasting their territorial claims, and once even praised the leader who deployed troops to eject Argentine forces.
I’m not sure I’d describe Milei as “right-wing,” but we can leave that to one side. If Milei can “navigate nationalist sensitivities” and govern according to the liberal principles he has long espoused — he will prove an uncannily skillful politician indeed.
• Andres Oppenheimer is a journalist long associated with the Miami Herald. He started out in Buenos Aires — I mean, he was born there, in 1951. Earlier this week, he published a column that opens as follows:
When I read that Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador called me “a fascist, fascist, fascist” at his press conference on Monday, I found it hilarious, considering my background and consistent criticism of both leftist and rightist dictatorships.
What had set AMLO off? An interview that Oppenheimer had conducted with President Milei.
At the end of his column, Oppenheimer writes,
The real political division nowadays is between democracy and dictatorship. Now, more than ever, we should remind ourselves that there is no such thing as a good dictator, and that — as the old saying goes — power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Above, I said that Isabel Debre’s story about Milei, nationalism, etc., encompassed some of the most important issues of our time. So does the brief, but potent, column by Andres Oppenheimer.
• So does this column by Nick Cohen, I swear. “The terror that dares not speak its name: Fear and silence in the UK.” What does Cohen mean? I will quote him:
There’s a blasphemy law in the UK and the rest of the West. No Parliament voted for it. No court enforces it. There is no presumption of innocence, and no possible appeal against conviction — even when the sentence is death.
I could quote at length, but I will stop at one more passage:
You can always find an audience on the left if you expose the far right, and conservatives will always prick up their ears if you denounce radical Islam. Finding an audience for both is harder, but let me try.
He does it well, Nick Cohen does.
• You have perhaps been in an earthquake — an unsettling experience. Of course, when an earthquake is really bad, it is deadly. Catastrophic. Taiwan is famous for earthquakes (or infamous). The worst earthquake I was ever in, was in Taiwan. (And it did very little damage, as I recall.)
A report yesterday from the AP reads,
Taiwan was struck Wednesday by its most powerful earthquake in a quarter of a century. At least nine people were killed and hundreds injured, buildings and highways damaged and dozens of workers at quarries stranded.
A further paragraph:
Taiwan is no stranger to powerful earthquakes yet their toll on the high-tech island’s 23 million residents has been relatively contained thanks to its excellent earthquake preparedness, experts say.
Taiwan’s is a society with a lot going for it. It is a society that works. I hope they can keep it.
• Every day, something like this comes into my phone. You can’t block them fast enough. They are telephonic crabgrass.
There are many foul things about the Trump movement. One of them is its constant equation of “Trump supporter” with “patriot.”
In the run-up to January 6, Charlie Kirk, the young Trumpista, tweeted,
The historic event will likely be one of the largest and most consequential in American history. The team at @TrumpStudents & Turning Point Action are honored to help make this happen, sending 80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.
Uh-huh.
• News from my home state, examined by Alex Demas, of The Dispatch:
On March 27, Matthew Maddock, a Republican member of the Michigan House of Representatives, tweeted two images purporting to show buses of illegal immigrants being loaded at Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport.
Representative Maddock said,
We know this is happening. 100,000’s of illegals are pouring into our country. We know it’s happening in Michigan. Our own governor is offering money to take them in! Since we can’t trust the #FakeNews to investigate, citizens will. The process of investigating these issues takes time.
It didn’t take very much time, as Alex Demas says: The buses were occupied by members of the Gonzaga University basketball team, who had come to Detroit for a Sweet 16 game.
Classic. (Confronted with the facts, Representative Maddock said, “Sure kommie. Good talking point.”)
• Sometimes, it takes nerve to state merely elementary things. Alex Byrne and Carole K. Hooven have done so in a piece for the New York Times: “The Problem With Saying ‘Sex Assigned at Birth.’” I’m so old-fashioned, I say “sex” instead of “gender” (which traditionally has had other uses and implications).
In the old days, sniggering young men had fun on the forms they were required to fill out. Next to “Sex,” rather than saying “Male” or “Female,” they’d write, “Yes.”
• My impression is, a lot of us are reflexively pro-police, because we can’t stand those who are mindlessly anti-police. In 2014, I wrote an article called “A Job Like No Other: On policing.” It says pretty much what I have to say on the subject.
It is important, I think, for people like me to reckon with reports such as this: “Why did more than 1,000 people die after police subdued them with force that isn’t meant to kill?” (That article is here.) One always has to examine, and to listen, and to think. (It can be a chore.)
• I thought of a friend of mine — a golf coach — on reading this story. Headline: “College will cost up to $95,000 this fall. Schools say it’s OK, financial aid can numb sticker shock.” I’m glad for the financial aid. But back to the 95 grand.
Ages ago — ’80s, maybe early ’90s — some of the top golf courses started to charge $100 for a round. (I don’t know what greens fees are up to now. I am a range rat, in Manhattan, who never gets out on a real course.) My friend the golf coach said, “No course is worth a hundred dollars. I don’t care what it is.”
It is important to know that my friend was well off. (He had been in business before getting into coaching.) He just couldn’t countenance $100 for a round of golf. He could afford it, but it offended him.
Ninety-five grand — hell, call it 100 — for a year of college. Holy smokes.
• Mind-bending, time is — just mind-bending. (Dr. Einstein could give us a lecture or two on the subject.) “NASA wants to come up with a new clock for the moon, where seconds tick away faster.”
• If you’re like me (heaven help you), you have a traditionalist side and a modernist side. You embrace modernity, or at least accept it, and know that it is largely unstoppable anyway. At the same time, you may shed a tear for the passing traditional.
Henry Ford motorized the world. But he had a panging nostalgia for the agrarian past (as exemplified by his Greenfield Village, which he opened in 1933). (When I visited Greenfield Village as a child, they were churning butter and whatnot.)
I was taken by this article: “On French Riviera hillsides, the once-dominant Menton lemon gets squeezed by development.” The “traditionalist” and “modernist” sides of me danced together — not harmoniously.
• Do I have any music for you? Huh. Here’s a podcast I just did: welcoming, and celebrating, spring. Also, something wonderful hit YouTube the other day: Leontyne Price, singing in Turandot (Puccini) in 1961. No wonder we all went nuts over this rare and sublime lady.
Later. Have a good weekend.
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