Kate Muir of The Times (h/t: normblog) writes about the Chavez book programme, whereby Chavistas are distributing literature to encourage broader reading among the masses of Venezuelans who, until recently, were functionally illiterate. Influenced by El Presidente's own shelves, Victor Hugo, Eduardo Galeano and Simon Bolivar are, unsurprisingly, pretty high up on the list, along with a pile of anticapitalist stuff ranging from intriguing to turgid to soul-sapping. Friedman and Hayek, surprisingly enough, don't get a mention!
An interesting reporter might have read some of the books on the list, examined how different they were, and perhaps discussed how the ideas within them might influence the way Venezuelans interpret the world. But this is a puff piece so I probably shouldn't expect too much. What we want is the solid, simple image and then a few coffee and croissant jokes at the end for a nice, self-satisfied morning read. Muir tries to make the book programme sound like a darkly menacing project of mass indoctrination, but I don't think even she can bring herself fully to believe it. The best she can do is note that groups are assigned "a group leader who structures discussions and at first encourages people to read aloud." A description that fits rather accurately my experience of primary school.
Muir generously admits that a government sponsored plan to distribute books is not the same as Nineteen Eighty Four, Fahrenheit 451, or "Nazi's Germany's attack on degenerate literature." But she neglects to explain, given this fact, why it was necessary to mention such comparisons in the first place. I'd like to point out that The Times is nothing at all like a smug and pompous broadsheet for little Englanders who believe that the whole world should be like Tunbridge Wells.
The truth doesn't make good reading. It's a damply unsatisfying conclusion for closed-minded readers to note that Chavez's efforts might be good and bad at the same time. And so, neglecting the fact that most of the people involved in the scheme will never have read books before, Muir concludes that the government distribution of books is "an extraordinary narrowing of opportunity for readers."
"Foreign titles used to make up 80 per cent of sales, but now because of recent currency and import restrictions on “non-essential goods” it is almost impossible to buy certain books, even pulp such as Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. And while the officially listed books are free or the equivalent of £1.50, Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone was seen by a writer from PublishingPerspectives.com in one Caracas bookshop, priced at £80."This leaves me in a quandary. I've been critical of Chavez's economic policies and have been watching the growth of personalism in Venezuela over the past decade with great concern. But Muir's brave new world of market freedom is almost enough to have me heading for the Big Red Door, having witnessed what the big book companies have done to our once great reading habits in the West. If I were being provocative, I'd be tempted to argue that the relentless focus on a smaller and smaller number of commercially appealing but intellectually empty titles, a product of the consolidation of publishers and distributors in the Anglo-American marketplace, amounts to an "an extraordinary narrowing of opportunity for readers." The result has been Dan Brown selling a hundred million books but not actually being able to string a sentence together. The first chapter of The Lost Symbol, by the way, is available for download from the very same page of the Times website, just to the right of Muir's article. The audio version, of course, since actually reading is probably a bit too much effort. Thanks Rupert!
Let's face it. Reading a Dan Brown is the educative equivalent of spooning a year's learning out of your head with a melon baller. And if I were given a choice between freely reading Harry Potter provided cheaply in the marketplace, or getting to read Les Miserables at the cost of an hour's wrangling from an ideologue at the end of the session, Monsieur Hugo and a pair of earplugs is frankly the only sensible choice. Looks like I'd better be buying my red shirt and beret and jumping on that plane...
