VENEZUELAN GOVERNMENT ISSUES ALL PURPOSE SHAMPOO.

Did you see the picture "Moscow on the Hudson", with Robin Williams and Venezuelan actress Conchita Alonso? In this comedy, Williams plays a Russian escapee in New York. When he starts life in the city he goes to a super market to get some coffee. Faced with the dozens of different varieties, alternatives, choices, of coffee in the stands... he faints. In his native communist Russia he only had access to a monthly ration of the only type of coffee available, when available.

Well, the current venezuelan political regime is walking in the opposite direction of the New York supermarket. In a country where the government has received an income of almost $800 billion in the last ten years one would assume that you could walk into a market and buy any type of coffee, milk, cheese or shampoo available in the global markets. This used to be the case before Chavez came into power. Although there are some supermarkets around, especially if you have government money in your pockets, the glorious revolution has dictated that, for the bulk of the population not connected to the ruling elites, one type of each item is enough and the rest should be defined as imperialistic consummerism.

The government store called MERCAL has just issued a revolutionary, all purpose, shampoo, that will have to do for every kind of hair and, probably, for every kind of mammal. According to the Venezuelan commisars it seems superfluous to have shampoos for fine hair, thick hair etc or to fight dandruff or lice, if you can get a single product estipulated to adress all of these requirements. Another telling characteristic of this new product is that, although the Chavez version of our national flag carries eight stars (the eighth one said to be for Cuba) the number of stars in the bag of shampoo is seven. This kind of error is creeping up with increasing frequency: mathematical errors, typos, erroneous symbols. It gives the impression that the people behind these efforts are inept or just indifferent. This increasingly lackaidaisical attitude seems to be characteristic of the Venezuelan regime. The reason is that there are no checks and balances. If 8X7 are no longer 56 but 52, or if man arrived on earth only 2000 years ago, as Chavez has stubbornly maintained on TV, what's the use to worry about one more or one less star in the bag of shampoo?

T. S. Eliot could have been thinking about Latin American "revolutions", when he wrote in "The Wasteland" about the world ending "not with a bang but a whimper".