Annie Hall and the Challenges to Romantic Comedy Convention

Alvy's Classmate: For God's sake, Alvy, even Freud speaks of a latency period.
Alvy Singer: Well, I never had a latency period. I can't help it.

Although a lot has already been said of Woody Allen's Annie Hall the full weight of its "Freudianism" has been left out, especially regarding the later writings of Freud. Woody Allen was no stranger to the works of Sigmund Freud, indeed this knowledge played a very important part in his films, so it is forgiveable to call Allen himself a Freudian filmmaker. In order to show the depth of Allen's Freudianism and how it challenges certain established conventions it is necessary to pinpoint what exactly Woody Allen’s screen persona is, using Annie Hall (1977) as an example, then to locate what conventions of the Romantic Comedy it is a challenge to.

Film critics are ready to accept Annie Hall as a romantic comedy and no popular film website or book challenges this film belonging to this genre. But when watching the film it is obvious that the typical optimism of a RomCom is disturbed. What Annie Hall does which this sub-genre of comedy would usually erase is denote the impossibility of love. Or rather it shows the impossibility of love for a “Manhattenesque” intellectual pessimist. Indeed this impossibility is furthered by Woody Allen’s character Alvy Singer being a self-conscious Freudian undergoing analysis. As Socrates said ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’ only for Alvy he is not able to live for he is forever examining. Even more relevant is Kierkegaard’s quote ‘Life can only be understood backwards; but... it must be lived forwards’ though for Alvy Singer his (Freudian) obsession with analysing his childhood to understand why he is the way he is, condemns him to a life that cannot properly be lived forwards. Indeed this is aptly summarised by Alvy’s theatrical play about his time with Annie, as he says himself “you know how you’re always tryin’ t’ get things to come out perfect in art because it’s real difficult in life”. It’s as if the only way to psychically patch things up with Annie and experience a proper closure is to rectify his relationship outside of reality – something he says he has always confused anyway.

Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik identify in Woody Allen his ‘incurably incompetent character’ which is not as challenging to Romantic Comedy convention as the questions about love Alvy Singer cries at the people on the street of New York. When the young couple tell Alvy that shallowness of the mind is “love’s only guarantee of durability” then he realises that love is his impossible project. Implicitly in the answer that the young couple give Alvy, they tell him that unexamined love may or may not be worth living, but its the only thing that keeps it alive. Alvy is at the point of his analysis where examination is no longer an option, deeming the durability of his love with Annie as improbable. And indeed this is their loves fete. As such, his incompetence does precede his challenge to Romantic Comedy convention.

As Geoff King points out, Alvy Singer encapsulates the notion of romance as ‘complex, frustrating and elusive’. For Alvy, if romance could just simply be romantic then he would bypass all his pent up anguish, however his tension concerning romance is a reluctance of commitment to a post-feminist heterosexual union. It seems his main battle is to synthesise his fantasy of the old-fashioned couple and the “Manhattenesque” female independence. In comic fashion, his inability to find a synthesis between the two sees him spy on Annie after she has just finished a class, where it is she begins to find his paranoia intrusive.

Alvy’s paranoia demonstrates the same vulnerability which Annie previously found affection for. However, in trying to craft in Annie his perfect woman – one who takes classes at Columbia and who takes analysis – Alvy helps provide Annie with the necessary confidence for her to leave him. At this point, Annie is also able to examine her own life, and she envisages, as Babington and Evans call it, her ‘“second sex” status’.

Another element to Woody Allen’s screen persona which precedes his being a challenge to Romantic Comedy convention is his preoccupation with stereotypes. This also relates to his being an exemplary Jewish humorist – a point I shall come back to further on. On Alvy’s first meeting with Allison Portchnik, he labels her as a typified New York, Jewish, Liberal intellectual after she tells him the subject of her thesis, to which she replies ‘I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype’. In a way, Woody Allen’s screen persona is a reduction to a cultural stereotype. One critic has suggested that telling jokes about the racial/religious group one belongs to is at once a knowledge of the negative stereotypes others have about that group, whilst it not being an affirmation of that negative stereotype. Alvy’s complaint “I distinctly heard it. He muttered under his breath, “Jew”” is at once Alvy Singer being paranoid about his Jewishness, and Woody Allen’s portrayal of the stereotypical paranoid Jew.

Indeed there is something rather unique about Jewish humour. It was Freud who distinguished humour (or as the title of his study suggests, wit) from jokes and comedy. The difference is that anyone can tell jokes or churn out prescribed forms of comedy if they chose to, humour on the other hand is something inherent in ones psychological make-up. So what is inherent in Woody Allen’s humour? His pessimistic, self-deprecating humour is characteristic of Jewish humour. With even a limited knowledge of Judaism one can identify why Jews have needed a psychological defence against persecution. Freud himself recognises humour as a defence mechanism used by the Jews in times of hardship. Martin Grotjahn explains the self-deprecating joke as ‘taking the enemy’s dagger, splitting a hair in mid-air, stabbing himself and giving it back with the query ‘can you do half as well?’’ The self-deprecating Jewish sense of humour seems like a distinguished way of causing psychological trauma to the enemy, by querying whether the enemy can do half as well at denigrating Jews. Amid this, it also underpins a defiance against the Romantic Comedy conventions.

Other than being too intellectually neurotic for love, pessimistic, preoccupied with Semites and stereotypes there is one other thing that is indicative of his screen persona which deems him dissimilar to the conventional Romantic Comedy character. When Alvy Singer announces that he ‘never had a latency period’, whether intentionally or not (as this is a Freudian critique, intention is not important here), he proclaims something which has troubled Jews for centuries: Moses and the latency period.

The latency period in Freudian psychoanalysis is the fourth stage of psychosexual development during which the child develops a libido – that is to say discovers pleasure from being fed (oral phase) and defecating (anal phase) – and when years later on the child begins to go out of its way to control the movement of its bowels. Freud in his text Moses and Monotheism asserts this same period as an analogy to Moses’ relationship with Judaism. So, looks back Freud, Moses was not Hebrew but an Egyptian priest of Akhenaten (Effective spirit of Aten). He furthers by saying that the Jews killed him in despair of his Monotheism, but later historically felt guilty and formulated a religion acknowledging him. Moreover, by killing Moses, the Jews sacrificed the use of historicising – something Freud attributes to the peoples of Egypt. Without a history of these events, there remains an unexamined period of around 150 years of Judaism, which Freud termed the Jewish latency period. In addition, Freud declared that the guilt of killing Moses has remained in (and is the reason for) the Jewish faith - to make Jews feel better.

What then, now, is significant about Alvy’s confession that he never had a latency period. Is he not saying that he didn’t kill off the Moses in his Jewish persona because having a latency period, and being Jewish is, for Freud, the equivalent of accepting the killing of Moses. And so this is relative because by keeping that kernel of Judaism alive in Alvy, has meant that his persona is characteristically Jewish (without actually having the guilt of being a religious Jew for killing Moses – as it happens Allen, like Freud before him, is Atheist). And it is this characteristic, as I have detailed, which constructs him as a challenge to the conventions of Romantic Comedy.

Babington and Evans describe Alvy as ‘struggling ... to detach himself both from Madison Avenue taste and the trauma of an ethnic minority childhood’. And this vulnerability is very public. Indeed it is what makes him attractive to Annie, and also what ends up repulsing her about him. Babington and Evans also talk about the contemporary comedian who must declare a distance between his comic persona and himself. This is precisely what Woody Allen does not do. Critics have convincingly commented on how autobiographical the film can be seen. If this is true, Alvy’s pseudo-intellectualist-Manhattenesque-Atheistic Freudianism, which is attributed to him not being a conventional Romantic Comedian, is Woody Allen’s own.




Bibliography:

Babington, Bruce and Peter William Evans, Affairs to Remember: The Hollywood Comedy of the Sexes 1989, Manchester University Press, UK

Bailey, Peter J., The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen 2001, University Press of Kentucky, Kentucky

Davies, Christie, Exploring the Thesis of the self-deprecating Jewish sense of humour in Zajdman, Anat and Auner Ziv (eds.) Semites and Stereotypes 1993, Greenwood Press, US

Grotjahn, Martin, Jewish jokes and their relation to Masochism in W.M. Mendel (ed.) A Celebration of Laughter 1970, Mara, LA

Freud, Sigmund, Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays 1974, Hogarth Press, London

King, Geoff, Film Comedy 2002, Wallflower Press, GB

Neale, Steve and Frank Krutnik Popular Film and Television Comedy 1990, Routledge, London

A Note on Wyndham Lewis

A Note on Wyndham Lewis

The years between 1912 and 1915 were important in the history of British art. In lieu of an authentic avant-garde artistic style, British artist Wyndham Lewis formulated and maintained the energy behind “Vorticism”. Lewis’ contemporary Ezra Pound invented the word Vorticism in 1913 which Lewis would remain linked to until 1915 when he joined the army, after which Lewis’ work had a definite sense of the anxieties of war and destruction.

The etymology has been the subject of some confusion amongst academics and critics. The strongest claims highlight the word ‘vortex’ emphasising Lewis’ imagery of the descending whirlwind of ideas with a concentration of artistic energy at the centre. Otherwise the term vortex conjures images of art finding its referent in the eddy of emotions. Whatever one fancies there is a definite sense of an organisation of artistic and creative energy that may have hitherto been lacking in the British art scene, something that the Vorticist movement had the potential to fill.

An understanding of ones communication with the external world made a deep impact on the materialism of Vorticism to the extent that the style itself as could be perceived as being “dogmatically external”. Although this might appear to be Vorticism’s trepidation of nature this wouldn’t be quite true. Indeed Lewis had a terrific respect for, and anxiety over the artistic recreation of, the natural world. For Lewis, an affirmed humanist, there is a real risk for artists when they take to a recreation of nature and the sense of its conveyed emotion. The true essence of nature cannot simply be found in its representation alone.

Vorticism was able to demand more legitimacy in its short-lived magazine Blast written and edited primarily by Lewis. The first edition opened with the Vorticist Manifesto detailing the elements that needed to be either ‘Blessed’ or ‘Blasted’. The second (and final) edition of Blast was entitled The War Number and dealt further with Vorticism’s epochal aesthetic.

The post-Blast Lewis developed a style that was more intimate and more becoming of an era ravaged by world war. Lewis would still stick to his guns in the main elements of his art namely a style which is “[n]ot vulgar, not bourgeois, not parochial”. It was only so long before his intimacy would find expression in portraiture. He dealt explicitly with critiques of portraiture in his writings and demanded of himself and his audience a proper understanding of the surroundings of portraits. Lewis had said of this subject “accessories in portraiture … involve special problems” and the artist himself should go to lengths in order to take “particular care over them”. It was clear that for Lewis ones surrounding environment and the “line, rhythm and volume” meant just as much as the subject himself in its ability to convey meaning and direct the particular essence of that painting.

Early on in Lewis’ writing life he felt the need to express his thoughts on the definitive relationship that should exist between a work of art and its critic. Everything crucial to the genesis of an art piece, its essence and self-enclosed homage to its environs, has the potential to be translated by a competent critic if that critic extracts elements of that art as though they were objects to be found in everyday life (which is what the production of art should definitely focus upon). The artist, however, should not attempt their own translation because of the intricacy one has with the essence of the thing, which is potentially unattainable even by ones own senses.

These propositions may not be totally original (which was the Vorticist’s primary raison d’etre) but they do give a certain insight into the hubris that was to permeate the future of art in general. Indeed Lewis’ deep feelings towards art and environment did predict some of the problems with art in the post-theory age, namely the illusion that the artist enjoys the mastery over the symptomatic readings of his own work, which simply has no consideration of an individual’s own relationship with the essence of the thing. In our present historical situation where it is widely considered that appeals by hard materialists to the physical dynamics of the brain meat which can function and alter at the level of psychosis in a much more concrete way than the abstractions and speculative activity of Freudian psychoanalysis, there is a big mistake among artists to perceive analysis itself as self-enclosed, that it is possible to properly know thyself relative to the environs that inhibit oneself. This, I assert, is the true lesson (or, rather, reminder) of Wyndham Lewis; that it is entirely the case that nature’s imposing manner unto its human subject is defiant of sense-perception of that subject himself and the only way to truly quantify oneself with ones environs is the put oneself up for scrutiny in the same way as one might translate and extract from a piece of art.

One hopeful appeal to academia in this argument is perhaps directed towards Thomas Kuhn; the interplay and acceptance of scientific theories are paradigmatic, but truth itself is not paradigmatic, rather, beyond human clarity. Our pursuit of truth emanates from hypotheses both sound and unsound, still truth remains indefinitely whether apparent or not. This, I argue, is the lesson against the artist’s futile attempts at self-translation, and here we should not forget its relevant root viz a viz Wyndham Lewis.

References

Handley-Read, Charles (1951) The Art of Wyndham Lewis, Great Britain: Faber and Faber

Wilhelm, J.J (2008) Ezra Pound in London and Paris, 1908-1925, US: Penn State Press

A New Political Subjectivity

Many top politicians have exposed and fought against voter ambivalence, concerned that uncertainty could be exploited by the far right. The economic crisis may have woken something in the political consciousness that asks new and exciting questions of current and future politicians. This new surge I call the "New Political Subjectivity". (Read on)

Iran-Bolivia Investment Deal

Perhaps amid the war cries and the warmongering, and amongst the condemning and condoning, the blockheaded blockaders and the desperate defenders of Bolivia will meet on one single point: is this the right time to introduce Mahmoud Ahmadinejad into the political mix? The energy sector is a violently dissentious issue in Bolivia - stirring US ambassador to Bolivia Phillip Goldberg to announce "US institutions should interfere in Bolivia's internal affairs." Subsequently energy is what Morales' undemocratic opposition want to target, with aims to interrupt oil exports into dependent neighbours like Brazil.

The timing from the perspective of the Iranian President is less ambiguous. There is the prospect of an Iran-Russia oil relationship. Dick Cheney, while in Kazakhstan, expressed considerable interest in building new export pipelines that bypass Russia from Central Asia. His central message, by symbolically avoiding a Russian visit, is to weaken the power of the nation, and highlight America's interests. Russia will look to relations with Iran as a prosperous investment.

As well as this possibility, Iran, keen to remain a chip on the North American shoulder, will try and drum up the support of other oil-rich, anti-imperialist nations. The oil and gas industry ties, established in September 2007, shaped by Morales and Ahmadinejad in Tehran are said to promote economic development and welfare for both nations. Their joint statement drawn up last Tuesday, declared importance to "political struggles against Imperialism."

The diplomacy with such an unsavoury political figure (to say the very least) like Ahmadinejad - whose reputation stands as being one of anti-Semitism, anti-women's rights, and not just homophobia, but one who denies the existence of homosexuality in his country - may initially cause grave concern for any ardent Morales supporter. But why, one might reflect, shouldn't Morales allow this investment deal? At least for now.

ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of our America), the economic model set up by Hugo Chavez to resist the relentless pursuits of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) is still in its early stages, and is still reasonably small (Honduras, in Central America, recently joined making a total of 6 countries). Investment from Iran, as well as the joint loan with Venezuela for a state cement company to ease profit concentration, is necessary until ALBA can assuage reliance from foreign investment. Iran may be politically virulent, but there is nothing to suggest that it will have any ideological influence.

Despite what some sceptics may say, such as Israeli commentator Isi Leibler, the commercial relations Venezuela has with Iran has not affected the political persuasions of either country. Liebler accuses Chavez of anti-Semitism on account of favourable comments made about him by Ahmadinejad, even after Chavez's recent talks with the World Jewish Congress where he condemned "all forms of anti-Semitism, discrimination against minorities and anti-Muslim sentiment." Liebler even appeals to Chavez's opposition to Israel's foreign policy though Chavez himself has stated "criticisms of Israel aren't meant to demonise Jewish people."

Bolivia is the poorest country in Latin America, and its left wing measures have made it possible for the country to keep up to 85% of its gas profits, making it possible to redistribute that wealth to provide the basic needs of its inhabitants, who were, before Morales' presidency, very much disregarded. With the limited choices of investors who are not at the beck and call of the US, supporters of Morales will just have to resign themselves to the fact that Iranian investment is a necessary evil. And lets hope a temporary one. To be sure, Morales is not a soft touch, he is a man of equality and will not be swayed by Ahmadinejad’s disreputable ideas.

If one still finds the deal disagreeable, then it is important to remember that it is precisely this kind of economic model - where a country has to rely on the ideologically unsound for investment - which, in the final analysis, Morales seeks to overthrow. As revolutionary as Morales is, and as much as his heart is in the right place with regards to the economy, unfortunately for him and his supporters, at this moment in history, this pocket of imperialist resistance exists within the global framework of neo-liberal capitalism and will have to, to some extent, entertain this framework in order to survive. Indeed, if this settlement alleviates some domestic economic pressure, for the time being supporters should view it as a small price to pay and conditionally vindicate it.

The God for atheists

In the latest attempt to disclose Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams' personal attitude towards homosexuality a series of letters dated from 2000 and 2001 have revealed Dr. Williams having paralleled that "[a]n active sexual relationship between two people of the same sex might therefore reflect the love of God in a way comparable to marriage, if and only if it had about it the same character of absolute covenanted faithfulness."

Continually acting as ombudsman between progressive and traditional Anglicanism he is susceptible to hostility from either direction. But while two opposing sides of the Anglican church battle it out among each other over who has rightful understanding and belief of their holy script, an argument is impending which supposes that belief should not be maintained for the conventionally religious at all. Or rather, put with a hint of grandiloquence, it is only atheists who can truly believe.

For a complete history of an atheists relationship with God, or, God for atheists would be far too monumental to print here. As an important component of it certainly one should consider the rationalist philosopher Spinoza's use of the word God as synonymous with nature, rather than keeping with the orthodox view as directly in the image of man. Such a subversive view subsequently led to Spinoza's cherum, or excommunication by the Jewish community. To liken someone to Spinoza was to liken them to an atheist.

The Jewish-atheist psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, influenced greatly by the works of Spinoza, himself tried to change the conventional manner in which Judeo-Christianity was perceived, most notably in what was to be his last major work entitled Moses and Monotheism. The fact that it appeared in 1939, at a time of great ferment for Judaism was given careful consideration by Freud. The premise of the text revises the history of Moses including the formerly neglected detail that Moses was not a Hebrew but an Egyptian priest of Akhenaten (Effective spirit of Aten). He goes on by saying that the Jews killed him in despair of his monotheism, later remorsing and formulating a religion acknowledging him. Freud declared that guilt has since remained core in the Jewish faith (guilt, also, is a key feature of psychoanalysis, a deeply religious tinted practice).

Materialist re-readings of the bible have been a commonplace in the texts of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris recently. Works focusing on the place Christian ethics has in radical politics has been a feature of authors such as Terry Eagleton, Frederic Jameson, Giorgio Agamben and Alan Badiou. Ken Schei, a self-confessed "atheist for Jesus" and founder of the group "Atheists for Jesus" argues for a denial of any deity, but to follow the ethical teachings of Jesus exemplified by his sermon on the Mount. Against the kernel of Paulist interpretation, Schei is influenced by the Ebionites who were followers of the original apostles, and unlike Paul had met Jesus in person. Here it is stressed that Jesus was a teacher of moral and ethical guidelines without contradicting the great knowledge we have, and will increasingly improve in the future, of science.

The current most prominent philosopher reinterpreting Christian ethics against today's New Age and Gnostic religious vista is Slavoj Zizek. As the title of his 2001 study poses, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? he details why it is imperative that atheists consider the legacy of Christianity for themselves. Zizek's human subject in today's religious landscape battles with a conflict in what he knows and what he believes. He elucidates this religious problem with a comparison found in the oncoming global warming scare; we know of the earth's warming, but we cannot really believe it. He asks that the materialist reading of the incarnation be considered the same way, that man is forever condemned between knowledge and belief. To use the more familiar experiment shown by Richard Dawkins, a spectrum of ideas ranging from 1 - Strong Theist (I know God exists), 2 - short of 100%, 3 - higher than 50%, 4 - exactly 50%, 5 - lower than 50%, 6 - short of 0%, 7 - Strong Atheist (I know God does not exist). Since knowledge is trapped in a parallax (another Zizek book title) then belief is vital.

One common element to the above efforts is to retrieve religion from less generous hands, namely the fundamentally religious or the politically far right. Freud's motive was to, rather than join the resistance and speak out for Judaism, suggest the true legacy of the Jews. Yielding an indirect jab at the Nazi's, for whom the message is you think you know your enemy, you don't. For Ken Schei we should acknowledge Paul had never met with Jesus and his so-called vision of Jesus' teachings on the road to Damascus to arrest Jesus' followers, was wrong. A rather more difficult position to summerise is Zizek's, who insists for the materialist and atheistic core of Christianity whilst also exposing a creationist's initial problematic trying to pass off what has hitherto been a faith system as science - for someone of faith Zizek argues - the language of the enemy.

As a response, these atheists may respond to Archbishop Williams that Christian love is not a reflection of God, but God is a reflection of Christian love, or that our ethical imperatives are borne in the world, and not from a divine intervention in our souls.

The Voice of Palestinian hope is buried in Ramallah

"I have learned the words of blood-stained courts in order to break the rules.
I have learned and dismantled all the words to construct a single one:Home"

"I Come From There"

Landing in the presence of mourners numbered in their thousands around the streets of Ramallah, a helicopter carrying the body of the Arab world's best loved poet Mahmoud Darwish arrives for the first state funeral to take place in the West Bank capital since Yasser Arafat's in 2004. His coffin, mantled in the Palestinian flag and olive branches, was soon driven through streets overlooked by gatherers on a hilltop that will shortly be named after him, near the Ramallah Cultural Palace.

While the faces of the city were filled with tears, the poems - bursting from loudspeakers - were filled with both isolation and ambition. Later, after the burial, commenced the sound of 21 gunshots and the eulogising words of Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, "master of the word and wisdom, the symbol who expressed our national feeling, our human constitution, our declaration of independence”.

Darwish was born in the city of al-Birweh 7 years before the Nakbah in 1948. In the 1960's he achieved prominence for his poems in leftist publications critical of the Israeli occupation. In the years between 1961-1967 he spent 5 occasions in jail before exiling himself, firstly to the Soviet Union, then Cairo, Beirut, Tunis, Paris, and then back to the West Bank in 1996. Exile would prove to be a staple of Mahmoud's work, ensuring his canonical status amongst those who, too, felt the full weight of his words in the occupied lands.

His politicisation began when he returned illegally back to the city of his birth a year after it had been occupied. He joined the Israeli Communist Party and later the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) where he was on the executive committee before resigning in protest at the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993. Preferring to focus more on his literary work, he brought back from obscurity the journal Al Karmel which had been pushed aside by the Israeli invasion of Beirut a year after its original founding in 1981. Efforts were then taken by Darwish to promote the poetic voices of other Palestinians who were exiles in their own country.

In 2000, an Israeli Minister proposed including Darwishs' poems into the national curriculum, spurring outrage from rightwingers who subsequently went on an offensive to oust the Ehud Barak government through a non-confidence vote. The following year Barak, now Minister of Defence, was defeated by Ariel Sharon's Likud Party. The topic of Darwishs's poetry in schools is still an area of debate, recently former Education Ministry director-general Zevulun Orlev told The Jerusalem Post that the poetry 'would arouse sentiments against Zionism, Judaism and the country.' Dismissing this, former Education Minister Yossi Sarid stressed the benefits of teaching arab students about Israel's national poet Haim Nahman Bialik, so why not the Israeli students about Darwish.

Last year, in a momentary return to the political stage, Darwish condemned Hamas's violent takeover of Gaza, following that statehood would only be effected by unity. A pity it is that he won't be able to cast opinion on Israel's proposal to withdraw from 93% of the West Bank, as reported on Tuesday from Israel's leftist news source Haaretz.

In April of 2002, away at a poetry reading, Darwish was informed that the office where he edited Al Karmel had been turned over during a series of Israeli army operations to uproot suicide bombers. Regarding the viciousness of the attack, Darwish was quoted as saying "I took the message personally. I know they're strong and can invade and kill anyone. But they can't break or occupy my words." This last sentiment rings especially true, as the volume of people who took to the streets to observe his coffin would seem to suggest.

For those who mourn the poet as someone who shared in their sense of being ostracised, the struggle continues, but, hope shall too remain.

Bolivia no longer has Shell to pay for

With Shell out the way, and the recall referendum under his belt, Morales can now start to get things moving

Latest figures on Venezuela Analysis show that Morales's result in Sundays recall referendum topped 63.1%, over 10% more than he scored in the December 2005 presidential election. The result has prompted surprise calls from the US for other Bolivian parties to launch a 'unity of dialogue' hoping to score a role in relaxing the political tension present in Bolivia.

Celebrations within the Evo camp should be consorted with a dose of profuse planning, especially concerning matters of national wealth. Last Friday Jose Maria Linardi of Anglo-Dutch Company Shell signed an accord with Bolvian Hydrocarbon Minister Carlos Villegas to compensate the oil conglomerate for its share in the nationalised company Transredes. The compensation figure looks to be in the ballpark of $120.57 Million, but reports are yet to be confirmed.

The deal is set to validate the Bolivian state-owned Yacimientos Petroliferos Fiscales Bolivianos (YPFB) with a 98% stake in Transredes with the remaining 2% in the hands of private partners. The situation regarding Ashmore Energy International (AEI), the British company based in the tax haven Cayman Islands that was sharing a 50% stake with Shell, still remains unfinished. The company filed for International arbitration when the Morales government seized the stake of the company - which previously controlled the operations of 6,024km gas pipelines - after weeks of inconclusive talks.

It is of no surprise then that the gas-rich departments - otherwise known as the "Half Moon" areas - are also the departments that have given Morales his strongest opposition, the Tarija department, where governor Mario Cossío will keep his job after the referendum, contains 85% of Bolivian total gas reserves. Santa Cruz, the first department to back regional autonomy, contains 10.6%. It is clear that the eastern rich of Bolivia fail to see the imperatives of the poorest country in South America being able to keep 85% of its national gas profits and the push for Morales' redistribution plans.

But of course why would they when they have the likes of Branko Marinkovic as their spokesperson. Marinkovic is a known promoter of separatism in Bolivia where he is a member of the Federation of Free Entrepreneurs of Santa Cruz. A descendent of Croatian Immigrants, like so many of the corrupt and rich in Bolivia, he is also a big landowner who once pulled strings at Transredes. As a leader of the Santa Cruz autonomy movement, he is an avowed supporter of nesting gas wealth exclusively to the privileged.

Of course Marinkovic and other regionalists appeal only to the greed and short sightedness of the "Half-Moon's" rich population, but there are perfectly equitable reasons to advocate the nationalization of the gas fields. Firstly public revenues are on the rise, by fivefold according to one report. An increase in the number of children who once worked the streets have returned to school, illustrated by the teaching of the autochthonous languages Aymara and Quechua in schools. The health sector now caters freely to half of the population, there has been the introduction of a dignity pension for the over 60's, the inhabitants of the altiplano are due to receive 24 hours of solar panel energy from the existing 3-4 hours of energy they have now.

In other plans to better the existing conditions of those who live in the high plains, Venezuela along with its commercial ties to Iran, are due to loan Bolivia 225 Million to create a state cement company. Bolivia’s vice minister of medium and large businesses, Eduardo Peinado, has said that “The plant will have the capacity to produce 700 ton[ne]s of cement per year, and this will be destined principally for the construction of roads and houses for Bolivians”.

If left to private interests and the NAFTA-pandering consortium of overt fascists and white nationalists still disregarding Morales's attempts to reorganize Bolivia for the better, then the likelihood of any changes on the scale of those written above seeing the light of day would be rather slim.

Comments like that of Enrique Mendizabal demonstrate the extent to which some observers interpret Evo Morales himself as blame for the political unrest in Bolivia, but its these very same observers who want a return to the "democracy" where the most vulnerable communities are without artificial light during the night hours, where children don't receive educations, where healthcare is promised the rich before the poor, where pensions are non-existent, and where the "Cruzano heavies" come before the 63.1% of Bolivians who want Evo to push through with his waiting initiatives.

His legacy should be one of glory and hope for the Bolivian people, not intimidation and destitution. Exactly how democratic would this be?