This event was live-tweeted by Tom Jakob.
RICHMOND, Va. — The evening of Thursday, January 30th was cold. I rolled into the Jefferson Hotel on Main Street in a black tee shirt, mangled khakis, a cardigan sweater and my crimson Members Only jacket … eyes red and lowly from four helter-skelter days of interviews, meetings and deadlines. It had been a rough week … as the Coronavirus continued to spread throughout China, the work ethic in non-quarantined parts of the world was in equally high gear.
I was there for another assignment … a discussion panel from the Richmond World Affairs Council titled “Venezuela After Chavez” … the panel’s featured speakers was enough to draw my interest. Corralling the attention of Americans towards what is happening in Venezuela these days is tough, unless of course there’s an incentive to show face. The RWAC understood this wholly, which is likely why they assembled the likeness of a former Venezuelan mayor and an acclaimed professor on the topic. Then again, anything sounded better than being out in the bitter cold, and city council meetings about Navy Hill weren’t much more uplifting.
Not to my surprise, the crowd was packed and all but every seat in the front row was taken … everyone knew the event was not going to be lighthearted, so distancing oneself from the stage seemed appropriate. I had been to RWAC discussion panels before, and while I always enjoyed them there was also an acute sense of humor I always found at them. I figured the events to be ironic, considering the topic for discussion was usually centered on humanitarian issues abroad … nothing beats listening to old, white men ranting about the rape of the Rakhine State in a ballroom fitted for a Confederate infantry.
Georgetown University’s adjunct professor on Latin politics, Michael Shifter, opened the panel with a miraculous history lesson on the regimes of Chavez and Maduro, as well as how those regimes worked with other foreign governments … the U.S. in particular. Sadly, it fell on deaf ears more or less … Shifter acted as an introduction and stalling device for David Smolansky, the real meat and potatoes, who was stuck in traffic on I-95 when the panel began.
Near the end of his speech, Shifter brought everything full circle while also setting the stage for Smolansky, who had arrived mid-way through Shifter’s speech and made himself at home on the stage with his iPad. Shifter finished shortly after, which was met with a hearty round of applause. Then, he gave the mic over to “the Mayor”, who told the coveted Smolansky life story … about how he went from a being a student activist, to a mayor for one of Caracas’ five provinces, to a fugitive of a corrupt state. All the while, he tied it in with having watched Hugo Chavez become elected and politically self-immolated all in one short lifetime.
The discussion portion wrapped up with a thunderous roar of applause, and Smolansky returned to his blue velvet armoire next to Shifter’s in preparation for the Q&A. Meanwhile, I began packing my things … I had to go chug coffee and finish doing the layout of a newspaper spread … besides, my associate was there recording the whole session. I wasn’t eager to leave … but I was ready, and lateness is a high holy sin for my moral and professional compasses.
But as I was making my way to the exit, I spotted the next audience member approaching the mic with a question and knew within an instant that I had to stop and listen in from the back of the room. It was a student from one of the nearby high schools, made clear to be one raised by dues-paying GOP members by his pompadour haircut and Vineyard Vines long sleeve. By the time he finished with his question, I was certain the MAGALand sapling that was growing in his mind already had grown the root system of a mighty and arrogant oak.
“When the Chavez regime banned private gun ownership in 2012,” he began, “do you think this made it easier for the government … the police … the military … to oppress the population? And do you think that we would be in a different position right now had that not been implemented and taken effect?”
The wave of silence that swept the room following his question was ass-clenching, to say the least … you could cut the political tension in the room with a rusty butter knife. Neither Shifter nor Smolansky said a word in response for almost a full minute.
Finally, Smolansky broke the strain in the room with the best attempt any human would have made in a weirdly specific moment like that.
“That’s a … very smart question.”
The rest of his answer was long winded and a bit dodging. But, his thesis somewhat acknowledged exactly what had me fuming in the back of the ballroom once that blonde haired yuppie tried to inject his ideology on gun control into a discussion about a refugee crisis.
Venezuela is a violent country where hundreds of thousands of people have been killed by gang activity under the Chavez and Maduro regimes. Smolansky delicately shut the child down with this point, citing both the violence and economic disparity as the reason why about five million Venezuelans have fled the country. He made no real effort towards giving credence to the boy’s main point … instead, he gave a non-answer to a non-question.
It was obvious to everyone paying attention at that moment that the boy was only looking to pick an argument with anyone who had the balls to hold a dissenting opinion. On the stage stood two accomplished and respectable men bringing attention to one of our age’s worst refugee crises, providing nuanced and thought provoking discussion to a city that had no real reason to care … and then along came this hairbrained looney. The boy was eager to usher in an agenda that related only to his mindset and had absolutely nothing to do with the program’s topic … even those who may have agreed with his ideology could recognize he was a largemouth bass out of water.
I felt like the crowd was starting to settle with a similar attitude as mine, so I swiftly exited the scene … It was too heavy to endure the rest. I left the Jefferson that evening and rushed down Main Street all the way to Temple Hall, running the whole scenario over and over again in my head … trying to understand where a person like that gets the gall to behave so audaciously during a very generous event.
This is White Nationalism, or at least the early symptoms of it … it’s a mentality that shows an effervescent apathy towards victims of both itself and other issues. It has existed here in the U.S. since the Sons of Liberty duped the British at Saratoga and maybe even before then … defaulting to the idea that those who are oppressed simply didn’t have the unwavering desire to stand up for themselves. The neo-Nazis of today’s age feed on problematic situations and if Virginia is the holy land that makes Richmond the Jerusalem equivalent. Moments like the 2020 Lobby Day demonstration and the 2017 Unite the Right March have made that abundantly clear.
Just as it was starting to seem like things were finally lifting up in this city, reality snapped-back. Boulevard was renamed to Arthur Ashe Boulevard … Rumors of War by Kehinde Wiley had been put on permanent display at the VMFA … Richmond was finally mending its many scars from racism and oppression before everything went haywire.
Once I arrived at Temple Hall, I sat down at my computer for a long night of Adobe InDesign and singed brain cells, when my cell phone received a text message from my associate who was recording the event. The text was an audio file … a recording of the panel, but there was another message attached.
“Skip to 17:06 and get ready to rage.”
The recording was of the last audience member to have approached the mic that evening with something to say … a Venezuelan-American woman not with a question, but a statement.
To wit:
“I married an American man 41 years ago … I came from a very poor family, but my mother always said ‘you have to be educated so that you can do better’. And she made sure that I left Venezuela with an education, but my brothers stayed. They were employed and doing well.
“I am Venezuelan by birth and American by blood and choice. But everyone has to understand that what’s important is not just the ones who have been left there to suffer. It’s also about the one’s like me, who have family there and cannot return to see them.
“My brother died three years ago, and I could not be there for my family. When I heard that he was killed, I rushed out to my car and just …screamed. My husband is the only one who sees how I suffer every single day. My family and I have to text using an encrypted messaging service … it is hard.
“You (to Smolansky) and others like you are my hero, because there are others who have been affected in a different way. I would love to return to Venezuela and see my family again … but even from here, I don’t have that freedom … and I will never be able to forgive myself, because I was not there to hug my other brothers or father.
“So, we are with you … I believe in your generation and whatever I can do to help. We have to stop being impolite to refugees … please, this is a crisis … not just for the ones that are living there, but also for those of us who have been deprived of seeing our families.”
British Parliament finally passed Brexit this week, meanwhile, many holes in American democracy were made glowingly apparent by the Robin Hood antithesis and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, along with his band of merry men. But, diplomacy would end up taking the biggest hit the next day, just in time for U.N. General Assembly week. The Don’s long anticipated Middle East Plan would soon drop like a fart in the orchestra section of Carnegie Hall, leaving Israel with the lion’s share of benefits while Palestine was left in the dirt. Many were saying it would be the starting point to a Third Infitada, and I saw no reason to discredit this. The White House would also be announcing that it was expanding the 2017 travel ban to include six more countries … Myanmar being one of them. But none of it felt important anymore.
