Greg Grandin explains why Hugo Chavez calls Bush “Mr. Danger”: it’s a reference to Rómulo Gallegos’s 1929 novel Doña Barbara, evidently the most famous Venezualan novel. Chavez’s epithet has been repeatedly trotted out as evidence of his craziness – why has nobody in the press bothered to talk to an educated Venezualan, who would presumably recognize the reference? One wonders if all reporting about South America is so elementarily flawed.
a recent article in, i think, the atlantic talked about chavez’s evidently intense attachment to The Autumn of the Patriarch, but i don’t remember this making its way in.
oops, wrong book:
“This hardly makes him the second coming of Simón BolÃvar. Nonetheless, there are unavoidable similarities between the two—including some that Chávez might not care to acknowledge. Chávez claims that his favorite book is GarcÃa Márquez’s historical novel about BolÃvar’s last days, The General in His Labyrinth. If this is true, he must know that BolÃvar ended his life distraught and depressed.” (franklin foer in the atlantic monthly, may 2006)
for context, here’s the same article’s obligatory mr. danger paragraph:
“His theatrics distinguish him as perhaps the world’s most anti-American head of state. Chávez has described Condoleezza Rice as an illiterate, and has suggested that she suffers from sexual frustration (though he has declined to offer to help her with this problem, saying, “I don’t make that sacrifice for my nationâ€). Bush he calls “Mr. Danger,†or simply “asshole.†Last year, Venezuela withdrew all of the assets that it had held in U.S. banks and transferred them to the Bank for International Settlements, in Switzerland.”