Wednesday, March 14, 2007

The politeness of Hugo Chavez

For full context on this post, first read this one from Backword, where Dave concludes --

Isn’t it great that so many diverse people are reclaiming the offensive langauge of yesteryear?

Now National Review's The Corner seems to have a niche monitoring the utterances of Hugo "Islamo" Chavez, so Mario Loyola reports this one --

CHAVEZ: And ... in the height of ridiculousness ... [Bush] said that today we are all children of George Washington and Simon Bolivar. In other words, he considers himself a son of Bolivar. What he is, is a son of a ...

AUDIENCE: ... B!@%h! (*)

CHAVEZ: That word, I can't say it here.

For those who are accustomed to hearing Chavez in his colorful Spanish, this display of vulgarity is nothing but ordinary. What is remarkable about his style is how authentically populist it is in the worst way—how he sugar-coats his political extremism with the slapstick vulgarity of a Chris Rock or Andrew Dice Clay.


Besides dating himself with that Andrew Dice Clay reference (what year was Ford Fairlane anyway?), the delicate Mario can't resist telling us what Hugo wouldn't:

* Hijo de puta: literally, "son of a whore."

Amateur scholars of the Iberian languages can note that the insult is nearly the same in Spanish as in Jose Mourinho's Portuguese.

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