Image by Meg Jenson.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, I was a goddamn commie, and I’m not talking Bernie Sanders here. I’m talking hardcore, blood-red, dyed-in-the-wool, revolutionary Marxism. I was a goddamn tankie and while I quoted Lenin and defended Putin, I tended to look to the Third World for inspiration. For a deeply closeted Queer kid outnumbered by pervy Catholic fundamentalists in hick country, there was something scrumptiously satisfying about other post-Papist outlaws taking on Washington’s New Rome just south of the border. I was fascinated with Che Guevara, Salvador Allende and the Castro Brothers, but in the early aughts, Hugo Chavez was my greatest hope.

Everything about that man seemed impossible. He was a trash-talking, pot-bellied, serial David, going off on Goliath over and over and over again and somehow winning every fucking time. While Allende went down in a blaze defending democracy from the pulpit of Marxism and the Castros were forced to reduce Cuba to a floating citadel just to keep the Batista out, Hugo Chavez faced down the guns of American imperialism like Tony Montana and managed to come out of the maelstrom without ever missing an election.

It all should have been over by 2002 when the CIA organized another one of its spectacular Latin American coup d’etats. A phony protest movement was organized, high-ranking military officers had Chavez kidnapped and absconded to an unknown location, some corporate gangster named Pedro Carmena was arbitrarily installed as president, the National Assembly and Supreme Court were dissolved, and then-President George W. Bush recognized the whole farce as democracy. This is usually where the story ends and I’ve read that tragic story more times than I can count, from Augustus Sandino to Jacobo Arbenz. But then the Bolivarian Revolution flipped the script.

Hundreds of thousands of irate Venezuelans poured into the streets like a flash flood, many from the most impoverished favelas in the country, swarming the national palace and demanding their democracy back. When Uncle Sam rented thugs to open fire on these people, the people stood their ground and fired back. The lower ranks of the Venezuelan Army, staffed largely by denizens of those same barrios, were inspired to do the unthinkable. They turned their guns on their commanding officers and brought Chavez back from the dead. And just like that, what had started out as a carefully orchestrated American putsch had resulted in a spontaneous anti-American uprising. Uncle Sam was humiliated, Venezuela was galvanized, and I was officially in love with the Bolivarian Revolution.

Babylon kept on trying but their attempts just kept on backfiring in the most spectacular ways. When Wall Street manufactured........

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