The best advice for any Op-Ed writer in these days of instant high-speed Internet access is to take the various inane lunacies of Internauters with a very large pinch of salt. Quite often, the irate reader is expressing a very hasty gut reaction over his/her own incapacity to grasp what is REALLY written ... or blasts off into the outer reaches of cyberspace thinking that a verbal missile will demolish opinions which which s/he may instantaneously disagree, but subsequently regret after the brain processes kick in to wrench them back to reality...
It's all part of the geography, unfortunately, to receive emailed comments to one's writings ranging from the more obviously pleasurable plaudits and roses to the more sublime and ridiculous ... usually peppered with expletives and invariably ending up telling me "to go burn in Hell!"
The incantation, when you think about it, poses an intellectual dilemma for, if at the end of my earthly sojourn, I will -- as I intend -- have my mortal remains cremated, how will it be possible for me to be incinerated yet again in Hell, if indeed it exists! On the other hand, the fiery furnaces must be extensively overheating in contemplation over the arrival, at some time in the future, of the bulk of the world's lawyers, politicians and soon to be former residents of the White House to boot!
It's all words!
But, when enflamed rhetoric comes from a former Education (?) Minister of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, justifying a desire to "burn alive" anyone who attacks controversial President Hugo Chavez Frias, it surpasses any intellectual debate on the qualities of Christianic "hellfire and brimstone" and is brought down with a violent bump in brutal REALITY!
Does United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) election candidate, Aristobulo Isturiz have even a shred of humanity in the blood coursing through his veins, if he even contemplates burning political opponents ALIVE?
If so, what does it say for the moral, never mind the judicial, content of the PSUV's nascent political ethic?
What does the brutality of such contemplation contribute to President Hugo Chavez Frias' original ambition of bringing 21st Century-style socialism (...NOT communism) to benefit the Venezuelan people?
Aristobulo Izturiz: "Burn Alive"!
And with no less than forty-seven (47) brutal homicides recorded this weekend in metropolitan Caracas alone, how does Isturiz' "burn alive" rhetoric serve to portray the more human aspects of what President Chavez wanted to achieve with Venezuela when ... almost ten years ago ... he took over the presidential reins intent on making Venezuela a better place in which Venezuelans could live and have their being?
Is Izturiz' brutal statement a further indication that the Chavez regime is digging its own grave?
Isn't it enough that that George W. Bush continues to slaughter millions around the world?
Is it really "stomach-able" to regress to the horrific epoch of when Andean Merida's founder, Juan Rodriguez Suarez, was brutally dragged by galloping horses to have his bloodied body then savagely quartered and denied a Christian burial for the grievous offense of having sited the colonial city a few hundred meters out of kilter with what the Spanish King had ordained ... from several thousand miles away in Madrid!
Personally, I had always believed -- and nevertheless continue to believe -- and experience -- Venezuelans to be a warm and loving people, filled with welcoming 'mi casa es tu casa' (my home is your home) welcome and generosity.
So what's gone wrong to have former Minister Aristubulo Izturiz resurrect the brutalities of five centuries ago and justify the burning alive of anyone who dares to attack President Hugo Chavez Frias?
Can we conjecture that it is only feckless and reckless rhetoric?
