Venezuela and the Narcotic of Spectacle

The theatrical management of imperial power

Richard Wilson exposes the opiate of theater behind the Venezuela spectacle.

Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too proficient, the game is threatened with termination.

— William Burroughs

I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.

— Antonin Artaud

When empires collapse, there is a return to theater. Their efficacy as a stabilizing monolith, whether moral or immoral, is immaterial, but its acceptance from outside, from its colonies, and most importantly, from its soldiers and upper echelons of the empire, when those inside the empire begin using theater, the end is nigh. Theater is always a twilight strategy and a twilight recreation. The helicopters flying over Caracas saw zero response, not one MANPAD was used. That doesn’t sound like shock and awe, it sounds like Artaud. The country that cannot stop ISIS, the Houthis, Iran, Hezbollah, says loudly that they overwhelmed the Venezuelans. No, they didn’t. Something was negotiated. Maduro probably made an offer or was made an offer. I’ll go, save my family. The theatrical dances and movements aren’t without reason. Their empire of kitsch and obesity and gluttony, included in the gluttony for food is the one for erasure, drugs.

If there wasn’t a market, a need for narcotics, and the need to get high, drunk, stoned, is an ancient need, immoral or moral is immaterial, we can probably find one person in history that you adore and who was a drunk, a junkie, at least a dabbler. To fix the nation’s drug problem would require real action, not theatrics. It doesn’t require elegies by rednecks, or protests, but real work and money to give hope and a reason to live. The drug problem is mostly a problem of reality. The problem for most Americans is reality is shit. And so, their obsession with theater: TV, sports, sex, porn, shopping. After all of these prove futile in filling the hole inside a man, next is drugs or alcohol.

In 1989, America invaded Panama, a small nation, with 16,000 troops. Panamanian forces killed 26 Americans. And yet, Venezuela, a nation with 200,000 troops, didn’t hurt one American soldier? Everything screams spectacle. Maduro and Trump made a deal. What we saw is what they gave us. In this world of a few billion realities, the dying Empire relies on its old tactics, spectacle. A theater not as absurd as logical. A nation which cannot, after two decades, stop an insurgency in Vietnam or Afghanistan has no other recourse but deceit and show.

Theatrics are the narcotic of the Americans from the lumpen class to the elite. The opiate of theater has a nation nodding off, ignoring their wants, their offspring…patriots laugh down their noses at the fentanyl casualties on the streets, in their macabre yogic poses, foam at mouth corners, yet their leader and leader class are all, to a man, just as ignorant of reality. Trump and the Empire have just injected themselves and the people of the world with a heavy dose of smack. Enjoy the high.