New Socialist Man needs no Colombian lingerie

You can always count on the New York Times to elide important distinctions, and you can usually rely on its siding with rules, regularity, and authority. It's therefore no surprise to see this article on the Caracas government's campaign to purge unlicensed and black-market street vendors from a particular boulevard captioned "Vendors’ Removal Brings a Venezuelan Gem Back to Life."

There seem to be a number of different things going on here:

1. Once Sabana Grande was the epicenter of the city's "effervescent intellectual life," but it had lately become "emblematic of the city’s decline into lawlessness and neglect." Apparently there were many pickpockets.

2. In recent times, about 3000 street vendors had set up shop in the boulevard: "products like pharmaceuticals of dubious origin, smuggled Colombian lingerie and pirated Hollywood DVDs were available."

3. This interfered with the "exclusive shops and outdoor cafes" of Sabana Grande, some of which shut down.

4. Having prevailed in the latest election, and thus no longer needing the vendors' political support, the state is now trying to sanitize the area.

Now, it's clear that the reporter approves of cafes, bookstores, outdoor chess, and (presumably licensed) mimes, and finds pirated DVDs, unregulated pharmaceuticals, and Colombian lingerie distasteful. The crackdown is no doubt a happy development for those who see capitalist transactions between consenting adults as threatening things, presumptively illegitimate without the blessing of the state, and for those more generally who take administrative legibility to be the sine qua non of social order.

A few skeptical observations, though:

1. How tightly linked were the vendors to the crime? Was removing them genuinely necessary to controlling the crime, or was it simply the case that the area wasn't a high police priority, being primarily a marketplace for the lower classes?

2. The article says that "pedestrians have flowed back," but this is a misleading formulation. With 3000 street vendors, it can't be the case that Sabana Grande was a desolate wasteland prior to the crackdown; you can't sustain that many vendors (nor a thriving pickpocket sector!) without customers and crowds. A bustling marketplace has been destroyed, or at least displaced (which entails some destruction).

3. The genuinely black-comedy aspect of the article is the credulity shown towards the possibility of reviving the boulevard as an "area for discussing the direction of Venezuelan politics." As we all know, the first step towards reviving an atmosphere of free expression, disagreement, and debate is to make sure that everyone is properly licensed and that everything is orderly and clean.

Now, you see a bit of skepticism expressed in one newspaper seller's worry that the boulevard will become "a place full of boutiques for the bourgeoisie." But the piece as a whole turns a blind eye to the fact that this is, in fact, the clear and unmistakable goal of the city. None of this should be particularly surprising coming from a newspaper that thinks it an expression of civic virtue to use state authority to seize property in order to build itself a new headquarters. It's just a sad example of the way reporters' natural habits of mind shape the news the rest of us rely upon.

Sigh.