Venezuelan exile Alek Boyd went back to Caracas for a visit after several years living in England, and has asked us to flag his chronicles of his tour there, where he will be covering the campaign of Manuel Rosales. Sounds interesting enough.

In his first dispatch, he writes a fair and accurate account of arriving at the airport there, speaking of the monumental Chavista signs, a dictatorship trademark, and the courteous, swift Venezuelan customs officials, something pleasantly surprising.

But oh god, Alek’s language! And I don’t mean his command of English, which is fine, but his use of language to conceal rather than reveal his thoughts.

When he means to say:

Look at me, I’m in CARACAS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

which is the worthy point of his piece, he writes:

If empiric conclusions about this country????s politics are to be drawn from observation of displayed propaganda, then one can conclude that there’s only one party here folks.

Empiric? Urrrrggh! You’re in Caracas, Alek, and that’s the first thing you want to tell us?

That is about the worst lead to an article he’s ever written.

I hope he doesn’t do the rest of his coverage like this, in godawful passive, indirect, wordy language. He uses annoying phrases like ‘mind you’ in the middle of his point, archly distracting from his serious point (and I can just see the tap-tapping of the black umbrella and the tilt of the bowler hat, but I feel nothing of blazing tropical skies and Chavista urban chaos he ought to be trying to convey). He is well on his way to using words like ‘aforementioned’ and ‘aforesaid’ and other cluttering particles and hackneyed cliches that obscure what he really wants to say.

Maybe that is what is going on in this badly written essay. As a returning exile, he must have a huge range of emotions, and wants to say something, but maybe the sight of Caracas, which he has written about from afar for years, is still too big for him to take in. That would explain why he conceals his thoughts, and reveals only a default mode of fussy petty British bank clerk English that wanders off onto irrelevant points and manages to use a lot of pixels but say little.

Meanwhile, since going through an airport and into Caracas is a mundane experience thousands of people experience every day, and is not something – you know, cosmic – Alek misses the chance to convey some excitement about BEING HOME or the potentially joyful experience of seeing the familar, or the good fortune of getting no hassle at the airport.

I mean, here is an exile, returning home for the first time in years, except that now he’s a known dissident – that’s a compelling story right there.

In his case, I would be curious about why he wasn’t stopped at the airport because if anyone is gonna get hassled at the airport, it’s him. I am very relieved he wasn’t. But I’m disappointed he didn’t have any explanation for it, either. So this normalcy means Venezuela isn’t a tyranny, and you’ve been exaggerating all these years, Alek? Or that Chavistas still underestimate bloggers? Or what does it mean?

But we don’t hear about that. Nor do we hear anything about the long road through the Caracas slums now that the bridge to the airport has collapsed from Chavista neglect, something we all have been covering for a long time but have not had an update on for months. Or those Cuban doctor kiosks on the road from the airport, are they still empty due to Cuban doctors defecting? No idea from reading Alek’s piece.

Another thing we don’t hear about are those miles and miles of hillside Caracas slums, the mottled patchworks of red and green, and how they affected him. When I first saw them, they so freaked me out I had to lay down and I could not get them out of my head. No one had warned me about them, so on my own I first realized how powerful Chavez’s message must be to poor people and how many Chavistas there might be out there. Heck, I wanted to be a Chavista! Based on that experience, I can see where Sandalistas get their fervor. But I don’t know what Alek thought, did the sight of the slums just gloss over his mind like something normal … or did he not want to say anything? I wish he did.

Anyway, he tries to make a theme message of Venezuela being a one-party state, based on Saddam-like road monumental signs, which is a little undersourced, and something we already knew.

Since I’d like to hear about the rest of this trip, I hope Alek sticks to descriptive writing, the appropriate thing when travelling, and leaves analysis and deep thought, which will come, for later. His first post is here.

Sorry to be so critical, Alek, but you’ve got to put some heart into your writing and leave your inner English bank clerk in London!