back from caracas

I just got in last night after spending an amazing week in Venezuela, reporting on Hugo Chavez's "Bolivarian Revolution" for Smithsonian Magazine, which ought to publish it this fall.
This will be short, as the kids could wake up any minute, but I wanted to let anyone who's interested know I'll be speaking at Book Passage in Corte Madera tonight at 7 p.m. and that a rather odd story I wrote about mom rats will be in the San Francisco Chronicle Sunday magazine this weekend.
I hope in the next couple of weeks to produce a coherent impression of Venezuela for people who are just getting up to speed on what has become to my mind the most compelling story in Latin America. Reporting the story turned out to be much harder than I'd expected, as the city is in utter chaos, the institutions breaking down, traffic so appalling it can take an hour to travel a couple miles (I saw a jeep in flames in the road one day, and when I tried to take the subway once a train had stalled). Government officials have pretty much stopped talking to U.S. journalists, and I heard that U.S. diplomats likewise have no access. Still, I was lucky to find informed and patient sources who helped me tremendously, and managed to spend a day in a shantytown, exploring the root of Chavez's continuing popularity. For now: the story is much more complex than it might seem from many press accounts here and especially from the polarized U.S. debate between "hands off Venezuela" leftists and Cold War conservatives. One perspective of special relevance for moms is that traveling to that country, where the dependence on fossil fuels is so extreme (oil is Venezuela's main, almost only, export) and the poverty so severe and the social crisis so intense brings home what an uncertain future we face even in rich countries. Packed in my bag was James Kunstler's very disturbing new book, "The Long Emergency," arguing that the great boom of the age of oil is near its end, and that no one is prepared for it, lending a fairly powerful perspective to my interviews. More soon on that.
On a somewhat lighter note, on the way home yesterday I was on a Continental flight where I was surrounded by fidgeting young kids. The toddler in the seat in back of me kicked my seat for, I'm not kidding, three hours straight before I did what I'd sworn to myself, in my days of traveling with my own babies, I would never do, and turned around and glared at the mom. She glared back. I told her -- and this, I admit, may or may not be precisely true -- that while I used to travel with babies, I would never have ever let them kick someone's seat for that long. (Hey, but what I do know is I'd never have changed a poopy diaper in the seat -- because when I tried once, the flight attendant insisted I do it in the restroom. This lady, however, changed THREE of them.) "Well, then we're different!" the mom said to me. I tried, Buddha-like, to summon compassion, and turned back around and fumed for the next hour. But the experience brought home -- again -- just how crazed we can be when we're in the Short Emergency of coping with babies, and how soon we can forget and stop forgiving thereafter. I remembered tottering through SFO once, overloaded with an infant, luggage and a diaper bag, and noticing a poo stain on my dress, when a middle-aged man caught my eye, and, as if reading my thoughts, said, "And your shoelace is untied...!"