This month’s GQ includes superslugger/supermodel Naomi Campbell’s interview with Hugo Chavez after her visit to Venezuela in November. Maybe the magazine knows how dumb an idea this really is as it promotes the piece with the faux tabloid coverline “Bush wants me dead!”.
The good news is that in the ten years since the model last visited Venezuela (for a Sports Illustrated shoot) the “people seem happier”. Result.
In the interview spread over six pages, Campbell describes Chavez as a “rebel angel” who is unafraid to speak his mind but poses “no threat to democracy”. Phew. It is good to know that Venezuela is clothes horse asserted safe. Rest easy democracy.
She writes in the pieces that she did not go to Venezuela for political reasons?! Having read the piece I got that. It is all self promotional.
“I’d always heard Hugo Chavez was a people’s president and I wanted to see if that was true… I didn’t want to judge Chavez, or probe him for his political views, even though he gave them freely. I simply went to interview Hugo Chavez the man,” she writes.
It is a ludicrously silly piece and an open mic for Chavez to spout about this love for Fidel, rant about the US and about how everyone is out to get him (he’s probably right about that though).
Bush he said was “completely crazy” and Condoleezza Rice was “secretary of state of a genocidal government”. Asked if he thought Bush wanted to kill him, he replied: “I think he does. Him and his companions.”
Weirdly he has lots to say about the Queen and Prince Charles. Sadly nothing about King Juan Carlos of Spain who did what we all want to do at the end of last year and told him to “shut up” at the Ibero-American Summit in Chile.
AFP has some more excerpts here.
Next month Naomi goes to Zimbabwe. Maybe.
Gene adds: Chavez has a knack for making fools of fawning foreign celebrities. Film director Oliver Stone played a part in his latest hostage-freeing misadventure. Stone, of course, didn’t blame the the actual hostage-takers– the FARC militia in Colombia– for their failure to release the hostages, but rather (you guessed it) the United States.
