[Clinging Bitterly]

...with no knowledge of the distances ahead, but with the knowledge of death behind them -- moving, to collapse on the roads, in the gullies, in the breaks of rotted bridges.

This, of course, is it in a nutshell. Which I see as a bit of a challenge. We read the book to the end and it comes to an anticlimax, the warnings unheeded bring them to this desperate state but it isn't the end. Just as in the novel the producers and the wealth have expatriated, the engine has stopped and the millions of the Eddie Willers' remain in the ruins, to what end for them?

We have some recent history, witnessing the collapse of the Soviet republics and how many of them have returned to prosperity in our lifetimes, and it seems to me Venezuela is near that stage in its "evolution" where it is time to start thinking about how it is going to come back.

Or am I overthinking it? Is there a role for the outside, for the greater, more prosperous of modern civilization to play in a future re-emergence of a state like Venezuela? I don't know, I have to confess I'm not as well versed in how the old Soviet republics (among others) came back from the brink.

What do you guys see in the yet to be written chapters of this saga?

[Publius]

You have to hit rock bottom, crash through that bottom, and find a whole new bottom before people will rethink their premises.

I'm waiting for the Sign of the Dollar scrawled with chalk, lipstick, highlighter, spray paint, or any other means on walls, overpasses, statues -- and government buildings.