Let’s face it, the Miss Universe pageant isn’t just about beauty. It’s about flaunting power on the world stage. It’s a metaphor for geopolitics. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Miss USA, Crystle Stewart—a Texan—tripped on her jewel-encrusted dress at the pageant yesterday in Vietnam, not unlike her Miss USA predecessor did so famously in Mexico a year earlier. These have been rough times for Miss USA winners around the globe. We can only hope that next year we’ll see a real change in the way the next Miss USA conducts herself abroad.

Slate’s Well-Travel series heads to Venezuela this week, with Andres Martinez—author of a book about Las Vegas I loved—exploring the land of Hugo Chávez. Venezuela’s leader is inescapable on the small screen. “[He] makes for seductive television,” Martinez writes, “a bit like watching your Uncle Fred run the country from a reality TV show.”

Related on World Hum:
* The Venezuela-Cuba Freebie Vacation?

Why don’t we in the U.S. get radio shows like this? Now that’s entertainment.

You bet. It’s Karl Marx meets Club Med! USA Today reports: “Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has plans to sign an agreement with Cuba to send at least 100,000 poor Venezuelans to the communist-led island for no-cost vacations, an official said Wednesday.” A free vacation? That’s one item on the socialist agenda I can get behind.

We noted early last year that Venezuela was the new, hip Latin American travel destination for good sandal-shod lefties (or naive commies, depending on your perspective). Cindy Sheehan, Danny Glover and Harry Belafonte, among other famed agitators, had already made the trek. Now comes another breathless report on the phenomenon. “From a trickle a few years ago,” the Mail & Guardian reports, “there are now thousands, travelling individually and on package tours, exploring a left-wing mecca that promises to build social justice in the form of ‘21st-century socialism.’”

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Sure, like Oprah, the Venezuelan president has the gift of gab. But it turns out Chavez, too, can sell books—lots of them. After he recommended Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance at the U.N. Wednesday, the book shot up bestseller lists. What’s more, Chavez is a big fan of “Don Quixote,” and last year, he handed out a million free copies of the book in Venezuelan squares to celebrate its 400th anniversary—yet another Oprah-esque gesture. Any poli-sci graduate students searching for a thesis topic?
* Added: Chomsky will be discussing “Hegemony or Survival” on C-SPAN2’s Book TV Sunday.

The Bush administration might see Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez as a Fidel Castro-loving, Condoleeza Rice-taunting, socialista anti-Christ, but some American travelers aren’t so turned off of Venezuela. A new generation of sandalistas, it seems, is heading south. “Channeling the spirit of 1980s Nicaragua, 1970s Chile or even Cuba in the ‘50s, Venezuela is drawing a new generation of students, celebrities, intellectuals and activists,” according to an interesting item in Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle. “Famous recent visitors include actor Danny Glover, singer Harry Belafonte, anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan and Bolivia’s new president, Evo Morales.”

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