To-may-to, To-mah-to

In the little "Where did you come from" box along the right side of the page, I get updates that tell me where different visitors to this blog arrived from. Most of them, anyway, as the little widget has a feature that allows people to opt out of having their visit recorded. My Blogger account page will show me those, but we can't see that on the main page.

Anyway, a recent visitor came from the town of Bolivar, Missouri. That interests me, because my mother was born near Bolivar and lived the first few years of her life on a farm there. Technically, the municipality closest to the home was Halfway, today boasting about 175 citizens and named, so Mom said, because it was halfway between the larger towns of Bolivar and Buffalo. But when they "went to town," they went to Bolivar. Which they pronounced to rhyme with "Oliver."

Most of Bolivar's original settlers came from an area near the town of Bolivar, Tennessee, and so they named their new town after their old town and after the South American revolutionary who was the old town's namesake, Venezuelan-born Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios Ponte y Blanco. He was usually known just as Simón Bolivar, pronounced according to Spanish custom as "See-MON Bo-LEEV-ahr." But in Missouri, where a statue honoring him was given to the town in the 1950s, he is plain old "Simon Bolivar," pronounced "SY-mon BALL-eh-ver."

Bolivar -- and since you are probably not reading this out loud, you can pronounce his name however you like in your head -- acquired a fanbase in the United States early in the 19th century because he fought to free the nations of South America from Spanish rule. England's former colonies had no problems rooting for a local boy who wanted to kick a far-off snooty landlord to the curb, and so Bolivar was sometimes even called "the George Washington of South America."

His efforts resulted in freedom from Spanish rule for several countries in South America, first as one large nation called Gran Colombia, of which Bolivar or El Libertador was president from 1819 until just before his death in 1830. That country dissolved into the present nations of Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama soon after Bolivar passed. It claimed coastal areas of what is now Costa Rica, Guyana, Peru and Brazil, but never exercised any real authority in them. 

Gran Colombia did not contain the present-day country of Bolivia, which was named after Bolivar in honor of his efforts to help it free itself from Spanish rule. However the official name of Venezuela, one of the successor nations to Gran Colombia, is República Bolivariana de Venezuela, or the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. And that country's thuggish loony-toon president Hugo Chavez dug up Bolivar's body last year in order to test it for evidence that El Libertador was murdered by Colombian generals.

Bolivar himself, given the challenges of ruling a large, well-dispersed population in a time and geography that made distant communication next to impossible, became increasingly authoritarian in his rule and proclaimed himself a dictator in 1828 -- maybe that's why Hugo likes him so much. His vision of a republic that valued and protected individual rights against the powers exercised by the state or by the wealthy mostly collapsed, he resigned in April of 1830 and was dead of tuberculosis by December. No small number of lesser leaders have found the challenges of bringing democratic republican government to different Latin American nations more than they could handle, so it's hard for history to judge him too harshly.

And in any event, his nickname of El Libertador gave the school sports teams of his namesake town one of the more unusual -- and definitely cooler -- names as well. Bolivar High School athletes take the field to bring glory to their alma mater as the Liberators. Nobody's named a mascot after Hugo Chavez yet -- although the University of California at Santa Cruz would seem to have had him in mind, their logo was chosen in 1986, while Chavez was still a mostly unknown Venezuelan Army captain plotting to overthrow his government.