Don’t worry, I shant bore yinz with the hideous racist and flat out psychotic quotes from the coward Che Guevara. Yinz can duckduckgo them yourselves.
As a fun aside (and some background), I let an uniformed Che T-shirt wearing undergraduate have both barrels when I taught 20th Century America. The young man was ignorant of Che’s real past. The student was made, how shall I say, aware. I did tell him that he could feel free to wear that shirt in my lecture hall if he would be so kind as to defend some quotes that I had selected from his man Che in writing. He was allowed to do this for some extra credit but did not have to present it. The student declined to accept the challenge and I didn’t see the shirt for the rest of the semester or the semester after that in macro-econ. Was he wrong to wear the shirt or, perhaps, was he ahead of the curve? It is far easier to put an image on a t-shirt than it is to launch a product that can buy real advertising…or is this the natural progression?
So, imagine my sudden shock, realization, and then out-loud guffawed amusement as I was watching stages 1-3 of the WRC Championship in Argentina, when I saw the major sponsor of these legs was this:
.
Well! VIVA CAPITALISMO!!!! Can we now please have some Ramírez Sánchez estate grown whole roasted coffee beans? Mahmoud Abbas organic cous cous? Ulrike Meinhof Rheinheitsgebot lager? Mario Moretti bespoke footwear? Fusako Shigenobu hand-made yakisoba?
Che is reduced to an image on an energy drink can pushing taurine, sugar, and b-complex…Perhaps Chris Hitchens was right:
He belongs more to the romantic tradition than the revolutionary one. To endure as a romantic icon, one must not just die young, but die hopelessly. Che fulfills both criteria. When one thinks of Che as a hero, it is more in terms of Byron than Marx.
The image of Che sold T-shirts and now he sells energy drinks and sponsors WRC races. The revolution is truly dead and replaced, sadly. Sadly because now the post-Cold War lid is off of the retrospectively quaint regional revolutionaries and is replaced by muslim terror and endless war; this is far worse in scale, blood, and treasure than the occasional murder of an industrialist, bombing of a pub, or taking hostage of OPEC ministers.
Am I allowed to say that I miss the Red Army Faction?
