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Warrior-Poet
Apr. 28th, 2012 08:41 pmWas walking down the street today, and a guy commented on my Che Guevara T-Shirt I was wearing.
It was kind of awkward, because my actual feelings towards Che are rather ambivalent. I own the T-shirt more for the kitsch value than anything else. The man’s ideals cannot be criticized, I feel, but his methods ranged from the brutal to the incompetent; his attempt to lead a revolution in Bolivia that lead to his death was almost comically inept. And the cult of personality that developed around him after his death is very much about the romantic image of the revolutionary ideal at the expense of the more complex reality of his life.
So, as I said, it’s awkward when I’m wearing the shirt and someone comments on it, because I am sympathetic to the point of view that he wasn’t an individual that should be immortalised in the way that he has been, while at the same time, the right-wing Latin American governments and their American backers weren’t really open to any sort of compromise with the left, so I’m not willing to complexly condemn Che’s revolutionary socialism either. It’s a complex issue, and not one that it’s easy to have with strangers I meet on the street.
Of course, as it turned out, the whole situation ended up a lot less awkward – for me at least – once it became clear that the guy thought Che was a musician…
It was kind of awkward, because my actual feelings towards Che are rather ambivalent. I own the T-shirt more for the kitsch value than anything else. The man’s ideals cannot be criticized, I feel, but his methods ranged from the brutal to the incompetent; his attempt to lead a revolution in Bolivia that lead to his death was almost comically inept. And the cult of personality that developed around him after his death is very much about the romantic image of the revolutionary ideal at the expense of the more complex reality of his life.
So, as I said, it’s awkward when I’m wearing the shirt and someone comments on it, because I am sympathetic to the point of view that he wasn’t an individual that should be immortalised in the way that he has been, while at the same time, the right-wing Latin American governments and their American backers weren’t really open to any sort of compromise with the left, so I’m not willing to complexly condemn Che’s revolutionary socialism either. It’s a complex issue, and not one that it’s easy to have with strangers I meet on the street.
Of course, as it turned out, the whole situation ended up a lot less awkward – for me at least – once it became clear that the guy thought Che was a musician…
