February 5, 2009, Thursday

Geog 157 Latin America

Iconoclasm

One of the more memorable scenes in the film Che was of the Argentine
revolutionary tugging around in the mountains of Sierra Maestra, hiding from
soldiers, while having an asthma attack. As someone who has asthma, somehow
finding out that one of the greatest revolutionary icons of the world had this
condition is, to pardon the expression, a good feeling. You look at this man and you
know the same miseries that he has gone through, and although you may be
separated both by time and place, a connection is formed.

When people think Che Guevara, they think passionate revolutionary triumphing
against American imperialism, they don't think asthmatic idealist with a gun
dreaming of toppling a dictatorship. But the first image is just as true as the second
one. Somehow a cult surrounds icons and all their frailties, all their human
limitations are blotted out, making them appear more beautiful to the minds of
those who idolise them.

I've read somewhere that the best way to get rid of saints is to worship them.
Worshipping something creates a gap between the worshipper and the worshipped
so that from far away, the object venerated appears more beautiful and
unattainable. This idea is dangerous in that it renders the worshipper impotent,
unable to be, only able to worship those values that he sees in the object
venerated.

And this is why Che Guevara merchandise is so popular with the youth market. We
see these young rebels sporting the image of the revolutionary and somehow they
fail to see the irony of the image of a Marxist being used in a capitalist undertaking.
Is this not the triumph of capitalism over Che's idealism? That those who idolise him
can only do so by engaging in an activity that is so typically bourgeois, that is, the
activity of consumption? Somehow this idea just begs the comparison to that of a
victorious tribe showing off their strength by displaying the head of those they
vanquished on a pike. Only here, the head is Che Guevara’s, and the warriors are
the rebel fashionistas unaware of what is it exactly that they are doing.

But maybe I'm being too harsh about all of this; maybe I'm just problematising
something that isn't really a problem. Philosophers raise the dust and then complain
that they cannot see, goes a well-known rebuke. What is wrong with veneration
anyway? Is it not good that people actually find Che an inspiration and that they
express this being inspired by buying Che Guevara merchandise? What would Che
Guevara do?
Well, Che is dead and we will never know. He was shot by counterrevolutionary
forces in Bolivia decades ago and the photograph of his corpse, naked from the
waist up is in polar opposition to that other image we see plastered all around. Here,
we see the humanity of Che, his mortality, his being capable of dying. The irony is
that this particular image of him might well serve to free us from the dictatorship of
that other more popular image of his. This is because this image of his cannot be
plastered in merchandise and then sold to adoring crowds of pseudo-rebels. In the
end this image might teach us to personify the values of Che, not merely praising
them.

Entitled "The passion of the Che”, this photo displays the corpse of Marxist revolutionary Che
Guevara one day after his execution. His body was put on display to the world's press to
prove that in fact he had been captured and killed by Bolivian rangers with assistance from
the CIA. Taken by photographer Freddy Alborta on October 10, 1967 in Vallegrande, Bolivia