CHE GUEVARA: NOT WORTHY OF A T-SHIRT

I'm quite amazed at all of the people I see walking around with t-shirts of Che Guevara. All of them are young, teenagers to college students, which shows the state of affairs of both our modern education system (is history even taught anymore?) as well as the state of parenting (Hey, that t-shirt looks great on you, son!). I even asked one young man, a college student, why he was wearing one and he replied, "Well, you know. He stood for, like, freedom, and stuff. He was all about tearing down the establishment, you know?"

Eloquently put. Beavis, himself, couldn't have done better. Listening to the young man, I was reminded of a passage from the book, The Eiger Sanction, by Trevanian, in which he describes the main character, ex-spy turned college professor, Jonathan Hemlock:

Dr. Jonathan Hemlock, Professor of Art, spun out his closing lecture to the mass class in Art and Society- a course he abhorred to teach, but one which was the bread and butter of his department. His lecture style was broadly ironic, even insulting, but he was vastly popular with the students, each of whom imagined his neighbor was writhing under Dr. Hemlock’s superior disdain. They interpreted his cold acidity as an attractive bitterness in the face of the unfeeling bourgeois world, an epitome of that Weltschmerz so precious to the melodramatic soul of the undergraduate.

Hemlock’s popularity with students had several unrelated bases. For one, at thirty-seven he was the youngest full professor in the Art faculty. The students assumed therefore that he was a liberal. He was not a liberal, nor was he a conservative, a Tory, a wet, an isolationist, or a Fabian. He was interested only in art, and he was indifferent to and bored by such things as politics, student freedom, the war on poverty, the plight of the Negro, war in Indochina, and ecology. But he could not escape his reputation as a “student’s professor”. For example, when he met classes after an interruption caused by a student revolt, he openly ridiculed the administration for lacking the ability and courage to crush so petty a demonstration. The students read this as a criticism of the establishment, and they admired him more than ever.

In case any young, Che-sporting students happen to be reading this blog, let me sum up some of Che's accomplishments for you, because I'm willing to bet most young people can't give three facts about him:

-He organized firing squads and personally presided over the execution of hundreds of prisoners after the Cuban revolution and only stopped, reluctantly, when Castro himself ordered him to cease.
-His methods were so extreme that even liberal, pro-Castro journalists were shocked by his behavior. When columnist Nat Hentoff asked Che in the early 60s if there could ever be free elections in Cuba, Che "..burst out laughing at my callow naivete."
-During the Cuban Missile Crisis he urged Castro and the Soviet ambassador to launch nuclear missles at the United States (your country, I should remind you) and was furious at Khruschev for accepting a diplomatic solution.
-He went to Africa in 1965 to raise a force to fight white mercenaries in the Congo. He gave up after nine months of losses and an inability to control his own temper, which caused desertions among his lieutenants. Castro, himself, was so embarrassed that he covered up the Congo affair and declared Che dead.
-He went to Bolivia in 1966 to make a "Second Vietnam", naively believing that his rhetoric, instead of massive amounts of arms and aid from the Soviets and Chinese, could persuade the landowning peasants to rise up. He was captured and killed, face down in the mud, by CIA trained troops.

So, there he is: bloody, unhinged, bumbling, and fanatical. It seems the only thing that kept Che in check was the number of bullets he was able to gather, for if he had been in charge of Cuba or any other country, he would have rivalled Pol Pot's or Stalin's slaughter of his own people. If he'd had nukes, he would have launched them at Washington and New York. It's certainly a sad indictment of someone's character when (ahem) Castro has to act as their voice of reason.

To my dismay, I even found a rack of Che t-shirts being sold at my local, "patriotic" surplus store which I'll no longer be frequenting.