Saturday, January 29, 2005

Che chic

Marc Cooper pointed us recently to a new book, Nation of Rebels : Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture in a post on Sunday, saying that the authors "raise (and answer) the hard question: how much activism today is thought-out, strategic and effective? And how much of it is rather just a lifestyle option, a hobby that makes its participants feel better about themselves while accomplishing nothing?"

But also in my inbox a couple of weeks ago came a link to this article by Jay Nordlinger about the commodification of Che Guevara, and I couldn't resist sharing the above picture from there. Nordlinger also tells this revealing story:

A few weeks ago, the Hartford Courant ran a photo of a Trinity College freshman who was protesting the execution of a serial killer. He carried a sign that said, "Why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong?" — and he was wearing a Che Guevara hat!

NOTE: Thanks to Stacey Philbrick Yadav, a Cairo-based Ph.D. candidate in Political Science from Penn, blogging at al-Hiwar, for helping me figure out how to let text wrap around photos!

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