A libertarian friend recently got grumpy with me, on ideological grounds, for wearing a Ernesto “Che” Guevara peak cap with a red star in front. It’s just a souvenir I bought from a stall on Tiananmen Square, Beijing, 10 years ago. The very font of liberty. It’s also my only peak cap, but I wouldn’t admit that for fear it would muffle my fashion statement. The red star is associated with Che, but for me it’s an all-purpose up-yours to the “common-sense” tech-brotherhood discourse that now rules social media, and the world.
It’s not the first time my friend has complained about my cap, but I realise that misleading him on its Che provenance, rather than its Chinese origin, agitates the ideologue in him, and I take secret pleasure in his erudite rants.
“Murderer of Bolivian peasants!” he exclaimed, playing on my supposed indifference to the Bolivian peasantry. New territory for him, too, I would have thought, given that the bowler hat-wearing paisanos of the altiplano were oppressed for decades without a footnote from the educated classes.
Granted, Che was a middle-class trendy with time on his hands to refashion the timeworn, all-purpose remedy of murderous idealism to his purpose. Cue chaos and lots of burning, and unshaven gauchos spitting tobacco and red chilli, and stricken llamas loudly missing centuries-old feeding times. Who wouldn’t, especially in one’s more sanguine years, celebrate such a poetic exposition of the finer arts of social mobility in practice?
Idealism may have perished, but Che lives on in the internet age. A Google search uncovers that, for example, from the Chapellerie Traclet, a fancy Franco-Chinese milliner, you can pick up “the Che Guevara beret ... a timeless symbol of revolution and rebel spirit, inspired by Che Guevara himself ... a pop culture icon and fashion accessory”, for the giveaway price of 35 English pounds, about what 10 sacks of coca leaves would fetch at the Cochabamba market. Marx wouldn’t have lain awake at night fretting for the future of organised greed if he’d grasped its eternal ability to part the deluded from their cash.
So, Che motorcycled (a socialist Captain America for the tropics) around South America and became a Fashion Icon Against Poverty and Imperialist Exploitation, recognised by the Great Cigar himself, Fidel Castro, as the missing ingredient in his revolution. Incredibly, Che was too revolutionary even for Castro, and was soon redeployed, going off to try his luck at being revolting in the rest of South America and even Africa, for a while.
Guevara was a product of the Sixties: rebellious in looks and attitude, carrying a torch for an idea whose time had yet to come, reckless of outcomes, undiluted and unwashed. Similarly, the peaceniks, the environmentalists, the dropouts, the gay agitators, the civil rights movement, the social dreamers: all foretold of causes that would become mainstream decades later. We laugh at them now, or worse still blame them for what we are now urged to regard as the source of the “woke” society, whose opponents take liberties in the name of freedoms gained by those who came before.
I’m of argumentative disposition, so I tend to oppose whatever present company supports. If it suits me, I’m an anachronistic exception to the saying, “If you weren’t a socialist when you were young, you didn’t have a heart; if you’re still a socialist when you’re old, you don’t have a brain”.
In attempting to source this aphorism, I found a related contribution from a brain surgeon in the US, who shall remain nameless for Hippocratic reasons. He admitted he was more radical in his medical approach (and with scalpel) in his youth and attributed his being less handy now with the cleaver to having aged. Worse still, he says his results have improved the less he does on patients.
The dawning of self-realisation in a US surgeon who shall remain anonymous parallels, I suppose, the tendency to age and shed one’s idealism like a pair of embarrassing bellbottom jeans. Brains have supplanted hearts. But where feelings felt real, actual thought can only be guessed at.
Though one may succumb to the temptation to break ranks from the thinking de jour and go online and buy a Che beret, it’s too late. Communism fell, the end of history was declared, and social media confirmed the pursuit of the middle-class dream. (Yes, it’s within reach of all who would work for it!) The rewards of acquiescence are many.
Where’s the Left in all this? Last seen living in Yeoville digs and belonging to veggie co-ops. After all the hopeful travel, the awful arrival. The classless society, but still with classes.
Global citizens we are now, all of us. Champions of the status quo. The Che cap, scarf, T-shirt — get the combo online! Be the change! Ts and Cs apply!
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