you mean the guy on the t-shirt?

i love it when i walk into a high end coffee joint and see a pimply teenager from some upper class school wearing a che t-shirt. whats even more amusing is the guy who works in an international bank and has just stopped off to have a ice-mocha after a hard workout at the gym wearing it. admittedly, it used to infuriate me, but now i just love it.

i actually made my che t-shirt. i went out and got the picture printed on 't-shirt transfer paper' and ironed the it onto a tee i bought. my rationale for doing that was that che would never approve of anyone making a profit from his image. which the both the guys that i got the paper and t-shirt from did. (but who cares about particulars)

whats even better is getting a quick lesson in socialism 101 from these people. i jokingly confronted the adolescent, asking him if he knew who the dude in his tee was.. "thats che man, commandante along with fidel castro" "interesting, you little prick, but can you tell me who was the third commandante?" (yes, i know you know; camillo cienfueges, he died in an alleged aircrash) but the boy didnt know.

what actually irritates me is pseudo knowledge..

when i went through my "im a socialist rebel" faze, i went all out. i read about the russian revolution, lenin, mao zedong, che and castro etc.. i even attempted to read karl marx's das kapital (has anyone seen the size of that book?!?!)

the funniest thing though, is that there is a small poster on the glass door of this particular cafe,with a picture of 'el che' on it, with the caption "this isnt what hollywood told me about che - a stage play"

"the beauty of it" i thought. "this goes way beyond irony, this just rips the pants off

'ChICaGo - dA MuZiKaL' " clearly this was put up by some delusional (albeit well meaning) cappuchino chuggers who thought it would be a sort of public service to convert the message of world socialism into an hour and a halfs entertaiment for the wealthy and privlidged citizens of a nation thats going through a food, energy, inflation, moral, ethical, spritiual (ad infinitum) crisis.

what would be cool is if the potential audience are asked, before entering, if they know what the word 'proletariat' means. and if they dont, they cant see the play. i wonder how many would get in?

maybe once they're done with showing us lot "The Real Story about Che - The One They Dont Want Us to Know" they could translate the play into urdu and other regional languages and take it out on the road. take it into the farm lands and inner cities to thoes people who do manual labor, you know, the ones who work for a daily wage, theres a word for thoes people, i forget what it is.

but on second thought they'd better not.. they might start a revolution.

i think over the years, che's body has turned in its grave so many times that by now its created a fucking vortex.