Monday, December 11, 2006

When the Big Screamers Have Little Screamers

There’s a sucker bred every minute.

To my mind, however, his appearance in all post-revolutionary photographs of him, save the most famous one by Alberto Korda, is that of a man distinctly unwashed. No doubt this accounts for a proportion of his continuing popularity among youth.
Some purists, or rationalists, might object that one’s aesthetic response to Guevara is rather beside the point. The trouble with Hitler was not his absurd appearance, after all, or with Stalin his pockmarked complexion. And yet, if we analyze Guevara’s popular appeal more than a third of a century after his timely death, we can see that it is the result of aesthetic and emotional responses rather than rational reflection, responses that are now kept alive by a good dose of commercialism.

- Dr. Anthony Daniels (a.k.a. Theodore Dalrymple)

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