With The Motorcycle Diaries opening next month, expect to see a slew of anti-Che "exposés" in the press.  Starting us off is this well-developed but predictably dismissive piece from The Guardian Observer.  A few comments therein:

Che lives! all right, but not in the way he or his fellow revolutionaries could ever have imagined in their worst nightmares.  He has become a global brand.

Apparently the commodification of Che's image and mystique serves to undermine his politics in the most ironic and final way possible.  Not a new idea, and certainly one that Americans with Che paraphernalia (i.e. me) are all too familiar with.  Contrary to popular belief, however, it is exactly this uneasy relationship we have with Che that makes him such an attractive figure.  It is often assumed that those who admire Che either ignore his politics, are communists themselves, or are simply ignorant.  While his appeal largely lies in his power as an individual and as a revolutionary as such, without his politics he would be remembered as nothing more than a good soldier.  Che is the anti-capitalist.  As such, he stirs the conscience of young American capitalists – and this is a good thing, a thing for which I imagine Che would be proud.  In this sense, it is not disingenuous or oddly ironic or ignorant to sport a Che Guevara bumpersticker or T-shirt; it is a declaration that you are both participating in - and dissenting from within - simultaneously.  In short, you're questioning authority.  Onward…

If, as the historian Robert Conquest once claimed, the cult of Che among the young is based on 'one of the unfortunate afflictions to which the human mind is prone... adolescent revolutionary romanticism', ["The Motorcycle Diaries" director, Walter] Salles should have a sure-fire hit on his hands.

Go fuck yourself, dickhead.

'Che's iconic status was assured because he failed,' says [Christopher] Hitchens, 'His story was one of defeat and isolation, and that's why it is so seductive.'

Wow.  Another brilliant analysis from the bottom of a bottle of scotch!  It's the failure that’s so seductive.  Hmmm….  Let me think about that for a minute.  Defeat.  Isolation.  Yeah, that's it.  That must be why I like Native American art.  Hey Hitchens, you know what?  Fuck off.

By the way, I highly recommend Jon Lee Anderson's Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, as well as Fernando Meirelles' City of God, which was produced by Walter Salles.