terça-feira, maio 25, 2004
Che Guevara
No Sunday Telegraph.
Images of Hitler are not considered in any way to be fashionable, even though there are many stunning photographs of him. Guevara, on the other hand, retains an extraordinary psychological and visual allure. Yet, contrary to modish perceptions, their ambitions were very similar: to engulf an entire continent in fire and quench its flames with the blood of millions.
Guevara merely happened to be less successful, yet his memory is preserved in a sickly aspic of brainless sentimentality and mawkish stupidity. Why? It cannot simply be because he was prepared to die for his beliefs: unquestioned respect for such determination perished at 9.12 am, September 11, 2001, Eastern Standard Time.
No, the militant Left appeals to the adolescent Oedipus complex in insecure, immature artists for whom the status quo is a resented father-figure, and the socialist revolutionary is the liberator who will expel paternal authority. And even though artists have seen what happens when you chuck out dear old dad - as in the Soviet Union, Red China, Kampuchea, North Korea - these cultural darlings are usually too obsessed with their own visceral emotions to comprehend fully the catastrophe of the triumph they seek.
For such lesser artists, art is all about self: the world is merely a warehouse of artefacts for personal indulgence. Thus these solipsistic infants drink from the mythic wells of "liberation", and revere a serial-murderer from Argentina. The poster of Guevara on an undergraduate wall is an echo of this fatuity, a historically-ignorant and adolescent rejection of the poor devil who is paying for the flat. Above all, Guevara's enduring status in film and populist imagery is proof of mankind's pathetic inability to recognise evil when its guise is beauty and its lie is love.
posted by Miguel Noronha 11:05 da manhã
Comments:
Enviar um comentário
