che

In my optimistic phase freshman year of college, I hauled my tentative derriere from the dorm to hear a speech by Inga Muscio, self-proclaimed feminist author and activist. I spent most of her speech allowing my mind to wander off to section dynamics and how to cultivate friendship, but I perked up when she started talking about the power of names. She focused on W. Bush, on how a trace of negative energy and power leaked to him with every mention of his name, no matter the context. She called him Arbusto (Spanish for 'shrub') to avoid the unintentional reinforcement of her own theory. I thought it was a bit extreme, but an intriguing idea: each time our name is mentioned it affects us and the world around us in some way.

Her idea came back to me today as I continued to push through Empire's Workshop. It's in the shimmer of certain names, their oily sheen or their beatific glow. Every time I read the words Oliver North I feel like I shrink inside my own skin. Bush's name produces a narrowing of the eyes and an occasional cynical burst of laughter as each mention confirms my feelings. The strongest impression I've gotten of late, though, came from Grandin's treatment of Ernesto "Che" Guevara. I should almost say 'lack thereof.' In the whole history of Latin American resistance to U.S. involvement, the Argentine-doctor-turned-guerilla-revolutionary-turned-pin-up-boy-for-rebels-who-don't-do-their-research merited only one paragraph. And my reaction to that one paragraph only proved the wisdom of that choice. Guevara has become sheer magic realism. His name means something entirely different from what he actually did with his life. Have you seen The Motorcycle Diaries? I watched it for the second time last weekend. It paints a stunning picture of an honorable, gruff young man struggling as his idealism overtakes his ties to the bourgeois world in which he's grown up. The soundtrack is masterfully concocted and composed by Gustavo Santaolalla, the fellow behind Brokeback Mountain, which tells you a bit about its tendency toward sweeping. Have you walked into a bookstore in Central America? Every shelf is heavy with Che, Che, Che. He's grander than Fidel because he never calcified, and more immortal than Allende because he fought with guns instead of politics and therefore remained untinged by diplomacy. You read his name and sigh with the envy of any socially-conscious member of the upper middle class for one who followed his idealism through to its lowest common denominator, you see his face emblazoned on the red t-shirt or incongruously pasted across the rasta-colored flag and long for the courage to achieve the same glory, regardless of whether his life actually confirms the values he's come to represent. It Doesn't Matter. He is fiction. That is why, I think, Grandin spent so little time on him. A book devoted to exposing the uncomfortable scope of ugliness in Latin America has no room for such dewy hero-worship, but were he to try to ground Guevara's story in quotidian unmagic realism he would alienate a large portion of his readership. So Che gets his paragraph and then fades behind the Allendes and the Castros and the Pinochets and the Kirkpatricks and the Montts and the Somozas and the Sandinistas and the Norths and the Robertsons and the Carters and the whole mess of mixed figures that villainize and manipulate one another for months upon months. And I'm left running his name through my fingers, trying to decide if it's one that belongs on the world's lips.