The Benz and the Psychopath

A friend sent me the link to the grimly amusing  El Che: The Crass Marketing of a Sadistic Racist  by the Heritage Foundation’s Michael Gonzalez. Mercedes Benz, it turns out, just launched a new car in front of a giant picture of Che Guavara with the Mercedes Benz symbol on his beret.

They used the picture in service of announcing a new gadget that would let owners find people to share rides.  ”Some colleagues still think that car-sharing borders on communism,” declared their chairman of the board. ”But if that’s the case, viva la revolucion!”

There’s something smarmily over-dramatic about claiming the gadget to be communistic or revolutionary. But okay, smarmily over-dramatic is what the boys in the advertising department do. Rather worse is their choice of icon. Gonzalez writes:

Che Guevara, not to put too fine a point on it, was a psychopath whose sadistic lust for blood was not easily quenched. He killed for pleasure. He had, moreover, little time for youthful rebellion and none at all for individualism. Lastly, Che Guevara was a racist who specifically held blacks in contempt.

Here, with a great deal more evidence, is Alvaro Vargas Llosa on Che , in an article originally published in The New Republic .

As I’ve commented before, the people who would recoil in horror, and rightly so, from a t-shirt bearing a romanticized image of Himmler or Eichmann do not even notice the image of men who were their equal in wickedness. Especially Che Guavara. He’s cool. Maybe it’s the beret.

But there is, as others have undoubtedly said, something very pleasing in the thought that he’s now just  consumer symbol and an advertising gimmick. One hopes he knows.

My thanks to Mark Barrett for the link.