'CHE'.

This is not a lament post. The remark’s not counter-intuitive, (I just learnt the term, I only knew it before) it’s a preventive measure against what could lead to the same. Pretty much like the face-value suspicion of illness in a fairly healthy man, only to be ruled out in the end, so it’s like a healthy-sick-healthy transition, throughout, and it’s not like I intend to stop that. I’m just pre-stating what you’re in for.

“What’s his name?”

“Che.”

“Aha!”

“What?”

“Commie. (Snide smiles)”

I was about twelve when I read a piece about this man called Ernesto Guevara on the last page of ‘The Hindu’ (I don’t remember the date, so you’d look stupid if you counter-checked) and it’s not like I ‘read’, it was a time when I used to want a newspaper that had nothing but the last two leaves in it. And it’s only been downhill, since, because right now, I don’t want a newspaper at all. Anyway, that was when I enquired, you know, probed and I was to find that he had led a revolution, spat at the USA, got himself killed by the end of his prime, only to become the most-worn person ever. I’m not entirely sure about the credibility of that remark of mine, but I’m sure I’m close enough, bringing to the front what’s been stowed away in the back of my mind. I told him I’ve never seen him on a shirt before. He said I’ll see. And I see now.

The Beatles. Iron Maiden. Nirvana. ‘Che’. I guess that’s a paragraph shortened, irony withheld.

Anarchy is different, so different. That’s the official ‘everything else’ by ‘everyone else’, an excuse to do what you’ve been doing because after all, you find you need an excuse for that. No, it’s an excuse for the excuse, than the excuse itself, and ‘Che’, for all intents and purposes, fought against that very excuse. And while ‘Anarchy’ is nothing but a vengeance against a wrong that’s not yet happened to you, a hit back against a raised hand (or a hallucination of the same), revolution is a third hand that helps drag by the collar, the white that’s drowning you. It’s not a symbol, it’s a spirit, and you carry it inside, not bear it on you, showing it off to the world, that’s sharing some spirit you never have anyway.

“Heart on a sleeve,

you need a stab to believe,

in auricles and ventricles,

a hundred each;

that’s how hard you are, to reach.”

The world already knows what I want it to know, without me getting to tell it. But I say it all the same. Ernesto Guevara died at 39. No OD. No suicide. No unspecified lack of belief in life. He was shot dead by the forces that decide and define ‘pop culture’ today, and his instatement has been but a Dostoyevsky fate, or far worse. There’s a fact-fiction ruckus about Jesus Christ, but this man’s flesh and blood and he’s been so, he’s been seen so. I don’t think I’d die for anyone else but me, and that too would be contested by a want to live, and I know it’s a shameful thing to be saying that, but I won’t, I don’t think so. This man did. And that doesn’t make him a ‘martyr’, no that’s not what it makes him.

He’s a Hero. 'The' Hero.

(Heart beats to the left. Well, mine does, at least.)