« Shouldn't They Be Studying Torah, or Something? | Home | I'm Sure Glad Her Name Isn't "Harriet Katzenellenbogen-Shapiro" »

May 29, 2008

Che Moods

Che Guevara is coming at me from all sides. First, there's film Che, courtesy of Steven Soderbergh's four hours of fatigue-clad fun divided into two chunks, The Argentine and Guerilla. I haven't seen it, so I'll withhold comment, although I'm not expecting it to be a Chequivalent of the riveting Hitler movie I just saw, Downfall.

From the literary side, I got a big dose of the darling of the revolution in the novel Killing Che, which is a very high quality spy novel complete with hot gringo-y-Latina shtupping, cattle-prod torture and double-crosses galore, grim stuff with flashes of humor and truly great writing by Chuck Pfarrer on every page. A sample, in which burned-out CIA contractor Paul Hoyle surveys the scene at a gala ball in La Paz, Bolivia, 1967:

Hoyle drank a second champagne without the slightest sensation of irony. There were a million places in the world where the rich danced while the poor starved. Hoyle had been around the world, and it had beaten sense into him. He knew that injustice was a phenomenon as irresistible and inescapable as gravity. The privileged always danced and drank champagne. They did so in Saigon, in Johannesburg, in Havana; it could not be different here.

Hoyle was not cruel, but he was not an empathetic man. He looked at the crowd with narrowed eyes and thought, It’s coming for you. It did not matter that Hoyle was here to stop that day of reckoning, or at least forestall it. In that mission, he took no joy beyond a certain dark pride in his work. His was an assignment, not a personal aspiration. There remained the very real possibility that Bolivia would succumb to revolution. If it came, the people around him would be swept away, perhaps even liquidated as a class. Hoyle did not pity them. In plain truth, he hardly cared for them at all.

It just doesn't get any better than that.

Van | 05/29/08 at 10:17 PM | Categories: WWIV

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.keshertalk.com/cgi-bin/mtb.cgi/6734

Comments

Fat Man | May 30, 2008 06:41 PM

Post a comment

Name:

Email Address:

URL:
Remember Me? Yes No

Comments: (you may use HTML tags for style and URL links.
My spam filter rejects any word containing "sex" and "poker" - use asterisks like so: "p*ker")