Gairney Bridge

I commented on the Romish superstitions surrounding relics here. Of course, Rome Catholics aren’t the only ones who valuable the remains of the dead. I recently picked up a copy of Coffee News — one of those free weekly papers that one finds in restaurants and coffee shops (I like reading the trivia) — and saw this interesting “story”:

 Valuable hair: A bookstore owner from Houston, Texas, has paid $100,000 for a lock of hair cut from the head of Ernesto (Che) Guevara. Bill Butler, a collector of 1960s memorabilia, called Guevara, a Marxist, “one of the greatest revolutionaries of the 20th century.” The three inch snippet of hair was obtained prior to Guevara’s burial in 1967. Butler said he would be displaying it in his bookstore, Butler and Sons Books, in Rosenberg, near Houston. He added the Marxist’s writings are still worth reading today. The hair was sold by a former CIA operative and Cuban exile involved in Guevara’s capture.

His writings are still worth reading? Well, sure, but so is Mein Kampf — so that we can recognize monsters before they become leaders of totalitarian states. Here’s an appraisal of the legacy of Guevera, and one that comes from a source that can’t be pigeon-holed as right wing:

The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. Many of the early leaders of the Cuban Revolution favored a democratic or democratic-socialist direction for the new Cuba. But Che was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution’s first firing squads. He founded Cuba’s “labor camp” system—the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims. To get himself killed, and to get a lot of other people killed, was central to Che’s imagination. In the famous essay in which he issued his ringing call for “two, three, many Vietnams,” he also spoke about martyrdom and managed to compose a number of chilling phrases: “Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become …”— and so on. He was killed in Bolivia in 1967, leading a guerrilla movement that had failed to enlist a single Bolivian peasant. And yet he succeeded in inspiring tens of thousands of middle class Latin-Americans to exit the universities and organize guerrilla insurgencies of their own. And these insurgencies likewise accomplished nothing, except to bring about the death of hundreds of thousands, and to set back the cause of Latin-American democracy—a tragedy on the hugest scale.

Nice guy. Even nicer pic.

That’s a lot of hair. No wonder there was no problem clipping a lock of it. Probably a lot more to be had, and no one would have been the wiser.

The bookstore must be doing pretty well if the owner can drop 100K on a lock of famous hair. I doubt he’d be able to afford it, though, if Che had had his way. Quite ironic, actually.