Real Guerilla Marketing

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This ad for fracturedatlas.org has been appearing for some time in Backstage the newspaper for actors (and by proxy, waiters and dog walkers). I’m not sure what to make of this. A communist guerilla says that artists deserve health insurance? What’s next, Mao demanding artists get car insurance? Perhaps Stalin wants artists to have discounted dry cleaning? What would Kim Jong Il propose? Maybe subsidized theatre tickets for the people.
Che is not on the same level as Stalin, Mao, and Kim, mind you. He didn’t get a chance to kill millions before he was dispatched by Bolivians, but he did have a hand in the death of plenty of folks. He was a jungle-dwelling communist rebel and comrade of Fidel Castro, for God’s sake. He ordered the lock-up and execution of “deviants” and “anti-revolutionaries.” He’s no John F. Kennedy.
Speaking of: Che was in favor of the Cuban missile crisis escalating to nuclear war. The dashing revolutionary icon thought a better world could be created in the aftermath. Presumably he’d suggest that not only artists deserve health insurance, but all folks suffering from fallout radiation and third-degree burns.
Here’s a cute quote: “Blind hate against the enemy creates a forceful impulse that cracks the boundaries of natural human limitations, transforming the soldier in an effective, selective and cold killing machine. A people without hate cannot triumph against the adversary.”
Who said that? Bin Laden? Hamas? Hitler? Nope. The cute, cuddly, face-on-a-t-shirt guy.
Perhaps the ad agency that chose spokesmodel Che is the same one currently at work trying to convince us how great the Saudis are.