[Lo]

Did they or didn't they?


Targeting Che
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Posted 12/13/2006

Business Ethics: Target, the retailer that distinguished itself last year by banning Salvation Army bell-ringers, has topped itself this yuletide by selling Che Guevara CD cases for a little tyrant-chic right under your tree.

The big box retailer has jumped onto the Guevara bandwagon, selling the murderous revolutionary's image as if it had just turned its stores into Marxist rally stalls.

What next? Hitler backpacks? Pol Pot cookware? Pinochet pantyhose? Target gives this monster a pass, while using common sense on almost everything else it sells.

We can only guess it's because Alberto Korda took one glamorous snapshot of Guevara in 1960 that has delighted leftists and blown around at global anti-American rallies ever since, something Target might do well to consider.

The firm is not immune to trendy leftism. In its Community Giving program, it has given cash to artist Rupert Garcia, whose claim to fame is glorifying Guevara, something noted on Target's Web site.

All this reflects an indifference to history. For some real market research, Target ought to go to Miami, a shopper haven that is a place of exile for the 20% of Cubans who fled for their lives from Guevara's communist Cuba.

For them, Guevara was no hip revolutionary with a free spirit wearing earbuds, as the Target CD case shows. He was a psychopath with a central role in Cuba's 1961 mass executions in the "year of the wall." Guevara signed at least 600 death warrants and executed children against firing squad walls; he was responsible for at least 2,000 deaths.

After that, the Argentine-born communist organized Cuba's gulag. His violence was so over the top it scared even Castro, who eventually sent him away to fight mercenary wars in Africa.

Guevara also left a lot to be desired on a personal level, never paying bills, living in houses he confiscated and wearing Gatsby suits and smoking from a cigarette holder as Cubans starved.

Target would be well-advised to yank the Guevara trash from its shelves, melt it down and purchase their buyer some history lessons. Even for the sake of self-interest, it would make sense, because marketing Guevara probably will come back to bite.

The ailing Castro is en route to the ash heap of history and freedom's gales are blowing through the land he has long oppressed. If there is any justice, there will be a democracy and there will be a reckoning. Leftists who romanticized Guevara will be called out and the consequences will reach U.S. shores.
http://www.investors.com/editorial/editorialcontent.asp?secid=1501&status=article&id= 250906458533409

Remember....no fair Googling the answer.....I said "without looking."

Lo

[Quincy Lehr]

Wow, what a right-wing tirade! And the comparison to Hitler is especially rich (if predictable)! And it gets the reasons behind the Castro-Guevara rift completely wrong! And that last sentence seems to be calling for a right-wing bloodbath! Where's Augusto Pinochet when you need him!

[Lo]

Originally posted by Quincy Lehr:
Where's Augusto Pinochet when you need him!

I think Wal-Mart has him....left of the hardware aisle and right before the toy section.

[David Landrum]

I read about this in the paper the other day, so I think they really did ban Che.

When I was a teenager in the sixties, I worked with a Cuban guy in Indiana who had been an anti-Communist fighter in his native land, was captured and imprisoned by the reds, and eventually got to the USA. He said "Fidel was a Dictator, but Che was a Communist." He said Che used to come around to them in the POW camp and try to persaude them to become Communists. He believed in it enough, this guy said, that he was an evangelist of sorts for the cause.

But whatever your politics, Che is a great graphic.

[Dick Morgan]

Lo-

I didn't google --I think Target has already pulled it. Quincy, why is the truth always a "right wing tirade". I've discovered after this last election that the Republicans blame themselves when they lose while when the Democrats lose they always "blame shift" to someone or something else (voting machines--or some kind of conspiracy -f'rinstance).

Dick

[This message has been edited by Dick Morgan (edited December 23, 2006).]

[Dan Halberstein]

Hell, even when the Democrats win, like in 2000, they have to blame-shift, because somehow they manage to lose...

Okay, so far we have 1 guess and I'll add a second... I'll guess they contextualized somehow instead of removing.

I personally would put him in a red santa suit obviously superimposed, so all romance is slapped in the face if you're suitably right-wing, but you get to retain the radical chic if you're left-wing.

If this is the answer I swear to God I didn't google first... but I'm gonna now!

D

[Dan Halberstein]

Having now googled, I won't ruin the end with "the answer," but I can provide this link, mentioned in a response to this hubbub on a bulletin board:

"The picture of Che with the earbuds is a complete rip-off of the cover of the May/June issue of communication arts Magazine.
http://www.commerce.commarts.com/shop/images/ISS200605.jpg"

Dan

[Michael Cantor]

Does this mean that the The East is Red kid's lunch boxes I'm having tooled in China - Fidel embossed on one side, Che on the other, a Mao-shaped thermos inside - may not appeal to K-Mart?

[Michael Cantor]

Does this mean that the The East is Red kid's lunch boxes I'm having tooled in China - Fidel embossed on one side, Che on the other, a Mao-shaped thermos inside - may not appeal to K-Mart?

And the comparison to Hitler is especially rich (if predictable)!

Quincy,

Apparently most people are Hitler these days. Does this mean that Che has superseded Ahmadinejad who superseded Saddam Hussein who superseded Nasser who superseded...? I notice that even one of your poem titles was Hitler. The blighter seems to be everywhere. I suppose Fidel and Kim Jong-il are Stalin. It just never ends.