July 07, 2005

Peaches and Che

Apologies for the lack of great free content on this site of late; I've been a bit harried trying to get in some quality reporting-hours so that I, too, can get in on these great new journalist shield laws. Um, if and when they ever arrive.

But on the light and frivolous side, let me endorse just about everything Margot Talbot has to say about Roald Dahl in the New Yorker this week. As it happens, before I settled on my eventual topic for a college English thesis, I thought very, very seriously about trying to root out all the hidden Marxist subtexts in James and the Giant Peach—something about the collectivization of agriculture, as I recall. The only flaw in that idea was that it was pretty idiotic. In that vein, Alvaro Vargas Llosa's hit piece on Che Guevara is also well-deserved. No sense wading into the "commodification of former bloodthirsty radicals" issue here, but Llosa hits on an even more burning question: Why did anyone ever hold Che up as some sort of master of asymmetric warfare when he was, in fact, horribly incompetent at that sort of thing?
-- Brad Plumer 9:55 PM || ||