Every day on my way home from work, I pass by, in true Israeli advertising fashion, 2 or 3 billboards by the HOT cable company (Heb/Rus only). They all say (approx. translation) "We need revolutionaries!" There is a picture on the side of Che Guevara, in an earpiece. Apparently, they need customer service representatives, people who are going to reinvent the meaning of Israeli customer support. (Job hunting? Take note, revolutionaries!)
What strikes me as funny every single day is that its simply not true. They don't want support personnel of the likes of Che. He would murder all the management. It gets me every day, and someday I am going to pull over and photograph it and post it here. Its completely twisted.
Ben and I talk about things like this often. I knew he would have a good one on the Che billboards - and he does. Che Guevara would be rolling over in his grave if he knew that his face was being used in Israel to sell cable television. Cable television! And with an earpiece on!
Israel is not the only place to do something stupid like this. Benicio del Toro, when accepting his "Best Actor" award for Che, dedicated it all to Che. Which is kind of funny, seeing as someone like Che himself would have mowed Del Toro down, together with the rest of Hollywood. I don't think he treated artists very nicely.
I'll never forget the day we saw someone in the mall wearing a Mao Zedong t-shirt. It really got Ben angry and he went up to him and told him off for wearing a shirt with the face of someone who killed 60 million people. And we mourn our 6 million in Europe! The guy didn't know what he was talking about. "Who is Mao? A Chinese dictator? My girlfriend bought it for me."
That's all. The man who killed 60 million is now just "a Chinese dictator" - doesn't matter very much.
It takes a little while to realize that it really doesn't mean anything. The billboards are just saying - we need something different. Perhaps the movie tries to say a variety of different things, but at the end of the day, it wants to sell tickets. The t-shirts - just making money for some guy with a stand in the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station.
I wonder that Communism is really kind of dead in our little end of the world - so dead that its turned into Pop Culture. Its kind of cool, in the way that JNCOs once were. So dead, that when people far to the left of center try and spread the wealth too much, they don't really remember what they are asking for. Maybe we should try and take it a little more seriously.
Anyone for sending letters of complaint to HOT and the media?
I Lost My Swim Meet
5 months ago
1 comment:
When we were in South America there were Che T-shirts sold EVERYWHERE, t-shirt stands, Tango halls, guys on the street, museums, everywhere. Of course, the Homer Simpson - Che spoofs were just as abundant.
The funniest t-shirt I saw was a spoof on the spoofs - A T-shirt with a picture of Che wearing a Simpsons shirt.
I think you need to look at all these t-shirts and billboard advertisements a more of a victory over che and mao than a capitulation. If anyone ought to be writing letters of complaint, it's the communists.
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