Cool Commodities

Gil Scott-Heron may never have realized just how relevant his critique of the appropriation of revolutionary images would still be 30 years after recording his seminal composition, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." While he skillfully broached the apparent trendiness and decontextualized politics of being a revolutionary in the early 1970s, one can only imagine his reaction to the commodification of revolutionary icons today.

Thirty-five years after dying an anonymous death in a remote region of Bolivia--the culmination of a lifelong struggle for justice and against exploitation by First World countries--Ché Guevara has reappeared on $20 T-shirts and on posters in college frat houses in the Land of the Free Market. The Latin American revolutionary has paradoxically become an icon in the heart of capitalism, stripping his image of his ideology and allowing any kid from the suburbs to transform himself into a revolutionary--a true hero of the people.

Third-world heroes have a tendency to be made into icons, symbols, and mere clichés. After the liberation movements succeed, independence is won, and the former freedom fighters become the faces of the new corrupt governments, the leaders are usually reduced to a single function, idea, or phrase. Not long after Indian independence, the world agreed on the equation, Gandhi = nonviolence. And in truly absurd cases, Ché has even become the logo of a rock group signed to Sony Records, and Bob Marley's music has been diminished to an excuse to smoke pot.

Of course, these visionaries deserve recognition, but to pimp out their images is an insult to some very complex figures. It seems that advertising firms have fully mastered the art of reducing these images of resistance to empty shells in order to sell goods. Who knew consumption itself could be so subversive?

Selling Nonconformity

There's no question that dissent has become cool, and nothing sells quite like "nonconformity." Billboards across the country encourage us to "think different" in a campaign that features none other than Mahatma Gandhi himself stitching his own clothes (khadi) in an explicitly anti-colonial, anti-capitalist gesture. Other icons selected for these Apple ads include Cesar Chavez, the farmworker organizer who led the struggle against capitalist forces in California's Central Valley, and civil rights heroine, Rosa Parks. Curiously, Jesse Jackson publicly complained that Parks is too 'sacred' to be included in fictional jabs in the film Barbershop, but apparently finds nothing sacrilegious about her image being used to sell neon-colored computers.

This past year, television viewers in California have been subjected to ads from the power company Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) that cleverly reinterpret the 1960s radical folk song, "Power to the People, Right On!" The astonishing contradiction lies in the fact that PG&E was a significant player in and beneficiary of the 2001 electricity crisis whose burden was borne most heavily by California's working class. And, in November 2002, PG&E successfully campaigned against a San Francisco initiative that would have created a public power infrastructure as a local solution to the nightmare created by the privatization and deregulation of the electricity market. Sure, power to the people, right on!

In all cases, when icons of resistance are commodified, they become depoliticized. In essence, dissent is cool as long as it is fashionable, predictable, and contained by consumerism. At the same time, actual political and ideological dissent is not really cool at all, especially in the post-9/11 Ashcroftian era.

So, it can be said that any item that is bought and sold, or simply used in advertising campaigns, is inherently detached from the cultures, ideologies, and movements that produced it. As with any product, the market creates a separation between the consumers and producers of those goods. In that sense, Ford drivers never interact with the Detroit auto workers who assemble their cars, and kids with Ché T-shirts need not read up on his political ideology.