Iconic and Ironic

In conjunction with the book my students and I are reading for English class, I had a lesson planned on irony. It also happened to be a free dress day at school –no uniforms. I was introducing irony and struggling to get my students to understand the concept. “No, no; rain on your wedding day is not an example of irony, that’s just an example of bad luck.”

Then I looked up and noticed Julian’s hoody. Emblazoned across the entire sweatshirt were images of Che Guevara.

“Okay boys and girls, here we have an excellent example of irony. Who can tell me who Ernesto “Che” Guevara was?”

Che Guevara was an Argentina-born medical school dropout who went on to become one of South and Central America’s foremost communist revolutionaries in the 1950s and 60s. He rose through the ranks to become one of Fidel Catro’s key henchmen.

He also happens to be one of Argentina’s greatest exports. In every open air market we go to in Southeast Asia, I see his image on t-shirts, mugs, wrist bands, hats, and banners. Judging by the availability of t-shirts, Che is more popular than Obamao and Bob Marley combined.

Che Guevara was a committed, ideological communist. In other words, he couldn’t have been more anti-capitalist. As a die-hard communist, he was against free markets and he was certainly against personal profit. If Che Guevara knew that people ranging from souvenir vendor to large corporate retailers were making millions off of the sale of cheap t-shirts sporting his visage, he would roll over in his grave. Che stood against a lot of things, but first and foremost, I think that he would be against the working class using its labor to produce low quality, mass-produced t-shirts intended to be sold for profit.

So middle class students –whether in Hong Kong or the suburbs of Chicago- wearing overpriced designer Che-shirts purchased at the mega mall? That boys and girls, is a textbook example of irony.

In order to sport Che chic wear, a kid needs to either be ignorant of twentieth-century history or he needs to have a really sophisticated, subtle sense of irony. Which most middle schoolers don’t have. Sarcasm? Yes. Sophisticated, subtle sense of irony, not so much.

Okay, okay, true confession, I didn’t actually use my student’s Che hoodie as an in-class example of irony. I would never want to do anything to embarrass a student in front of his or her classmates. But oh how I was tempted.

A perfect example of the exact concept I was trying to teach my students was sitting right there in front of me and I couldn’t use it.

How ironic.

-Jack

[Picture and entry posted with permission]