Cool commodities: how many Che T-shirts does it take to launch a revolution? (Culture).

Third-world heroes have a tendency to be made into icons, symbols, and mere cliches. 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, Che 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.