Heroes: lionized, supersized

MEXICO CITY — A few days ago, Aleida Guevara March made a startling disclosure regarding her father, the late Argentine revolutionary leader Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Her papi, Guevara told an interviewer, was even more handsome than Gael Garcia Bernal, the young Mexican heartthrob who plays Che in Walter Salles' new film "The Motorcycle Diaries." However, Guevara March did concede that Garcia Bernal has "very beautiful eyes."

Che's daughter is by no means a frivolous custodian of her famous father's legacy. On a recent trip here, she made a speech against the U.S. blockade of Castro's Cuba at Mexico's National Autonomous University, where she reportedly was greeted by student chants of "Cuba si, Yanquis no!"

But in playing up Che's matinee-idol magnetism, Guevara March underscored the strange mix of folklore, fact and Hollywood-style fantasy that have converged in the face of the bearded man in the black beret. As her remark inadvertently suggests, the way we picture Che today says less about what he lived and died for than it does about mass culture's tendency to sexualize and glamorize public figures while leaving their actual achievements (or lack thereof) in soft focus. That's a pity in the case of a complex figure like Che, whose legacy is still hotly disputed and whose enduring popularity across boundaries of class, race, region, politics and religion have made him as much of a global commodity as Nike or Microsoft.

Of course, in a post-Warhol world, practically any public figure is fair game for pop-culture sainthood. If, as the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle put it in the 1800s, "The history of the world is but the biography of great men," then the history of the world in the 21st century is but the A&E "Biography" series of great men (and women) -- if not the E! channel's True Hollywood Stories.

Still, why does pop culture mythologize and mass-replicate some historical heavyweights but not others? Why did Warhol himself silk-screen Chairman Mao but not, to my knowledge, Mahatma Gandhi or Leon Trotsky? Surely it wasn't the former's fabulous sense of fashion-forwardness. And why is it Che's smoldering visage, looking like a Caravaggio Christ in combat fatigues and heavy-metal-rock-god hair, that gets splashed on T-shirts and carried into protest marches around the world, and not the face of, say, Nelson Mandela, Vaclav Havel or some other less flamboyant revolutionary who arguably achieved far more than Che for his people with considerably less spilled blood?