Abe, in defense of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, perhaps that Che-looking statue is actually an homage to Woody Allen’s commanding performance in Bananas, important scenes of which take place in Manhattan (just as a bronze Rocky Balboa now stands near the steps the character triumphantly climbed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art).
Then again, maybe the Central Park statue was installed to please musical-theater aficionados, who cannot forget Mandy Patinkin’s star-making turn as Che in Evita.
Why is it that nice Jewish boys so often play Latino Marxist revolutionaries? Admittedly, Fidel Castro himself has speculated that his mother was of Jewish-Turkish descent. Oy vey.
Forget politics: what’s truly amazing about the “Che” statue, in this day and age, is that it glorifies smoking.
