Mountain City is the last town one passes through before passing out of Tennessee and into Virginia or North Carolina. Tucked away in the northeast corner of the state, the town of about 2,000 is the only community in the county and home to Johnson County High School, the county’s only high school. I moved there just weeks before my freshman year and found myself alone in a place where everyone knew everyone and had known them for generations.
Ernesto "Che" Guevara at Havana airport in 1962(Tony Ortega/AP)
The community was locked away in time and tradition. While the whole world began to turn a little faster, Mountain City seemed to not just turn slower, but maybe not turn at all. Time had stopped sometime before I arrived.
By some strange occurrence, a copy of Che’s 1961 book, Guerrilla Warfare, was on the shelves of the high school library and wound up in my hands. Far from being a revolutionary, I was intrigued by the notion that armies of nation’s could be defeated by the will of a few who believed in what they were doing. It was a notion I felt must have been felt by those young revolutionaries who in the late eighteenth century stood up to the most powerful nation on earth, its army and its navy defeated by farmers and tradesmen who simply wanted their values to be respected and wanted their land to be governed by their values, not those of a distant land and distant values.
My embrace of his words had nothing to do with Communism. It had nothing to do with totalitarian regimes whether from the left or the right. It had to do with the power of people to set their own course and in extreme cases use the weapons at hand to set that course.
It was forty one years ago today he was killed, but he is not dead. And even as I remember him, I wonder who else does, and in what remote parts of the world did those who remember Che first read his words and hear his voice.