You have seen him before. He was wearing wire-frame glasses in 1937, talking about the blood of the proletariat, Stalin and Trotsky and counterrevolutionaries in Mexico. He wore a flannel suit in the heat of the New York summer in 1953 and was obsessed with the Rosenbergs. He was radical chic in 1970, all tight pants and confabs with Black Panthers who stroked their pistols while eating canapés on the Upper East Side. You saw him in a Mao suit in 1975, a red star on a green military cap, the Great Leap Forward and the “Little Red Book” and a thousand flowers, all in bloom.
In 2024, he wears sneakers and a black T-shirt, the better to show off the tattoos that climb the guns and speckle the face. The one below the Adam’s apple—“ACAB”—is for “All Cops Are Bastards.” The one on the cheek, a kind of arrow beside his large brown eye, means something like “Fuck you and your death culture.”
