The reading this week, brothers and sisters, is from “The Black Book of Communism” by Stephane Courtois and others. There you will find that in the last century Communist regimes worldwide killed, not counting deaths in war, 20 million people in the U.S.S.R., 65 million in China, 2 million each in North Korea and Cambodia, 1 million each in Vietnam and Eastern Europe, 150,000 in Latin America, and a million and a half or so in both Africa and Afghanistan – for a total of about 100 million.

That’s a one with eight zeroes after it. 100,000,000. People.

But no matter how many millions were murdered in its name, no matter how disastrous in human as well as economic terms it has proven every time and in every place it has come to power, communism still has the power to capture the imagination, especially of the young and idealistic.

Ever since he was killed by Bolivian soldiers in 1967 while attempting to foment yet another ruinous revolution, Che Guevara has been a worldwide icon of just that youthful idealism, his silk-screen print with the wild hair, defiant whiskers and black beret has hung on thousands of dorm-room walls and has been emblazoned on millions of T-shirts.

Do all those young men and women not know about communism’s woeful history?

The answer is that they probably have a vague idea of it – and that is probably what they like about Che. He’s a dangerous guy. His ideas can get you killed. He is the rock star, the shock jock, whose flirtations with violence, death and obscenity gratefully scandalize their parents and respectable society.

To them, Che is a symbol. He stands for youth and attractiveness combined with high ideals, strong principles, and ruthless methods – and it just doesn’t matter that the ideals were false, the principles misconceived, and the methods resulted in the deaths of a lot of people they didn’t know.

Che’s real historical importance is that he, along with his patron Fidel Castro, invented gestural politics. Gestural politics is kid politics, and 15 years after “the end of history,” kid politics sometimes seem like the only kind of politics there are.

Even in our democracy, our political leaders attempt to “brand” themselves in the political market by making the right gestures. Senator Kerry is the sensitive, “nuanced” brand, more appealing to women, minorities, and young people, while President Bush stakes out his claim to the tough-guy vote – even as they seem to find less and less to disagree about substantively.

So the legend of Che goes sublimely on. A rock star from the age that invented rock stars, he set the stage for heirs, like Subcomandante Marcos of the Chiapas rebellion in Mexico, who have grown more interested in marketing themselves as romantic revolutionaries – Read the book! See the movie! Buy the T-shirt! – than actually accomplishing their ostensible revolutionary aims.

As more than one commentator has pointed out, the world’s latest rock star guerrilla in the Gueveran mold is Osama bin Laden. Not only does the bearded guy in the turban get the same T-shirt treatment as the bearded guy in the beret, both have made their revolutionary fortunes out of their hatred of the United States of America, or “the great enemy of mankind” as Che called us.

That doesn’t stop American teenagers from worshiping the latter’s image. Che’s many murders are now in the distant past and took place somewhere else, while Osama’s were here and are still fresh in our minds. But maybe in another 40 years a new generation of New York teenagers will dart past the World Trade Center memorial on their hover-boards wearing Osama sweatshirts.

Osama’s version of Islamism is as reactionary and obscurantist as Che’s version of communism. Osama’s pan-Islamism echoes Che’s pan-Hispanicism – “a united America, from Mexico to the Magellan Straits, with a single mestizo race” – and both men appeal to a poor people’s nostalgia for an idealized past. This is symbolized for Osama by the Ottoman Caliphate and for Che by the Incan imperial city of Machu Picchu.

In “The Motorcycle Diaries,” opening this week, Walter Salles shows that he knows the basis of Che’s appeal. “I wish you could see us,” his Che, played by the Mexican heartthrob Gael Garcia Bernal (“Amores Perros,” “Y tu Mama Tambien”), writes to his sister of himself and his friend Alberto Granado (Rodrigo de la Serna). “We look like outlaws, commanding attention wher ever we go.”

Mr. Salles’s film deals with the most romantic and innocent episode of Che’s life, a journey with Granado in 1952 by motorcycle, foot, and thumb that lasted for seven months and took in more than 7,000 miles around the continent of South America. He starting in his native Buenos Aires and ended seven months later, after traversing Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela, in Caracas.

According to the Che legend, observing the sufferings of the poor on this trip radicalized our hero, a young medical student at the time. Mr. Salles wisely sketches in the suffering poor with a very light hand, however. In fact, apart from a couple of committed communist itinerant workers, one or two Indians, and the lepers in a Peruvian leper colony where the two young men work for a time, the poor will leave almost no impression on the members of the movie audience.

The chief impressions they will leave with are the beauty of the landscapes through which the two boys travel and the fun they have – as anybody would at that age. And who can quibble with that? It is Che’s universality that still interests us, his paradigmatic figure as young, handsome, and ready for adventure – much more than the compassion for suffering which has, since his time, become a little shop-soiled as the vulgar affectation of every Oprah or Geraldo.

The only problem with Mr. Salles’s film is that it does not allow any distance from the subject, and distance is necessary if it is not to lapse, as it does in the end, into hagiography. Che becomes a Latino James Dean, his three-years’ junior contemporary. Dying young is part of the job description. A truly clear-eyed treatment of Che’s legend simply could not ignore the human misery associated with all that he stood for.

It’s one thing to treat with respect one of the icons of the worldwide youth revolution of the 1960s – whose repercussions still re-echo down the decades – and quite another to treat it uncritically. Neither Che nor Fidel may have learned this, but Mr. Salles ought to have done so.