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PA - Cameron’s bag raises a few eyebrows

Actress Cameron Diaz appears to have committed a major fashion crime in Peru.

The voice of Princess Fiona in the animated Shrek films may have inadvertently offended Peruvians.

They suffered decades of violence from a Maoist guerrilla insurgency by touring there on Friday with a bag emblazoned with one of Mao Zedong’s favourite political slogans.

Somebody rather mangled that line with a uncompleted cut-and-paste operation, didn’t they. Maybe they were trying to keep all the actual suffering down at the bottom and the Shrek references up at the top.

While the bags are marketed as trendy fashion accessories in some world capitals, the phrase has particular resonance in Peru.

The Maoist Shining Path insurgency took Peru to the edge of chaos in the 1980s and early 1990s with a campaign of massacres, assassinations and bombings.

Nearly 70,000 people were killed during the insurgency.

Hell, if she thought about it at all, she probably thought she’d be making friends. “Didn’t they have a Maoist insurgency here? I’ll wear my Mao bag to show my support!”

A friend of Peter’s was visiting the past couple of days for a conference and brought along his girlfriend and brother, and she works at a gallery in Philly and we got started talking about South America, a piece of trivia she’d heard about Venezuela, I asked if they knew a piece of trivia that I’d heard, that gas is cheaper there than it is in Saudi Arabia, and she asked if we’d heard that ‘Oogo had given gas to poor people in the North East and that there were ads playing in Philly of poor people thanking ‘Oogo, and how amazing it was that they were watching Venezuelan propaganda in the US, and that it got on the air at all.

So that’s how we were on the subject of Venezuela, so she said that there’s a Venezuelan artist at her gallery and there was some showing and some Philly idiot got into an argument with this guy, telling him how great ‘Oogo is, and the Venezuelan guy telling the Philly guy that actually he isn’t and that this Venezuelan guy is struggling to get out of the country because of ‘Oogo, and the Philly guy telling him, no, he’s wrong, ‘Oogo is great, and on and on until finally the Venezuelan guy gave up.

So maybe Cameron Diaz was just trying to tell the people of Peru that they were wrong about the Maoist insurgency that killed 70,000 people. Because Liberals, they’re concerned about changing the reputation that America has around the world of being arrogant, know-it-allish, and a lack of understanding of the little people’s thoughts and concerns.