erik lundegaard

Monday January 20, 2014

SLIDESHOW: Tea Shirts


  • I first noticed them in Rehoboth Beach, Del., during the summer of 2010. There are several T-shirt shops along the boadwalk there, and while in the late 1970s they tended to focus on the pop cultural (DARTH VADER LIVES, etc.), by 2010 they seemed angrier, loutish, sexist and right-wing. Call them Tea-shirts. Last month in Minneapolis for Christmas, I saw the same at City Shirts at the Mall of America. The above one isn't bad, although using a Wayans Bros. catchphrase for a backwoods reality-show star who has commented on how happy black people were before civil rights is, at the least, incongruous.

  • But it's the political ones that get to me. A diminishing number of producers? Having their wealth confiscated? In what world? 1950s America when the top tax rate was 91%? Or today when it was a battle to make it 39%? And that's for wages not capital gains. The above tee is a bigger fantasyland than any of my “Star Wars” T-shirts ever were.

  • Dude: 1) Those aren't guns; 2) Pres. Obama isn't going after guns. Sadly. Apparently to enact any kind of sane gun laws in this country, we'll need a Nixon/China thing: a politician less likely to be besmirched for doing the thing because he's usually the one doing the besmirching. We need this because armed men coming into our schools and killing our children isn't enough.

  • I've said it before, I'll keep saying it: America is a man eating filet mignon on a yacht telling a man eating a baloney sandwich in his car to resent the man eating his crumbs on the street.

  • Then you get to the sexist ones. Here's a T-shirt worn by a dude who will never get laid.

  • Ditto. This is a sad, sad shirt for anyone who stops to think about it for two seconds.

  • People on the right do know that John Wayne avoided serving in World War II, right? He fought the safer battle in Hollywood for bigger bucks. And speaking of World War II ...

  • Is there anything more stupidly American than reducing the worst conflagrations in human history to Sunday afternoon bragging rights? Thirty-seven million died in World War I and 60 million died in World War II and all I know about it is this lousy T-shirt.

  • Stay classy ...
Posted at 08:16 AM on Monday January 20, 2014 in category Culture  
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