Conservative patriotism bad, liberal Marx-hugging good
The once unpretentious T-shirt has become ground zero in America’s never-ending culture war.
Wearing the wrong shirt in the wrong place at the wrong time can get you banned from airports, expelled from schools, barred from military bases, kicked out of shopping malls and threatened with arrest just about anywhere.
The media is littered with stories of people stopped, threatened or arrested for attempting to board commercial airliners with cartoon guns on their T-shirts. The reasoning is always the same; it’s a security risk.
When the transpo-police can’t explain how a fabric firearm figure can possibly pose a threat they quickly backslide into that most politically correct of platitudes: “It’s offensive.”
In Pennsylvania a fourteen-year-old boy received detention for wearing a T-shirt with a gun design that he said was intended to honor his uncle, a soldier fighting in Iraq. Meanwhile, on a sports website no less, another kid commenting on those ubiquitous Che Guevara tees posted, “Che shirts are popular” and “People in my school wear them.”
Conservative patriotism bad, liberal Marx-hugging good.</em>
Me, I like this one:
“armed”
