What Not To Wear

If you were going to make me wear one of those conservative shirts that are always advertised on blogs—and hey, about that, what's going on? what did I ever do to you?—I guess I'd pick this one. I have a kind-of similar shirt with Putin's mug done a la Warhol that garners me daggers from anyone who knows that Putin is a baby stomach–kissing despot. (Oh! And I have another shirt acquired abroad, one that entirely unironically says "Istanbul" across the chest, that earned me some nasty looks from a trio of teenaged Armenian protesters. Later that day I was planning to go into Wrapworks to buy a delicious smoothie, when I spotted them again and had to flee. Sans smoothie. The price of genocide.) This terrible "world tour" shirt forgets all the military's engagements between 1945 and 1991, a black-out that would make Keith Richards blush. But that one, I think, is one that liberals could co-opt, what with its 2003 listing of Iraq as "FREE." This one makes the American bald eagle shed a single tear, but this shirt—oh, it's so good—this shirt trades on pan-African identity to promote handgun ownership. Subtext that crisp doesn't wrinkle.