Poking Gentle Fun With Clever Political T-Shirts
Sometimes it seems like we're a nation split in two. There is a red half and a blue half, each feeling very strongly that they right and the other side is wrong. Before elections, candidates' signs litter our highways, streets and yards. Our mailboxes are stuffed with pamphlets, and negative campaign commercials and infomercials take over our TVs. Everyone has an opinion, but, truth be told, it often looks like we're a nation of sheep, blindly following a party or a candidate, and unable to think for ourselves. Well, fortunately not everyone has lost their independence and sense of humor, and what better way to gently poke fun at things or express a different opinion than with T-shirts?
Politics, of course, are important. We all have our views and opinions as to how the world should be and how it should be run. And some of us have the urge to express ourselves with clever imagery and wordplay. If you feel like we the people are really sheep in this whole political process, hey, maybe that makes us sheepol (rhymes with people and has "politics" thrown in) in this demockrasee of ours (yes, we do a bit of mocking here). And maybe we want to use sympols of our independence. And if you think I am making up words, I am not; the urban dictionary defines "sympol" as a simple political symbol representing a rhetorical metaphor. And sheeple as folks unable to think for themselves. Mix in "politics" and you have sheepol. Throw it all together and you have demockrasee T-shirts.
There are those who believe that miscommunication is the major problem in American politics today. Politicians say what people want to hear and what doesn't offend anyone. Or they build a platform of issues that gives candidates a way of pontificating without really saying anything at all, or committing to anything. As punsters, we'd advise to keep things as sympol as possible, and we consider clever political T-shirts as sympols of our independence. As long as we're all sheepols, why not a T-shirt that humorously shows that we at least consider ourselves as sheep that flock, or floc, differently? Or as long as the political parties view us as commodities, why not mock them a bit with clever commodatees Tshirts or younitee shirts?
There's just plenty of ways to poke fun at the ultra-serious, angry and often sleazy tone of political debate. I've seen political T-shirts with red or blue barcodes that cleverly oppose the concept that we're political party commodities with a human serial number. Or clever use of signs and symbols to do anything from gently opposing a concept of idea all the way to letting the world know how you really feel. Hey, if there are green T-shirts, environmental T-shirts, and a trillion T-shirts with commercial messages or stupid slogans (I'll never understand why that's considered cool), why not a brainteaser floc differently T-shirt, a protest commodatees T-shirt, or something else that gets the message across? That's the least you can do as an independent member of the voting block, or floc. Life's political and we live in a political culture, but no one says you have to be one of the sheep.