The Obama Shirt

President Obama. It rolls off the tongue… though I had a few worries there for a while. And they weren’t so much about the possibility of John McCain being elected; he’s a moderate and so would’ve probably done an okay job, considering what he had to follow. And it wasn’t so much about Caribou Barbie being potentially one overactive melanoma away from the presidency, or about having just another white male as president of the U.S. of A, which is supposedly one of the most diverse and tolerant countries in the world with an enormous population of educated, independent, and capable females (with the exception of aforementioned Miss Wasilla). But I digress.

No, my greatest worry was not along the lines of anything even remotely socio-and-or-political.

What I was worrying about was the “Obama shirt”.

Let’s rewind a bit. This summer, due to some lapse of rational mental processing, I applied (and got!) a job at Zumiez, a self proclaimed “skate-snow-surf” shop that actually caters mostly to the upper middle class AZN bros in Orange County who cannot accomplish a single one of the aforementioned extreme sports without falling embarrassingly on their dainty derrières, but who can sport a well styled faux-hawk. Our male styles included and were mostly limited to: baggy pants, shutter shades, oversized t-shirts, skate shoes, aviators, and other douche-wear, etc, etc. However, one brand of ours in which I covertly indulged my 25% employee discount was the Obey brand, a rise-up-with-fists-and-buy-our-product!!! clothing company begun with Shepard Fairey’s skate-street Andre The Giant Has A Posse graffiti/phenomenology experiments, which were then turned into a teenage suburbanite revolution. It was an arbitrary Monday—I tore open another box of t-shirts with feverish anticipation (yeah) so I could fold, stack, and refold the shirts as the daily stream of lazy teenagers came through and messed them up. I barely looked at the shirts in question, and it was only really when I was folding the last shirt that I saw the visage that stared profoundly back at my laboring self—Presidential Candidate Barack Obama. My initial reaction, naturally, was holy crap this is cool, because like all teenage suburbanite rebels I was stoked for a Democratic half-black president under the age of 50— which was all that mattered, credential-wise. Upon reflection, however, as I put the shirts away, I realized that Obama was just what I had mentioned: a Presidential Candidate.

This is so wrong, I thought, this is like making posters of Che Guevara before the “shoot, coward, you only kill a man” epic-last-line fame and la revolucionary cause for every young iconoclast who ever called themselves hardcore rebels— it’s like making his posters when he was just some dude named Ernesto! Because, in the terrible event that Obama didn’t win, what the hell would we do with all of this extra cotton? The t-shirts were silkscreened with a fiend-like print of Obama’s face with then the word “HOPE” at the base of the shirt; I started reinterpreting this “HOPE” as “Shit, I hope this guy wins because if he doesn’t I’ve just wasted an enormous design campaign on some Junior Senator who lost to another white guy and these shirts are gonna have to be sold in Vietnam or somewhere where they have no idea what any of this even means and thinks it’s another word for ‘cute.’” At the time it seemed like a legitimate cause for concern, and as I began to see the shirts disappear off the shelves, I, looking out for the general well-being of humanity, had to stifle the urge to leap out in front of the customers and yell loudly “Can’t you see you’re making an unwise investment!” in the hopes that the Zumiez customers would a) understand what the word “investment” meant and b) heed my sage advice and put the shirt back to purchase after Nov. 4 (but of course buy something else in the meantime).

I guess, now that November 4th has passed and we’ve thrown things off and into and over (clothes, champagne in street, and Bush; respectively), and many of us here in California have mourned the bittersweet wake-up call of Prop 8 the following Wednesday morning, we don’t have to worry about silly fashion problems anymore. Even I, the trendy-t-shirt cynic myself, have started searching for possible Obama shirt investments online, now that I’m sure that Obama actually will be in the Oval Office. I’m still a little iffy on the whole sensationalized propaganda bit though; the Obey graphic phenomenon was started as an ironic antiauthoritarian movement that was intensely aesthetic, subversive and yet moving.

It included not just anti-war and anti-establishment sentiments but calls to peace, awareness, and actual hope, and not just trendycized political slogan-fads. I just hope that Obama doesn’t turn into another Poképhenomenon, just a face on a t-shirt to find years later at the Salvation Army (actually, I do hope to find one there; like, totally vintage!). I hope that our hope is worth something, that every time we watched Will.I.Am’s “Yes We Can” video (youtube that, by the way; it’s pretty catchy) or screamed the words “Yes We Can!!” while sprinting gleefully through the streets, we actually meant that we knew we could. Because it is up to us, because otherwise, regardless of the fact that Obama is now America’s 44th president, those shirts will be just scraps of cotton-polyester blend if we don’t change like we said we would, if we don’t become this new and improved America that we’re expecting, touting its arrival loudly alongside our favorite new face. Because if we don’t, it’ll be bad news for Shepard Fairey, who’ll have to start drawing us up a new idol pretty damn quick.