“We just thought it was something funny we could do,” Peregrine Honig says. “But it was so scary.”
Honig is part-owner of Birdies, an “intimate apparel apothecary and swimwear boutique.” The funny thing? Offer shorts with the letters “KC” and the phrase “Take the Crown” printed on them, to cheer on the Kansas City Royals in Major League Baseball’s World Series. The scary thing? The visit by two men who identified themselves as Homeland Security agents . . . who confiscated the underwear.
“I asked one of them what size he needed and he showed me a badge and took me outside,” Honig told the Kansas City Star. “They told me they were from Homeland Security and we were violating copyright laws.” Although Honig had designed the shorts herself, not simply mimicking a KC logo, the feds said that the intersection of the K and the C in the design was enough to cross the line.
But hey, they were nice!
Apparently even somewhat abashed, like “kicking a puppy,” as Honig puts it; very nice as they took away the merchandise. Which I’m guessing — now stay with me here — was not a threat to national security.
What we have here is called overkill.
At worst this is a minor and inadvertent infraction of copyright law. What’s that worth? A phone call. A visit. Maybe a cease-and-desist letter.
So, do we file this under Silly? Or Ominous?
Or round-file it as just one more little example of the governmental excesses we’re supposed to accept as normal?
Though they lost in the seventh game of a first-one-to-four-wins series, I was rooting for KC.
Oops, did I just commit a crime? I mean I was rooting for K . . . C.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.
Voting is the engine that drives our democracy. It needs a 21st Century update. We need to move past partisanship and start to see the humanity in people.