If you have a lick of sense, you wouldn’t emblazon images of Ché Guevara on your chest or your wall — and yet Ché t‑shirts and posters have been a pop culture hit for decades now.
He is cool, we are told, because he was ¡Viva la Revolución! and all that.
But it could get worse. You could be emblazoning a hammer and sickle.
Walmart’s website is there to help. Under “men’s sleeveless,” for example, we see an artistic rendering of the old Communist symbol, frankly identified as a “Soviet Hammer and Sickle,” white on black for $14.97.* Walmart files it under “Pop culture.”
Aren’t men’s sleeveless shirts called “wife beaters”? Should we now call them Kulak Killers?
It’s hip to murder millions!
No wonder Lithuania and several other Baltic countries — who suffered greatly under Soviet rule — object. Indeed, many of these countries go too far in actually banning the symbols. Now, they have contacted Walmart requesting a cessation in hawking the offensive merchandise. “You wouldn’t buy Nazi-themed clothing, would you?” Lithuania’s foreign minister Linas Linkevicius tweeted. Or sell such items.
But a few people might. Certainly, a lot of people do buy stuff that others regard as “Nazi.” Sometimes to be “cool”; other times to make a controversial political point.
At the Uhuru Store, Gavin McInnes’s “ProudBoys Official” sells a “Pinochet Did Nothing Wrong” t‑shirt for twice the price of Walmart’s Hammer and Sickle shirt — and that surely has annoyed leftists who have seen it.
I’m waiting for the death of cool.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* The shirts also come in Navy, Royal and Gray. I guess to get a red commie shirt you have to go for the sleeves.
