Cafe Mass Murder
Cafe Press is a website where people can create and submit their designs and Cafe Press will put their work on a variety of apparel and merchandise such as t-shirts, boxer-shorts, jackets, satchels, buttons, bumper stickers and coffee mugs.
Recently while browsing some of their merchandise, I ran across a number of rather hateful designs which had made it past the Cafe Press quality control team—like:
Normally this would just be considered a minor nuisance. Every society has its fringe group of dimwits and hate-mongers (and bad graphic designers)—and, yes, freedom of speech is a good thing, so if you want to purchase a “Nuke Iran First” bib for your beloved infant or “Nuke Iran” doggie t-shirt to keep your pet warm, then it’s certainly your right to do so.
But as a business, Cafe Press seems fairly mainstream and doesn’t appear to be owned and operated by racist wingnuts (for example, they also sell regular baby merchandise). So, I got curious and took a look at their “General Guidelines for Prohibited Content,” which among others includes:
• Use of marks that signify hate towards another group of people.
• Hate and/or racist terms.
• Inappropriate content or nudity that is not artistic in nature.
• Obscene and vulgar comments and offensive remarks that harass, threaten, defame or abuse others such as F*** (Ethnic Group).
• Content that depicts violence, is obscene, abusive, fraudulent or threatening such as an image of a murder victim, morgue shots, promotion of suicide, etc.
• Material that is generally offensive or in bad taste, as determined by CafePress.com.
I was surprised to see how many of the following designs routinely and absolutely violate Cafe Press’s own guidelines and sincerely began to wonder what they consider to be “bad taste.” I searched several other countries and ethnic groups on the Cafe Press site, but was not able to find any other examples of merchandise calling for the wanton destruction of an entire country or the wholesale murder of an entire people.
Indeed, it’s impossible to imagine substituting any other country or ethnic or religious group (Black, Hispanic, Asian, Jew, Christian..etc) and imagining these designs to somehow be okay. Here are some more items:
The two above are of course, alluding to a little ditty sung by the Republican candidate for the President of the United States. So I don’t think the “Persians for McCain” Teddy Bears are exactly selling like hot cakes:
Now, back to the original theme…
Many of these designs come from “Right Wing Stuff” a business that operates inside Cafe Press. Their banner below reads that they are acclaimed by USA Today, L.A. Times, Fox News, the S.F. Chronicle and more…
Irancove @ July 6, 2008