Novelty Tee Shirts, Joker Memes and Donald J. Trump
I am a man of many obsessions. I am obsessed with Joker motivational memes, of course, but also with bizarrely ubiquitous novelty tee shirts with uncannily similar messages.
A typical tee shirt of this variety reads something like this:
I Am a Lucky Mom
I Have a Crazy Son
Who happens to Cuss A Lot
He has anger issues & a serious dislike for stupid people
He is not the Best
but a Rare Limited Edition of a
Perfect Freaking Son
4. You Hurt Me
& They’ll never find
Your Body
(Yes, he bought me this shirt)
Unsurprisingly, I’m also fascinated by the considerable overlap between motivational memes and tacky tee shirts. I'm interested in Joker memes and terrible tees as kitsch and sources of unintentional laughter but I’m also interested in what they say about society as a whole.
So what do these tee shirts and memes tell us? For starters, they tell us that the qualities of the subject of the tee-shirt are good and admirable.
What are these qualities? Craziness, of course, but in this case it’s less a matter of someone being comfortable with their own mental illness than a self-styled lunatic bragging about what a crazy son of a bitch he is.
This is followed by a penchant for explosive, indiscriminate profanity, a core of white hot rage combined with a blinding hatred of people of people they consider insufficiently intelligent and a willingness to commit murder if the person wearing the shirt is hurt in any way.
Oh, and of course narcissism, since the whole fucking point of the “I Am a Lucky Mom I Have a Crazy Son” shirt is to establish what a world-class badass the person canonized on the shirt is, and how lucky the wearer is to have them in their life, regardless of their willingness/eagerness to commit homicide on their behalf.
What these tee shirts are really promoting is a personality type that is at once extremely specific and hilariously vague. Explicitly and implicitly they say that the person described on them is willing to turn people off with their bluntness, candor, honesty and foul mouth but is ultimately a paragon of honesty and authenticity and the most loyal friend, father, husband, mother-in-law or uncle anyone could ask for. They’re nothing but rough edges and raw candor but they have a heart of gold and are ultimately a force for good in the universe.
Joker motivational memes espouse the same qualities and personality type. They’re all about eschewing “political correctness” and “wokeness” and fake niceness in favor of something more real.
This realness and authenticity is then conveyed by giving loved ones novelty tee shirts about how crazy and amazing they are and sharing online memes where an image of a fictional sociopathic comic book clown is juxtaposed with an online aphorism they never said in any iteration yet is somehow suppose to convey something about their true essence.
In that respect my obsession with Joker motivational memes and novelty tee shirts overlaps with another of my obsessions: Donald Trump.
After all, who is crazier than Donald Trump? During his four insane years in office, the 25th Amendment was constantly invoked as a way of removing him from office for being too mentally ill for the job.
Trump similarly loves to cuss. He’s got a famously filthy mouth and thinks nothing of tossing around phrases like “grab em by the pussy” and “I moved on her like a bitch.” Trump’s anger issues are legendary and I can’t recall a single politician, on a local or national level, who hates “stupid people” as much as Trump.
Trump used Twitter as an invaluable tool to insult the intelligence of everyone he didn’t like or disagreed with him. He was CONSTANTLY disparaging the intelligence, IQ and competence of his critics, particularly if they happened to be African-American, female, a Democra
t or a member of the media.
Trump wanted very badly to be seen as the only honest man in Washington D.C (despite being a pathological liar) and an exemplar of authenticity and loyalty despite turning viciously on anyone he thought was not properly deferential.
It seems safe to assume that Trump probably got 90 percent of the vote of people who buy novelty tee shirts and post inspirational Joker memes. These memes and crappy garments ostensibly celebrate what’s great, if “politically correct” about the American character but they actually extol the very worst of us in their aggressively obnoxious embrace of Trumpism as a movement and Trump as an icon.
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