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In This Issue

• East Campus Drink-or-Treating
• Why Your Vote Doesn't Count
• Cheney-Edwards: Now That's A Ticket!
• Fed Fun Guide to Third Party Candidates
• Homeless Voters Choose
• Vintage T-shirt Democracy Plot
• A First lesson in Russian Swearing
• September 10th: The Adjective
• Letters to and from The Fed
• Zombie Reagan!
• Liberal Bias Alleged in Democratic Party
• Presidential Candidates Have Large Height Difference
• Lover's Lane Hook Psycho Mutilated
• Advice from the Manly
• Complete Presidential Debate Coverage
• Monsters of the World
• THEY WATCH
• Alarming Statistics on Brain Eating
• Ice Bitch for Election Day
• Where's Dick Cheney?

vintagevantage.com

This shirt cost $1977. Go for it! Shoot yourself!

At the website VintageVantage.com/vvip.html, there is an "Internet lounge" with an NES Mario Bros. design motif, an advice column, a reality dating contest, and just about everything else that you might expect from a version of Seventeen magazine for kids who hang out in Brooklyn a lot and dress in grayscale. It's actually very witty; however, the site has a sinister secret. It's actually an elaborate marketing front for a small clothing business. Vintage Vantage sells vintage T-shirts for outrageously high prices. I'm not talking Abercrombie & Fitch high, but more like Cheech & Chong high-most of the vintage shirts on the site cost over $200, some over $1000.

What kind of T-shirt could possibly be worth that much money? There's a 1984 Denver Nuggests t-shirt (the year the Nuggets' jerseys featured a disco-lit skyline against the Rockies and a rainbow sky) for $90, an original 1981 MTV logo shirt for $1300, and a My Adidas Run-DMC shirt for $13,000. The shirts are admittedly awesome. But does buying a shirt from Al Gore's failed 1988 presidential primary campaign (Al Gore: He'll be Great in '88!) for $165 make you more or less hip than Al himself, who probably buys his shirts at J. Crew or Banana Republic for only $80?

Vintage Vantage also sells a line of original shirts with what they describe as "vintage style." These are slightly more reasonably priced, at $19 a pop, and emblazoned with slogans that include such witticisms as "Women: You Can't Beat ‘em!" and "Vietnam: We Were Winning When We Left." They all seem to be in rainbow colors which attract even more attention to the wit and style of the wearer than the slogans would alone. There certainly is a whole bunch of wit and style to go around.

This was not a very newsworthy concern until earlier this year, when a Vintage Vantage design that proclaimed "Voting Is For Old People" landed at a national retail chain and online purveyor of pre-packaged hip-ness, Urban Outfitters. Shoppers (or their parents) complained, saying that the T-shirt encouraged political apathy. They reasoned that, in an important election year, not voting was definitely not funny. The controversy reached MTV News. Then Russell Simmons, a popular hip-hop entertainer and clothing designer who wishes he was an important political figure and who is notorious, among other things, for totally screwing up serious attempts to reform New York's Rockefeller drug laws last year, went on TV to complain about the T-shirts. Then Harvard Political Institute professors were quoted complaining about the T-shirt in The New York Times. Urban Outfitters, not really being a very bold or controversial outfit when the chips are down, pulled the design from its stores. Vintage Vantage continued to sell it, and, in the wake of national media attention, definitely sold a lot more of them than they ever could have foreseen. I wish Russell Simmons and Harvard would get together and complain about me, since they don't seem to have much else to do.

In August, the story of the Voting is For Old People T-shirt took another bizarre turn. Through their website, Vintage Vantage began offering the shirts for free to anyone who promised to vote while wearing the shirt and send in a photo of him or herself doing the deed. The offer was quite generous, and though the promise was clearly not enforceable, customers were warned that if they reneged they would "most likely contract scurvy...because nobody likes a flake." In a press release, founder John Foster-Keddie, incidentally a Yale graduate, wrote that he believed the gimmick would "prove once and for all that young people CAN comprehend irony and participate in the political process at the same time." It is a well known fact that most young people are not actually bright enough to do either, never mind both at the same time; however, I digress.

The shirts were shipped to over 500 people, who paid only $4.50 to cover shipping, in less than a month. On September 16, the company discontinued the free shirts due to "overwhelming response," but continued to offer the shirts for $5 to cover materials and expenses in addition to the shipping charge. The shirt is now promoted as "not free, but very, very cheap." And it certainly is, at least compared to the other shirts the site has to offer.

For students, mostly living at non-permanent addresses, a valid question to ask is, "Is it morally acceptable to order a shirt and then send a photograph of myself filling out an absentee ballot in my room while wearing the shirt?" The answer is yes. But only if you are also wearing pants.

If you order a Vintage Vantage shirt, you will be very glad next month that you didn't pay full price for a voting-themed T-shirt like all of your friends when Bush wins re-election by a sizeable margin and voting stops being cool because everyone realizes that, in fact, it really doesn't make a difference after all. And in twenty years, your shirt will be worth just as many thousands of hipster dollars as theirs.