Welcome back to Combat Threads. This week is the last installment of my research on Gulf War T-shirt with a look at the media response to the designs. Next I will be moving away from the Gulf War. I have a few ideas for the next few newsletters, but I want to hear from you. Do you have any ideas or questions? let me know!
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While the Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm were underway, these T-shirts were a hit. Countless T-shirts in countless designs were produced. The reception of this glut of patriotic and pro-war merchandise ranged from humorously approving to disapproving, as could be expected. The media reporting on the T-shirts shows a range of receptions and provides insights into how they found their way to market and who bought them.
A little over a week before the war began, The San Antonio Daily Express covered the Gulf War merchandise trend. Framing the trend as a way for citizens to provide “tension relief,” the piece runs through a variety of T-shirt designs and includes interviews with retailers. With war uncertain ahead, retailers are wary to re-order T-shirts in case the situation is resolved without a war. "That's a retailer's look at war," one is quoted. Further in the piece a psychiatrist is interviewed, who says “Iraqi-bashing may do more good than harm.” A Sociologist also interviewed has a different perspective, saying that the focus of all the merchandise on Hussein, “trivializes the very important and serious issues in the Middle East." The fear of trivialization comes up throughout the reporting.
Media, looking to understand the phenomenon, continually looked to past US wars. The Vietnam War and World War II continually come up. The outpouring of patriotism is compared to that of WWII while being structured as the antithesis of Vietnam. In his speech declaring victory, the President said, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” A month after the war, A headline in The Los Angeles Times stated “Patriotism has a sweet ring for business.” It quotes a professor of Marketing at USC who says, “With the end of the Persian Gulf War there is an appreciation for soldiers and support for the government, all the things that were exactly the opposite at the end of the Vietnam era. Today, patriotism is culturally in demand. And the marketplace just mirrors the culture." The Gulf War, along with its T-shirts is part of a realignment of American culture around war. As Brockmann writes, “To overcome the “Vietnam Syndrome” is to overcome the central trauma of the twentieth century: the trauma of World War I. It is to make war “fun” again.”
Quoted in The Los Angeles Times piece, an assistant marketing professor at Loyola Marymount University said, “we have heroes now. We are a nation that gets things done. This is the first time in a long time people have felt that way. And we need the newest T-shirt with the latest thing on it to show it." War is “fun” again. Part of creating the “fun” war is the humor slogan T-shirts that went with it. A former political consultant turned T-shirt shop owner put it succinctly in the Washington Post, “humor sells. In the Gulf war, 'No blood for oil' didn't sell.”
The “humor” was not universally enjoyed. While dissenting views on the T-shirts were in the minority, they mainly focused on the poor taste of the slogans. An editorial in the Bloomington, Illinois Pantagraph takes on the “I’d Fly” slogan T-shirt directly:
This is a disgusting and racist slogan which I've already seen and heard too frequently in the last few months. There is no difference between this epitaph and, say, "smoking" a gook, a nigger, or a honky. It is unfortunate that in America's admirable support for troops who had nothing to say about going to war, a significant element of this support extends the hatred of Hussein to hatred of Iraqi people and Arabs in general. To me, this hatred and racism is partly the trickle-down from a president who from the very start cast the Gulf crisis as a fight of good vs. evil.
Even in this full-throated condemnation of the racist slogans, couches itself with the line “America’s admirable support for troops,” which can be seen as directly a symptom of the Vietnam War. The Gulf War creates the illogical ‘support the troops, not the war’ stance. Brockmann again on the paradoxical stance taken by the peace movement, “Like a dishonest priest, the anti-war movement seemed to be denying its own pleasure. In this war, patriotism was definitely not only “in,” it was fun; lack of patriotism was as boring as it was hopelessly “out.”
Humor was not the only tool needed to create the fun war, it had to be a struggle of good versus evil. The Ghostbuster-inspired “Scud Buster” T-shirts quite literally equate the US Military to the “good guys” of a Hollywood movie. In a rather telling quote from the already mentioned San Antonio Daily Express article, the same psychiatrist says “you take a character who essentially has stepped on the flag, apple pie and the American way, someone who the president has identified as bad, and blame him. He (Saddam) becomes an easy target.” What the psychiatrist doesn’t seem to take into account is that he has the cause and effect in the wrong order. Hussein and Iraq have not “stepped on the flag” creating the media environment for these trivializing, ridiculing, racist T-shirts, but the media environment of news and slogan T-shirts has cast Iraq and Hussein as the evil freedom-hating villains.
Not all Americans were buying up the pro-war merchandise, however. In Philadelphia, street vendors noted, “black people, they don't want to buy this. They're not interested. It's almost all white people." This off-the-cuff observation mapped onto current polling, “A nationwide Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey, reported Jan. 25, showed that 78 percent of white voters polled during that week believed that President Bush had waited long enough before using military force. However, only 52 percent of African-American voters agreed.”
Soon after the war, the appetite for patriotic wares declined. “Markdown racks are full of the red, white, and blue patriotic wear that gushed out of factories during the Persian Gulf War. Sweaters, hats, accessories, and T-shirts have all met the same ignominious fate,” reported the Los Angeles Times in June 1991. Just as fast as the nation was swept up in pro-war T-shirts, they disappeared, replaced by the next big seller.
While Gulf War T-shirts were replaced by new trends, relegated to the sale aisle, they never really disappeared. 30 years after the war, these T-shirts are still abundant in thrift stores and on digital resale platforms. If anything, there you can find more online today then ever before. As mentioned earlier, there are even companies making reproductions of Gulf War T-shirt designs. It seems odd that the merchandise, often with racist or jinguisitic imagery would have such a strong audience. There are of course collectors (very much like myself) who look at these shirts less as wearable clothes than artifacts of another time in US culture. While my research focused on the production and consumtion of these T-shirts in the moment, there is more work to be done on the second hand market for them and the popularity of vintage T-shirts.
Till next time,
C.W.M.
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I lived in Bahrain during the Gulf War and remember these tees - maybe not the exact ones, but the concept. You could easily pick them up from street vendors in the Souq who, in time, learnt to put on American accents to try and connect. I was young at the time - around 9 or 10 and we were evacuated back 'home' to the UK. Some years later, when I was back visiting on holiday, I picked up a pack of playing cards that had been handed out to the US marines. Each card had a different 'bad guy' pictured on it with Saddam as the Ace of Spades. Just another sign of the gamification of that specific war I guess. Really interesting articles Charles - thanks for sharing your knowledge and insight!