I Now Purvey T-Shirts

Encouraged by my wife and a few friends, I put some of the t-shirt designs on a do-it-yourself site

http://www.zazzle.com/wasatch_liberation

I name my shop the Wasatch Liberation Front in tribute to an obscure Pat Bagley comic (one of these days, I'll scan it and post it). Maybe I'll track down his email and send him the link to my shop...

If you have any ideas how any of the designs/colors/layouts could look cooler, let me know. I am certainly not one for design, so I'll welcome any feedback. And if you like any of them, go ahead and purchase. I'm going to give all of my royalties on these to the Church's Perpetual Education Fund. It's only 10% on each (Zazzle's making a killing). I tried to do 0% but Zazzle's system wouldn't proceed unless I put at least 10%. When I griped to my wife earlier today about not caring about the royalties, she said, "Why not just give it to the Perpetual Education Fund?" A little nova went off in my head. I agreed right away. Whatever pennies I get from Zazzle go straight to the Church's Perpetual Education Fund. It made (and still makes) perfect sense to me.

You see, putting the designs up actually got me thinking about the commodified culture we live in. Sure I came up with some ideas for pithy shirts that may sell (or more likely not), but the people who actually make the darn things (whom I will likely never meet) I guarantee get paid less per shirt than I will. Doesn't seem right. Most of these people live in mind-boggling poor countries. Yeah, I've heard all the guilt-reducing arguments ranging from trickle-down theory to the value of mind-over-production, but none of those arguments resolve the central issue for me which is this: capitalized production is and forever will be a practice of Babylon not Zion.

When Karl Marx was 26, he wrote, "The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Labor produces not only commodities: it produces itself and the worker as a commodity - and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general."

I actually used that third sentence in a church talk five or six months ago (I just introduced it as a "German philosopher").

Anyway, I figured that since most of the beneficiaries of the Perpetual Education Fund live in the kinds of countries that get economically raped by first-world capitalism, it made sense for me to put the money I earn from these commodities back to those communities.

I know - still rationalization. But I'll get to sleep a bit better tonight anyway.

So, enjoy the shirts and don't forget to give me any tips/suggestions/pointers about the designs. If I eventually see just one person I don't know wearing one of these, I'll die happy.