Political T-Shirt Elections at CollarFree.com

CollarFree.com are on a mission to make politics ‘more friendly’ and I wish them all the luck in the world, but I have a sneaking feeling they will be in a minority. On a commercial level I can completely understand what they’re doing, they don’t want to cut their target audience in half, i.e anyone in the world who both buys t-shirts and has a political opinion, which is quite a few I’d surmise.

However most people with a political opinion don’t particularly like the opposition, I doubt that many Americans out there who’d vote for Obama would have any kind words for McCain and vice-versa. The truth is electoral politics lives and breathes the antagonism of difference, without it the debate becomes stale, although it could be said that parties in power immediately switch to a politics of indifference in an effort to avoid being torn apart by the arguments of an unsatisfied and even angry electorate. I can’t think of a single political campaign that hasn’t sunk to the depths of bickering, sniping, and personal insults that CF obviously want to avoid.

At least CF give you the option to skip a candidate, say you don’t want to vote between two t-shirts of McCain or Obama there’s an option to move ‘to the other side’. But deep in my heart this isn’t a judgement in fair play, it’s censorship. People love to hate, it’s a fact of life, there will be some ardent politicos out there pummelling the vote buttons trying to increase the popularity of their favourite candidate, but eventually they know they can’t ‘win’ anything over the competition, this isn’t a political contest, it’s a t-shirt vote. Still, it’s nice to have a break from all the back-stabbing out there at the moment.

So what’s on offer? Well for the voters there’s a chance to vote and consequentially buy an Obama or McCain t-shirt when the contest is over. However for the designers, there’s a $250 prize and 20 free t-shirts plus tons of recognition for the winning designs (one for each candidate), and 10% of the profits from each t-shirt sold. I appreciate what Jimmy Hendricks (wow nice name) and his team are trying to do at CollarFree.com, I know how frustrating the backbiting in politics must seem to the majority of everyday people looking for a fairer deal, equality or perhaps a few tax breaks. However if CF’s model was to be taken on by government, you’d have two Americas, Donkey USA and Elephant USA. Which isn’t exactly united is it? The political fires are inevitably stoked by the media, and those corporations with enough vested interests, such as oil refineries and car manufacturers who regularly throw money in an attempt to avoid the problems rather than fix them. Besides the media has it’s own unique agenda, the agenda of fighting the boredom of a generation with the shortest attention span in history. I’ve said it many times before, good news = no news. A ‘pig with lipstick’ makes the headlines not ‘candidate makes a valid point about macro-economics’.

They’re using the popular ‘crowd sourcing’ model that many market research companies have taken up off the back of sites like Threadless.com, and I can see this having a big future in politics itself…

The only way we can take the electoral process to the next level is to remove the media from the process altogether. Get the voters to click on their TV remotes and tally the results. No fanfare, no ticker-tape parades, no public advertising. Everyone knows we’re always going to get the same thing. One loves big business and war, the other favours the poor and human rights, one wants to reward the winners, the other wants to help the losers. If anything I think society is almost ready to drop government altogether, they’ve privatised enough of the services and utilities in the USA and Europe as it is. The rich have private security and the poor are more often abused by the police than protected by them. Perhaps I’m leaping ahead by a few decades again, perhaps we do have to keep going through this ritual for a little longer, but never forget, the only people who truly control the electoral process are the media, financial markets, manufacturers, retail giants, and energy and arms barons. The rest of us are only here to make up the numbers.

No person, no party, no government can fix our current situation. The electoral process has been reduced to a market research tactic, and the swaying motion of the undecided is merely economic. If the economy is doing well we all want to be humane and benevolent, if it’s not we become selfish and opportunistic, just the way that politicians do.

Still, I fully appreciate CollarFree.com’s admirable intentions, I’d rather CF were in government, at least there would be far less argument (and plenty of great t-shirts for every voter). If you feel the same, go and check out CollarFree.com right now and have your say.