Submitting Penn State Shirt Designs

Fallout has continued to rain over Happy Valley following the NCAA’s unprecedented and severe sanctions against Penn State for their part in covering up former coach Jerry Sandusky’s sexual abuse of children.  We’ve seen emotions run the gamut from depression to outrage to sadness and now Smack Apparel, basically the T-Shirt Hell of the sporting world has given us one of the most bizarre reactions to this we’ve seen yet.

Kevin Horne, managing editor of Onward State, posted a photo he says he took in the student bookstore of this beauty:

Photo Credit: Kevin Horne

Take a big step backwards for a moment and try to ponder exactly what this shirt is supposed to convey.  In what way is the NCAA like the Soviet Union?  How has it evidenced itself as a communist organization?  Apart from the infantile oversimplification of “communist = bad” it’s hard to see where they’re going with this.

Well, maybe the back of the shirt will prove more illuminating:

Aren’t those the first few lines to Penn State’s Fight Song?

In reality this is just an uncreative company trying to hitch their proverbial wagon to this controversy and churn out a few ducats in the process.  That in and of itself isn’t upsetting.  What is upsetting is that a student bookstore (though not one directly affiliated with the university) is apparently proudly displaying this mess and that people will purchase it and wear it with no apparent sense of irony.

Then again if you manage complain about the innocent being punished while simultaneously minimizing the impotent non-response of Paterno, Spanier, Curley et al then maybe irony isn’t an arrow you’ve got in your intellectual quiver.

It got me thinking though: would it be possible to come up with a shirt as inflammatory and non-nonsensical as this?  Let’s find out!

At the conclusion of his long and troubled career Pol Pot was sentenced to lifetime house arrest and died within a year.

Go on.  Try to tell me it makes any less sense.

(pbuh)