Last month, I rented a car and drove from Brooklyn to the Jersey Shore on a mission to commune with the American psyche the best way I know how: going shopping. The Jersey Shore’s Seaside Heights borough is famous for, among other things, its novelty T-shirts. You know the ones. They read, “I’M NOT ALWAYS A BITCH JUST KIDDING GO FUCK YOURSELF” or “SHUT UP LIVER! YOU’RE FINE.”
The shirts are printed à la minute, meaning they’re highly responsive to a given moment in culture. As with the tees you find in Midtown and other tourist havens, these designs reflect what’s popular: memes, political figures, sex acts. I wanted to see where our heads are by taking stock of what we’re putting on our chests. If anything could speak candidly and insightfully on contemporary U.S. culture, I figured it would be commercial goods granted the gift of speech, provided they weren’t too preoccupied with ❤ing My Boyfriend or proclaiming Italian descent.
To help, I brought my friend Greg, who’s handsome in a “leading man in an Old Hollywood musical” way and endlessly willing to engage with strangers. For the low cost of playing Sky Ferreira’s “I Blame Myself” on a loop for the first 30 minutes of our drive, I’d have unfettered access to everyone we met.
We arrived at Seaside Heights to a scene of desolate peace. The only people on the boardwalk were restaurant workers with “Try me, bitch” faces on, a couple of shirtless, glowering Italian American beach teens, and an employee manning a lonely hoop-shot booth.
“Come on, big guys!” he said. “Give it a shot!”
“No, no,” Greg waved him off. “We’re —”
“Gay,” I finished.
“Disabled,” Greg said simultaneously.
Most shops weren’t open yet. The only interesting article of clothing was a single, ominous pair of booty shorts reading “MY BOYFRIEND WILL KILL YOU.” I was beginning to worry we’d come on some kind of Jersey-specific holiday (Gas Attendant Awareness Day?) and that we’d wasted our time.
To be honest, I was bored. Then the boardwalk turned red.
As we walked on and stores opened up, Seaside Heights erupted with unofficial MAGA merch: Trump riding a tank or wielding a machete. Trump’s mugshot. Trump, fist raised, post-assassination attempt. Trump sporting that “Sorry, not sorry” grin, accompanied by some version of “CRY ABOUT IT, LIB.”
There were so many plushie seagulls in MAGA hats that the plushie seagulls not wearing MAGA hats registered to me as Republicans. I began to perceive even the flesh-and-blood seagulls as, at the very least, vaccine skeptics.
As we poked into more stores, I was able to Darwin out the five major clades of T-shirts available for purchase.
1.
MAGA
A good percentage of available merchandise features Donald Trump. More on this in a bit.
2.
Japanese
Dragon Ball Z. One Piece. Decades after its debut, Naruto, the heartwarming tale of a blond-haired, blue-eyed child soldier, maintains its hold on the American mind.
3.
Rick and Morty
Call this a metonym for “Flagrant Copyright Violations,” but there’s too much Rick and Morty to ignore, so much so that “Flirting With a Lawsuit” is more a subphylum. (This means this category also encompasses shirts with Tupac, Jason Voorhees, and Marilyn Monroe on them.) Rick Sanchez is the patron saint of former C students who like to announce, “I was smart, I just never tried,” which is a very common kind of person.
4.
Identity
These identify the wearer as, e.g., a Latina or a fan of Latinas or, more commonly here, as an Italian, or an Italian American, or an Italian American from New Jersey with an undiagnosed personality disorder. A subcategory, “Homosexual,” straddles “Identity” and the category below.
5.
Lewd and/or needlessly bellicose
FUCK YOU, BITCH. I’M A BITCH. I’LL SUCK MY BRO’S DICK. I’LL SUCK YOUR DICK. I’LL SUCK EVERY DICK NO HOMO LOL.
As a thought exercise, I tried my hand at mentally designing a best-selling novelty tee. Might not, I wondered, some enterprising individual crossbreed a MAGA and Japanese T-shirt depicting Trump in a Naruto headband? But hybridizing the spiritual CMYK of Seaside Heights yields unholy results, as I learned from a chimeric monstrosity reading “HELLO TITTY.”
Whether they concerned Trump, interpersonal relations, gender and sexuality studies, or Pickle Rick, the predominant shared quality among the shirts was a tone of trollish malice.
Though the faces on the shirts are recent, our tradition of provocative crassness stretches back much further. In his 1830 book Democracy in America, French philosopher and historian Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that American culture worshipped “spectacles vehement and untutored and rude” in their pursuit to “stir the passions more than to gratify the taste.” One can only imagine what ghastly behavior we were up to back then that rattled de Tocqueville’s poulaines thus. (Google helpfully suggests deployment of naughty language such as “gadzooks,” as well as minstrel shows.)
Today, in lieu of calling a Frenchman some vintage slur on the street, Americans seeking to “stir the passions” might try their hand at trolling. Trolling is the good, clean fun of weaponizing a person’s sincerity against them, which was first popularized online but, like “online,” is now everywhere in person. The troll, safely removed behind layers of irony, reaps the satisfaction of raising their victim’s hackles. It affirms the troll’s cool, detached superiority over a lesser creature ruled by base emotions (Rick Sanchez would never find himself in such a situation).
News to us all, I’m sure: Too much time spent marinating in irony on social media has an unsalutary effect on the human brain. It increases numbness while decreasing the attention span, leaving a troll to seek out sharper thrills. This is basically common knowledge, though we, as a nation, aren’t known to let an abstract-but-very-pressing cost get in the way of our momentary fun.
The boardwalk shopkeepers are consummate professionals. They have about as much emotional investment in their wares as a T-Mobile employee would in their phones. A handsome young man, who wore a plain black tee and a silver chain with a cross on it, ran the largest shop. Among its offerings was a hoodie that read “MY GIRLFRIEND BEATS ME” that I assumed would continue “OFF” on the back but didn’t and I guess was just a straightforward disclosure of abuse.
I was studying a bizarrely autobiographical shirt reading “American Grown With Mexican Roots” when Greg asked the shopkeeper, “So what are your most popular shirts?”
“The Trump shirts,” he said. “This is a fairly Republican area.”
“Did you sell Kamala shirts before the election?” Greg asked.
“We did,” he said. “But they didn’t sell much. We print what’s popular.”
“What’s your least popular shirt?”
He came out from behind the counter, and I stopped reading diaspora poetry to join them for an informal tour. “These are probably our least popular,” he said with a hint of It’s a shame in his voice, gesturing to shirts honoring firefighters, policemen, and POWs.
“These are popular among guys who are interested in men,” he went on, all corporate, nodding toward a pair of rainbow tees reading “I’M HIS” and “HE’S MINE,” either trying to give us a fuller picture or clocking us. “These are more for straight gentlemen making a joke,” he said, referencing another pair — “I LOVE TO FINGER PAINT,” and, “I’M PAINT!”
I was astonished by the variety of gay shirts, such as the befuddling “I’M NOT GAY BUT MY ASSHOLE IS,” as well as the longstanding classic: “I’M NOT GAY BUT $20 IS $20.” I noted that it had not been adjusted for inflation, understandably; “I’M NOT GAY BUT $34.87 IS $34.87” would be a bit of an eyesore.
Lesbian couples seemed shit out of luck. Close gal pals might make do with matching “BEST FUCKIN’ BITCHES” tees — provided they stick together as, in isolation, they read, “BE FUC BIT” and “ST KIN’ CHES,” which sort of read as Vietnemese or Gaelic to me.
After you select a design (as my souvenir for this trip, I opted for one in the category of “Japanese”), your shirt is pressed onto a blank. The machines make hissing noises, and the smell is not a pleasant one. Since images can be cooked up on the fly, they can more readily be inspired by whatever’s trending, as evidenced by a shirt reading “I’LL BEAT OFF 100 GORILLAS,” a nod to a recent meme (don’t ask if you’re not already aware).
Probably not unlike you, and definitely not unlike me, Seaside Heights has a close relationship to The Algorithm, as evidenced by pistachio-green cameos from Dubai chocolate, as well as a robust local population of Labubus (POP MART) and Lafufus (POR MAPT). Surprisingly, I didn’t notice too many AI designs, as I have at similar markets and stalls elsewhere in the world this year (one can only applaud Seaside Heights for its artistic commitment to bespoke Trump designs).
Otherwise, if you’ve ever wondered, What if my timeline were a location I could physically stand in?, you might want to visit the Jersey Shore. Another question it helps with: What to make of all these Trump shirts? So I asked, and looked, and listened. I realized this place had many answers. It wasn’t just the shirts. The boardwalk was saying something.
The Seaside Heights boardwalk is not made of wood. After Hurricane Sandy, it was rebuilt using Trex, a false wood made of composite materials. Trex doesn’t warp or splinter, and it makes a hollow, plasticky sound as you walk. While scrolling my timeline (I was doing so zealously, Trump and Elon Musk were feuding) and walking down the boardwalk, the word “feed” came to mind, both because of the pretzel and ice cream stands, and because of the frictionless feel of movement across the Trex.
In our third, fourth, and fifth laps around the boardwalk, Greg and I kept popping into stores we’d forgotten we’d been in. “I swear we haven’t seen this one!” I’d say, noticing some shirt I hadn’t noticed before, which always led us to awkward reencounters with shopkeepers whom Greg had already informally interviewed, and who must have considered us a little unwell.
For instance, this AI “POPE TRUMP” shirt. To my credit, it is AI, but it was an image posted by Trump himself to social media before I saw it here — which in my opinion makes the “POPE TRUMP” design, oddly enough, a reference to “a real thing,” as in a reference to an event and a real person in a way, spiritually not AI. This is what the boardwalk, the algorithm, our current political situation, and the collision of all will do to your logical capacities. Welcome!
Looking at the treats and shirts and posts about Trump vs. Musk, I thought about the Algorithm: a tank’s tractor belt, moving in cycles and inching toward some interminable horizon. Where is this thing going?
I came across a discarded baby-sea-turtle plushie on the boardwalk that echoed an Instagram Reel I’d seen that morning of a newborn baby sea turtle effortfully crawling toward the sea with the text “The Value of a Second” written on it. I’d expected to see a narrow escape from a seagull, but no threat ever came and the turtle never arrived at the water. Nothing happened at all, which made me irate.
It’s remarkable the extent to which the MAGA shirts mingled and blended right into the “GO FUCK YOURSELF” shirts. Donald Trump’s face felt perfectly natural alongside a non-political T-shirt with one arrow pointing up (“THE MAN”) and one arrow pointing down (“THE LEGEND”).
Many shirts were some take on “DADDY’S HOME,” insinuating that Trump was going to grievously harm former president Joseph R. Biden. One depicted Trump in a cowboy hat and read, “IT’S TIME TO TAKE BIDEN TO THE TRAIN STATION.” I originally understood this as a broad, spaghetti-westernish threat but was later corrected by my sister, who has watched Yellowstone and informed me it’s a euphemism for murdering someone and dumping them in a mass grave. The things you miss!
Some tees reminded beachgoers that it’s the “GULF OF AMERICA” now, an executive order that does feel issued by a sentient novelty T-shirt. Especially given the amount of har-dee-har-har sexism in play — “Cool story, babe, now make me a sandwich” — There were shockingly no “YOUR BODY, MY CHOICE” shirts. Other than that, a Trump supporter looking to trigger the libs at their local Wegmans wouldn’t want for CHOICE at Seaside Heights.
A creature of TV, and now of the internet, Trump broke a major taboo by admitting that U.S. politics is all but indistinguishable from entertainment, which, a lot of the time, is itself synonymous with marketing.
To his supporters, that made him feel honest, authentic — that skittish golden-goose quality chased by many a stiff with a flag pin affixed to their lapel. Like a novelty T-shirt, Trump’s populism is raw, unfiltered, and if it hurts you fee-fees, good. That’s the point, and it’s working: Currently, Republicans control all three branches of our government.
Obviously, both Trump and these shirts are abrasive. They’re vulgar. But we ought to take vulgar in both senses of the word here. “Provocative,” yes, but also, per the archaic Latin meaning, “of the masses.” They titillate. They rely on trollish humor and naughtiness to distinguish themselves from, respectively, a pearl-clutching stick in the mud (say, Jeb Bush) and out-of-touch elites.
Standing there among the MAGA shirts, I felt prim and sentimental — and like that feeling no longer made sense in the modern world and could only be expressed in the dead language of decency, legible mostly to tenured academics, political consultants, and other such individuals I’ve no desire to do drugs with.
Maybe I’m among the LIBS who are CRYING ABOUT IT. But it wasn’t seeing Donald Trump everywhere that upset me at Seaside Heights. It was something else. Something that unnerved me.
The hissing shirt-pressing machines were within earshot, endowing blank crewnecks with their new personalities, as represented by Trump, Goku, or Rick Sanchez. I considered what it would mean if these were temporary faces belonging to one unseen creature; if, perhaps, the individual designs were only colorful lures dangled before a concealed maw.
I began to perceive even the flesh-and-blood seagulls as, at the very least, vaccine skeptics.
Individual is certainly the right word. It’s the job of these mass-produced articles of clothing to make the wearer feel, through acts of minor transgression (FUCK YOU, COMMIE) or straightforward testimony (to being Italian, Latina, gay — everything, it seems, but American), like a rogue outside of some dull, colorless system. (My favorite “I See Dumb People” shirt from Hot Topic comes to mind).
But what if all this is a consumerist machine marketing its own pseudo-sabotage? What if all this anime and Rick and Morty and unofficial MAGA merch is a skin that the system will eventually shed in some huge hole in the desert before lumbering on? Couldn’t this machine successfully sell a bunch of “I HATE THE MACHINE” shirts to people who think they’re not the machine? Is that not characteristic of our present political moment? Isn’t it a distraction, masquerading as, and then becoming, who we are?
Consider the influence of MTV’s Jersey Shore. Once holding such a monopoly on a generation’s attention, it is now localized to the Shore Store, which exists with all the enthusiasm and obligation of a land acknowledgment at a City Council meeting. I walked away from Seaside Heights feeling a weird sadness about Jersey Shore. A large banner offered the opportunity to “TOUR THE JERSEY SHORE HOUSE” and “TAKE YOUR PICTURE WITH THE DUCK PHONE,” as if it were some kind of known Catholic relic. A woman inquired about visiting the house and was told it would take ten minutes to arrange. “Is it worth it?” she asked her partner.
This situation seems like the best-case afterlife for such briefly adored ephemera. But the shirts themselves, as opposed to their fading signifiers in the cultural mind, or whatever, end up elsewhere. Estimates vary, but per 2018 stats from the EPA, some 11.3 million tons of U.S. textile waste ended up in landfills, and that number is steadily climbing. Large quantities of T-shirts are sent off as foreign aid (the mental image of a child miner abroad wearing an “I [HEART] LATINAS” shirt is as geopolitically fraught as it is unsettling).
Seaside Heights has an amusement park, Casino Pier, which does not have a casino but does have a roller coaster with a dragon theme. Hydrus was empty, save for two young girls seated behind me, who were stern and quiet and reminded me of having co-workers. The attendant lowered the safety bars and told me to please enjoy myself. The cart crept out from under the roof, went vertical, and tick-tick-ticked up toward the peak.
On my ascent, I thought about how I had once considered roller coasters so intimidating as a child; then about roller-coaster mortality rates; then about how I sort of wished I was on a bigger, more intense roller coaster than this one. The cart reached the top of the peak. I pushed all thoughts aside, ready for the brief thrill of being jostled around by a machine.
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