Totalitarian Chic — At the Georgetown Urban Outfitters, for $45 you can get a replica Soviet soccer Jersey — CCCP boldly emblazoned across the breast. For only $45, you can purchase ideological transgression. For just $45, you can have your own faux-vintage wearable protest against hegemonic market culture. Show you’re too cool to care about forced starvation and other forms of mass murder! Nazi-wear is a skoche too Republican for the scenester in the know. But Urban Outfitter Soviet-wear… well that’s just proletarian, but, you know, with flair!
The irony just destroys me. The Guevara-gear too. The kids who buy this stuff in a spirit of dissent are oblivious to their role in punctuating the utter destruction of the collectivist order. Like severed heads impaled on posts, these kids are walking warnings for anyone who would dare challenge the market order:
Resistance is futile. You will be commodified. Attack us with ideology and we will sell it as nostalgia.
Will Wilkinson 