Peace, politics seeping onto Shore’s T’s

WILDWOOD, N.J. - Yes, much can be gleaned from a stroll through the T-shirt shops and arcades on the boardwalk in Wildwood.

Our beloved sand-coated sun-burnt fun-lovers have let a little social and political consciousness creep into their good time. These days, they seem to want to recycle their beer bottles. And give peace a chance - at least on the back of a hermit crab or on the henna tattoo on the small of your back.

If T-shirts for sale on the boardwalk are a guide, green is no longer a symbol of just the traditional Jersey Shore big three: the Irish, pot smokers, and pessimistic Eagles fans. Green is now recycling-symbol green, albeit occasionally, as in "I (recycle symbol) boys."

As a bonus on the shifting cultural landscape, Big Oil is now your paintball target, not the Iraqis.

The place that brought the nation "Whack the Iraqi" paintball, later toned down to "Fight the Insurgent" and eventually de-war-themed altogether, now is offering "Big Oil" as its human target.

"The war started turning ugly," explains owner Gary Rutkowski, 52. "Nobody was supporting it."

As an added bonus, Rutkowski is turning the paintball game into an ongoing presidential poll, McCain vs. Obama. He expects to declare a winner by August, barring any paint-chip recount.

Rutkowski hasn't yet figured out if competitors will express their preference by shooting at the wheel with their candidate's name on it, or the opposite. Paintball elections are tricky. It should all be worked out by the Fourth of July.

"They're going to do the chads, we'll be looking at the paintball chips on the wheel," he says. And yes, a Hillary Clinton target will be hovering somewhere near the Barack Obama wheel. Cheney and Bush will be on garbage cans "to let people take their frustrations out," he says.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in town, if the national pop-culture pulse can be measured on T-shirts and those Shore perennials, hermits and hennas, then the peace sign is all the rage, right up alongside the "I'm a drunken idiot," "Party Naked," and relatedly themed T-shirts.

"Peace is the hottest thing," says Baruch Cohen, of Israel, who runs the Way2Cool Sports shop on the boardwalk. He's staying away from politics, and, in truth, the closest thing to a political T-shirt in Wildwood was a shirt with Bill Clinton's face and the slogan: "First Ladies Man."

"Recycle shirts are big this year," says Steve Macomber, 23, manager at Gemini, a clothing store on the boardwalk. Although, he adds, "For the guys, it's all about drinking."

He thinks most customers are buying recycle shirts and peace-sign shirts with actual sincerity for the cause, not just a fondness for Shore stoner fashion trendiness.

Other observations from an afternoon of pulse-taking in the arcades and T-shirt shops of the Wildwood boardwalk:

Moms still want to be cool, paying cash for unfortunate fashion statements such as the "If you think I'm a b-, you should meet my daughter" pink tanks.

Appearance is no longer everything. It's cool to be pale and fat.

"Pale is the new tan," said one shirt.

"Diets are mean," said another.

"Uggly," said one, referring to the still-popular ugg boots. (Fine, let that trend devolve back into authentic surfer gear, not Hollywood chic.)

"Everything that's the opposite of trendy seems to be selling," says Macomber, including shirts that poke fun at MySpace and texting. (O So Textual).

Lesbians, yes. "Instant lesbian, just add alcohol," says one shirt, the perfect fashion companion to Katy Perry's already ubiquitous summer of 2008 tune, "I Kissed a Girl." (Lyrics: "I got so brave, drink in hand/Lost my discretion/It's not what, I'm used to/Just wanna try you on.")

Emo - short for emotional, as in the punkish emo style of music and guy-liner emo culture - no. "See no Emo, Hear no Emo."

Britney is always hot. "Save Britney" is a big seller, says Macomber.

Kanye West's "Glow in the Dark Tour" shutter sunglasses - the kind with the horizontal lines in front - have morphed into everyone's favorite novelty sunglasses. They allegedly work with or without the plastic tinted lenses. Does Kanye have a patent on these?

So, does having a hermit crab with a peace sign on its back sleeping in cages up and down the Wildwood boardwalk actually mean the nation longs for peace, or is that just the ultimate lowest common denominator in trickle-down fashion statements?

Jim Twitchell, professor of advertising and popular culture at the University of Florida, says the peace sign has been showing up in odd places, most recently on the belt buckle of golfer Rocco Mediate during the U.S. Open.

"I thought that was pretty [gutsy], what with the golf course the last refuge of geezer Republican warmongering," Twitchell wrote in an e-mail. "Little wonder the symbol should end up on the back of a pet hermit crab."

Perhaps, he noted, an explanation for the serious symbols on kid T-shirts and pet crabs might be found in old John B. Sebastian lyrics: "All I've learned my kid assumes, and all my deepest worries must be his cartoons."

In other words, if it's playing for fun on the Wildwood boardwalk, somewhere, someone is actually worrying about it.

Back in Wildwood, meanwhile, the best guidance available comes, dubiously, from this boardwalk T-shirt perennial: "Whatever the Question is, Liquor is the Answer."

Some things never change.