Back in early June, I was packing for my big summer trip to the UK and listening to the news. I heard a piece about people around the U.S. commemorating the 82nd anniversary of D-Day. I knew we would be going to the Churchill War Rooms—I already had tickets for a timed entry slot—and I was suddenly struck with an idea for the perfect souvenir from London.
Only I knew the Imperial War Museums wouldn’t sell it in any of their gift shops. Not even the Churchill War Rooms.
I hopped online and logged into the AI site that I am supposed to use “for work.” I do, occasionally. But mostly it helps me goof off by creating funny and somewhat offensive images.
For instance, here is the wallpaper I created for my phone. I call it Lord Murphy, First of His Name, Viscount of the Couch. I uploaded a photo of my dog and asked the bot to convert it into a 17th-century portrait by a Dutch or Flemish master.
This time I asked the bot to give me a T-shirt design. I said, “I want an image of Winston Churchill and I want it to mostly be the classic Winston look. Cigar, greatcoat, bowler hat, that great English-bulldog mug. BUT! I want him wearing a T-shirt that says ANTIFA with a Molotov cocktail on it. And I want him to have a Union Jack neck tattoo.”
Usually my chat box just complies and creates what it thinks I want, with decidedly mixed results. This time, however, it pushed back. I am condensing the exchange here, but essentially my bot said: Interesting, but maybe tone down the neck tattoo. And lose the Molotov cocktail. That suggests ‘frustrated street protester,’ and Churchill was never a man without power. Maybe give him a denim vest and a punk-band patch instead.
I found this humorous. Churchill can’t have a Molotov cocktail, but he can have a patch on a denim vest that says “Buzzcocks?” That makes no sense. But my bot was right about the power dynamics. Churchill did have power. And he wielded it decisively, sometimes ruthlessly.
“You’re right,” I told it. “No Molotov cocktail. Make it a Spitfire.”
The Spitfire seemed perfect: powerful, deadly, and somehow posh, with that Rolls-Royce engine powering it through the skies over Europe.
“And make the neck tattoo as big as possible.”
Here is what my bot came up with.
I freaking loved it. It was precicely what I saw in my mind.
I downloaded it and immediately found one of those enormous online custom gift shops people use to put pictures of their children on mugs and blankets for the grandparents at Christmas. I ordered a T-shirt and added my design at checkout.
The next day I got an email from Unnamed But Very Large Company:
Thank you for your recent order: 1310964.
Unfortunately, we are unable to process your order. The designs are in conflict with our content guidelines.
I would like to say this immediately made me feel like some dangerous free-speech rebel and only added to my resolve to own this shirt. It did not.
First, it hurt my feelings. It felt like a slap on the wrist: This is offensive. You shouldn’t have made it. It is tasteless and possibly hurtful.
This is an ongoing internal battle for me. I like to be informed, and I have a powerful urge to say something when I think something is unjust, hypocritical, or absurd. Preferably in a funny and thought-provoking way. This impulse is unhelpfully coupled with an almost pathological discomfort with actually offending anyone. I want to be heard and even controversial, apparently, but I would also very much like everyone to be okay with it.
So naturally, I went back to my bot to ask whether I had been bad. I gave it the rejection and a link to the company’s content guidelines.
The bot surmised the biggest problem might not be ANTIFA. There was a crossed-out swastika in a little “NO NAZIS” patch on Churchill’s coat, and automated moderation systems are notoriously bad at context. It might simply have seen a swastika. Or perhaps the problem was a recognizable historical figure being used in contemporary political satire.
The bot suggested replacing the patch with an RAF roundel, a Spitfire squadron patch, or something that said, “Never Surrender.” But I doubted the little patch was really the problem. I suspected that it was ANTIFA that was flagged, and there was no way I was taking that off the shirt.
It wouldn’t make any sense. The whole point was that we were once all supposed to be anti-fascist. When I was growing up in the ’80s, even the Germans were anti-fascist! And now it’s a BAD thing?
I did decide to make one change. At the bot’s suggestion, I got rid of the “NO NAZIS” pin. I had just finished a book about English history called An Utterly Impartial History of Britain, or 2000 Years of Upper-Class Idiots in Charge by John O’Farrell, and I was still thinking about something I read about the red remembrance poppy.
O’Farrell explains the poppy became a symbol of the First World War because it grew in the churned-up earth of the battlefields. It was as if life and blood was poured into the soil, and then, with time, that life and blood seemed to bloom. He joked that, surely plenty of less photogenic vegetation grew back too—nettles, weeds, brambles—but none of those looked nearly as nice pinned to a gentleman’s lapel. I’m paraphrasing.
I asked the bot to replace the pin with a single red poppy.
That changed the shirt.
Though the poppy began as a symbol of remembrance after the First World War, it eventually came to commemorate the dead of later wars as well. It says: remember what this cost. Remember the people who didn’t come home. And, perhaps most importantly, remember what they were fighting against in the first place.
My shirt had started as a joke. I was “taking the piss,” as the Brits might say. But when I saw the updated design—with everything in gritty black and white except that one small spot of red—I got unexpectedly emotional. I didn’t realize until then that I was making a serious point. Or at least, trying to.
Between sixty and seventy-five million people died in WWII. But it isn’t only about the lives lost. Think of the dreams set aside. The marriages that never happened and the children that were never born. All of the personal stories that were interrupted and never resumed. That generation sacrificed so much for us. For future generations. The poppy only asks us to remember.
Don’t forget, kids. Don’t you dare forget.
I got on Etsy with my new design and a restored sense of purpose. I picked a custom T-shirt printer more or less at random. I did deliberately choose a woman because, for some reason, that seemed like a safer bet for my First Amendment assertion. That probably makes no sense and is, I admit, completely sexist. Sorry, guys.
I started composing a message explaining the design.
I realize this might be considered offensive…
Delete.
I hope this isn’t a problem, but…
Delete.
I was apologizing for the thing before she objected to it. So I stopped.
“I want a black women’s T. V-neck if you have it.”
I uploaded the design and placed the order. If she refused to print it, I would move on to somebody else. A few hours later she wrote back. She LOVED it. She would get it printed ASAP. Whew!
Thanks, Etsy Lady.
I had ordered too late to have the shirt for the trip, but I secretly felt very smart knowing that my souvenir would be waiting in my mailbox when I got home. No suitcase real estate required.
In London, we saw red poppies everywhere. I explained the symbolism to my stepson Ethan, who found it interesting. After that, he started noticing them too and pointing them out to me. When we left London for the Lake District, we started noticing the actual flowers. The poppy became a little touchstone of the trip.
As planned, when we returned, a little package was waiting for me. It was perfect. Five stars, Etsy Lady!
The next night we had been invited to a party for my twin niece and nephew, who had turned eighteen while we were traveling, and obviously I decided this was the occasion for Boss Churchill’s debut.
My family likes history and my irreverent sense of humor. At least I think they do. They make a good show of it if they are just putting up with me, which I would also appreciate, to be honest. I showed off the shirt and my family laughed.
My younger sister is a designer, so I told her about the evolution of the image and how I thought the poppy had unexpectedly become the most important part. It anchored the design visually—that one bit of red—but it had also become the part that meant the most to me.
At some point in the evening, my older sister, the host of the do, informed us that we were going next door for an ice cream social.
A neighbor was also having a birthday and had rented a soft-serve ice cream machine. The entire street had been invited, but there was apparently still concern about a dangerous ice-cream surplus, so we were enlisted to do our part.
This presented a problem.
I am an introvert, and I was wearing something that implied I wanted to have a conversation. Perhaps even a loud conversation. I never do that unless I know exactly who I will be interacting with.
I don’t know my sister’s neighbors particularly well—though, oddly, I know them better than I know my own neighbors because she has lived there so long and they have all enjoyed being involved in the twins’ lives over the years.
I did what I have been doing since I developed boobs in the fourth grade. I hunched deeply to hide my chest and walked next door.
We had some ice cream. We chatted with the neighbors. Nobody confronted me about fascism. It was all working out okay. Then, I was talking to my brother-in-law when he suddenly stopped mid-sentence.
“Oh, here’s Werner! Hi, Werner!”
I turned toward the street.
A very old man in an electric wheelchair was speeding down the road in our direction. He stopped to say hello to everyone and, in a light German accent, said, “It’s so vunderful to see you all smilingk!”
Then he headed off again down the road toward his home. “When he was nineteen,” my brother-in-law said as he gestured in Werner’s direction, “he was in the Battle of the Bulge.” Then he paused. “Not on our side, though.”
I felt my eyelids expand in all directions.
I turned to my oldest nephew, one of the birthday twins. “Did I just meet an actual Nazi? While wearing an ANTIFA T-shirt? At an ICE CREAM SOCIAL?”
His eyes enlarged too. We stared at each other for a beat. And then we both started laughing.
Of course, I don’t actually know that Werner was a Nazi. I know that, at nineteen, he was a German soldier fighting in the Battle of the Bulge. I don’t know what he did during the war or what he thought about any of it afterward. I know he was a kid in the war and that he moved to the States afterward.
And I know that the Battle of the Bulge was awful. I know this because my husband’s grandfather was there that winter, fighting with the Americans in Ardennes. He was also just nineteen. I know he nearly lost his feet from frostbite and was sent home after the battle. And I know he never spoke about it. His family asked, and he always refused.
And I saw Band of Brothers. So… I’m basically an expert.
Earlier that day, when I was talking about design elements with my younger sister, she told me about the ending of Blackadder Goes Forth, a show I know about but have never seen. The entire series is a comedy—irreverent and absurd—but in the final episode, set during the First World War, the jokes suddenly stop. The soldiers are ordered over the top. They run out of the trench toward the guns. And then the battlefield becomes a field of poppies.
I thought about Matt’s grandfather at nineteen.
I thought about Werner at nineteen. And as a very old German man speeding down an American street in an electric wheelchair on a lovely summer day, delighted that everybody was smiling. And I hoped he didn’t see my shirt.
I thought about all those poppies Ethan and I had noticed in Britain. And I looked down at Winston Churchill glaring out from my chest. ANTIFA. Spitfire. Union Jack neck tattoo.
And one bright red poppy.
The shirt is still funny and I will continue to wear it. I will always look for the absurdities and try to find a way to laugh. But my point is serious.
Don’t forget, kids.
Don’t you dare forget.