Blindly "Edgy?" Disgruntled Employee? What?

      Not to be too vague about it, but the online official swag store of a certain auto-racing sanctioning group briefly offered a T-shirt design so offensive that I won't post it here.

     There's also the fact that they memory-holed it shortly after the image started making the rounds on social media.  Sure, the page got archived; but provenance is a bit tricky when all you've got is a big stack of HTML that anyone with the skills could write, having grabbed the code from a different page of the same site.  I saw it myself, so I think it was indeed real; doubting the initial reports, I had done a search on their site to find it and had the page up for about thirty minutes before hitting "refresh" and pulling a 404. 

     The design in question featured a race-car driver in full kit -- helmet, fireproof union suit, gloves and so on -- seated in a throne-type chair modeled on the one the statue of Lincoln sits in at the Lincoln Memorial, fasces and all.*  Vertical red and white stripes in the proportion of the ones on our flag fill space behind and above the seated figure.  It was apparently in promotion of an automobile race in Washington, D.C. that is part of the celebrations for our country's 250th anniversary.

     The image itself is not the offensive part; it's a little tone-deaf to unseat Lincoln, but decades of zany Presidents' Day-themed ads show that general kind of thing isn't uncommon.  Nope, the problem was the text: Above the driver, "ONE NATION."  Below him, between five-pointed stars, "ONE RACE."

     It's not a cute pun. It's not a dogwhistle.  It's an air-raid siren.  To their credit, the page selling that shirt was taken down shortly after it started getting general attention; to their detriment, somebody made the decision to create and post it in the first place.
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* There's a tendency in various corners of the Internet to point at such representations of rods bundled around an axe in various government buildings, documents, coins, etc. and sagely intone, "That proves it! It's a fascist government!" It proves nothing of the sort; our government was established by men LARPing the Roman Republic (with a touch of Ancient Greek democracy) and for Rome, fasces were a symbol of the power to dispense high and low justice.  Mussolini co-opted it, but he was way late to the table, and was thinking more of Imperial Rome.  And yes, Republic or Empire, the Romans were a bloody-handed bunch, and there are better ways to symbolize government than implied beatings and beheadings.  It's a pretty good reminder of the need for checks and balances, and that justice had better be tempered with wisdom and mercy; but artistic and symbolic use in the U.S. is rarely that nuanced, either.  It's just one more bit of semiotic shorthand to say that government is still in charge of all levels of justice, right up there with the eagle clutching arrows in one claw and olive branches in the other.