Travis Parkin said if he'd opened his T-shirt shop in 2002, officials might have strung him up under the Patriot Act.
"But now people realize the war was a sham and was based on a lie, and they're starting to - even on network TV, people are outspoken about this," he said, "so we feel it's 'safe' to express ourselves, as well."
Parkin and his daughter, Ramona Teo, who attends UNM for filmmaking, opened Guerilla Graphix at 2205 Silver Ave. S.E., next to Annapurna Chai House.
They silk-screen their politically charged and humorous designs onto good-quality shirts bought at thrift stores. Each design is printed onto a handful of different shirts with sleeves of varying lengths.
"You don't have to worry about going to a party and seeing someone in the exact same shirt," Parkin said. "Another nice thing about the recycled idea is that after you wash them there's no surprises. They've already been washed 20 times, so they're not going to shrink."
Teo makes intricate mandala designs, and she likes to see people wearing them around town.
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"Each one represents a certain type of energy, and a lot of people like to meditate on mandalas, and it's like a spiritual thing and an art thing for me," she said. "I've been doing art my whole life, but it's really exciting to see it on T-shirts."
They also sell hats and tote bags, which are sewn by blind people.
"We buy them and print them," Parkin said. "How do they stitch? Yeah, I don't know."
There's a Lucky Strike cigarette pack logo, but it reads "Likely Stroke."
There's a satellite dish under the words "One Nation Under Surveillance."
"Here's a very funny one: 'Barack is a Klingon Name,'" he said. "You know all the speculation about his being Arab and Muslim, and Hussein is his middle name and all that kind of stuff. So we thought we'd poke a little fun and say, 'Oh, he's a Klingon! Even worse.'"
Some of the design ideas come from the bumper sticker and T-shirt contests Parkin hosts on his 89.9 KUNM radio spot Thursday afternoons called Afternoon Freeform.
A popular sell during the Olympics was the five-ring logo redrawn as loops of barbed wire.
"It's an oppressive regime, an oppressive society in China, and there's been a lot of protest on their occupation of Tibet and their limitation of free speech," he said. "That was our little way of, you know, the whole idea behind this is to give people an opportunity to express their politics."
Another shirt design is of a monkey's face under the words "I am the 100th monkey," based off a story about monkeys in Japan that suggests the existence of collective consciousness. Monkeys ate sweet potatoes from the ground with the dirt still on them.
"One day, one of the younger monkeys decided to wash his sweet potato in the river and clean off all the sand before he ate it," Teo said. "And other monkeys around started catching on, and once the 100th monkey cleaned his sweet potato, suddenly all over the island they were doing that whether they were connected or not. Even on islands nearby, they started picking up that trait too."
All shirts cost $12. And for less, there's a rack with vintage shirts, discontinued styles that weren't popular sellers in the store (like one with an Abu Ghraib torture victim that reads "New World Odor"), and old Lobo shirts.
