Peninsula Daily News
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HOQUIAM — A community festival celebrating Grays Harbor’s timber heritage is attracting national attention with a T-shirt mocking Osama bin Laden.
The Loggers’ Playday festival celebrates that heritage every September — this year’s logging festival is scheduled for Sept. 10 — and every year, a special shirt is made.
Known for being edgy, previous designs have mocked environmentalists and hippies.
This year’s black shirt features a heavily muscled logger with a USA hat and a flag tattoo pushing terrorist Osama bin Laden into the ocean.
Bin Laden is tied to a log and is looking up at the logger in desperation.
Underneath the picture, it states: “Osama bin Loggin’.”
“The shirt in no way, shape or form was intended to be racist or bigotry and anything along those lines,” said Donny Bell, the festival T-shirt creator and Loggers Playday emcee.
Organizers said they got the idea because their Sept. 10 Playday is so close to the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and because bin Laden was killed by U.S. military forces in May.
“Bin Laden was buried in a wood product, and that’s what sparked the idea for the shirt, and that’s what we have him doing,” said T-shirt designer Christian Burgess, who helped design the logo.
[Actually, according to U.S. Navy reports, bin Laden’s body was washed, wrapped in cloth and deposited into the ocean within 24 hours of his death, in accordance with Muslim law.]
“To be honest with you, we decided to feature Osama bin Laden because this happens to be the 10th anniversary of the attacks, and it’s the year he died,” Burgess told The Daily World of Aberdeen.
“It also just happens that loggin’ rhymes with Bin Laden.”
Burgess said the design was not meant to resemble bin Laden being waterboarded, as some shirt opponents have claimed.
“We wanted to make sure there was no blood and that his eyes were open,” Burgess added.
“That way, if a little kid saw it, he wouldn’t put two and two together.”
But opponents said they are uncomfortable with the subject matter and the depiction.
“I don’t like the looks of it,” said Aberdeen resident Sharon Gabryshak.
“If he [bin Laden] wasn’t on the front, it would be better.”
Another Grays Harbor County resident, Jeanne Ward, printed several T-shirts that say, “My Hoquiam is a Hate Free Zone.”
“I decided to make my own response,” she said in between shirt pressings.
“It was really important to me to say something. . . . I wanted there to be an alternative.”
A Facebook page for the festival, linked from the city of Hoquiam website, lighted up with comments for and against the shirts — with accusations of racism, hatred and poor taste.
But by Monday afternoon, it was brought down.
Bell said money raised from selling the shirts at $15 apiece goes toward college scholarships for local students.
“Clothing can be fun, clothing can be disgusting, clothing can be anything you want,” he said.
“But this piece of clothing, however you want to take it, is all for the positive for our kids.”
More than 350 shirts have already been snatched up, and hundreds more are set to be printed.
“I’d love to sell 10,000 of them,” Bell said.
Kathi Hoder, a business owner who sits on the Aberdeen City Council, said she’s “in awe” over the national reaction to the shirt.
“[The shirt is] not something I would have chosen, but I’m old,” Hoder said.
“The people who do these things are more with it. They’re trying to sell this shirt to a younger audience, I think.”
Noting that the festival is not run by a nonprofit group, she added:
“They have a right to have this shirt. I believe in freedom of speech.”
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The Daily World of Aberdeen and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
