Debbie Nathan

Tchotchkobama

This summer I was at the Carnavalet, a museum in Paris that reprises that city’s history, with emphasis on the events of 1789-1799. The coolest thing there is the collection of French Revolution tchotchkes — everything from sans culottes paper dolls to lumpily glazed plates and mugs celebrating “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité,” as well as

this lovely “Bastille doll house,” complete with toy guillotine that would probably decapitate a petite fille’s finger, or maybe a rat.

Amazing how social movements for centuries have inspired the popular manufacture and sale of gobs of memorial junk. It’s about shopping! But it’s the kind even Reverend Billy would like.

And now we’ve got Obamarabilia.

I was strolling down 125th Street in Harlem earlier this week on an October-magic afternoon. Outdoor vendors rule on 125th, and lately it’s hard to walk three feet without passing another winsome tchotchke dedicated to Barack. Many are crafted by people from the neighborhood. Here’s the Obama light switch plate, made by H.W. Clarke, owner of Art World of Harlem. His street stand is near Malcolm X Blvd. and he says the plates are “going like hot cakes.”

And how about this “You’re the Bomb” framed poem? It’s offered by a poet who calls himself Battery Man. He’s been street-vending his rhymes for years.

To me, this Viagra-like “Bomb” thing seemed off kilter for Obama and Michelle. (Like, what’s with the “New York” reference, when they’re from Chicago?)

I asked Battery Man and it turns out the poem originally graced a different picture. But recently he saw the Michelle-and-Barack photo and was deeply inspired to hook it up with “You’re the Bomb.”

He recited the poem for me right on the street, in booming voice, declamatory pose and without missing a word or cadence. I couldn’t resist buying a copy. I love it when some person — in this case Obama — becomes so symbolically dense that his or her image overloads the conventional imagination of folk artists and craftspeople. When that happens, the image leaks out, like water from a overflowing bucket. It sloshes onto other cultural references. It’s wet and sloppy and joyful. I’m glad no one wants to clean it up.

I showed “You’re the Bomb” to my folklorist friend Emily Socolov. She had an idea: “Let’s go on Etsy.com and see what else we can find.”

(Obama bowling pin from Etsy.com)

Etsy.com is a site where craftspeople sell their labors of love. It’s way better than CafePress, because you can do a lot more on it than just decal things onto teeshirts or mugs or buttons. On Etsy you make things out of popsicle sticks or wires or dough or thread or any damn thing. Etsy has a product-search engine, so I keyed in “Obama,” “Palin” and “McCain.”

The latter two have only a couple dozen pages of products for sale. Obama has more than a hundred. I looked at all of them, which took awhile but was like visiting a 2008 Olde Curiosity Shoppe. If Obama gets elected and responds to the needs of the kind of people who made these tchotchkes, he’ll probably get 100,000 more and some will end up in his future Presidential Library.