A grown man has printed T-shirts telling another grown man to go fuck himself for making fun of his love of cats. Normally, that’s the sort of sentence you’d only read in a gossip sheet covering the social scene of an emotionally fraught comic book store. But because the cat-mocking man was TV host Anderson Cooper, and the T-shirt printer is The Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan, here it is: Browsers at the merch table for the Pumpkins’ recent tour dates have had the opportunity to pick up a super-classy “Fuck You Anderson Cooper” T-shirt, complete with a picture of two cats wearing bow ties. It’s a thrillingly passive-aggressive escalation of the feud that’s been brimming between the two titans of influence ever since Cooper publicly mocked Corgan on his CNN show Anderson Cooper 360.
Cooper’s assertion? That things like loving wrestling and posing with his cats on the cover of PAWS Chicago magazine mean that Corgan has betrayed the sacred covenent he once made to stay young and cool forever, like immortal elf man Anderson Cooper. Corgan’s response was to use the phrase “raising cain” to describe goofily smiling while hugging his cats, and then call Cooper a “globalist shill” on Twitter, two very cool things to say (Corgan also raised $60,000 for Chicago-area cat shelter PAWS, the only legitimately cool thing about this feud). But apparently no one told Billy Corgan that there’s nothing cool about swears, so now people will be walking around in public with shirts that say “Fuck You” to Anderson Cooper. It’s a powerful message, and one that will likely shake Cooper to his core when he sees one, years from now, being ironically worn by one of his neighbors on the secret street where the beautiful people live.