The poverty of AntiNike (wasRe: Nike iD)

kelley kwalker2 at gte.net
Tue Feb 20 11:29:32 PST 2001


At 01:55 PM 2/20/01 -0500, LeoCasey at aol.com wrote:
>In a message dated 2/20/2001 11:44:51 AM Eastern Standard Time,
>owner-lbo-talk-digest at lists.panix.com writes:
>
>
>>I looked into this, calling Jonah, to verify -- it would have been an
>>example useful in my work. What I don't quite get is why Jonah has a pair
>>of Nikes to begin with and why there should be outrage that Nike wouldn't
>>stitch "sweatshop" on the sneakers. Gimme a break! this is a foolish
>>request, given all their disclaimers on NikeiD. i'm not defending Nike,
>>per se, but really, who gives a crap that Nike doesn't want to make a
>>profit by putting just any old thing on their products?!
>>
>>What is wrong with this picture?
>
>
>What is wrong is that you seem to be missing the panorama for the details. It
>was a quite ingenious way of pointing out -- and bringing a great deal of
>attention -- to the contradictions between the corporate image Nike would
>like to promote and the dirty, filthy reality of their daily operations. You
>seem to have entirely missed that.
>
>Poverty of political imagination, in my humble view.

it wasn't ingenious at all. it was a mistake on the part of someone who only casually followed the news. what this kid missed is that this IS how capitalism works. what people who are outraged by Nike and Nike alone miss, is that this is how capitalism works. that it encourages outrage on the part of those who learn about it is a sad statement.

and what is funny, is that if you were to press them, from interviewing people from staff to executive level managers, i'm sure most of them would acknowledge that there is a contradiction between the image a corporation exudes and the daily reality of their corporate lives is readily apparent to almost anyone i've ever talked to. they live in that milieu every single day and the critique of management and executives is a lexicon familiar to most USers.

what the demonization of nike does is encourage people to think it's THAT company, not their own or not that one. and this is typical for USers, too, since they reveal this tendency on opinion surveys (eg., the health care system sucks, but my doc is mostly okay)

it's not much different than what ehrenreich identifies in _fear of falling_ where the professional strata projects onto laborers all that is racist, sexist, repulsive so they can maintain a pristine image for themselves. see, likewise, the demonization of the south and "those dumb workers" exhibited here on this list more frequently than i care to count.

kelley



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