Nike Just Declared War on America; Let’s Return the Favor!
Don’t Think for a Second that Nike Actually Believes in Anything Other than Its Own Bottom Line
by Alexander Zubatov
Nike might be named for the Greek goddess of victory, but today they embraced a big-time loser in tying their fortunes to the clueless, narcissitic, America-bashing bro, Colin Kaepernick, making him the new face of their #JustDoIt campaign. “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything” is the message you will find on this world-class doofus’ Twitter page. That’s a message right out of the playbook of some crazed Islamic suicide bomber, and if you just look at his photo above, with the facial hair and that unswerving, holier-than-thou look in his eyes, you’ll see the resemblance.
But in embracing that man and that message, Nike also wants you to believe that it — a big, profitable, bottom-line oriented corporation — is somehow identifying itself with that same message. It wants you to believe that, knowing full well how controversial and scandalous its decision to partner with Kaepernick would sound to many American ears, it still made that decision because … well, because Nike’s boardroom of stuffed shirts, like Kaepernick, believes in something for which it was willing to sacrifice everything, even profit. This, we are meant to think, is a corporation with a conscience.
Don’t believe it for a second. These people have shareholders they have to answer to, and they don’t make a single move, much less a controversial one like this, without lots of analyzing and calculating going into that decision. Nike’s play against America is a variant of the same cynical profiteering move we saw more crudely made in that god-awful Pepsi ad that tried to monetize protesting:
Of course, Pepsi’s tone-deaf ad got widely panned. Everyone saw through it. Nike, which has long had a history of being a bit more edgy than the likes of Pepsi merely by virtue of a longtime strategy of riding the coattails of prominent prominent black athletes, is hoping that the difference between this campaign and Pepsi’s misstep is that Nike will look genuine in being down with the Kaepster. From that vantage point, the boardroom calculus undoubtedly looks something like this:
Yeah, we know doin’ this is goin’ to alienate lots of conservative and rah-rah-for-America types, but hey, honestly our analysis shows that traditional Nike buyers trend younger, more liberal and more diverse anyway, so we’re bettin’ that in hinging ourselves to Kaepernick, we’re goin’ to generate tons of controversy and publicity, which is free advertising to our core audience, so then we get those guys and all their friends to jump on our bandwagon and really identify with us because we’re sending out what they see as a positive message. Moreover, we’re really goin’ to extend our brand to an audience of young people and kids who aren’t that into sports, maybe, and wouldn’t normally think to wear Nike but are just woke and eager to get out there and flash their political message, which they can now do by sportin’ our stuff. Not to mention the whole international market, which pretty much hates America anyway, so those people are gonna be only too happy to run us down. The way we see it, this is a big win-win!
Makes sense, doesn’t it? So what should we do? I see two main approaches here:
First, we need to make the response much louder and more overwhelming than what Nike’s corporate stooges anticipated. Remember, corporations that see their profits threatened get cowardly in a heartbeat. Despite what they might want you to believe, the only “belief in something” that they’ll “sacrifice everything” for is their belief in saving their jobs and lining their pockets, and that means that if we overwhelm them with our voices, they’ll crack. What we might get then is one of those bland, fraidy-cat corporate statements of the sort that tactfully distances Nike from the campaign and thus alienates even its core audience.
But second, we need to get self-respecting liberals to hop on board as well. What that means is that we take this in the same direction as the protests against the Pepsi ad: if we focus merely on Nike’s anti-American sentiments, we get many of the America-bashers on the regressive left to embrace the brand just as Nike is hoping, but if we focus on Nike’s cynical profiteering, its attempt to turn a protest movement into a profit margin, then we score big-time points all around the political spectrum. For example, here’s a Tweet I just sent out to pick up on these themes:
Retweet me, if you want, or come up with your own stuff. Either way, let these bozos know where you stand. Don’t let them monetize these dumb protests, which I’ve discussed separately, on their own terms, here:
Make your voice heard. Don’t let Nike profit at the expense of our morale, our unity and our nation.
— — — — — — — — — — — -
Alexander Zubatov is a practicing attorney specializing in general commercial litigation. He is also a practicing writer specializing in general non-commercial poetry, fiction, drama, essays and polemics. In the words of one of his intellectual heroes, José Ortega y Gasset, biography is “a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.”
Some of his articles have appeared in The Federalist, Times Higher Education, Quillette, The Imaginative Conservative, Chronicles, The Independent Journal Review, Acculturated, PopMatters, The Hedgehog Review, Mercatornet, The Montreal Review, Republic Standard, The Fortnightly Review, New English Review, Culture Wars and nthposition.
He makes occasional, unscheduled appearances on Twitter (https://twitter.com/Zoobahtov).
