Colin Kaepernick, the NFL quarterback who sparked a player protest movement by taking a knee for social justice during the national anthem, has just signed on as the centrepiece of an advertising campaign with Nike that will last until 2028.

I have mixed feelings about this.

It might be inevitable, but I always find it distressing when activism is transformed into product. A recent and particularly ham-handed attempt at this occurred when Pepsi used Kendall Jenner as an instrument to co-opt the symbolism of the Black Lives Matter movement in an effort to sell soft drinks.

The ad was a failure in just about every way, but it was particularly stupefying to watch one of the most privileged people on the planet try to show us that drinking Pepsi was actually an act of resistance, and that protest itself was more like going to a really sexy block party than say, having a fire hose turned on you.

No matter, Colin Kaepernick stands on different ground, and everything I have read about him suggests he’s a good and sincere man, one who has quite clearly been denied an opportunity to work because of the way he has been expressing his political beliefs. There are rational, if unappealing, arguments on both side of this issue, but his activism, and the price he’s paid to for it, and the money he has donated to it, seem real enough. So real, in fact, that although he hasn’t actually played football for over 2 years, his jersey is still amongst the top sellers.

Nike, who not long before they signed Kaepernick, extended their deal with the NFL to supply them with uniforms and equipment for the next eight years– at a price in excess of a billion dollars– saw an opportunity to have their cake and eat it, too. The NFL is a monolith, a powerful institution that is comprised of almost 70% black players, players who are almost certain to suffer lasting and severe brain injury as a result of their jobs.

It’s a gladiatorial spectacle that has always exploited it’s workers for the benefit of gamblers and billionaires, and as wonderful as the game might be, the league that governs it is really kind of evil, and in spite of Nike’s deep and longstanding partnership with the NFL, they want to be seen as a white hat corporation. When we see that swoosh, we’re  supposed to think of commitment and excellence and fighting against the odds. We’re supposed to think of character.

Nike doesn’t want us to think about how they enable and profit off a violent and dangerous sport that cares little for the combatants,  so they hire the iconoclastic Kaepernick to sell shoes to us, thus “seizing control of the narrative.” Nike now pays Kaeprnick for his activism. In the old days, people would say they bought him. And so, with Kaepernick as the face of Nike’s campaign, we are to believe that they are the Rebel Alliance and not the Death Star.

We are to believe that Nike is about civil rights, not sweat shops.

Anyway, I don’t begrudge Kaepernick a single thing. I like his protest and I like him, and I hope that the fortune he has now earned makes him happy, and gives him an opportunity to further his activism and do whatever the hell he wants. He has earned that. Just don’t believe that Nike “has seen the light.” No, they’re just presenting the face they think we want to see, while keeping their own concealed.

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Fantastic turnout here.

Just light’s out.

You’re a great, great crowd, a very smart crowd, and I want to thank you all for coming out in such huge numbers to hear me speak. What’s that? Wow. My people are telling me that there are thousands more waiting outside. In the rain. Terrifying lightning flying around, too, and the sort of giant thunder that scares dogs. These people don’t care. No, they’re happy to risk their lives. They just want to be close to greatness and pay their respects. Real Americans, those people. I love them just as much as they love me. Well, maybe just a little bit less– let’s be honest– but still, I give them huge, huge amounts of love.

Of course, the media will make up lies about this turnout, just like they did at the inauguration.

So dishonest.
No conscience at all.
Lazy perverts.

They’d even stoop to blacken the memory of Mary Tyler Moore just to push their liberal agenda. Makes me want to throw-up.

But you know who doesn’t want to make me throw-up?

Mary Tyler Moore.

So beautiful.
So classy.
Such manners.
A real tribute to her race.
A true 9 out of 10.

It’s hard to believe she was taken before Crooked Hillary. Crooked Hillary who is so sick and weak and has those big bug eyes that always make it look like her head is going to explode. And those coughing fits? Awful. Why couldn’t death just take her? Yesterday’s news. She’ll probably be the next to go anyway. .. And then Bill. Both in such poor, poor health. Sad. Thankfully, I don’t have that problem. I am in excellent health. Best health of any President in the history of America.

It’s a fact.
Never had a drink in my life.
And no drugs either.

And let me tell you, it’s not like I didn’t have opportunity.

I had big time opportunity.

Mary, Mary liked to drink. It’s true. She struggled with it, but it didn’t matter because she really could turn the world on with her smile.

She really could.
Honestly.
No lie.

She could also do it with her ass.

Sweet Jesus, what a caboose!

You’re all probably wondering, did I?

A gentleman never tells, but let me just say that I bounced quarters off that ass. It should have been classified as a secret weapon because that ass could topple regimes. If I had sent Mary, the vintage Mary, young, like when she was doing the Dick Van Dyke Show,

into one of those pathetic, little airport protests, everyone would have seen her ass and just forgotten where they were. Seriously.

You couldn’t say the same for Rhoda.

Oy vey!

No, Mary was the real deal, the one and only.

Mary, and I can give her no higher compliment, was a real star– the Ivanka of her times– and America and her allies, will miss her.

How could that be?

Look at her.

She’s stunning.

I, of course, had the blunt interests of a boy who knew nothing about women or sex– although I was very interested in both– and I simply accepted Hollywood’s casual objectification of these mysteries. I didn’t know somebody was attractive unless Hollywood signalled to me that they were, something they usually did by a display of nudity. And so the promise of Jessica Lange, Kim Basinger or Jamie Lee Curtis taking off their top in some accessible, high velocity movie was simply too much for me to resist.

Streep, who even at a young age seemed to be playing adults rather than sex toys for naive adolescents, was cast in the sort of films that my parents might be interested in, in “prestige” films, and even though she was of the same general age as all the other celebrities I lusted after, she was stood apart from them, a European cousin, or something.

As an adult I came to love Meryl Streep. Not so much for her acting, which was always somehow obscured for me by her reputation for “acting,” but for her presence. Talented, charismatic and beautiful, she’s also fantastically articulate and charming, and like everybody else I was super keen to hear her speak at the Golden Globes.

Her speech was widely celebrated.

Meryl Streep, Hollywood’s single-combat hero, called to our better angels, and as we sat there listening it was as if the Stature of Liberty herself was speaking. Expecting to love every word of it, I was surprised to discover that I did not.

Although she might have been joking when she referred to the roomful of beautiful, insanely wealthy and adored people sitting before her as, “The most vilified segment of American society,” it made me roll my eyes . Whether she intended it with any irony or not is unclear, but the thrust of her argument was that Hollywood, full of outsiders and foreigners, was representative of some sort of scrappy refugee success story rather than a consumerist ideal of near-unattainable privilege. She continued, saying that if Trump had his way, all America would have left would be football and mixed martial arts– and as she said this, her voice rising in certainty, finger wagging, she admonished, “Which are not the arts!”

The home crowd cheered.

I don’t know.

I had thought I was the home crowd, too, but was I supposed to believe that actors were rescuing America from the things that the people who lived there liked? That football and MMA were unworthy to watch unless they were recreated in movie format starring celebrities?

Something like that?

I wasn’t sure.

Her audience was rapt, hanging on every word. And they were all so beautiful and dewy, so earnest and self-congratulatory in expression, so not of this earth that I imagined them separating from the rest of the world and rising up, up, up in some magical balloon that they knew the rest of us, so smitten, would never be able to let go of.

Her condemnation of Trump’s nascent war on journalism struck me as wanting, too, because there is likely no industry that succeeds so brilliantly at manipulating the press as does Hollywood. The Hollywood Foreign Press, who are responsible for the Golden Globes, are little more than a marketing wing for the industry, trading off favourable stories for glamorous access.

When we see our celebrities on the red carpet refusing to be objectified by not revealing who made their outfit and thus striking a blow for equal rights, we have to keep in mind that they’re still accepting money to advertise that dress.

Hollywood is about money.

Period.

If art or diversity or empathy is a byproduct of this pursuit, all the better, but if Meryl Streep were being honest with herself and the rest of us, she might acknowledge that she, like Trump, depends on a compliant media to promote her work and spin her narratives.

And so it goes.

Everything touches everything else.

It’s not like Streep was saying anything crazy, though. She was trying to do good, but her blind spots were, well, Hollywood in scope. Her words were tangled in contradictions, a stinging disregard for those who might not agree with her, and an imperious detachment from the pedestrian, discount store lives the rest of us struggle to lead, and that actually demoralized me.

Politicians and actors, I have found out, have all too much in common.