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.

Public shaming of members of President Trump’s administration has become the latest act of resistance against the government. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave a restaurant, Environmental Protection Agency Chief Scott Pruitt was lectured and videotaped while dining out, Kellyanne Conway, a consultant to Trump, was mocked in a grocery store, and most recently Stephen Miller, a particularly loathsome advisor to Trump, threw out $80 worth of sushi after the bartender followed him outside of the restaurant and told him to go fuck himself.

Here, in their own words, are other Trump officials relating their stories of being heckled in public:

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Mira Ricardel, Deputy National Security Advisor:

“ I was called a ‘Shit Donkey’ by some tall woman when I went to see Ocean’s 8 at the Cineplex. It completely ruined the movie for me. This is not the America I know.”

Kevin McAleenan, Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection:

“ I had just finished collecting the quarters from the washer and dryers at one of my rental properties and was walking back to my car when I felt a little sting on the back of my neck. When I turned around I saw that some old man sitting on a stoop had just spit a sunflower shell on my neck.  He then fired another, and that one hit me in the leg, and as I reached for my taser he called me “a traitor to my nation and to humanity,” before twitching out.

Wilbur Ross, Secretary of Commerce:

“ The woman working on my feet during my morning sports pedicure was extremely rough, almost violent while exfoliating my heels. And make no mistake, it was intentional. I can tell. And when I admonished her  and told her how lucky she was to be living in America, she said something under her breath in a foreign language. I called the manager and had her fired, but it’s getting intolerable, this lack of civility.”

Betsy DeVos, Secretary of Education:

“ I was at the Illuminati sex party in Novgorod and right after the sacrifice, a man wearing a goat’s head refused to have sex with me saying, “Children in cages aren’t my thing, you Trump skank.” I had my mask on so I don’t even know how he knew who I was. Jesus, I don’t even want to think about what they’re saying about me at Martha’s Vineyard!”

Peter O’Rourke, Secretary of Veteran’s Affairs:

“ I was at a Bryan Adams concert with a few of my paintball buddies and while I was out on the floor enjoying the show I saw that they put my picture on the giant screen with the words, EVIL TRUMP FLUNKY across it. Not cool, Bryan, not cool.”

the White House Press Secretary to President Donald Trump, was refused service at the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia based on “moral grounds.” The owner, Stephanie Wilkinson, simply did not want to serve somebody she found so politically offensive, and so she didn’t.

Since then the Red Hen restaurant in Washington, DC, which has no affiliation with the one in Lexington, has been getting attacked by both left and right on social media.

Keep in mind, this is not the restaurant that refused Sanders service. No matter, even after they explicitly stated that this was all a case of mistaken identity and they had nothing to do with the Huckabee Affair, people still demanded that they take a political position on the matter. The Red Hen responded by saying that businesses in DC are prohibited from discriminating against people for political affiliation because they are in a federal district. This wasn’t good enough. People still pressed them. Okay, we know you’re not the restaurant that was involved, and we know that you are subject to different laws and therefore don’t have a choice to make in the matter, but what if you did have a choice? What if you were the restaurant she walked in to? What would you do then?

And so it goes.

And now Donald Trump is tweeting furiously at the Red Hen in Virginia ( the right one) in the hopes of destroying their business.

The owner, likely seeing in herself a patriotic exemplar, stands by her act of micro resistance while the pitchfork and torch crowd– from both the left and right–gather, eager to burn some shit down.

So surreal and terrible and hilarious and scary.

It’s amazing to me just how quickly things are reduced to the symbolic. All the nuance, history, vulnerability and complexity that informs a person– or a restaurant, even–are swept to the side, reduced to little more than the baleful projections of a furious, roiling,  unconscious. The appetite right now is for enemies rather than friends, so if you’re caught in the public eye you become what that public needs you to be, not who you might actually be.

And so when I see Sarah Huckabee Sanders tossed about in the media, I think of Monica Lewinsky.

They really look alike.

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I mean, they really do.

But beyond that, remember also how Monica Lewinsky was treated by the press and public? She was despised– crucified, by both the left and right, for the sins of Bill Clinton. Honest to God, I think it’s a miracle she didn’t jump out a window. But she survived, admirably, in fact, and it’s as if her ghost is now visible in “the perfect smokey eye” of Sarah Huckabee, and the antipathy that Lewinsky withstood is now being visited upon her. Both of them appear as privileged white girls, Beckys, really, and their ambition, greased by a system that favours people like them, propelled them right next to the most powerful man in the world, and this, this seems to be something our society simply cannot abide.

Ask Hillary Clinton.

And so these women rise up into the culture like cautionary tales. Reduced to cartoon figures, they float slowly above us, soft targets, while we, the rabble beneath cast stones and curses. If you’re a woman and your cultural centrality can in any way be traced back to a powerful man, you will be hated for it– by men, and by women, it would seem. This is America, and if you’re a woman and you fly too close to the sun, you’re declared a witch and you’re going to get burned, whether you deserve it or not.

I continued to watch her, and just a little further up the street she joined a small group of 20-something women waiting for her on the sidewalk. They were beautiful and happy, these women. Smiles were their default setting, and as they stood there in a semi-circle chatting with one another and comparing the signs they’d made for the Women’s March, they seemed so full of light as to very nearly be glowing. They were going off to do something important,  they were going to try to influence the world rather than merely survive in it, and knowing that made me hopeful and proud.

I didn’t actually attend the Women’s March. I was a little bit uncertain if it was my place to be there or not, and so I stayed home and watched from the sidelines. But I should have known just from looking at these women, from the way they genially accepted my clumsy thumbs up from the window, that I would have been entirely welcome.

Millions of people, it turned out, rose to this occasion, millions were welcome.

All through the day my social media streams were flooded with images from the marches. As I was following via Facebook and Twitter, I was seeing the feeds of people I knew and loved, so they were not strangers to me, but real people– warm, intelligent and kind people with complicated and sometimes difficult lives. It was their faces, and those of their daughters and sons and partners that were looking back at me from my computer monitor, and regardless of how heavy or congested their lives might have become, there they were, all so beautiful and strong and joyous.

And in spite of the sneering rhetoric that’s been the baseline of our daily lives for so long now, the marches had a celebratory, almost parade-like quality. They were happy places, and they opened up a new space, one that allowed us the opportunity to pause and breathe deeply for a moment. 

It was incredibly moving to watch this, cathartic even, and I am not overstating things when I say that I felt like something essential had just changed in the world.

For one day our concerns and anxieties were blown away like bad weather and we felt safe and protected, encircled by a good that was spreading out in concentric circles. And everywhere you looked, you saw one of your better angels smiling back at you, there they were, thousands and thousands and thousands of them, building that shining city on the hill.