"Jay-Z Isn’t a Sellout, He’s a Capitalist."

Dave Zirin? He's perhaps the only sportswriter who truly matters. We are reminded of the importance of following the money.

Jay-Z Isn’t a Sellout, He’s a Capitalist, by Dave Zirin (The Nation)

He’s a billionaire who wants to be an NFL team owner, and erasing Colin Kaepernick is the price of admission.

 ... The truth is actually much more banal. None of this is about social justice. It’s not about, as Shawn Carter put it, “helping millions and millions of people.” This partnership is happening because Shawn Carter is a billionaire who wants to be an NFL owner, and erasing Colin Kaepernick is the price of admission. Now Shawn Carter gets to multiply his fortune, and the NFL believes they will no longer be branded as racist, or have to schedule skim-milk Super Bowl halftime shows headlined by Maroon 5.

Jay-Z is a boss. Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid are workers. It is the interest of workers in the NFL to unite and say that blackballing people for their political beliefs is never going to be OK. It is in the interest of workers to stand up for their colleague. It is in Shawn Carter’s interest to stand up for himself. It’s not “millions and millions” who are going to be helped. It’s one person. It’s Jay-Z’s ultimate hustle—a hustle he told us, over 20 years ago, we were never to knock.

As Eric Reid said when the news broke, “Jay-Z claimed to be a supporter of Colin…and now he’s going to be a part owner.… It’s kind of despicable.” It is despicable. It’s also the reality of doing business. Colin Kaepernick is a worker. Shawn Carter is a boss. Better to have clarity on that question than the idea that billionaires will ever lead social movements in anyone’s interests other than their own.

The Kaepernick-Nike alliance is a "teachable moment, illuminating our relationship with brands."

Nike sweatshop in China.

The Great Nike Wars of 2018 are fascinating, but neither because of Colin Kaepernick nor the "post-purchase boycott" shredding of gear.

Rather, it's about a tacit admission that by now, we're all branded by brands. We accept corporate America's framing of the terms of consumer engagement just as totally as peasants in medieval Europe did the Roman Catholic hierarchy.

We're resisting the wrong thing. You can't burn your Nikes, then grab a bite at Chick-fil-A. You can't make Kaepernick's ad your Fb cover photo, then trot over to Target. Of course, you can -- but there's more than a little hypocrisy in the choices.

In a few minutes, I'll be publishing this entry. Quite a lot of you will open fire from both angles on social media without the essential component of reading the linked essays. Just be aware that in this day and age, genuine resistance takes the form of actually doing homework.

Just saying.

Following are three takes; first, a veteran columnist from the Bay Area.

Nike backs Kaepernick: A declaration of war? by Scott Ostler (San Francisco Chronicle)

Nike has made Colin Kaepernick the face of its 30th anniversary “Just Do It” campaign.

From its vast roster of superstar endorsers, Nike is shining its gigantic spotlight on an unemployed quarterback who is taking legal action against the NFL, and whose kneel-down protest against police brutality has split America roughly down the middle.

Nike’s campaign means war. Cultural, political, economic, social.

Writing for The Nation, Dave Zirin finds the center of the target.

Global, multibillion-dollar corporations that run an archipelago of sweatshops don’t underwrite rebellions. They co-opt and quash them. If anyone can navigate this snakepit, it is Colin Kaepernick, but it won’t be easy. The revolution will not be branded. We should be honest about that. The message of standing up to police violence and racial inequity shouldn’t end up in a swoosh-laded graveyard. That’s the risk that comes with this sponsorship. But if anyone has earned the right to take that risk, it’s Colin Kaepernick.

But it's The Baffler for the win.

Something for Nothing, by Nathaniel Friedman (The Baffler)

If corporations come off as sinister and oppressive, brands convey a message that’s relentlessly personable and accessible. We’re haunted by the aloof, godlike specter of corporations whenever we pay our bills or contemplate our election-season choices; we engage with brands on a daily basis, allowing them to define us even as we reciprocally try to define their uses and significations. And perhaps most essentially, we ascribe meaning to them apart from what they actually are. In what one might terms the Citizens United style deregulation of commerce in our psyches, we relate to brands as if there were an ideology, agency, and governing sentiment underlying them. Brands are companions, friends, and allies. The alternative—that we’re all dupes incapable of imagining a life not circumscribed by our relationship with these entities—is absolutely grim and raises all sorts of difficult questions in its own right.

Viewed in the context of the charged psychic minefield of brand symbolism, the embrace of the Kaepernick ad as an unconditional triumph is a gesture of self-preservation. The current state of debate surrounding putative loyalty to the national anthem and the NFL—both patriotic brands cultivating a similarly charged sort of signification among a very different consumer demographic—requires us to interpret the Nike-branded message as a token of progress because otherwise we would have to admit how cut off we are from any real version of dissent or meaningful opposition. Our own capacity to trust Nike belies an underlying sickness that we would rather not address. That we are okay with a politics mediated by brands puts the onus on us—which is to say, where it should ultimately belong. Unless Nike stuns everyone by expanding its partnership with Kaepernick to the point of adopting his worldview to influence corporate practices, we should view these efforts neutrally. Having Kaepernick around is good for the discourse; but our own ready inclination to pat Nike on the back for the culture-war troubles it’s now fending off largely by design points to some disquieting truths about ourselves.

Being pro-Kaepernick doesn’t require you be anti-capitalism. Nor does seeing value in the ad make you a sinister sell-out. Ideally, though, the ad’s appearance can serve as a teachable moment, illuminating our relationship with brands even as the Kaepernick-Nike alliance also highlights the consumer psychology at work in establishing and cultivating our loyalty to consumer brands: their agendas, their putative virtues, or their capacity for political action. Corporations wield real power. But brands are a figment that we feed every day—and if we ever we plan to reckon with them, we must also truly reckon with ourselves.

NFL Follies: "Billion dollar teams choosing to fail rather than sign Kaepernick is a scandal for reasons beyond wins and losses."

I'm told that the national concussion league's playoffs begin this weekend, moving from wild cards and betting lines toward the inevitable Stupor Bowl, which exists for otherwise intelligent people to indulge their childlike glee while comparing the merits of advertisements designed to relieve them of their money.

Meanwhile, Dave Zirin remains the only sportswriter who matters, because he writes about things that ... matter.

Zirin places sports into a context, as a part of life, not removed from it. I only wish he had time to bring the same skill set to beer writing, which is in a wretched condition these days.

As a prelude to Zirin, consider this: Colts fans offended by anthem kneeling could receive refunds under legislative proposal.

Colts management tanked its season after it became obvious Andrew Luck wouldn't return -- but fans are strongly urged to be outraged by freedom of expression and civil rights, not the team's ineptitude.

Uh huh.

The NFL Chose to Tank Its Season Rather Than Sign Colin Kaepernick, by Dave Zirin (The Nation)

Billion dollar teams choosing to fail rather than sign Kaepernick is a scandal for reasons beyond wins and losses.

... That is why the sports story of 2017 was how many NFL teams chose to flush their seasons, screw their fan bases, and gut the local economies that had lavished them with tax payer dollars rather than sign free agent quarterback Colin Kaepernick ...

... This matters not only because it reveals the moral rot of a league that would sign abusers of women before people who have given time and money to organizations that empower women or a league that lives in fear of the tweets of a racist autocrat with a 32 percent approval rating. It matters because so many of the above teams cited have stadiums at least partially built on the public dime. Whether you are a sports fan or not, you are subsidizing these organizations. By fielding an inferior product, that means fewer fans in the seats, fewer people in the bars and restaurants, fewer rooms filled at the hotels. It means that the always exaggerated bang-for-your-buck that comes from subsidizing a stadium was muted just so NFL owners could send a shot across the bow to other players that political talk would not be tolerated. Of course, all they did was spur more resistance.

Kaepernick’s current collusion lawsuit against the NFL should not be complicated. It should be as basic as showing videotape from the 2017 season and asking the question, “Why would multiple NFL teams with playoff hopes willingly choose to tank rather than sign me? Why was Tom Savage put under center only to be concussed?” To even ask the question is to answer it: the Bob McNairs and John Elways of the world hate the idea of a free-thinking, openly anti-racist player more than they love the idea of winning a Super Bowl. That damns this league as much as hiding concussion data, and ignoring instances of violence against women. It’s more evidence that the league’s moral compass points in one direction: it’s not toward money and it’s not toward winning. It’s toward remaking this country in their political image: an image where billionaires make the decisions and the rest of us just shut up, work, and salute on demand.

Learning how to kneel: "Over the past century, 'The Star-Spangled Banner' and baseball have become inextricably wed."

It wasn't necessary for Colin Kaepernick to take a knee to dissuade me from watching football. Whatever waning interest remained was jettisoned some years back when the appalling extent of brain injuries and crippling physical impairments finally started being reported.

The NFL's lies and cover-ups since then sealed the deal. By all rights, we should be protesting the nature of the sport itself, but as for those other protests currently compelling white America to boycott modern gladiators:

(Psst -- it's not about the flag or the military, and it never has been.)

If you're saying to yourself, well, I never protest, and when I do it is done tastefully, so as to be inoffensive to others ... you just might be revealing yourself as a privileged societal cog unable to fathom injustice.

Would you have participated in the American Revolution?

If so, on which side?

So much for football. I've always been a baseball fan, anyway, and I was proud as proverbial punch when Bruce Maxwell, a catcher for my beloved Oakland A's, became the first major leaguer to take a knee. He comes from a military family, and his military family gets it.

The bigger question for me is this: How did the tradition begin of the national anthem being played before sporting events?

It goes back a century, to 1918 and the Great War, which did more than another single event to inaugurate and define the parameters of American "patriotism" as we now (usually unthinkingly) accept it -- and also gave us Prohibition, among other intrusions.

America's forgotten past: "It is worth reviewing how World War I turned out so much worse than the experts and politicians promised."

 ... Wilson acted as if the congressional declaration of war against Germany was also a declaration of war against the Constitution. Harvard professor Irving Babbitt commented in 1924, “Wilson, in the pursuit of his scheme for world service, was led to make light of the constitutional checks on his authority and to reach out almost automatically for unlimited power.” Wilson even urged Congress to set up detention camps to quarantine “alien enemies.”

This entertaining 2011 account tells the rest of the story.

The song remains the same: Over the past century, "The Star-Spangled Banner" and baseball have become inextricably wed, by Luke Cyphers and Ethan Trex (ESPN The Magazine)

THE FIRST THING to remember is that it's a battle song.

The most memorable lines involve rockets and bombs, and the lesser-known verses conjure "the havoc of war" and "the gloom of the grave."

The second thing to remember? It's a taunt, a lyrical grenade chucked at a defeated opponent. "See that flag still flying, the one you tried to capture?" it famously asks the British. Then it answers: "Scoreboard."

That's why, in a country that loudly lauds actions on the battlefield and the playing field, "The Star-Spangled Banner" and American athletics have a nearly indissoluble marriage. Hatched during one war, institutionalized during another, this song has become so entrenched in our sports identity that it's almost impossible to think of one without the other.

Our nation honors war. Our nation loves sports. Our nation glorifies winning. Our national anthem strikes all three chords at the same time.

Colin Kaepernick and the NFL, a league "more comfortable with concussions than someone having a conscience.”

From just about the only sportswriter in America who really matters ...

"Dave Zirin is sports editor of the Nation and author of eight books on the politics of sports. He is working with Seattle Seahawk Michael Bennett on Bennett’s autobiography."

 ... on the NFL's latest public relations nightmare.

When it comes to conscience, specifics and circumstances may vary, although non-conformists of many sorts in this purportedly "free" country can easily imagine themselves wearing Kaepernick's cleats.

As an atheist, permit me to inform you that it happens all the time. In my reckoning, any time it's the occasion for all of us to perform the same rote act (pray publicly, declare allegiance to the flag) all at once, then it's time to consider dissenting.

For a very long time, I've always stood for the national anthem and pledge of allegiance in honor of my father, a World War II veteran of the Marines. However, I've refused to recite the pledge of allegiance aloud, because the words "under God" simply have no place in it and should be removed.

Now Colin Kaepernick has me rethinking this position, primarily because he's right.

Maybe I need to dissent a little harder from this point forward.

Op-Ed The NFL wants you to think Colin Kaepernick isn't being sidelined by politics. The NFL is wrong — again, by Dave Zirin (Los Angeles Times)

 ... As Green Bay Packers star quarterback Aaron Rodgers said last week, it is “ignorant” to think that Kaepernick is unemployed because of his play.

“I think he should be on a roster right now,” Rodgers told ESPN’s Mina Kimes. “I think because of his protests, he’s not.” Rodgers is not alone.

The rash of anonymously sourced articles trashing Kaepernick’s play came just days after several thousand people rallied in front of Goodell’s NFL headquarters on Park Avenue in New York City: a demonstration that loudly called out a league dependent on the physical punishment of black bodies, a league that — in the words of the Rev. Jamal Bryant — is “more comfortable with concussions than someone having a conscience.”

The NFL seems to believe that shutting out Kaepernick will be like a crack of the whip across the backs of its players, stamping out dissent, keeping everyone in line. But the opposite has been the case. During the preseason, and in the wake of events in Charlottesville, Va., more and more players stepped forward to sit, take a knee or raise a fist during the anthem, and they are not shy about telling the world why. Unlike last season, white players also have involved themselves in these protests ...

Your smack talk about Colin Kaepernick contrasts with "perhaps the greatest defense of freedom of expression ever formulated by a Supreme Court Justice."

Time for some learnin', thanks to a recommendation by Stephen. After all, Brain Injury Ball need not be damaging to your OWN noggin.

COLIN KAEPERNICK AND A LANDMARK SUPREME COURT CASE, by Jeffrey Toobin (New Yorker)

The decision by Colin Kaepernick, a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, first to sit and then to kneel, rather than stand, during the national anthem before his team’s games has set off a national debate. The 49ers grudgingly supported his right to protest against the ritual, and other players have now joined him, while some politicians, like Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, have denounced the defiant, if silent, gestures. The best answer to the anthem conundrum, however, can be found in the most eloquent opinion in the history of the Supreme Court.

And a concurring opinion: Kaepernick has made his fellow Americans think about what they’re standing for, and why.

No conscience for football players? As Colin Kaepernick is savaged, let's not forget August Landmesser.

"If you can't stand for the national anthem, get your sorry ass out of this country."
-- Courageous Facebook Lodger

Conscience is a tough concept, isn't it? We're for it, until we aren't. It's absolutely vital to safeguard OUR right to the exercise of conscience, but yours?

Of course -- so long as we agree with each other.

I've seen the photo above many times, and back in 2014, I finally decided to see if there's a story.

There is. The significance to me is that while the circumstances in this instance are ones about which we've long since reached general agreement (Nazism, Hitler, the Holocaust), it is not banal to suggest that non-conformists of many sorts in our own purportedly "free" country can imagine themselves in Landmesser's shoes.

As an atheist, permit me to inform you that it happens all the time. In my reckoning, any time it's the occasion for all of us to perform the same rote act (pray publicly, declare allegiance to the flag) at once, it's time to consider dissenting.

Speaking for myself, I'll always stand for the national anthem and pledge of allegiance in honor of my father, a World War II veteran of the Marines. But I will not recite the pledge of allegiance aloud, because "under God" has no place in it.

August Landmesser, The Man Behind The Crossed Arms (All That Is Interesting)

 ... There is no telling how many men in that crowd were acting out of fear, fully aware that failing to salute the Fuhrer was akin to signing his own death certificate. Knowing that it was, in fact, Hitler standing before the crowd makes the disobedience all the more admirable, but what may seem like an act of justified transgression was at its core a gesture of love. August Landmesser, the man with his arms crossed, was married to a Jewish woman.