Thursday, July 4, 2019

Okay, maybe I don't care if football players (who are individual people) take the knee, but keep your Corporation's "opinion" to itself.

Note, this is one of the many draft posts that I started a really long time ago, and then never finished.  I have on the order of 300 posts, most barely started, that fit that description.

Writer's block?  No, just the nature of available time.

Anyhow, this item oddly shows right back up in the news again.



Some time back I posted on football players "taking the knee" during the playing of the National Anthem.  As anyone who read it may have noted, I'm sort of generally lukewarm on any opinion there, unlike a lot of people I see (if Facebook is any guide).  I.e, I didn't have a fit about football players taking the knee and, absent an individual athlete's protest reaching the level of that of the 1968 Mexico City, Olympics, I generally don't get too worked up about that.

At the same time, I also tend to disregard individual opinions of people who have risen to fame through their athleticism or because they're entertainers.  Recently, for example, I read where Beyonce was expressing opinions at a concert of some fashion.  It would be nearly impossible for me to care what Beyonce's opinion on anything at all actually is.  Indeed, I thought her daughter's instruction to "calm down" at a recent awards show was pretty much on the mark.

But opinions, particularly social opinions, by corporations really aggravate me.

Recently this has become particularly common, and while I'll give a few entities a pass, it smacks to me of being blisteringly phony.  If corporations, as a rule, suddenly endorse something that's been recently controversial, the issue has probably actually become safe to express.

What this amounts to, of course, is belated virtue signalling, and it's phony.  Corporations main goal, indeed, their stated and legal goal in almost every instance, is to make money for their shareholders.  That's their purpose and focus, and when corporations suddenly take up a cause, what they are often really doing has nothing to do with values and everything with trying to co-opt a movement for profit or not offend a group that's been lately in the news and has obtained financial power accordingly.

Indeed, it's frankly much more admirable when a corporation has a stated position that it adheres to in spite of financial detriment.  The fact that they know an opinion will be unpopular and they stick with it probably says its a real belief.

Which gets back to the perceived views of people in general.  If you look out at a crowed of people supporting anything, or in modern terms posting their support in some fashion on Facebook or Twitter or the like, probably over half, and I'd guess around 2/3s, have no strong convictions on the topic at all. They may believe they do, but in other circumstances they'd be there supporting the other side equally lukewarmly.

Today is American Independence Day.  The day came in the midst of a truly bloody war.  Around 23,000 Americans lost their lives in the war fighting for the Revolution, including those who died of disease, and a nearly equal number were wounded in an era when being wounded was often very disabling.  The British took about 24,000 casualties of all types, meaning they took fewer than the Americans.

But among the "British" were a sizable number of American colonist who fought for the Crown.  Up to 1/3d of American Colonist remained loyal during the war to the United Kingdom.  Only about 1/3d of the American Colonist supported independence or the revolution at all.  The remaining 1/3d took no position.

Even at that, it's not all that difficult, retrospectively, to find example of combatants who fought on both sides of the war.  Some captured American troops were paroled with the promise to fight for the British, and did.  The times being murky and records difficult to keep, some men just fought on both sides depending upon how the wind seemed to be blowing, a risky course of action, but one that some did indeed take.

Howard Pyle's illustration of Tory Refugees.

After the war those die hard Loyalist who couldn't tolerate living in the United States, including many who were so outed as Loyalist they had little choice on that matter, relocated to Quebec where there descendants are still sometimes self identified by initials that note an honorific conveyed by the Crown.  But 1/3d of the American population didn't pull up stakes and relocate, which tells you a lot.  And what that conveys is that a lot of people who thought that the Colonies were making a mistake just shut up.  Indeed, it proved to be the case during the War of 1812 that British soldiers met with sympathy and assistance in Virginia as they marched on Washington D. C., and that was because many Virginians, in that state which had been a colony, of course, retained a higher loyalty and sympathy with the United Kingdom than they did the United States.

But if you read most common commentary today you'll be left with the impression that the Americans, and by that we mean all of the Americans, were eager to shake off the chains of British tyranny.  And I'd wager that as the war began to turn in Congress' favor that view became common at the time and that it really set in by the time the American victory became inevitable.  So most of the men who spoke quietly in favor of King George III at the Rose and Thorne, or whatever, on Saturday nights in 1774 were praising George Washington by 1781.

This commentary, I'd note, isn't directed specifically at Americans in the 1700s by any means, but is more broader.  There are big exceptions to the rule of the get along nature of human opinion to be sure, for example I think the Civil War may be uniquely an exception to it, but people shouldn't make any mistake about this in general.  During the 1930s a lot of trendy social types teetered on the edge of real Communist sympathy while some conservative figures in the country spoke in admiration of Mussolini's and Hitler's governments in their countries.  By 1941, however, everybody in the country was an outright die hard opponent of fascism and militarism.  By 1950 nobody had ever been a Communist sympathizer, not ever.  

In 1968 and later a lot of young Americans protested vigorously about the American role in Vietnam. Quite a few of them vilified American servicemen.  By mid 1980s the same people were backing the troops and by the 1990s quite a few of them were for other foreign wars.

If this suggests that people's stated opinions are fickle and can't be trusted its meant to.  I was in university during the Reagan Administration and a college student would have had to been cavalier or in very trusted company to express any kind thoughts at all about Ronald Reagan.  One of my most conservative in every fashion friends of long standing would openly declare that Reagan was going to reinstate the draft and send us all to fight in Nicaragua, which was just the sort of nonsensical opinion common at the time.  One young computer employee in the geophysics department was unique not only because he was an early computer genius, employed with their super computer that probably is less powerful than a modern cell phone, but because as a recently discharged Navy submariner he was an adamant and open Anti Communist.  Nobody openly expressed views like that.

Which isn't to say that a lot of people didn't think them.

Which is also not to say that a lot of those same people, in the presence of the granola chick at the bar, didn't express the polar opposite.*

Which gets back to the topic of corporations.

If people's confused and muddled approach to what they declare their views is quite often the rule rather than the exception, this isn't the case with corporations.  More often than not, their goal is the bottom dollar.  They're looking out at the confused and muddled crowed and assuming its focused and distinct, and they then leap on board because they want to sell you pants, shoes, or whatever.  and that's cynical even if its self confused cynical.

Which is all the more reason to ignore, or actually buy from the company that is open about just wanting to sell you goods because that's what they do.

*Which recall Zero Mostel's character's line in The Front as to his reason for becoming a Communist.

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