FLYING HOME

I asked guitar poet Randy Granger if he would let Tamara publish part of a song he wrote, called "Flying Home." He told me it reminded him of Nike's global business practices.

What are we gonna do/

They've got our children there/

In a factory where/

The Sun will never ever shine/

They've got brittle bones/

And the brightest smiles/

Brighter than the sun/

They sing, fly, fly, fly/

Brother fly on/

Sister fly on/Children fly/

We all fly home

Words and Music by: Randy Granger Copyright 2000 granger, rj.

We know that since the Life Magazine expose of soccer ball stitching in Pakistan (Schanberg, 1996), Nike has moved away from the pre-teen child labor market. To keep the record straight, the mean age of a Nike worker is now 16 to 23, with a few who are 13 to 15 trying to pass for older. After age 23, the mostly female workforce is fired, to make way for younger and cheaper labor. The stanzas about brittle bones, and where the Sun will never ever shine, recalls what Marx (1867, Ch 10) observed:

But in its blind unrestrainable passion, its were-wolf hunger for surplus-labour, capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the working-day. It usurps the time for growth, development, and healthy maintenance of the body. It steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight. It higgles over a meal-time, incorporating it where possible with the process of production itself, so that food is given to the labourer as to a mere means of production, as coal is supplied to the boiler, grease and oil to the machinery. It reduces the sound sleep needed for the restoration, reparation, refreshment of the bodily powers to just so many hours of torpor as the revival of an organism, absolutely exhausted, renders essential (The Working-Day).

Randy Granger and Acquenetta Taylor, are two poets who tune into Nike quite differently.

Is Nike answerable for its advertising fantasy, its addiction to sweatshops, and its role in the Society of the Spectacle (Debord, 1967)? Are artists answerable for prostituting art to increase corporate wealth? Am I answerable for deconstructing poems that glorify and vilify Nike competitiveness? Ninety-three Nike staffers report to V.P.'s Maria Eitel and Dusty Kidd, doing the bidding of billionaire Phil Knight, and they are ready to deconstruct anything I say. Nike please publish Acquenetta's poems, and to court the activists, make some ironic use of Randy's work, and so it goes...spin, spin, spin....

Copyright TamaraLand Publishers 2001
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