The NFL’s Capitalist Anthem Policy
How William Blake’s ‘dark, satanic mill’ explains the blowback against Kaepernick
Author’s Note: I use ‘liberal’ in this sense, not to refer strictly to American Democrats.
The excellent documentary Machines, about a textile factory in India, opens with a shot of a worker stoking a furnace with nothing but a handkerchief to protect them from the embers and sparks. This is what was really meant by the “dark, Satanic Mills” described by William Blake; when industrialization swept Europe, workers left rural settings their families had likely lived in for a very long time — for this and worse. Not a huge surprise that Blake and other Romantics saw the exchange as a raw deal.
I like the phrase in reference to the same epochal shift, but with each term abstracted a little. Take Satanic to mean ‘a kind of deal in which you always get less than what you bargained for’ and a mill to be ‘a machine that grinds many different things down to a uniform substance,’ and you have a pretty good description of the kind of game liberal capitalism has played with tradition, custom, ritual, etc.
Pro-capitalist historians of the phenomenon will usually tell you capitalism was always there, just trapped somehow, constrained by the ignorant mire of religion and its attendant…
