Association Is Currency

There’s a lot to grieve in the beautiful state of Tennessee at the moment. Our times call for both/and thinking. Grieve and organize. Lament loudly and speak specifically. Don’t ask how far our abusive supermajority will go. We already know. They’ll go as far as we’ll let them. We get to be precise in our enmity while refusing to dwell in it.

I have some words concerning the above image, but first things first. Listen to Melissa Alexander. She’s a Covenant mom publicly calling on Bill Lee to veto arming teachers legislation. Listen to Sarah Shoop Neumann. She’s another Covenant mom who delivered a letter signed by 5,366 Tennesseans demanding that our elected officials rethink their decision to debase themselves by moving this legislation forward. If you’re a Tennessean, consider reading and signing it here. And most of all, listen to, read up on, support, and amplify my friend, Shaundelle Brooks, who lost her son, Akilah Dasilva, in Nashville’s Waffle House shooting. I thank God she’s running for State House District 60. #FightLikeAMom. I mean really. Fight like a mom.

This brings me to the promotional consideration provided by a pack of abusive men as mothers who pay their way cried out to them from a balcony. That’s the wider drama (read about it here) outside the frame of the image above. The smaller event is this: These men thought it fitting to eat ChickfilA on our House floor on camera while voting to move gun cult legislation forward. The staging is a decision. There’s an optics here that interests me.

That weird phrase, “promotional consideration provided by…,” has been a generative head-scratcher in my life across the centuries. It lands, for me, like a rhetorical sleight of hand, a little like “product placement,” which, when mulled over a little, can get us thinking about thresholds, those in-between spaces where certain juxtapositions get smoothed over before they have a chance to wear us down mentally. To even ask why ChickfilA appears in the frame of men voting while their constituents cry out, “Blood on your hands!” can bring a mind up short. It’s too weird and depressing already. “Let’s not get into that,” counsels a voice in my head. Reader, I’d like to get into it.

I don’t know who ordered in or who paid for it. I’d like to know. I’ve asked Vivian Jones of the Tennesseean and Phil Williams of NewsChannel5, but haven’t heard back. I get it. They’re busy.

It matters though, because association is currency. If someone within ChickfilA sent over some product to communicate the company’s approval of our supermajority’s bullying behavior, that would be quite the story. If it is, I’d like to see it published. I enjoy me some ChickfilA on occasion, and I’ll have to rethink my arrangement with them if this proves to be the case.

I went ahead and asked ChickfilA about it directly with these words: Are you good with this? I haven’t heard back. You might be wondering why I even bothered.

Here’s why: Association is currency, and there's a limit to what a brand can abide. The promotional consideration in play is, I believe, awfully subtle. These elected officials aren’t doing ChickfilA a promotional solid in this instance. In fact, I believe they’re trying to pull ChickfilA into their own ugly God grift.

The elected officials within the frame are voting against the loud and clear interests of their own constituents. Clinging to a popular franchise while debasing themselves on camera makes deep sense, but I doubt ChickfilA (or individuals within the organization charged with protecting the brand) is comfortable with it.

As much as someone like Bill Lee and his men’s group might hope to be publicly associated with Buc-ee’s or In-N-Out Burger or Dolly Parton or Brad Paisley or Oracle or the Nashville Predators, I don’t believe any of these people and entities welcome the everyday, escalating threats to public safety posed by these morally unserious men. There are limits to these public partnerships. And individuals within particular partnerships sometimes overplay their hand and thereby force the hand of other individuals within those partnerships.

So…I don't know if someone provided these men with ChickfilA as a gesture of goodwill or in exchange for services rendered or if Governor Lee footed the bill or if they simply wished to be seen as dutiful hirelings who’ve succumbed to a snack attack while ignoring the audible cries of constituents. Maybe they imagined it as a flex or a form of gloating, as if ChickfilA is somehow on their side no matter how abusive they are toward the very people they’ve sworn and are paid to represent. Maybe it's a dare.

There's a limit to what a brand can abide. There is no "they" when it comes to ChickfilA and even, to a degree, the Republican party. There are just packs of individuals who normalize one another's behavior (for good or ill) until they don't. There are also siblings and spouses and spawn and grandspawn. There’s a limit to what a family will abide too.

We become what we normalize. If I worked for ChickfilA, I would not want my product to be associated with those who've targeted, pushed, maligned, and sought to degrade Covenant moms and Representative Justin Jones and students and librarians and teachers and authors in the beautiful state of Tennessee. I’d be worried about my brand. I prefer the word “witness” to "brand. But “brand” might incentivize better behavior quicker.

Nobody wants to be thought of as the bearer or the buyer of bigot burgers.

For more on thinking harder about what we normalize and why and for creative strategies on normalizing differently, see Robot Soft Exorcism.

For more on Nashville as an interesting tangle of geopolitical interests, see The Prayer Trade.

And for much, much more on all of the above. There’s a book called We Become What We Normalize (also available on audio read by little old me).

Any questions?