This is a war between iconographies, she thinks, as she reads the posterboard-and-Magic-Marker signs scotchtaped to the battered conference tables set up within the tent. Nike : Enemy Of The Workers!; People Before Profits!!!; 13¢ An Hour=Unfair Wage! $135 A Pair=Unfair Price!
It’s a war of images. Nike promotes its image in a thousand different ways that all equal, really, one way: the wavelengths of television may be densely packed with homilies to athletic triumph, each branded with the Swoosh: but the final message is this: the representatives of Nike (the company) are the earthly archpriests of Nike (the goddess of victory), and acquiring the shoes buys you communion with the divine.
The Students Against Sweatshops—there are maybe ten of them gathered here, clean-faced, earnest-eyed, somehow all smiles in the face of the solemnity of their task—promote the counter-image: that the Nike archpriests are really just the modern equivalents of the old plantation-owners: the ones presiding over a system of slaves and injustice in the name of production and demand.
These are the sides in the war. The side that will win is the side that is better at disseminating its information into the minds of the populace at large. Even as Samantha looks at the faces of the students gathered behind the stacks of flyers and leaflets—faces that manage the magic trick of looking both young and serious simultaneously—she fears, she knows, that Nike will win. Nike has the money to employ the mercenary armies of image-makers and image-disseminators well into the next century if necessary. The SASers have pluck and energy and a Xerox machine and maybe even are working on a website, but they do not have anywhere near as much money as Nike has. In the war of images, this makes them the smaller army: undermanned, undersupplied, inevitably doomed.