FROM the unpublished writings of Lawrence Auster:

The radical individualism that has undermined our collective sense of nationhood expresses itself not only through ideologies such as feminism, but, perhaps even more harmfully, through a leveling, “pop-culture” ethos that has insensibly replaced the old bourgeois-Christian ethos of the West. This popular culture is so much a part of the fabric of our lives that even conservatives hardly seem to notice it. In their complaints about cultural disorder, conservative moralists tend to focus on easy-to-identify, hot-button moral issues such as abortion and homosexual liberation, while taking for granted–and often happily participating in–the loosening of standards in every area of life, the systematic downgrading of speech, dress, and manners, that has made sexual immorality and its attendant ills inevitable. Catholic priests preach against abortion, while allowing their parishioners to attend Mass dressed as for a day at the beach, and conducting liturgies that have been stripped of any sense of the sacred. Christian activists campaign against anti-Christian bias on television, while ignoring the pervasive nihilism of which anti-Christian blasphemy is only a symptom. Conservatives call for a restoration of traditional values, while celebrating rock music, writing articles for Playboy, following the latest left-wing fashions in men’s and women’s dress, and editing newspapers from which the nouns “mother” and “father” have been replaced by the ultra-democratic “mom” and “dad.”

Such concerns about fashions in dress and language will inevitably be dismissed as trivial, even by many conservatives. But, I would argue, that is exactly the problem. Today’s conservatives want (or say they want) traditional morality in a pop culture world. They don’t understand that it is impossible to have a moral society when the whole demeanor of that society violates every feeling of respect and piety.

An example of this process of desacralization (if I may use that word in connection with secular values) is the use of the American flag as a clothing accessory. Up to the early 1960s, a period that already antedates the personal memory of most people alive today, the American flag was always treated with respect. There were strict rules on how to handle the flag, on the proper times for raising and lowering the glag, and so on, which were universally followed. Such respect was a sign of a deeply felt, yet moderate patriotism. The rules governing the use of flag placed a small but significant restraint on self. People weren’t free to handle the flag any way they liked–it represented a value higher than themselves.

When hippies and anti-war protesters began wearing the U.S. flag design on the seat of their blue jeans, it was understood by all Americans, and resented by most, as a flagrant sign of disrespect. But as the counterculture became mainstreamed in the Seventies and Eighties, so did the appropriation of the U.S. flag as a personal emblem. Many police departments began wearing a flag decal on their uniforms, not understanding that they were cheapening the symbol they thought they were honoring. The flag was also exploited commercially, as in the display of huge American flags, visible for miles, in front of highway automobile dealerships. While patriotic in a “fun” kind of way, these gigantic flags were also turning the symbol of country into a tool of self-promotion.

The perversion of the U.S. flag reached its height at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, a vast media-scripted celebration of racial diversity, consumerism, and the liberated self. At this pop-culture extravaganza, the U.S. team in several events were dressed–literally–in the flag, their entire outfits designed in fanciful stars and stripes designs. The uniform of the U.S. wrestler’s team consisted of a skin-tight “super-hero” outfit covered by a jazzy U.S. flag pattern. The flag, once a symbol of patriotism and restraint of self, now symbolized comic-book self-assertion.

The use of the stars and stripes as a flashy costume design should have been extremely offensive to thoughtful Americans as well as to the Olympic teams from other countries, none of whom had the hubris and bad taste to advertise their national symbols on their persons. But not a complaint was heard about it, a sign that the American counterculture has become the dominant world culture. The counterculture has been so perfectly mainstreamed that people don’t realize anymore that it is a counterculture.

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