From “Mass Pop Culture and the Destruction of the Sacred”

by Lawrence Auster

An example of the process of desacralization (if I may use that word in connection with secular values) by which popular culture flattens every higher value 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 flag, 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 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. If anyone questions the degradation of the U.S. flag, it is he who seems strange, rather than the people who have turned the flag into a wrestling costume. It’s not that contemporary Americans intend disrespect for a revered symbol, as the hippies of the 60’s did. It is that they have no concept of respect for anything. The typical member of the post-Sixties pop culture, whose soul has been formed by rock music, sexual liberation, and the irony of TV comedians, cannot conceive of anything higher than the liberated individual self–unless it be the massing of millions of such selves into orchestrated global celebrations such as the 1996 Summer Olympics.

Thus post-Sixties American culture undermines love of nation, not by attacking the nation outright (as the Sixties left did), but by appropriating the nation’s symbol for purposes of “fun.” In the same way, the post-Sixties American culture undercuts the honor and respect due to mothers and fathers, not by attacking parenthood outright (as the Sixties left did), but by virtually eliminating from our language the words “mother” and “father,” through which such respect is expressed, and replacing them with their informal, “fun” equivalents, “mom” and “dad.” Against this mainstream culture of subversion conservatives are helpless. Indeed, they barely notice the culture of subversion, since they are members of it.

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