JOHN LEO'S BLOG

The Leos display a big 48-star flag that has been in the family for years. This is probably a violation of flag etiquette. Nobody seems to mind, but I wouldn't try it in Hawaii or Alaska.

At picnics or along parade routes, you see people with flag emblems on shirts and caps or even on the seats of people's pants--usually an indication that the wearers are unhappy with their homeland. The trivialization of the flag-- by printing its image on napkins, sweaters, ties, and underpants--goes back to the protests over the Vietnam War. Those of us old enough to remember the web of understandings built around respect for the flag still feel a twinge over the casual use of flag imagery on products.

Before Vietnam, disrespect for the flag wasn't "criminalized" (the cultural left's favorite verb in these matters). It just "wasn't done" and needed no enforcement because it was based solidly on a national consensus. The British treat the queen with great respect (or used to), not because she is such a wonderful person but because she is a symbol of national unity. Here in the former colonies, the flag traditionally served that purpose.

The flag was the first victim of the cultural left's uncanny ability to conduct symbolic warfare. One example is the long campaign by some gay groups against the Roman Catholic Church. That campaign mostly skipped the normal methods of demo­cratic protest and concentrated on an attempt to enrage and degrade the whole symbolic structure of Catholic faith--bearded males dressed as nuns, loony-looking bishops' miters, cartooned Communion rites, swishy Jesus figures vamping their way through gay parades. This cultural style--find out what the mainstream holds dear, then go out of your way to degrade and mock it--made the flag its favorite target in the '60s. If casual use of flag imagery wasn't irritating enough, the dedicated counterculturalist could always whip out a flag handkerchief and blow his nose on it. The second stage in this campaign was mockery of pro-flag people as fetishists or idolaters. The Washington Post Style section once said, "No, son, you won't go to jail for letting the flag touch the ground." Translation: We enlightened people here at the Post think you folks are idiots for venerating a piece of cloth.

One of the lefty blogs ran this recent comment from a reader: "I have no more regard for a flag or some flag-themed ribbon magnet stuck to the tail of an SUV than I do any Taco Bell wrapper blowing across my path: just more marketing detritus." Well, that's one way of looking at it. Another way is to say that the flag represents our shared experience and our aspiration that this will be a just and united nation. My old boss and good friend Henry Grunwald, who died not long ago, was very emotional about the flag. It represented the freedom and decency of the nation that took him in after he fled his native Austria one step ahead of Nazis. At his funeral in New York's Temple Emanu-El, his casket was covered by an American flag (Henry planned everything well in advance). To top it off, he left instructions for those in attendance to sing "Battle Hymn of the Republic." Like the flag, the hymn was an expression of Henry's wish to connect himself to other generations of Americans, past and future. We are well beyond the power of a Taco Bell wrapper here.