Whenever an element that plays some small part in America’s cultural heritage is “updated,” the replacement is as dull, insipid, and uninspiring as possible. This applies to religion, entertainment, sports, architecture… just about anything that has ever captured the average American’s imagination. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is the latest entity getting in on the act. The state is abolishing its old flag, which proudly bears an official seal dating back to 1780. What is coming next is indicative of this cultural malaise.
The Massachusetts Seal, Flag, and Motto Commission in late August announced that it has chosen its three finalists for each category. Out with the iconic Algonquian brave holding a bow and arrow. Out with the defiant Latin motto: “By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty,” especially fitting for the state that birthed the American revolution. Out with the arm bearing a sword atop the flag, a visual embodiment of that motto and the official Massachusetts National Guard crest.
In with the banal, with accompanying leftist posturing to match in the three finalists. As always, the victim/injustice/oppression card was trotted out to justify the rebrand.
“As leaders of the special commission charged with reviewing the current seal and motto, we understand the harm these symbols and words cause for many Indigenous residents and anyone who believes in the promise of the Commonwealth. Our past, present, and future call on us to do better,” Brian Boyles, co-chair and Brittney Peauwe Wunnepog Walley, co-vice chair of the Special Commission on the Official Seal and Motto of the Commonwealth, wrote in 2023 for stridently pro-DEI online publication CommonWealth Beacon.
In other words, the old must be eradicated to make way for the enlightened progressive civilization that is replacing it.
That it is all so soulless and stultifying is intentional. The new order doesn’t want your creativity. It demands your conformity. Deliberate demoralization plays an essential role in breeding the silent acquiescence that paves the way to strict obedience.
It’s not a new playbook. When we call this Cultural Marxism, that is literally what it is. Its roots can be traced in a straight line to Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s in communist China.
A 1971 New York Times article describes Mao’s systematic attempt to eliminate “The Four Olds” from Chinese culture. These were labeled as “old things, old ideas, old customs and old habits.”
A ubiquitous drabness was the order of the day.
“Collections of traditional Chinese art objects of second‐class quality – porcelains, jades, paintings, lacquerware and jewelry – are for sale in special shops in Peking, Tientsin, Shanghai and Canton, but only for foreign visitors,” The Times’ on-the-spot correspondent noted. “The Chinese never get a sight of these examples of a great artistic past.”
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“Before the Cultural Revolution it was not uncommon to see women wearing traditional sheath dresses and using cosmetics. Now the old styles in women’s garments are gone, and today women wear the same frumpy blue or gray trousers and jackets as men,” the article continued. “The writer saw no use of lipstick or rouge. Dressed like men, women work alongside them in manual as well as office jobs at the same pay.”
Other observations will sound painfully familiar to any American paying attention to what the forces dominating the cultural landscape in their country today choose to elevate and value:
Communism is at its heart a 100% materialist construct. Human beings are things – building material, statistics, widgets – not individuals. Western societies today have likewise embraced a wholly secular materialist outlook, albeit in another guise, leading to the same diminishment of all that once inspired individual personal growth.
In 1994, the historic and jaw-droppingly beautiful Roman Catholic Cathedral of Saint Vibiana, seat of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, was damaged by the Northridge earthquake. Archbishop Roger Mahony, who was later to be relieved of all public and administrative duties as a result of his inaction during the sexual abuse scandal that plagued the Catholic Church in the latter decades of the 20th century, led an effort to replace the grand old cathedral, which debuted in 1876, with a new one.
In 2002, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels – or COLA, as it is called – was opened, a postmodern architectural monstrosity that defies description. It seems for all the world as if it were intentionally designed to deter any sense of religious majesty whatsoever. We’re talking Obama Presidential Center bad.
“The challenge in designing and building a new Cathedral Church was to make certain that it reflected the diversity of all people. Rather than duplicate traditional designs of the Middle Ages in Europe, the Cathedral is a new and vibrant expression of the 21st century Catholic peoples of Los Angeles,” the archdiocese explains of the design, parroting the justifications of the radicals in Massachusetts.
Funny how it keeps happening. Just as is being seen in the Bay State and with the Obama Center in Chicago at this very moment, the “new and vibrant expression” was as depressingly vapid as possible.
Preservationists properly clamored for Saint Vibiana to avoid the wrecking ball. It was saved, desacralized, but it now serves a new purpose: as an events hall for fashion shows, corporate gatherings, avant-garde artistic performances and other secular activities.
The Soviets and Red Chinese turned glorious old churches into warehouses and museums of atheism. We turn them into party spaces. There’s a metaphor for the state of the nation in there somewhere. What committed cultural Marxists understand and many Americans do not is that the step-by-step destruction of our cultural heritage ends in tyranny.