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“I hope in the future Americans are thought of as a warlike, vicious people because I bet a lot of high schools would pick ‘Americans’ as their mascot.” —Jack Handey, “Deep Thoughts”
We waste vast amounts of time and energy arguing over symbols, emblems, mascots, and various forms of artistic representation. On both the left and the right, our most passionate members get sucked into the silliest of debates: From renaming buildings to policing pronouns to the sex lives of Mattel products, these are the sorts of grandstanding controversies that make all participants look like kooks. Sure, it excites members of your base who are on the carnivore diet (subsisting solely on “red meat”), but nothing substantial is ever accomplished.
Attacking symbols is easy. Solving problems is hard.
This is why it’s such a popular pastime for hacks on the left and the right: It’s all spectacle and no substance. Pure fireworks; zero warmth.
It’s debate for the sake of debate.
Because symbols are malleable. They can mean whatever you want whenever you want — and you’re always free to change your mind.
And we do change our mind: Symbols change over time. Words, phrases, and archetypes aren’t static. They’re in a constant state of flux, evolving and growing with the society that uses them, mirroring our aspirations and reflecting our phobias.
This is why symbols always say more about the speaker than the object itself (or himself).
Humans coopt symbols all the time, using them for their own purposes. It’s why so many religious holidays, customs, and observances have pagan roots: When you redirect what the old symbol represents, you can also repurpose some of its adjectives for a new symbol.
That’s useful in social engineering.
The Nazis didn’t invent the swastika. It’s an ancient symbol that predated Hitler by 10,000 years. But after the atrocities of the Third Reich, the swastika became synonymous with Nazism, antisemitism, and Aryan nationalism. Its symbolic value as religious iconography was contorted into something vulgar and loathsome.
Symbols must be protected — lest someone repulsive coopt them.
Over the past 30 years, the so-called “Confederate flag” (stars and bars) went from a symbol so uncontroversial that it adorned Bo and Luke’s car on a Friday night TV show, to a vile, evil, racist symbol of white supremacy.
