Ellen Wood compares the weird US flag worship to Britain's monarchy cult, where both are so prominent because the idea of "the state" is conspicuously weak in each.
(From _Pristine Culture of Capitalism_:)
"What is distinctive about Britain is a political culture which, possessing an intellectual tradition and a popular consciousness where the concept of the _state_ is very weak, substitutes for it the cult of an artificial symbol of statehood. Britain is quite unique among major European nations in these respects. If there is in the Western capitalist world any analogous instance, it is perhaps, oddly, in the United States. The American worship of the flag is no less remarkable than the British cult of the monarchy (imagine beginning every school day with a 'pledge of allegiance,' hand on heart, to a national flag!); and, as in Britain, this holy symbol exists within a political culture that lacks both a strong association of nationhood with ethnicity and a well-defined conception of the state. [...] For the French, for example, the concept of the _state_ is an everyday experience. The English-speaking world seems uncomfortable with it. A bottle of Perrier has proudly emblazoned on its label "autorisee par l'etat." Any such imprimatur on a bottle of Coca Cola or a packet of PG Tips is unthinkable.
The British and Americans do not customarily attach the prefix 'State-' to their public institutions -- as in Staatsoper. The more common designation in the former case is 'National' or "Royal' (or both together); and the latter has a wide range of adjectives for the purpose: federal, public, national (though rarely), and often simply government-owned or government-controlled. The US and Britain recognize _governments_, but the British or American 'state,' for all such practical purposes, hardly exists. The 'state' is likely to appear, if at all, in pejorative contexts. Clearly, political legitimation in a culture that scarcely acknowledges the _state_ presents distinctive problems; and in both these political vocabularies symbolic substitutes are called upon to play an ideological role not required of them where the idea of the state itself is firmly implanted in the national consciousness."
...The foregoing, btw, all in passing in Wood's interesting critique of the Nairn-Anderson theses (re. the alleged persistence of ancien-regime social forms in Britain).
wondering what "a packet of PG Tips" might be, and if one purchases them at the pharmacy, Maureen