What has disappeared from the sacred--and this means finally all of the sacred, engulfed in the "immense failure"--reveals rather that community itself now occupies the place of the sacred. Community is the sacred, if you will: the but sacred stripped of the sacred. For the sacred--the separated, the set apart--no longer proves to be the haunting idea of an unattainable communion, but is rather made up of nothing other than the sharing of community.
In other words, a community does not consist of a real-world association of individuals which can be mapped directly onto a pre-existing communitarian ideal, but rather it is a process, a struggle to establish connections in the face of the very impossibility of this mapping.
Therefore, the tensions between the Journey West painting, the Japanese flag which it might signify, and the ideals which are embodied by the latter symbol; together with the tensions between the on-line flag-related protests and the real-world political protests which they resemble, are not in and of themselves arguments against the social-political relevance of the game-space activity. Instead, one might argue that, like the flag and the protests, community itself does not, and cannot, map neatly onto some immanent ideal, but rather is constituted precisely through a constant struggle against that which it might be.
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