It's hard to believe that England was once the embodiment of cool, but from Savile Row in the 1930s, to the early James Bond films and the Beatles, England could certainly be cool when she wanted to be. But to be "cool", it helps to know what you're about, and to maintain a certain inner reserve. It prevents aesthetic abortions such as the 2012 Olympics logo, of which James Lileks writes:

Seriously, what is the matter with people who come up with this? And what is the matter with the people who approved it? Ads that showed the logos have reportedly caused seizures among British epileptics, but I think this thing would make a fossilized femur bone suffer convulsive muscle spasms. If you can’t tell, it’s the year of the London games – 2012. I think it’s also meant to imply a human form – say, a discus thrower, or a runner bursting from the blocks. Whatever it is, it’s an aesthetic catastrophe, and would seem to indicate there’s no one around in the London Games who had the nerve to bark “rubbish, that; try again, and give me a proper logo with some bloody numbers.” I think there’s a point at which people lose the ability to pretend they have any sort of aesthetic criteria, and embrace whatever’s loud and ugly simply because loud and ugly is the style of the times. There’s always a fair amount of coin to be had for dissing the traditionalists, of course; I imagine that if someone submitted a logo with a flag or a bulldog they would have suffered a gentle sneer: still pining for the empire, eh, Smithson. Well, Kipling’s dead. Yes he is. Dig him up, you’ll find Posh Spice’s heel stuck in his heart, the coffin stuffed with I Heart Diana memorial teddy bears.

Ugh.

Ugh, indeed. Peter Hitchens' The Abolition of Britain began by contrasting England's collectively dignified response to the death of Churchill (who in large part won the Second World War) in the mid-1960s, to Britain's emotional spasms over the death of Diana (who in large part modeled Versace) in the 1990s. Churchill would roll over in his grave if he saw what has happened to England's sensibilities even in the short period after Diana's death, let alone after his own.

On the other hand, Glenn Reynolds notes that the possible military implications of the Olympic design. (Too bad the remaining members of Monty Python have gone reactionary--a sketch about "The Killer Logo" would have been a scream.)