Stardate 20030810.2134

(On Screen): The University of Central Florida is in the spotlight because many students there seem uncomfortable with the idea of having the US Flag in the classrooms there.

Old Glory with its stars and stripes is an American symbol, but at one Florida university, flying the flag in class has become a college controversy.

"If we can't fly it in America, then where can we fly it?" asked Heather Smith, a senior at the University of Central Florida (search) in Orlando and a member of the conservative student group called Rebuilding on a Conservative Kornerstone (search), or ROCK.

"I wish I knew why they are so opposed to the American flag," Smith said of some of her classmates.

ROCK wants UCF's Student Government Association — with its $10 million budget — to pay for 200 U.S. flags to be put in campus classrooms.

But liberal student leaders are balking at the thought. They say international students, among others, might be intimidated by the sight of an American flag in a college classroom. And they see this flag flap as nothing more than political baby steps.

For most of us, it is difficult to comprehend why anyone might think that foreign students would be made uncomfortable by seeing the US flag when in the US.

But to Chomskyites, the flag means something different than it does for thee and me. From their point of view, the US flag carries the same kind of symbolic value as the Nazi flag. Both are the national symbols of nations which have left a trail of death, destruction and utter ruin behind them wherever they were able to reach. But of the two, America is worse.

To a right-thinking (which is to say, a "left thinking") student, there is nothing whatever about America worthy of pride. The last fifty years of American foreign and domestic policy is viewed as an unbroken string of evil decisions, terrible and unnecessary and cruel wars, repression at home and subjugation overseas, and all in the service of America's obscenely wealthy corporate fat-cats.

The red stripes on the flag are painted with the blood of innocents around the world, blood that was casually shed by America in its never-ending quest to plunder the wealth of the entire world for its own benefit.

Anyone who flies that flag implies that they do not feel shame for fifty years of American crimes against humanity. It means that they support the most evil and terrible and cruel and destructive nation that has ever existed. It's holocaust denial; it means that either one refuses to acknowledge the holocaust America has inflicted on the world (which makes both Hitler and Stalin look like pikers), or that one refuses to admit that it was evil and wrong.

The victims of most of this were, of course, people in foreign countries and America's poor and women and minorities and... basically everyone except white American men (and the Jews, of course). For any member of one of the victim groups, the experience of being forced to attend a class where there's a US flag would be psychologically and morally equivalent to asking Jews to attend classes under portraits of Hitler.

Jingoistic Patriots (note: this is not a compliment) honor that flag, but to anyone who has transcended that intellectually and politically immature level, and come to understand and accept the transcendent sophistication of post-modern Progressive (i.e. "Marxist") internationalism, there can only be shame at that record, and shame at the flag which symbolizes that record. To force others to spend hours in its loathsome presence is entirely out of the question.

Money could probably be found to remove any existing flags, but the idea of actually buying and installing new ones is totally unacceptable.