Now stop right there, flag fans, and hold off on the nasty e-mail accusing me of being a pinko terrorist flag-burner. Read the rest, please. You will find that I am a patriot of the first order who still remembers the Pledge of Allegiance and recites it, hand over heart, before every city council meeting.

     But unchecked nationalism can go a tad overboard. Wearing the flag, displaying the flag - all of these have become in vogue since Sept. 11, and it's certainly understandable. When I watched the Super Bowl last week, I found that little of the pregame or halftime shows had to do with football. Indeed, the football game was almost beside the point. From U2's performance before the scrolling names of Sept. 11 victims (and flag coat-lining) to a marvelous (if mystifying) sequence on the Declaration of Independence, the stars and bars were in full flight in New Orleans. Then the onscreen graphics during the game included a U.S. Marine touching the screen for statistics, which struck me as a poor use of a military man's time during a war. Okay, I know he was probably computer-generated, but still - wouldn't a Marine in full dress uniform have better things to do with his time?

     Then came the Olympics. This international event is supposed to be the one place where all nations are equal - in fact, folks, that was the whole idea since the Greeks came up with it. But when Olympic officials said the American athletes couldn't carry the fragile World Trade Center flag because it would be an inappropriately patriotic political statement, the world came a-crashing down. In retrospect, it would have been better to let the athletes carry the flag. The "compromise" they came up with gave the flag a lot more significance - it will be carried in a separate procession after the main parade, to be flown during the playing of the National Anthem.

     "Well, why not?" Joe Six-Pack might ask. "After all, we're hosting the darn thing." Yeah, and all it took was a bribe or two. But we won't worry about that right now. The fact is that no nation hosting the Olympics goes more overboard with go-US! nonsense than America has nothing to do with anything either. Besides, the last time we hosted an Olympics, it got blown up, folks. Maybe it would be good to keep a low profile this time.

     But let's leave the Olympics out of this for now. Like it or not, it's an international athletic competition. I'm interested in a much more important matter: the lobby of the Boulder Public Library.

     Poor Boulder. It had already gone through a First-Amendment mess when it displayed artwork showing male phalluses that some of the citizenry found offensive. Then library employees asked to put a flag display in the lobby. The librarian said no. The flag they wanted to display was so huge that patrons would have to duck under it to get into the library. She also said, "It could compromise our objectivity."

     Oops.

     The world comes a-crashing down again. You'd have thought she put a lighter to the thing. It was the issue of the month in Boulder and made the top-ten news stories of 2001 lists for three newspapers. The fact that the library was already flying an American flag on a pole out front and hastily added a smaller flag on a pole inside the lobby was entirely ignored.

     Congressional Clowns can never resist a controversy involving a flag, especially in an election year. Rep. Thomas Tancredo (R-Colo.), whose main accomplishment so far seems to be a strong push for a moratorium on immigration, ran to the Hill with the Freedom To Be A Patriot Act. This mouthful of legislation denies federal funding to any public body that refuses to fly the American flag. Ten congressmen jumped on board as co-sponsors, hardly a ringing endorsement when the average successful bill gets enough co-sponsors to fill an Enron unemployment line.

     Of course, since the Boulder Public Library DOES fly the American flag, the bill wouldn't apply to them anyway. But that's beside the point.

     Even Congress has a brain sometimes. The House quickly buried the Freedom To Be A Patriot Act in the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, and there it will probably stay. Not even the ACLU has bothered to attack its questionable Constitutional merit - sometimes it just doesn't pay to shoot fish in a barrel.

     But the lure of election-year limelight is too bright for the moths of state politics. Here in Illinois, state Rep. Ron Stephens has jumped on a shaky bandwagon with his own Freedom To Be A Patriot Act, denying state funding to any public entity that refuses to fly the flag.  It's too soon to know if anyone in Springfield will take it seriously.

     I have an American flag flying in my cubicle. I have two stickers of American flags on my computer. My parents have a flag flying in front of their house, and I lit a candle on my front porch for Sept. 11. And still I find this the silliest chain of events since chad-counting in Florida.

     In a remarkable episode of "The West Wing," President Josiah Bartlet suffers through an interminable meeting on the issue of flag-burning. The debate goes on so long you can see the president trying to commit mental suicide while appearing to be listening. It's a desecration of all we hold dear. It's free speech and placing government limitations on dissent. Finally, poor Bartlet interrupts them with a question: "Is there some epidemic of flag-burning going on that I'm not aware of?"

     Silence.

     I ask the same question. Is there some epidemic of public buildings refusing to fly the flag of which I'm unaware? Because unless public libraries are secretly packing away their flags, police stations are chopping down the flagpoles for firewood and all the zillions of flags sold at Wal-Mart in the last six months are now being used to stuff pillowcases, I don't think the flag is in any danger whatsoever.