Star-Spangled Banner

I finally got to go to the National Museum of History today.  I have wanted to go for years.  Of all the Smithsonians, it is the one I  was most interested in.  It was everything I had dreamed it would be and even more, somehow.  I could have spent days in it.  I would like to go back.

I started in the section about transportation and electricity, and I thought about my father, his passion for current and his job.  I thought about the huge Corliss steam engines sitting silent now, still, in the Soule factory in Meridian as I walked past their big yellow brother there in the Smithsonian's halls, and I felt a moment of pride that I had seen one of those turning, actually working instead of just sitting as an exhibition during the Live Steam Festival.

There is no way to relate it all.  It is still turning over and over in my head in a glorious avalanche of overload.  I saw a Civil War horse preserved by taxidermy and the pajamas of a dead President.  I saw the first Kermit the Frog and artifacts from the Pullman Porters.  I saw Dorothy's ruby slippers and a resurrected Revolutionary War ship.  The collection covers who and what we are in all the nooks and crannies of the American soul.

No object moved me as much as the centerpiece of the collection, though, the huge flag draped so carefully in that darkened room, the classic and archetypical Star Spangled Banner.  One walks down a darkened hallway, slightly cool with little white lights guiding you toward the main exhibit.  Along the walls of that passage are the bits and pieces of war, a rocket, a bomb, the things Francis Scott Key was writing about when he made our national anthem.  It brings the song to life even for the most casual of observers in a way that it never has before.

Once one rounds the corner, though, there it is lying in state, vast, majestic, silent in its protective slumber.  The light is soft, blue, and somehow seems to come from within it.  Even though it is actually just tattered and frayed wool, the symbolism attached to those fragments of fabric have imbued it with something beyond its core components.

There is a bench down the wall in front of it so one can sit for a moment and take it in.  This is something you should do if you go, because you are not just looking at a flag, really.  You should sit down and really think about all the things it stands for as that gentle light it breathes out enfolds you.  There is something mystical about it, something dreamlike.  Maybe it's because it is something that has lived through war or known damage and lived to tell the tale.  Maybe it is because it is something that was made to serve selflessly regardless of the cost to itself, to use itself up.  That we have it at all is a miracle of preservation, after all....

We have problems and battles aplenty in our nation.  There are bad people here, crooks, thieves, charlatans, and tyrants.  That flag suggests, though, that at our base metal, we can be something better.  Perhaps we all need to go through that room more often and sit in its light and be reminded of what we should be about instead of what we're currently pursuing.