Washington — Washington - In near darkness, it appears almost as an apparition. Like reliquary, the tattered flag is displayed behind glass in a new temperature- and light-controlled chamber, the bones not of a saint but of a nation.
So these are the broad stripes and, once, bright stars. So this is the flag that withstood the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air. So this is the star-spangled banner that yet waved after a night of bombing, its survival signaling that the nation, too, had survived and inspiring Francis Scott Key to write what would become the national anthem.
Starting tomorrow, the nearly 200-year-old flag, hand-sewn in a Baltimore rowhouse and flown over Fort McHenry during the War of 1812, returns to public display at the National Museum of American History. For the past two years, the Smithsonian museum has been closed for renovations, the centerpiece of which is a new gallery to house the fragile, faded flag. It was dedicated yesterday, in a ceremony whose participants ranged from President George W. Bush to five new Americans who took their oaths of citizenship in an airy atrium that leads to the star-spangled banner.
At a time when flags are nothing if not ubiquitous, flying football-field-size over car dealerships or thumbnail-tiny on politicians' lapels, the star-spangled banner has a quiet, yet palpable power. In its darkened gallery, with Key's words projected on the wall above it, the flag seems to float in both space and time. It seems both historic and eternal, both untouchable and inviting.
"You almost don't want to leave," said Gov. Martin O'Malley, among those invited to yesterday's dedication. "It has a magnetism.
"I came around the corner, and I started getting choked up seeing her displayed like that," said O'Malley, who had seen it as needleworkers were painstakingly repairing it. "Illuminated like she is, it's not only a patriotic experience, it's almost a religious experience."
Maybe it's the timing of the museum's reopening, coming as it does during this neither-here-nor-there period, after the just-concluded presidential election but before the inauguration. Maybe it's the fact that one of the sillier "issues" of the campaign was why then-candidate and now President-elect Barack Obama didn't wear a flag pin, and why he sometimes started wearing one. Maybe it's just weariness over how the flag gets used by those who want to prove that they love the country more than you do.
