I miss the Star Spangled Banner
The way it used to feel
By Jan Worth-Nelson
The first bad sign: I couldn’t remember the words.
I went to the symphony Saturday night. It was the first time since the 2020 lockdowns. Even at this point in the pandemic, it still felt kind of thrilling — to reach into my closet to stare at clothes I haven’t worn for 18 months, looking for something kind of dressy. To actually think about shoes, and a scarf, and not just my everyday earrings but something a little sparkly, and a necklace too. I picked symphony-appropriate black pants and black turtleneck, and a velvet patterned vest I’ve been wearing for special occasions for years. It felt good to put it on.
I was looking forward to sitting in a dark auditorium with a good friend, my neighbor, my frequent walking partner.
I felt ultra-alert to everything about it: getting out into public fresh air, the cars pulling into the parking lot in the fragrant autumn dusk, people climbing out of their cars and walking in twos and threes, jostling genially into lines in the lobby.
It was clear the Old World comforts had been altered. Masks were optional but all the staff were masked up; at the last minute, at the door, not sure about the requirements, I fumbled nervously in my purse for my vaccination card, and I flashed it at the usher — but she didn’t need it. All she wanted was my ticket. I felt changed, a bit panicky, as if I’d just been through something traumatic, and needed to try very hard to be normal. We found our seats and settled in, noting that many seats around us were empty — an informal understanding remaining about six-foot distance.
And then, soon enough, when the lights went down, came the Star Spangled Banner.
Wbat a simulacrum of inspiration. The delivery was robust, every instrument involved. The conductor, a sweet and earnest man, flung his arms into the air and the horns and drums and rows of stringed instruments complied with gusto.
In my excellent Row 16 aisle seat, I wanted to feel uplift, with everybody else, during that rousing, orchestral version. In the first bars, everybody stood up, and perfunctorily, I stood up too.
Since I was in an aisle seat I could have stepped out and knelt down. I could have stayed seated. But I didn’t. I just stood up and started singing along because I was tired. I wanted the expected ritual to be reassuring, soothing.
I hadn’t sung the Star Spangled Banner in any kind of group with other Americans for years. I couldn’t remember the last time. A football game at Michigan Stadium decades ago? Or maybe the last symphony concert here, in this glowing auditorium, way before the pandemic zipped us all up? An archaic swearing-in ceremony at City Hall?
Like all my Boomer cohorts (yes, of course you knew that, right?) I lived through the JFK assassination, Malcolm X, MLK, RFK, the Vietnam War. I was at Kent State when the National Guard shot at protestors on the hillside. I was in Peace Corps when one volunteer murdered another and got off. Etc. Etc: the story of my youth — all ostensibly blows to my “patriotism.” And the significance of Trump getting elected has upended me, fundamentally altered my DNA about scary and flummoxing American deterioration.
And still, I wanted to feel something when the Star Spangled Banner rang out. That we’re “all in this” together, in this big old country. All that July 4, grade school, Girl Scout, Buckeye Girls’ State “patriotism” still carries some sway inside me after all.
But, but…those embarrassing, bellicose words. I guess to the apologists it’s supposed to be redeemed by the ending, that self-congratulatory two-part flourish.
Here’s the thing: I’d forgotten the words. I felt like I’d been so out of the center of life that something had left me, and in its place, aphasia, dementia about my country, my homeland.
At the end I couldn’t be sure if it was the “land of the brave and the home of the free,” or “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” How could that be?
So…I shut up and let other more tuned-up patriots, masked and carefully six feel apart, polish it off. Oh, right: Land of the free…home of the brave. Of course.
And so I didn’t feel uplifted. Instead, a sweat of enervation came up on the back of my neck, my spirit sticky with weariness and an anxious craving for some fading “before time.”
And that melodramatic old anthem played out like a relic of the last century, far far far from the exhausting two decades of the 21st.
Others, more angry than I, articulate bitterly why they refuse to sing the anthem, and they take honorable steps to protest its symbolism. For good reason. I respect them.
I’m sure better people than I will say of course, I’m deluded, and that’s a problem that must be fixed. I must be fixed. Of course: I’m white and privileged and old. Yes, yes, of course.
But Saturday night, in dark at the symphony, none of that changes how I felt: profound sadness — an understanding wordlessly, viscerally, that nothing is the same as it used to be, and some many things I once took for granted about the country are gone for good: some sense, even if wildly unfulfilled, that we had a common purpose.
Didn’t it used to unite us, singing these irrationally exuberant, “bombs bursting in air” words together? Didn’t it sometimes help our spirits soar?
But here we are: weakened by the plague and so exhausted by our hatreds and divisions. There can be little rest for us all for a long time to come, even in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. Or is it the other way around?
I just wanted our spirits to soar, once again, together, like maybe it never did.
