Read Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays for Free Online

major interstates converge here, and several rail lines. The town’s almost exactly halfway between Chicago and St. Louis, and its origins involve being an important train depot. Bloomington is the birthplace of Adlai Stevenson and the putative hometown of Colonel Blake on M*A*S*H . It has a smaller twin city, Normal, that’s built around a public university and is a whole different story. Both towns together are like 110,000 people.
    As Midwest cities go, the only remarkable thing about Bloomington is its prosperity. It is all but recession-proof. Some of this is due to the county’s farmland, which is world-class fertile and so expensive per acre that a civilian can’t even find out how much it costs. But Bloomington is also the national HQ for State Farm, which is the great dark god of US consumer insurance and for all practical purposes owns the town, and because of which Bloomington’s east side is now all smoked-glass complexes and Build to Suit developments and a six-lane beltway of malls and franchises that’s killing off the old downtown, plus an ever-wider split between the town’s two basic classes and cultures, so well and truly symbolized by the SUV and the pickup truck, respectively. *
    Winter here is a pitiless bitch, but in the warm months Bloomington is a lot like a seaside community except here the ocean is corn, which grows steroidically and stretches to the earth’s curve in all directions. The town itself in summer is intensely green—streets bathed in tree-shade and homes’ explosive gardens and dozens of manicured parks and ballfields and golf courses you almost need eye protection to look at, and broad weedless fertilized lawns all made to line up exactly flush to the sidewalk with special edging tools. Ý To be honest, it’s all a little creepy, especially in high summer, when nobody’s out and all that green just sits in the heat and seethes.
    Like most Midwest towns, B-N is crammed with churches: four full pages in the phone book. Everything from Unitarian to bug-eyed Pentecostal. There’s even a church for agnostics. But except for church—plus I guess your basic parades, fireworks, and a couple corn festivals—there isn’t much public community. Everybody has his family and neighbors and tight little circle of friends. Folks keep to themselves (the native term for light conversation is visit ). They basically all play softball or golf and grill out, and watch their kids play soccer, and sometimes go to mainstream movies …
    … And they watch massive, staggering amounts of TV. I don’t just mean the kids, either. Something that’s obvious but important to keep in mind re Bloomington and the Horror is that reality—any felt sense of a larger world—is mainly televisual. New York’s skyline, for instance, is as recognizable here as anyplace else, but what it’s recognizable from is TV. TV’s also a more social phenomenon than on the East Coast, where in my experience people are almost constantly leaving home to go meet other people face-to-face in public places. There don’t really tend to be parties or mixers per se so much here—what you do in Bloomington is all get together at somebody’s house and watch something.
    In Bloomington, therefore, to have a home without a TV is to become a kind of constant and Kramer-like presence in others’ homes, a perpetual guest of folks who can’t quite understand why somebody wouldn’t own a TV but are totally respectful of your need to watch TV, and who will offer you access to their TV in the same instinctive way they’d bend to offer a hand if you fell down in the street. This is especially true for some kind of must-see, crisis-type situation like the 2000 election or this week’s Horror. All you have to do is call someone you know and say you don’t have a TV: “Well shoot, boy, get over here.”
    TUESDAY There are maybe ten days a year when it’s gorgeous in Bloomington, and 11 September is one of them. The air is clear