Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays Read Online Free PDF Page B

show our support towards what’s going on, as Americans.” *
    The overall point being that on Wednesday here there’s a weird accretive pressure to have a flag out. If the purpose of displaying a flag is to make a statement, it seems like at a certain point of density of flags you’re making more of a statement if you don’t have a flag out. It’s not totally clear what statement this would be, though. What if you just don’t happen to have a flag? Where has everyone gotten these flags, especially the little ones you can fasten to your mailbox? Are they all from the Fourth of July and people just save them, like Christmas ornaments? How do they know to do this? There’s nothing in the Yellow Pages under Flag . At some point there starts to be actual tension. Nobody walks by or stops their car and says, “Hey, how come your house doesn’t have a flag?,” but it gets easier and easier to imagine them thinking it. Even a sort of half-collapsed house down the street that everybody thought was abandoned has one of the little flags on a stick in the weeds by the driveway. None of Bloomington’s grocery stores turn out to stock flags. The big novelty shop downtown has nothing but Halloween stuff. Only a few businesses are actually open, but even the closed ones are now displaying some sort of flag. It’s almost surreal. The VFW hall is obviously a good bet, but it can’t open until noon if at all (it has a bar). The counter lady at Burwell Oil references a certain hideous KWIK-N-EZ convenience store out by I-55 at which she’s pretty sure she recalls seeing some little plastic flags back in the racks with all the bandannas and NASCAR caps, but by the time I get down there they all turn out to be gone, snapped up by parties unknown. The cold reality is that there is not a flag to be had in this town. Stealing one out of somebody’s yard is clearly just out of the question. I’m standing in a fluorescent-lit KWIK-N-EZ afraid to go home. All those people dead, and I’m sent to the edge by a plastic flag. It doesn’t get really bad until people come over and ask if I’m OK and I have to lie and say it’s a Benadryl reaction (which in fact can happen).
    … And so on until, in one more of the Horror’s weird twists of fate and circumstance, it’s the KWIK-N-EZ proprietor himself (a Pakistani, by the way) who offers solace and a shoulder and a strange kind of unspoken understanding, and who lets me go back and sit in the stockroom amid every conceivable petty vice and indulgence America has to offer and compose myself, and who only slightly later, over styrofoam cups of a strange kind of perfumey tea with a great deal of milk in it, suggests construction paper and “Magical Markers,” which explains my now-beloved and proudly displayed homemade flag.
    AERIAL & GROUND VIEWS Everyone here gets the local news organ, the Pantagraph, which is roundly loathed by most of the natives I know. Imagine, let’s say, a well-funded college newspaper co-edited by Bill O’Reilly and Martha Stewart. Wednesday’s headline is: After two pages of AP stuff, you get to the real Pantagraph . Everything to follow is sic . Wednesday’s big local headers are: STUNNED CITIZENS RUN THROUGH MANY EMOTIONS; CLERGY OPEN ARMS TO HELP PEOPLE DEAL WITH TRAGEDY; ISU PROFESSOR: B-N NOT A LIKELY TARGET; PRICES ROCKET AT GAS PUMPS; AMPUTEE GIVES INSPIRATIONAL SPEECH. There’s a half-page photo of a student at Bloomington Central Catholic HS saying the rosary in response to the Horror, which means that some staff photographer came in and popped a flash in the face of a traumatized kid at prayer. The Op-Ed column for 9/12 starts out: “The carnage we have seen through the eyes of lenses in New York City and Washington, D.C., still seems like an R-rated movie out of Hollywood.”
    Bloomington is a city of 65,000 in the central part of a state that is extremely, emphatically flat, so that you can see the town’s salients from way far away. Three