Hartsburg, USA

IN 1991, ADDRESSING the languid, chewing crowd gathered to celebrate Hartsburg's 175th anniversary, Mayor Bob Sundstrom said, seemingly apropos of nothing, "Might as well cut my balls off and put a bell round my neck." People looked up from, or down at, their stuffed chicken breasts. What just happened? Was this some saying along the lines of "Well, tickle my toes and call me Louie"? Until now the speech had been suitably boring, no less so because he'd been speaking as if he were the town: "Hartsburg" had become "I," as in "I was born in 1817" and "My steel was used to make tanks that helped defeat the Nazis." So he was talking about cutting the town's balls off?

In the back of the room, a man who'd just been put out of work by the closing of the town's last steel mill, said "Amen."

Most people didn't understand that the mayor had been commenting on Hartsburg's status as a political bellwether, and most of those who did still didn't see what testicles had to do with it. Even the farmers in the audience, who got the joke—male sheep, wethers, were often castrated—couldn't summon a laugh for poor old Bob. It wasn't his fault that the town was dying—what's a mayor next to the exigencies of "free"trade?— but people tended to read civic significance into the age spots and booze veins on his forehead. Two years later to the day, Bob jumped off the bridge that linked Hartsburg's halves and ended up in a coma—a failure-to-fail failure whose metaphorical meaning was so obvious people barely bothered to comment on it. Bob had completed his transformation from human being into symbol. Few people had really known Bob, and no one went to visit him as he lay, half-dead, in the remotest corner of the nursing home. Out of sight, almost out of mind. But now, in the game show-bright ballroom of the Holiday Inn, he was in sight, on mind, and sweating terribly. "As I go," he said, still speaking as Hartsburg, "so goes the nation." People clapped. They clapped because they wanted to help Bob get through this and because most residents—at least most residents who went to events like this—were proud of the town's reputation as a trendsetter.