Embrace It

Nigel Duara: SPRINGFIELD, Ore. — The Springfield that exists in the mind of Matt Groening is a kind of American everything — hick pit stop, rosy-cheeked Rockwellian font of family values, cesspool of corruption, ethnic melting pot, boomtown gone to rust.

It's what the creator of "The Simpsons," the nation's longest-running sitcom, used as a backdrop for 22-minute allegories about the American experience, beginning as earnest tales about a lower-middle class nuclear family and expanding to encompass spoofs of presidential elections, the obesity epidemic and "Citizen Kane."

It's also, according to an interview posted online Tuesday, a real place.