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Perhaps they could call it Poisonville National Park. Poisonville. That's the name Dashiell Hammett, America's hardboiled Dante, gave to Butte in Red Harvest, his strange nocturnal novel of corruption and corporate filth. "The city wasn't pretty," writes Hammett on the opening page of Red Harvest. "Most of its builders had gone in for gaudiness. Maybe they had been successful at first. Since then the smelters whose brick stacks struck up tall against a gloomy mountain to the south had yellow-smudge everything into uniform dinginess. The result was an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining. Spread over this was grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of the smelters' stacks."
Times Headline today:
U.S. Is Completing Plan to Promote a Democratic Iraq
By DAVID E. SANGER and JAMES DAO
The plan calls for an 18-month occupation, trials of only the most senior Iraqi leaders and a quick takeover of oil fields.
I had been concerned that the Administration didn't have a plan, so this comes as some relief. It was nice of the Times to let us know about this. Also, that everything will be completed so quickly.