The horror! The horror!

Charles Martin illustrates the eerie parallels between Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the Iraq situation in today's Salon:

"By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded," Kurtz postulates. One of his cohorts affirms, "Each station should be...a beacon on the road towards better things, a center of trade of course, but also for humanizing, improving, instructing." Conrad informs us, "All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz."

(Sitting through the "Day Pass" webmercial to read the article is well worth the time.)