Word: rats
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...farm town that sprawls across the Arkansas border and serves assorted crooks as a distribution center for stolen cars and appliances. Now the city boasts a new source of notoriety: 17 of Texarkana's 24 sq. mi., including some of the better sections, are infested with sleek, fat rats. According to U.S. Interior Department investigators, the town harbors about 900,000 of the rodents-30 times the national average of one rat per two citizens...
...gnawing holes in buildings and contaminating food, Texarkana's rats cause about $3 million of damage a year. With their eleven internal parasites and 18 kinds of fleas, they expose people to rat-bite fever, murine typhus, bubonic plague and other diseases. Yet the city's residents have become appallingly adapted to the rats. As one retired Negro farmer casually puts it: "They play like ants behind my house...
...Pied Piper. Part of the problem is political. Because the city straddles the state line, it has separate mayors in Texas and Arkansas, two district city councils and health departments. To fight rats effectively, both city governments obviously have to cooperate. But the Texas side of town has budgeted only $4,000 for rat control while Arkansas begrudges $1,500. Says Doyle Purifoy, in charge of the Arkansas program: "We've got the rats on the run." Presumably to Texas...
...usually for misleading reasons. They see it as a masterpiece of German Expressionism, detailing the complete degradation and ultimate death of a bourgeois hero through his descent into the sex-and-violence filled world of the lower classes. The allure of a cabaret singer (Marlene Dietrich) leads Professor Rat (Emil Jannings) from the comfortable, orderly existence and, to complete the Expressionist myth as practiced in German movies, subverts his normal conduct until he becomes an object of the townpeople's scorn. The economic theme in this plot, closely related to the real and feared decline of the German middle classes...
Past the glass and aluminum office buildings run ribbons of superhighway. Beyond the highway are decayed brownstones and rat-ridden lots that have become the graveyards of automobiles and black aspirations. In this ghetto setting, a group of Negro activists conspire to aid the families of 17 jailed "brothers...