Flagg's City

In The Stand, Las Vegas is the designated capitol city for Randall Flagg.  It's his Washington D.C., the polar opposite of the New Jerusalem.  And is Las Vegas ever a wonderful choice!  It is a nasty place, ain't it?

 Stephen Mejias at stereophile us truly passionate in his hatred of Las Vegas.  (HERE)

He writes, "It's no surprise that Stephen King chose Las Vegas as the headquarters of evil when he wrote The Stand."  YES! 

Mejias explains:
My hatred for Las Vegas is juvenile and irrational and represents what is probably the last strand of my nearly resigned defiance for all things bourgeois, fascist, bogus, and generally lame. I’ve softened up a lot over the last 10 years, but Vegas hardens me anew. I hate Las Vegas. The place is soulless, hollow, utterly putrid, infested with sickness, vice, and abandon, driven by all that is dirty and unholy (I kinda like that part, actually), and, above all, fake. So incredibly fake, in fact, that one just has to marvel at its surface shine, its cardboard towers and phony waterfalls, its ridiculously realistic gondolas and Parisian skies.
. . . In Las Vegas, you have to wait years before you can safely cross the quietest of streets. Who built this city, anyway? Oh, yes: Criminals.
That's wonderful!  And leads to a quick question: Do any other cities qualify to be the headquarters of pure evil?  Of course, in the Bible, Babylon takes first prize, followed by Rome -- called the "Beast" and the "Harlot."  That's pretty nasty! 

So, nominate away: What other cities qualify for Randy Flaggs base of operations?

4 comments:

  1. You could make an argument for New Orleans, I suppose. Maybe for Miami. But nothing would work as well as Las Vegas.

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  2. I've heard Detroit is a dark and poor place. Derry is by far one of the evil places that Flagg can use.

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  3. Las Vegas, there is something weird in a city in the middle of the desert dedicated to gaming...

    Miami, the refuge for reactionarits all over the world and the city of sun and bodybuilders and pretty girls in bikini but with something dark on it just like LA the city in the edge of the world, the tinseltown for young girls from the mid west, now latinas too, that go there to try to triumph in show bussiness or fall in the darkside, I suggest you to read Dennis Etchison

    here in Spain we have some places of this kind like the region of Valencia with cities like Alicante, Benidorm or Valencia itself with pretty smiling girls and no winter but with massive urbanism enriching the politics and destroying the enviroments, macro discos of bakalao (radical electronic music) and its subsequent chemical drugs, fire, loud in traditional celebrations, Las fallas, massive tourism, the more lustful young and not so young people in Spain... take a look here a sympton of the situation in Spain the country is almost on bankrupcy but a politician from this region build an airport in Castellon and airport without traffic and with a huge statue in his own honour...

    http://blogs.larioja.com/entrevisillos/files/2012/01/coloso-fabra-castellon3.jpg

    by the way the town where I live, El Ejido, is a bit the same, is in the south east of Spain in the south of Valencia and Murcia (where they build golf camps in the desert) and is one of the very few medium cities in the world where The rolling stones have been performing and is a town where some years ago the mayor defy the constitution and the laws to authorize with his silence a progrom against north african inmigrants, it looks like the southern cities with warm weather all the year are more appropiate for that kind of weird things

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