If wishes were birdies. . . .

Everything's a metaphor. Especially in Detroit.

On the other hand, I think the United States' transition to a banana republic is going pretty smoothly, don't you?

Experience a city fighting back

Sorry, Newsweek.

A city that can produce a lipdub deemed "the greatest music video ever made" by Roger Ebert can't be one of "America's dying cities." A dying city isn't just a matter of population losses; a dying city is one that has lost its spirit.

A dying city is one in which the civic culture has unraveled and no one is his brother's keeper.

A dying city has no answer to the question "Why try harder?"


IF THIS LIPDUB is any indication of Grand Rapids' mettle as a metropolis -- albeit a small metropolis -- it's a lot healthier city than Newsweek is a magazine. Is what I am submitting for your approval, as Rod Serling might have said.

Now, I'm not qualified to judge whether Ebert is correct in Grand Rapids having produced the best music video ever, but I'd say this one is at least in the ballpark.

Experience Grand Rapids, indeed!


HAT TIP: The non-profit media conglomerate formerly known as National Public Radio.

Your Daily '80s: Plus ça change . . .

. . . plus c'est la meme chose.

1989.


2009.

Your Daily '80s: Remembering what's important

In Michigan in 1986, the forces of TV advertising pause to remember what's important about Thanksgiving -- the day after.

Death in the ruins

This is Detroit.

Charlie LeDuff is on the story for Mother Jones magazine. One place this story of Detroit took him was the morgue.

It's a busy place. It's a crowded one, too.

Life is extraordinarily cheap in America today. Funerals, however, are not:

Dr. Carl Schmidt is the chief medical examiner there. There are at least 50 corpses on hold in his morgue cooler, some unidentified, others whose next of kin are too poor to bury them. So Dr. Schmidt keeps them on layaway, zipped up in body bags as family members wait for a ship to come in that never seems to arrive.

The day I visited, a Hollywood starlet was tailing the doctor, studying for her role as the medical examiner in ABC's new Detroit-based murder drama Detroit 1-8-7. The title is derived from the California penal code for murder: 187. In Michigan, the designation for homicide is actually 750.316, but that's just a mouthful of detail.

"You might say that the homicide of Aiyana is the natural conclusion to the disease from which she suffered," Schmidt told me.

"What disease was that?" I asked.

"The psychopathology of growing up in Detroit," he said. "Some people are doomed from birth because their environment is so toxic."

"BUT IT'S DETROIT!" you may be tempted to scoff. Detroit, though, wasn't always an epithet. Something had to make Detroit into Detroit.

It might be a stretch to see anything more than Detroit's problems in Detroit's problems. Still, as the American middle class collapses, it's worth perhaps remembering that the East Side of Detroit—the place where Aiyana, Je'Rean, and Officer Huff all died—was once its industrial cradle.

Henry Ford built his first automobile assembly-line plant in Highland Park in 1908 on the east side of Woodward Avenue, the thoroughfare that divides the east of Detroit from the west. Over the next 50 years, Detroit's East Side would become the world's machine shop, its factory floor. The city grew to 1.3 million people from 300,000 after Ford opened his Model T factory. Other auto plants sprang up on the East Side: Packard, Studebaker, Chrysler's Dodge Main. Soon, the Motor City's population surpassed that of Boston and Baltimore, old East Coast port cities founded on maritime shipping when the world moved by boat.

European intellectuals wondered at the whirl of building and spending in the new America. At the center of this economic dynamo was Detroit. "It is the home of mass-production, of very high wages and colossal profits, of lavish spending and reckless installment-buying, of intense work and a large and shifting labour-surplus," British historian and MP Ramsay Muir wrote in 1927. "It regards itself as the temple of a new gospel of progress, to which I shall venture to give the name of 'Detroitism'."

"It is the home of mass-production, of very high wages and colossal profits, of lavish spending and reckless instalment-buying, of intense work and a large and shifting labour-surplus," British historian and MP Ramsay Muir wrote in 1927. "It regards itself as the temple of a new gospel of progress, to which I shall venture to give the name of 'Detroitism'."

Skyscrapers sprang up virtually overnight. The city filled with people from all over the world: Arabs, Appalachians, Poles, African Americans, all in their separate neighborhoods surrounding the factories. Forbidden by restrictive real estate covenants and racist custom, the blacks were mostly restricted to Paradise Valley, which ran the length of Woodward Avenue. As the black population grew, so did black frustration over poor housing and rock-fisted police.

Soon, the air was the color of a filthy dishrag. The water in the Detroit River was so bad, it was said you could bottle it and sell it as poison. The beavers disappeared from the river around 1930.

But pollution didn't kill Detroit. What did?

No one can answer that fully. You can blame it on the John Deere mechanical cotton-picker of 1950, which uprooted the sharecropper and sent him north looking for a living—where he found he was locked out of the factories by the unions. You might blame it on the urban renewal and interstate highway projects that rammed a freeway down the middle of Paradise Valley, displacing thousands of blacks and packing the Negro tenements tighter still. (Thomas Sugrue, in his seminal book The Origins of the Urban Crisis, writes that residents in Detroit's predominantly black lower East Side reported 206 rat bites in 1951 and 1952.)

You might blame postwar industrial policies that sent the factories to the suburbs, the rural South, and the western deserts. You might blame the 1967 race riot and the white flight that followed. You might blame Coleman Young—the city's first black mayor—and his culture of cronyism. You could blame it on the gas shocks of the '70s that opened the door to foreign car competition. You might point to the trade agreements of the Clinton years, which allowed American manufacturers to leave the country by the back door. You might blame the UAW, which demanded things like full pay for idle workers, or myopic Big Three management who, instead of saying no, simply tacked the cost onto the price of a car.

Then there is the thought that Detroit is simply a boom town that went bust the minute Henry Ford began to build it. The car made Detroit, and the car unmade Detroit. The auto industry allowed for sprawl. It also allowed a man to escape the smoldering city.

AND THOSE THINGS that made Detroit into a slur -- into a basket case . . . into a place where some humans have gone feral and nature has started to reclaim its turf from the ruins -- also are turning parts of where you live into little Detroits.

Somewhere near you, hope is dead and humanity itself ain't feeling so good.

Somewhere, some fool on cable television, or on talk radio, is telling you the biggest problem the country has right now is big government and high taxes. That what ails Detroit -- and what ails all the little Detroits just down the road, in all the neighborhoods you dare not enter after dark . . . or ever -- will be fixed by private charity and good morals.

Some say condoms are the answer. Others, Jesus.

A half-century into the collapse, however, neither the Trojan man nor the Savior of the World has made much of a dent. Not only that, charitable contributions these days are as down as the leading economic indicators.

Public policy in these anxious times seems to consist of hoping for a miracle in a world that doesn't believe in prayer. And while it's true that Jesus has no hands and no feet apart from our own, it also is true that Jesus' hands have taken to wringing and His feet have taken a hike.

In an emerging banana republic run by the rich men of Wall Street, it really sucks to be Lazarus. Detroit knows this today.

You will discover it tomorrow.

The campaign against epic a-holes

While gay and lesbian activists were busy politicizing bullying and telling America that stopping some bullying is more crucial than stopping the other 85 percent (or whatever) of bullying, this was playing itself out in Trenton, Mich.

Watch the video. Contemplate the sick, sick spectacle of the Neighbors From the Bowels of Hell ridiculing and harassing a dying 7-year-old girl, all because of a neighborhood feud. Consider going so far as to fill your yard with tombstones.

Picture hauling a fake coffin past the dying girl's house. In a pickup painted as a ghoulish hearse.

Imagine posting a picture of the dying child's dead mother in the arms of the Grim Reaper on your Facebook page. Which also features a picture of little Kathleen Edward's head replacing the skull in a skull and crossbones.

People all across the Detroit area, and all around the world, are outraged. They've been holding candlelight rallies at the girl's house.

And the tormentors, Scott and Jennifer Petkov, now are national pariahs.

FOR SOME REASON, the Petkovs now say they're sorry. Very, very sorry.




AS FAR as I know, the swift end to those bullies' reign of terror was not the work of the National Coalition to Stop the Torment of Dying Children. It was the work of "You don't do that to children. Period. Much less dying ones."

It was the work of "How dare you treat people that way?"

It was the work of "You're a couple of cruel scumbags, and now we're going to kick your miserable asses."

IT WAS the work of common human decency. Remember that?

If we want to stop bullying -- if we want to prevent tormented kids from killing themselves and all manner of societal awfulness -- maybe what we need is just a single campaign . . . a single advocacy group. Call it the Campaign for Common Decency.

Because, face it, common decency needs all the help it can get these days.

The Marlin Perkins Report

And I'll stay here, on the news set, while Jim goes around back to flush out the man-eating raccoon.

Welcome to the morning news in Michigan.

Sweet Jesus! What have we Nebraskans gotten ourselves into with all this Big Ten stuff?

On the other hand, if Michigan coons made the road trip down to Lincoln, then got loose in the studio for the Husker Baseball TV Show, it would be more excitement than Mike Anderson's squad has generated in the last two seasons.

Oh, mother of Mary!

The Culture of (freezing to) Death

Click on picture for video

We've been legally aborting the very, very young for a third of a century now. More recently, we started aborting the profoundly disabled and the terminally ill.

Now, we've moved on to the elderly. Namely, Marvin E. Schur, 93, of Bay City, Mich. Aborted for not paying his electric bill on time.

TECHNICALLY, the coroner listed the cause of death as hypothermia, meaning Marvin Schur froze to death. In his house.

Call it cryoabortion. This is a new technique, developed because of the cost-prohibitive nature of sending giant vacuum trucks to the homes of America's elderly to suck them out of their homes and into a tank full of saline solution.

In the new cryoabortion technique -- usually performed when a utility customer's debt to municipal power and light becomes greater than the value of his or her life -- the abortionist . . . well, why don't I let The Bay City Times explain how the procedure worked in the Schur case:

A pathologist said a 93-year-old Bay City man froze to death inside his home - his body found days after city workers said they limited electricity flowing to the house.

Marvin E. Schur suffered "a slow, painful death" inside his home at 1600 S. Chilson St. on Bay City's southwest side, said Dr. Kanu Virani, who performed an autopsy on the body.

"Hypothermia shuts the whole system down, slowly," Virani said. "It's not easy to die from hypothermia without first realizing your fingers and toes feel like they're burning."

Funeral services for Schur, a retired pattern-maker who lived alone, are at 11 a.m. Wednesday at the Gephart Funeral Home, 201 W. Midland St. Schur's wife, retired elementary-school teacher Marian I. (Meisel) Schur, died several years ago, and the couple had no children.

Virani, Oakland County's deputy chief medical examiner, performs autopsies for Bay County and numerous other Michigan counties. Of about 15,000 autopsies Virani has conducted, he said Marvin Schur's autopsy "is the first one I can remember doing on someone who froze to death indoors."

Virani said the temperature inside Schur's home was less than 32 degrees when neighbors George A. Pauwels Jr. and his wife, Shannon, found Schur's body Jan. 17.

George Pauwels Jr. said Schur owed almost $1,100 in electricity bills to the city of Bay City, though Pauwels said he noticed money clipped to those bills on Schur's kitchen table the day he found Schur's body.

Bay City Manager Robert V. Belleman said a worker with Bay City Electric Light & Power placed a "limiter" device outside Schur's home, between Schur's electricity meter and electrical service, on Jan. 13.

The device restricts the amount of electricity reaching the home and if a homeowner tries to draw more electricity than the limiter allows, "it blows the limiter, just like blowing a fuse, and then you go outside and reset it," Belleman said.

Belleman said he doesn't know if a city worker made one-on-one contact with Schur to explain the limiter's operation. Virani said he doesn't know if Schur suffered from dementia, which could have interfered with his ability to know how to reset a limiter.

Pauwels said Schur couldn't hear well, and said he believed Schur "had a little bit" of dementia.

THE CITY MANAGER, by the way, doesn't think the city did anything wrong. No, in most societies, it's perfectly acceptable to turn off the electricity of 93-year-old World War II veterans in the dead of a Michigan winter.

Dead of winter. Get it? It's a joke only municipal murderers could love.

If only poor Mr. Schur had been an investment banker. It's OK for investment bankers to leave the government -- and their investors -- holding the bag. In fact, if you're a Wall Street swell, you can spend all your money on million-dollar accessorizing, $50 million corporate jets and big bonuses for your homeboys even after Uncle Sam has pulled your cojones out of the toaster oven.

If you're a poor Michigan widower, on the other hand, the government will pull the plug on your toaster oven. And your furnace. And your stove.

THERE ARE people out there who get a bad case of the trots at the very thought of Darwinism in the science classroom but never get the slightest tummy rumble when Darwinism -- natural selection . . . survival of the fittest . . . the big evolutionary cull of "life unworthy of life" -- sets up housekeeping at the heart of civic society.

Either all human life is worth a damn, or none of it is. You can learn that now, or someday end up like poor Marvin E. Schur, killed by the city fathers for not being young, useful . . . or able to pay his light bill.

By the way, the Bay City Commission raised electric rates by 3 percent Monday. Good thing Mr. Schur died when he did.

Video of the week

Pick the version of events in the Saga of the Michigan Man you care to believe, but what it all came down to was LSU Coach Les Miles pulling the plug on an old, dear dream that was threatening to sink the football dream of a bunch of young men. His young men -- LSU Men.

And their dream did not die amid an ESPN hellstorm, nor did it die when a crippled up Louisiana State squad took on Tennessee in the Southeastern Conference title game.

NOW THE MICHIGAN MAN and his LSU Men -- after the most improbable chain of insane events during a wild and woolly season-finale weekend -- chase a renewed dream. A national championship. A dream so far out of reach that its sudden resurrection was marginally less stunning than ol' Lazarus stumbling out of his tomb a couple of millennia ago.

On one hand, the old Michigan Man can't go home again. Neither can many of us.

Things change, dreams die painful deaths and, sometimes, better ones show up after the funeral is concluded and the dearly departed's memory has been toasted.

Les Miles has a national championship to win against -- deliciously for an old Michigan Man -- the Ohio State University. And win it he just might.

As an LSU Man. Geaux Tigers.

Fans have Miles to go to be worthy of Les

MSNBC news item:

Les Miles insists he will remain LSU’s football coach despite all the speculation he would bolt for Michigan.

“I am the head coach at LSU. I will be the head coach at LSU,” Miles said Saturday. “I have no interest in talking to anybody else.”

LSU athletic director Skip Bertman said Miles and LSU chancellor Sean O’Keefe already have worked out a contract “they’re happy with,” but it has not yet been signed.

Wearing a purple tie, standing and gesturing, Miles angrily made his announcement two hours before the No. 5 Tigers played No. 14 Tennessee in the Southeastern Conference championship game.

“I’ve got a championship game to play, and I’m excited about the opportunity of my damn strong football team to play,” he said. “It’s unfortunate that I had to address my team with that information this morning.

Miles said an erroneous ESPN report that he was going to Michigan prompted him to speak to his players and the media.

“I represent me in this issue, please ask me after. I’m busy,” he said.

Here are some selected comments following the Times-Picayune story about Miles staying:

* DAMN..DAMN YOU SKIP!!! LET HIM GO ..DAMN!!

* he only wins because he has sabans recruits ...... you give him a new contract and then he starts losing ....... idiots .....

* OH NOOOOOOOOOOOO, Let Him GOOOOOOOOOOOOO !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

* Big Frank , as others, that , ley's face it, when Saban's recruits are gone, so is the dream! Miles is NOT a Coach by any means. He is where he is because he has been able to get 110% out of Saban's guys. Predictions are no better than 7-5 next year and that's on the high end. One more thing, Saban or Spurrier was here. Perrilloux's Hoodlum azz would be GONE!

GOOD GRIEF. I'll say here what I said over on the T-P:

How come no one ever bitched about Nick Saban winning with Gerry DiNardo's recruits? All some gobstopperingly moronic LSU fans want to do is run off a coach who has put together three straight 10-win seasons, something that even the Almighty Saban couldn't do.

If that's how you treat Les Miles, who the hell with any sense would WANT to come to LSU . . . except to get a sweet contract, make some money, bolster the resume and gut it out in a Third World country for three years before hauling butt to greener pastures.

Miles is displaying a little loyalty to Louisiana -- probably foolishly, being the man DOES have a wife and school-age kids to worry about. Any look at all the good rankings and the bad ones will tell you that Louisianians regularly manage to do what even a dog won't -- s*** in his own bed.

And the coach you want to run off still sticks with LSU and with Louisiana. I hope his compensation package amply takes that into account.

Frankly, as a Louisiana native and LSU grad who in 1988 hauled butt to Nebraska (where government generally works and people generally care), I am thrilled that my "other team" is getting Bo Pelini. Y'all didn't want him, but he's going to go to work for Tom Osborne down in Lincoln, and he's going to win, and win, and win, and win some more.

Suckers.

The tragedy of Louisiana is that people who are so idiotic as to want to run off a perennial 10-win coach probably aren't a tiny group of fringe lunatics.

The bigger tragedy of Louisiana is that people that damn stupid are allowed to vote. And it shows.

Give more for Les. Care less for more?

Some Louisiana State football fans have decided to stand by their man, Coach Les Miles.

Actually, they're going to march for their man Wednesday. Of course, that's pretty much a no-brainer when your guy's team is 10-1 and in the hunt for a national title. And when Michigan just might be breathing down your neck . . . and whispering sweet nothings in your coach's ear.

FOX NEWS LOUISIANA reports:

LSU fans are planning a rally to show their desire to keep Les Miles in Baton Rouge. The head football coach of the Tigers is likely the top candidate to replace Lloyd Carr at Michigan.

Miles is a former Michigan player and assistant coach and has a passion for the maize and blue. But he has also made it clear that he loves LSU.

The "March for Miles" is set to begin at 6 pm Wednesday from Tiger Stadium. Supporters plan to walk from the stadium to Walk On's, which is the site of the coach's weekly radio show.

THAT'S SWEET. No, really. It's a sweet, albeit self-interested, gesture.

I would imagine that would give pause to a coach if his alma mater were to come calling, offering him the chance to make his dreams come true. Back home. Do you stay where you're appreciated, where folks want you to stay?

Or do you try to buck Thomas Wolfe and go home again? Go home to whatever uncertainty might await you there.

You know, if I were in Baton Rouge -- instead of an 1,100-mile drive away, sitting in my studio on a cold, damp and blustery Nebraska night -- I might be soooooo there Wednesday evening for the march. LSU needs to hang on to men like Les Miles. Even if they're Michigan Men.

BATON ROUGE NEEDS to hang on to a Michigan Man like Les Miles. Baton Rouge needs more men like Les Miles -- disciplined, smart, driven, upright, successful.

Baton Rouge has a funny damn way of trying to do that.

See, to keep men like Miles -- to attract more men and women like Miles -- my hometown needs to quit begging and start doing. Make Baton Rouge someplace that people like Les Miles would be crazy to leave . . . no matter how loud the siren song of home and how full the pot o' gold at the end of the rainbow.

Instead, a parade of U-Hauls snaking toward the state line testifies that a lot of born-and-raised Louisianians think it's kind of nuts to stay.

Maybe that has something to do with Baton Rougeans and other Louisianians being motivated enough to organize a "Please Stay Les" march on, literally, a moment's notice but almost entirely uninterested in their crooked government, soaring crime rate and crumbling, ineffective public schools.

That testifies to some seriously messed-up priorities, people.

THINK OF IT, if Baton Rougeans were as interested in education as LSU football, Baton Rouge Magnet High School wouldn't be falling apart before their eyes. And around their kids. Talk about a school full of overachievers -- kids Louisiana is eager to hold on to but hard-pressed to keep.

They are the Les Mileses of education, business, industry and the arts. And most of them are going to haul butt, even without a multimillion-dollar contract as motivation.

Furthermore -- that is, if people cared -- East Baton Rouge Parish public schools would be a model system for the nation, not a failing morass of struggling students, fetid facilities and demoralized educators. One that's becoming blacker, and blacker, and blacker still with every passing school year.

For some insane reason, middle-class whites there are content to pay an astronomical "private-school tax" to keep their children out of the under-resourced and horribly mismanaged East Baton Rouge system, as opposed to paying the taxes and exercising the civic vigilance necessary to ensure a first-rate public system.

What was it the Supreme Court said about "separate and unequal"? That's what exists in Baton Rouge -- and across Louisiana -- today.

And anyone could tell you that a good public-school system is the foundation for building a better city. A city the likes of Les Miles would be crazy to leave, no matter what.

SO, GO AHEAD. March for Les. Beg him to stay. Perhaps he'll take pity on you and do what you ask.

But do you think you could spare a couple of hours, and a little concern, for your own children -- or for somebody else's not-so-fortunate children -- and have a little march for them, too?

Preferably one utilizing pitchforks, torches, tar and feathers.

Be careful with your dreams. They may come true.

Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue. And the dreams that you dare to dream, really do come true.

Harold Arlen wrote it, and Judy Garland lived it to a nightmarish end at age 47.

Sometimes, over the rainbow, the dreams that come true aren't all what they're cracked up to be. And you better be careful about those dreams that you dare to dream, lest they really do come true.

And break your damn heart.

RIGHT NOW, it's starting to look like Louisiana State's football coach, Les Miles, has an appointment to meet the dream of a true Michigan Man. Miles has the chance to try to fill the shoes of his old coach and mentor, Bo Schembechler, after Lloyd Carr has given up on trying to do just that.

And this grand opportunity to try to go home again comes as Miles and his LSU Tigers chase after a national championship. Could there be anything better than that?

Sure, doing that at your alma mater. Being a hometown hero back in the place you count as home.

Be careful of your dreams. Sometimes they only partially come true.

Can that count as one definition of "nightmare"? I think so, and I know a little something about that.

When you think you have it made, it's important to remember a couple of things: S*** happens, and people can be real jerks. It all falls under The Fall. You know, Adam, Eve, serpent, apple.

Ever since The Fall, we've dealt with sin, exile, death and chaos. Our dreams are subject to all of those, which quickly can turn them into nightmares.

And sometimes, you think you've landed yourself a really sweet gig. The powers that be tell you how much they love you. They tell you how much they need you. They pay you a nice chunk of change. All of this happens right at the point where you say, "I'm livin' the dream."

Then, of course, life intervenes. Unless you are exceptionally charmed, things don't always go quite right. You encounter slackers, backbiters and screw-ups. Sometimes, you are one -- or all -- of the above.

And then, to rip off another popular song:

Baby, baby
Where did our love go?
And all your promises
Of a love forever more?

REMEMBER POPE FM? That was an occasional series of posts I did about a Catholic FM station I really worked at, though the name has been changed to protect the guilty. In 1999, I thought I could be there forever.

I'm not there now. It's The Fall, dammit.

See, I loved that station, even though the programming wasn't always my cup of tea. I learned a lot, and I did a lot of good there, and I think I made a "religious" station just a bit more accessible to people who don't live in church . . . and who don't see life as a never-ending progression of bad liturgical music and stern church ladies.

The Catholic Church pretty much has been in disarray ever since the Second Vatican Council, despite that council having been much needed. What I learned from my "dream job" is that the folks who think they have the answers on how to set her straight again are pretty screwed up themselves.

Misplaced priorities and toxic spirituality have no ideology. The center did not hold, and one lunatic program director and several crises of conscience later, I was out of a job. The alternative would have been worse.

Still, I felt as though I'd been through a divorce. A nasty divorce from someone I once had loved.

I HAD SEEN borderline-crazy and completely wrong things done there in the name of Jesus Christ, by the people who ran a radio station that professed to have the Catholic answer. I had just seen the crazy underbelly of, and cold cynicism within, a tool of the Church I sought out as a refuge 17 years ago.

I almost lost my faith. The last thing I did as I gathered up my things and walked out of my office for the last time was to pitch a crucifix on the floor. What had gone on there under Jesus' dying gaze, the indefensible that had been defended in Christ's name -- indeed, under the nose of Jesus Himself in the Pope FM chapel's tabernacle -- was scandalous and a sacrilege.

I had come to believe that not only did the Church not have the answer, it didn't even have a clue.

Do you know how that feels? Do you know what it feels like to have something precious to you start to leave an exceedingly bad taste in your mouth?

It feels like The Fall. And it breaks your heart.

I am still Catholic, by the grace of God. I finally internalized the reality that the Church is not Pope FM, nor is it the flawed men who lead it. Pope FM is a flawed evangelist for the Church; the bishops are compromised shepherds who sometimes neglect their flock.

I am a Bad Catholic, trying to get to tomorrow from today. Intact.

We all are The Fall.

AND THE TROUBLE with our dreams is they sometimes come true . . . and aren't nearly so dreamy. I hope Les Miles thinks about that before leaving a pretty decent gig for his "dream job."

We all know that coaching is a do-or-die, cutthroat kind of profession, all the noble collegiate bromides aside. Boosters are cold, and fans are nuts -- I know this, I are one. A fan, that is. Don't have the scratch to be a booster.

If Michigan were to betray a loyal and true Michigan Man -- or if the loyal and true Michigan Man were somehow to betray it -- could Les take it? Could a coach's coach make the necessary halftime adjustments to his broken heart?

Aye, there be the rub.