Your Daily '80s: Afternoon TV

It's the fall of 1987 in Omaha. You're a vidhead.

What to watch, what to watch on TV this afternoon?

Well, you can watch this.


Or you can watch that.

Gross misconduct

What does it say about Omaha as the excitement capital of the Midwest when a championship high-school volleyball coach decides she's going to let her freak flag fly in . . . Grand Island?

Talk about not only gross misconduct -- or, in this case, Gross misconduct -- but I think there may be some "get a life" issues in play here as well. Let me be blunt: Coach (or ex-Coach, as the case may be), you do realize you are (were) the coach here of a high-school girls volleyball team, right?

And that you just won the Nebraska state championship and not the Olympic gold medal, right?

And that, like, you're waaaaaaay past your teen-age years, never served a single ace or made a single kill in the tournament and are supposed to be the adult here, right?

NEVER MIND. The Omaha World-Herald makes it pretty clear she never thought of any of that:

Korrine Schuster apparently is no longer the Omaha Gross volleyball coach, though the reasons for her departure are unclear.

Kearney-based television station NTV reported on its website Monday night that Schuster was removed from the Midtown Holiday Inn where the Cougars were staying after capturing their second consecutive Class B state volleyball championship. Officer Butch Hurst of the Grand Island Police Department was quoted as saying there was a disturbance at the location.

The station reported that no one was arrested, but police said Schuster was removed from the property after police received a call about 2:45 a.m. Sunday.

Hurst said, “At the time officers thought she was intoxicated, and she alleges she was coach of Omaha Gross,” the station's report said. The officer also was quoted as saying that “a female was being referred to the Hall County Attorney's Office for disturbing the peace.”

The television report added it wasn't clear what happened at the hotel, located just blocks from the Heartland Events Center — site of the state tournament. Further, the TV station said the police report made no reference whether any girls were involved.

The parent of a senior player said Tuesday that none were.

Gross president Beckie Cleveland was quoted in the TV report as apologizing for actions out of line with the Catholic school's mission. She also was quoted as saying that Schuster was no longer employed there, but declined to comment further.

KORRINE, all I have to say is that girls like you are why I wanted nothing more, as a 16-year-old, than to be the only male student at St. Joseph's Academy, the Catholic girls school in Baton Rouge.

But you're not a hot-to-trot Catholic schoolgirl. You were part of Catholic-school officialdom. Yet you were pulling crap like that.

Even as a hormone-crazed teen-age male, I would have found that just . . . well, gross.

It helps to know thy enemy

Suttle recall spokesman Jeremy Aspen explains to the Omaha press that
the Republican Guard committed volunteers have crushed the mayor.

In case you were inclined to mistake the Mayor Suttle Recall Committee for serious people with legitimate concerns and a well-thought-out plan for righting what's wrong with Omaha, your last illusion just disappeared.

In its place is a clear picture of a bunch of spoiled, angry asshats taking the money of gullible, equally irate Omahans and using it to throw a very public and -- at times -- very funny temper tantrum.

Take Saturday morning, for example. A gaggle of petition circulators in Elkhorn spotted some easy marks walking down the street and started selling hard the notion of how Omahans needed to get rid of that no-good, tax-raisin', outta-touch scalawag Jim Suttle.

One of the people they were trying to convince to throw the bum out, however, was . . . the bum. Mayor Jim Suttle.

IT'S ALL in this morning's Omaha World-Herald:

Recall petition workers unwittingly made their pitch to Suttle Saturday morning as he took a chilly walking tour of the Elkhorn business district with a small group of local boosters.

“He thought it was kind of funny,” said his spokeswoman, Aida Amoura.

The three recall backers — two men and one woman — approached the group.

Suttle played along for a while, said Elkhorn businesswoman Jennifer Pospichal, who described the exchange this way:

“What are you guys working on?” Suttle asked.

“We're trying to recall the mayor,” one man said.

Pospichal said it was obvious that the recall worker, who told Suttle he was not from Omaha, didn't realize whom he was talking to. She asked him if he was interested in meeting the mayor. When the recall worker said he was too busy for that, she motioned in Suttle's direction.

The man looked shocked, said Pospichal, an officer of the Elkhorn Station Main Street group.

“It was really hilarious,” she said. “He just turned in his tracks and started walking on the other side of the street.”

OBVIOUSLY, the guy -- the whole bunch of recall backers -- had no clue who Suttle was, or that they were trying to get the mayor to sign up to recall himself.

The recall committee wants you to believe these people are eminently qualified to tell Omahans -- who can recognize their own mayor when they bump into him on the street -- why their mayor is a bum. And then cajole them into signing a recall petition, triggering a special recall election that the city can't afford.

Which, of course, likely would end up raising taxes that much more, because the money has to come from somewhere. Just like mercenary recall workers, I guess.

What may be even funnier than some clueless carpetbagger asking the target of a recall petition to sign on the dotted line was how recall spokesman Jeremy Aspen tried to spin the unspinnable:

Aspen said the non-Omahan who spoke with Suttle was a paid worker who helps “coach” other petition circulators as they seek potential signers. Actual circulators must be Nebraska residents.

For Suttle and the recall workers to show up at the same place Saturday was a coincidence, Aspen said, but it illustrates that Suttle opponents are working hard to get the nearly 27,000 signatures needed to force a special election. The recall group has until Friday to turn in its petitions.

“It does demonstrate our presence,” he said.

IT DEMONSTRATES something, all right.

When TV was but a punk kid of 10

In 1949, this was the NBC Television Network. It stretched from New York to St. Louis, all hooked up to the coaxial cable, as ably explained that year by Howdy Doody, Buffalo Bob Smith and Clarabell the Clown.

If your city wasn't on the hookup, then your local network affiliate (assuming you had a TV station at all) got its national programming, what there was of it, via kinescopes -- 16-millimeter film recordings of a TV monitor at the New York studios. The hinterlands got network shows when they got them.

And videotape still was the better part of a decade in the future.

What you see here -- the state of the art four years after the end of World War II -- features less capability and lower quality than a 4G-enabled smart phone today. And it was miraculous.

As primitive as it seems today, it would revolutionize an entire society in the years following 1949.


THOUGH TELEVISION still was very much in its infancy in April 1949, NBC was in a mood to celebrate how far the medium had come since the advent of regular American broadcasts 10 years earlier in New York.

Through the New York facilities of WNBT (now WNBC), here we have a kinescope of TV's first anniversary gala. NBC was celebrating a decade of television, and the network was throwing a party.

Kind of an austere party by today's standards, but a wingding nevertheless.


IN THIS CASE, the folks at WNBT were thanking their lucky stars for now-forgotten singing stars, because not only was TV history in short supply in 1949, but also reliable ways of archiving old programs. That tends to make retrospectives problematic.

Let's just say I hope you enjoy old kinescopes of fighter planes taking off from the deck of an aircraft carrier. That was a really big deal back then -- it wasn't the content; it was that the TV people could broadcast from an underway naval vessel at all.


IT'S TIME to go, now. And, of course, that would be Bulova Watch Time.

Your Daily '80s: Square Pegs

Before there was Sex in the City, there was virginal and geeky at Weemawee High.

It's Square Pegs, and it premieres Sept. 27. And yes, that's Sarah Jessica Parker.

Welcome back to 1982. It's a totally different head. Totally.

Lou Holtz, you've just been Favre'd!

Via Deadspin, this YouTube vid of Lou Holtz being an a-hole -- and picking on the girls, to boot -- back when he was at South Carolina.

Look at Dr. Jekyll's Mr. Hyde here, and realize that he was making a young intern cry just because he had to wait five minutes instead of one minute, like he'd been told.

So much for Mr. Nice Guy. St. Lou, as it were.

What amazes me is how, the more big-shotty people become, the more dumbassy they become, too. You would think that if you absolutely, positively had to act like a Richard (Hey, this is a fambly blog, of sorts.) you'd have enough sense not to do it in front of a TV camera.

You'd think you'd realize that someone, somewhere was rolling the videotape.

But, no. Which just goes to show you, we've always had Facebook. It's just that we used to call it television, and you generally had to be a high-profile a-hole to be exposed to the world as one.

Eventually.

Have fun, Coach. Somewhere in South Carolina, "theREALpeto" is proving the axiom that revenge is, indeed, a dish best served cold.

A vortex of suck in Sarpy County

The Omaha Royals -- which, by the way, are no longer actually in Omaha -- are changing the minor-league team's name to the Omaha Storm Chasers?

Really?

YEAH, really, says the Omaha World-Herald:

Alan Stein, president of the Omaha Royals, unveiled the club's new name Monday night at the Embassy Suites Convention Center. The switch was made as Omaha's Triple-A baseball team makes the move to Werner Park in Sarpy County next spring.

Since 1969, the team has been named the Royals, the team's major-league affiliate, for all but three years, when it was named the Golden Spikes (1999-2001).

Martie Cordaro, general manager of the Storm Chasers, said the process of changing the name began in May 2009. The club hired Plan B Branding, a branding and logo company from Las Vegas, to research the Omaha area and hold focus groups on whether a name change should be made. The Royals polled the public on its website for name suggestions and then had the public vote on the top three choices.

Cordaro said the fans named the team, while Stein and the staff approved it.

"I'm very pleased," Stein said. "It's an extremely perfect name for Omaha. It will be a lot of fun. What I like about it is being able to get into the area schools and talk about science and weather safety with kids."

I DON'T KNOW about you, but the first thing I think about when it comes to Triple-A baseball is creating opportunities to tell kids about weather safety.

What's to tell about weather safety? "Hey, kids! When the siren goes off, run to the basement. And don't drive Mommy and Daddy's car into swiftly moving water during a flash flood!"

For God's sake.

Why not use the team's new identity to do some real "safety education"? Why not the Omaha Crack Hos? Or maybe -- and this one is a real hummer -- the Sarpy Syphilis.

No, really. I think the Sarpy Syphilis has a certain ring to it -- on so many levels, it just works, don't you think?

Call the new mascot Clappy (and, if you think about it, the same mascot could work for either the Sarpy Syphilis or the Omaha Crack Hos), and tell kids to "avoid the clap." And he/she/it could go to schools and pass out those condoms that look like candy coins.

You couldn't buy enough advertising to get that kind of publicity.

Your Daily '80s: Saturday morning TV

In 1989, I -- blessedly -- was long, long past my Saturday morning cartoon-watching prime.

Really, Punky Brewster was bad enough in prime time.

Wow. Just wow.

I think this is what Pat Cadell, an old liberal warhorse from the Carter White House, and a former Clinton Administration pollster, Douglas E. Schoen, are trying to tell President Obama and the nation:

People? See this here? This is the abyss.

Take another step, and you just might fall into it. That would be bad.

Basically, your -- all of your -- intransigence, venom, hatred of people unlike yourselves and willingness to do anything -- anything -- to make sure that you win and, more importantly, your "enemies" lose is pushing us toward that abyss. You are on a path that leads over the edge and into nothingness.

Nothingness as a people.

Nothingness as a coherent political entity.

And certainly nothing in the way of a decent life for your children or future generations of Americans. Some of you have forgotten the meaning of commonweal -- you think it's a dirty word, some radical notion cooked up by Karl Marx or Friedrich Engels.

Others of you believe in commonweal, only you think it's an excuse for some of you to wield the power of the state as a bludgeon against people you hate . . . ironically because you contend they are "hateful." Of course, hateful nowadays is a moving target, unaffected by objective standards of judging such.

One side or another of you may prevail -- that's certainly doable. It will be your funeral.

WHAT IS IT that Cadell and Schoen have written that I feel the need to boil down for you?

Oh, nothing much. Just an op-ed piece in The Washington Post calling on Obama to forgo running for re-election in 2012.

They want him to throw politics out the window, try to stop the division of America into warring camps and to, in effect, form a bipartisan national-unity government for the remainder of his term.

They think that either he does that, or there will be hell to pay. For all of us.

To wit:

This is a critical moment for the country. From the faltering economy to the burdensome deficit to our foreign policy struggles, America is suffering a widespread sense of crisis and anxiety about the future. Under these circumstances, Obama has the opportunity to seize the high ground and the imagination of the nation once again, and to galvanize the public for the hard decisions that must be made. The only way he can do so, though, is by putting national interests ahead of personal or political ones.

To that end, we believe Obama should announce immediately that he will not be a candidate for reelection in 2012.

If the president goes down the reelection road, we are guaranteed two years of political gridlock at a time when we can ill afford it. But by explicitly saying he will be a one-term president, Obama can deliver on his central campaign promise of 2008, draining the poison from our culture of polarization and ending the resentment and division that have eroded our national identity and common purpose.

We do not come to this conclusion lightly. But it is clear, we believe, that the president has largely lost the consent of the governed. The midterm elections were effectively a referendum on the Obama presidency. And even if it was not an endorsement of a Republican vision for America, the drubbing the Democrats took was certainly a vote of no confidence in Obama and his party. The president has almost no credibility left with Republicans and little with independents.

IT'S A reasonable suggestion. I'd call it "taking the high road," only radically so.

I also can't imagine any American politician actually doing it. I hope I'm wrong, because I think I might -- tentatively, at least -- associate myself with their remarks. Read on.

If the president adopts our suggestion, both sides will be forced to compromise. The alternative, we fear, will put the nation at greater risk. While we believe that Obama can be reelected, to do so he will have to embark on a scorched-earth campaign of the type that President George W. Bush ran in the 2002 midterms and the 2004 presidential election, which divided Americans in ways that still plague us.

Obama owes his election in large measure to the fact that he rejected this approach during his historic campaign. Indeed, we were among those millions of Democrats, Republicans and independents who were genuinely moved by his rhetoric and purpose. Now, the only way he can make real progress is to return to those values and to say that for the good of the country, he will not be a candidate in 2012.

Should the president do that, he - and the country - would face virtually no bad outcomes. The worst-case scenario for Obama? In January 2013, he walks away from the White House having been transformative in two ways: as the first black president, yes, but also as a man who governed in a manner unmatched by any modern leader. He will have reconciled the nation, continued the economic recovery, gained a measure of control over the fiscal problems that threaten our future, and forged critical solutions to our international challenges. He will, at last, be the figure globally he has sought to be, and will almost certainly leave a better regarded president than he is today. History will look upon him kindly - and so will the public.

WOW. Just wow.

Your Daily '80s: Early Fox . . . and early Bart

Remember the early days of Fox?

Actually, you probably don't -- not unless you lived in one of the scattered places that had a Fox affiliate in 1986 or 1987. I didn't.

No, we had to get our Tracey Ullman fix on the road. And what the hell are those really bizarre cartoon segments? The Stinsons? The Simons? The Simpsons? Something like that.






There you go. Welcome back to Nov. 1, 1987.

Y'know, those Simons . . . Simpsons . . . whatever . . . are weird, but I think they could catch on.

Spanning the Gulf betwixt skid marks, skid marks

When I was 7, I thought this commercial had it goin' on.

After 42 years, my opinion hasn't changed. No Nox against it at all.

Thank you! Thank you very much -- I'm here all week.

3 Chords & the Truth: Wintry mix

Don't let the name of this week's episode fool you.

That, for the most part, was no wintry mix out there. For the most part all evening, it's been a flat-out snowstorm in Omaha, by God, Nebraska. And suddenly the forecast for a "wintry mix" became one for "3- to 6 inches."

You know what kind of weather that is, don't you?

It's stay inside, grab a cup of something hot, grab something warm to curl up in . . . and put on 3 Chords & the Truth. Because while it's snowing like the dickens outside, the Big Show -- safely inside -- is offering up a "wintry mix" today.

And one set in particular is downright toasty. Really toasty. If you know what I mean.

WELL, that's about all I have to say about this week's edition of Everybody's Favorite Podcast.

Cold outside.

Warm inside.

Wintry mix.

Good music.

Some of it . . . very unwinterlike.

If you know what I mean.

DID I mention it snowed today? Did I mention the music's fine, so come on in?

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

Your Daily '80s: Andy & Dave, 1980

Here's a little agit for the never-believer. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Here's a little ghost for the offering. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Here's a truck stop instead of St. Peter's. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Mr. Andy Kaufman's gone wrestling (wrestling bears).
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

Hey Andy, did you hear about this one? Tell me, are you locked in the punch?
Hey Andy, are you goofing on Elvis? Hey baby, are we losing touch?
If you believed they put a man on the moon, man on the moon
If you believe there's nothing up my sleeve, then nothing is cool

-- R.E.M., 1992

The importance of being Bobby

The only thing that surpasses politicians' rank hypocrisy amid our never-ending Left-Right food fight is politicians' capacity for self-aggrandizement and lack of capacity for introspection.

This is how a ditwad governor of a failed Southern state manages to write a memoir at age 39, throwing in chapters about how to better run America while his own state sinks into a Third Worldish fever swamp and another complaining that President Obama was mean to him and Rahm Emanuel cursed his chief of staff.

(In Emanuel's defense, when dealing with a governor who named himself after Bobby Brady, and whose chief of staff is named Timmy Teepell, tamping down one's junior-high PTSD might be too much to ask of a man.)

AND, OF COURSE, Politico is on the story:

On Obama’s first trip to Louisiana after the disaster, the governor describes how the president took him aside on the tarmac after arriving to complain about a letter that Jindal had sent to the administration requesting authorization for food stamps for those who had lost their jobs because of the spill.

As Jindal describes it, the letter was entirely routine, yet Obama was angry and concerned about looking bad.

"Careful," he quotes the president as warning him, "this is going to get bad for everyone."

Nearby on the tarmac, Jindal recalls, then-White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel was chewing out his own chief of staff, Timmy Teepell.

“If you have a problem pick up the f——n’ phone,” Jindal quotes Emanuel telling Teepell.

The governor asserts that the White House had tipped off reporters to watch the exchange on the New Orleans tarmac that Sunday in May and deemed it a “press stunt” that symbolized what’s wrong with Washington.

“Political posturing becomes more important than reality,” he writes.

What might explain why Obama and Emanuel were so angry at Jindal is that the governor released his food stamp request the previous day to the media and indicated that he wanted a response by the close of business Monday.

AND PEOPLE wonder why reporters drink.

Probably because vast quantities of hard liquor is the only thing that will stop the voices of politicians in your head. Especially if the politician is the anthropomorphized cognitive dissonance that is Bobby Jindal.

Your Daily '80s: Uncle Walter sells the '60s

And that's the way it was, advertising '60s nostalgia in 1984. He was Walter Cronkite. Good night.

America 2010: A tragedy in four acts

Sorry, Glenn. In this case, "puppetmaster" George Soros was right.

"A 1957 movie -- made by a communist, appropriately" -- Soros' alleged "gift" for Glenn Beck. That is, according to Beck. You see, Soros thinks the Fox News Channel's resident paranoiac is the real-life "Lonesome" Rhodes from A Face in the Crowd, Elia Kazan's 1957 "communist" classic.

According to Beck.

Well, heck. It must be true, the John Birch Society's magazine is picking up Beck's "exposé" of Soros and running with it.


OK, DOES Andy Griffith's character remind you of anyone here? Anyone at all?

Substitute Goldline for Vitajex, Lonesome's sponsor in the film. Anything come to mind now?


THANK GOD that the ultimate faith of "Lonesome" Beck's followers rests in the United States Constitution -- not a TV host. At least if Beck starts to steer them astray, the foundational document of our democratic republic -- and Tea Party America's exhaustive knowledge of it -- will be there to steer them (and us) away from the brink of something really nasty.


OH, S***.

I'll give you my $516.32 worth

I am a late Boomer. Either that means I was born in the year of our Lord 1961, or that I had red beans and rice for supper.

Take your pick.

But as a member of a now-aging generation, one facing the creeping shadows of mortality -- and occasionally the discomfort of gastric distress -- I am increasingly compelled to explain myself, my generation, to those who follow. I suppose this is part of the human need to leave a legacy, to live on in defiance of one's biological expiration date . . . ultimately, to not be forgotten.

To be understood is to, in some way, be less alienated from the rest of humanity. To offer a glimpse into one's thoughts, into one's soul, into one's influences and eccentricities is to seek common ground with generations who find us as mysterious as we find them.

And, yes, The Gong Show winners above were that Oingo Boingo. Oingo Boingo may be another thing that needs explaining, but not right now.


CHILDREN, look. This is who we were. Deep inside, somewhere, this is who we are.

This is who we were before we began to take ourselves so damned seriously. The sum of what you see here is the totality -- or at least a reasonable facsimile -- of today's molders of the world you know.


HERE WE ARE. Understand us. Come to know us a little better.

And please do not gong us after 20 seconds have elapsed.

If you want to know why the world is the way it is, look at the . . . on second thought, avert your eyes. Ignorance is bliss.


WE, THE BOOMERS are not just a generation that now worries about heart health and contemplates bladder-control products.

We once were young. We once were 10 feet tall and bulletproof. We once rocked out. We once laughed.

And we once loved weird s***. Just like you.


TAKE IN what is before you now. Understand that this represents my generation's hopes, fears and insights into the human condition.


UNDERSTAND, too, that we once smoked dope. A lot, a lot of dope.

Which may or may not explain the tea party.

Good night, good luck . . . and I think I'll let Gene Gene the Dancing Machine take us to commercial.

One for Depends, no doubt.

Your Daily '80s: Before Late Night, mid-morning

Before there was The Late Show with David Letterman, there was Late Night With David Letterman, and before there was Late Night With David Letterman, there was The David Letterman Show. Which wasn't on late at all.

It didn't run long, just from June to October of 1980, but you can see what was to come in a couple of years. Not to mention what Jay Leno would be stealing in another decade or so.

So, welcome back to Sept. 30, 1980. Today's featured guest, Steve Martin.

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.

Your Daily '80s: Still wanna go to London

Speaking of "I wanna go to London," it's Lene Lovich on the BBC's Top of the Pops in 1981.

Apparently, she has a new toy.