Hill Street Blues, S1 E13 SEASON FINALE (sort of): Part One, The History Context
March 28, 1981
NOTE: Hi readers! Please note that this installment has two separate emails. The HSB summary is in the other one. Just a bigger blast for the season finale. Thanks - Scott
Week in Review
Mere days after we see the end credits of this episode of HSB, President Reagan will be shot in front of a hotel in DC.
In the aftermath of the shooting, when Reagan’s life, or his ability to lead, was in question, his Cabinet wobbled. This week, I want to give you a snapshot of palace intrigue between a war hawk and a future president in the days BEFORE the shooting that helps us understand why. I know, it’s a subplot, but it’s fun…
Alexander Haig was Reagan’s Secretary of State. He had an impressive history in war and politics.
As a battalion commander in Vietnam, he was once stranded with his troops, outnumbered 3-to-1, and encircled by enemy fire. He had a downright action movie moment to get them out and his award citation says he killed 592 in the battle.
He was President Nixon’s Chief of Staff all through Watergate, if you can imagine that job. He allegedly played an important part in convincing Nixon to resign, and was likely the key negotiator in getting Ford to pardon him.
Haig was then NATO’s “Supreme Allied Commander,” a job title he must have adored. While in Belgium, Haig himself was nearly assassinated when a planted land mine exploded under a bridge his car was traveling over.
But now, just three months into his stint as Reagan’s Secretary of State, things are chaotic. Haig is a power-hungry loose cannon. He voraciously supports authoritarians who are anti-Communist, including El Salvador’s government as it throttled its Marxist rebels. In a House Committee meeting last week he even suggested that the three American nuns who were murdered by El Salvador’s government death squads had been shot because they were “trying to run through a roadblock.” (!?)
When the authoritarian military government of Argentina invades Britain’s Falkland Islands in 1982, Haig will try to convince Reagan to support Argentina. Against Britain!
He likes to get involved in other departments and funding battles, hungry for influence and preeminence. Japanese trade, Agriculture, he has something to say about everyone’s business. “He thinks he’s President” said one White House aide this week.
A White House source was quoted claiming Haig had, in his first 65 days, already threatened to resign EIGHT times. A NYT editorial called him “pathetically naive” that any of this preening mattered.
Reagan makes his move. Tuesday, he names Vice President George Bush as his head of “crisis management” - a somewhat vague term, and a position often given to the National Security Advisor.
On Wednesday, Haig publicly announces his disapproval of the power shift. Public whining is not something Reagan appreciates. The next day, the President has to stand before the press in his turtleneck and riding boots and reassure everyone that Haig is still his “primary advisor.” Haig’s own aide called him a “wounded lion” Good grief.
Next Monday, when Reagan is shot, Bush is out of town in Austin, Texas. In a hasty DC press conference where reporters are asking who’s running the country, Haig says “I’m in control here in the White House.” His quote is probably the most enduring non-bullet related and non Jodie-Foster related legacy of the event, at least for history nerds. Here’s the video (46 seconds) of the quote. Doesn’t he look nervous? If you were watching this, fearing Reagan was dying, wouldn’t you be as well?
Haig will resign next year.
So there’s a fire in a Pennsylvania coal mine, which itself doesn’t sound unusual. But in the town of Centralia, with population of 1,200, the fire is burning underneath the town, spewing geysers of toxic gas into homes and opening steaming sinkholes in backyards.
The fire was started when a landfill leaked into an underground coal seam - and here’s the key - in 1962!! This fire is 19 years old.
A twelve year old was almost swallowed by a 250-foot sinkhole that collapsed under his feet. Grasping a tree root saved him. A guy discovered his furnace wasn’t working because the oxygen in his basement was 9% instead of the atmospheric 21% and fire wasn’t physically possible. A gas station owner put a dipstick in his underground gas tank and found the gasoline to be 172 degrees. People had to buy carbon monoxide detectors for their homes. They went off regularly, and residents would then open the windows to the cold and let the sulfurous odors in.
Did you guys know about everlasting mine fires? I did not. When this article was written, WHILE this article was written, there were 250 other mine fires burning in the USA. I looked up Centralia to see how it all resolved…
The Centralia fire? It’s still burning, right now 2022! Sixty years. Centralia is gone. In 1992 the governor condemned the whole town, and an adjacent town to the south was also abandoned. Now it’s a tourist attraction. Eternal underground fires. Really, did you guys know about this?
The Governor of Arkansas just signed a bill that was passed 22-2 in the state Senate. It requires that evolution and creationism be taught with “equal weight” in public schools as alternate theories. Remarkably, teaching evolution was completely illegal in Arkansas until SCOTUS invalidated the state law in 1968! Just 13 years ago!
The governor, Frank White, had just leveraged evangelical support last year to upset the previous incumbent governor. And he wanted to keep that endorsement.
The incumbent governor he defeated in 1980 was named Bill Clinton. Clinton would reclaim the office in 1982 and stay there until, well…
A quick peek at computers this week, leading to a retroactively cute quote. A NYT feature calls attention to the latest PC development - the handheld computer (HHC) that’s “small enough to fit in a coat pocket.”
The current leader in the race is the Panasonic/Quasar HHC. It has the look of a programmable calculator with a miniature full keyboard. It costs $600. For some perspective: It has 0.2Kb of programmable memory (about 100 words of text), “expandable” to 4Kb, 16Kb of onboard ROM, and its processor runs at 1MHz. Remember when this stuff mattered?
Anyway, my micro-point is that the architecture is entirely based on peripherals. You can connect a mini printer and extra memory, interface with a TV, or connect a modem to “access data banks that provide everything from stock quotations to airline schedules to newspaper articles” (Wait, what “data banks?”)
And that leads me to the quote, invoking an image of the future being an American Girl Doll-style suite of teeny tiny little office equipment. Here’s the prediction from a tech consulting firm:
“Businessmen will soon be carrying entire electronic offices with them, consisting of microcassette recorders, tiny printers, tiny televisions and small keyboards all attachable to a small computer” - NYT
Don’t you guys love this image as much as I do? Little tiny separate printers and monitors and memory drives, maybe with a 6-inch mini floor lamp, all sitting on the tray table of the “businessman” in the plane seat next to you? Maybe a tiny Keurig with tiny li’l cups.
Finally, wanna play a guessing game? Nestled on page 14 of the NYT Entertainment section Saturday, a very nice review of a 21-year old “wunderkind of Black music.”
“Four months ago, when [he] played the same club, it was half-empty. But word of mouth and widespread critical acclaim for his third album insured that the show would be sold out…Stylistically, [his] music breaks down the barriers between soul, funk and hard rock”
Give up? How about this hint:
“Wearing black bikini briefs, fringed high-heel boots and black thigh-high stockings, he is sexual license incarnate.”
Here’s a video from that very show at The Ritz. Check out the guitar solo at exactly 42:45 (NSFW for a good 5 minutes), or just watch his absolute stage command (at 21!) from about 8:30.
This show, by the way, is only about 6 months before Prince and his band got booed off the stage with all kinds of shit thrown at them by a crowd of 94,000 fans in L.A., while opening for the Stones. Which he never did again. After the tour, Keith Richards basically claimed Prince deserved it because of his attitude. C’mon, Keith!:
“Prince has to find out what it means to be a prince. That’s the trouble with conferring a title on yourself before you’ve proved it. That was his attitude when he opened for us on the tour, and it was insulting to our audience. You don’t try to knock off the headline like that when you’re playing a Stones [concert]…He’s a prince who thinks he’s a king already. Good luck to him.” - Keith Richards
As a reminder, Prince is his actual birth name…