Carl Hiassen: Sage for the ages

Carl Hiassen ruins a compulsively readable Miami New Times story chronicling Miami in the big bad 1980's (when snowfall was illegal and quite common) by interjecting crabby remarks about the alleged soullessness of the decade:

Hiaasen, moreover, is wary of anyone trying to romanticize the bad old days. "There are no deep truths there," he says of that period. "It didn't produce a single great novel, a single memorable piece of rock music that I can recall, and damn few movies that are worth watching twice."

Let's see: Born in the U.S.A., The Prague Orgy, Let It Be, Scarecrow, Blue Velvet, Purple Rain, She's So Unusual, any Madonna or New Order single, Run DMC...you get the point. OK, it was a grisly period (hell, I lived through them), one from which we're still in many ways recovering; but Hiassen need not turn into one of the septugenarians decomposing on the porch of a South Beach hotel in 1982.