Opinion

America seems to be failing, both at home and around the world. But why?

David French published a thoughtful op-ed in Monday’s New York Times titled The Fire of Stupidity Can’t Be Contained, identifying many of the symptoms of our national decline and wondering out loud why this is happening now.

When I was growing up in the pre-cable, pre-streaming '70s and '80s, there was this thing called “appointment television.” It meant a lot of people were watching the same show at the same time, because it was only on once. If you missed it, you’d have to wait for this thing called a “rerun” in the summer, when there was almost no original programming. Instead, the three networks, which were all we had besides a local channel here and there, just recycled all of the shows from their seasons, while everyone took the summer off, as if Hollywood were a school.

“Appointment television” in my house meant watching 60 Minutes every Sunday night on CBS. My mother would order Chinese food (Jewish, New Jersey, ‘nuff said), and my father would go pick it up, returning with a giant box stuffed with all of our Americanized favorites. It was the only meal of the week eaten in front of the TV as a family. We sat on the couch and ate off of small square side tables, each of which had a border of fake jewels, one of my earliest tactile memories.

I was a news junkie long before it was cool — was it ever cool? — or even common.

Growing up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I was probably the only kid on my block, maybe in the entire city and state, who planted himself in front of the television every night to watch Walter Cronkite on CBS News.

Can you feel it?

There’s something weird in the air, and I think I’m perfectly justified in tossing out this piece of unfounded conjecture based on sheer gut instinct:

In 1971, Don McLean wrote an eight-and-a-half-minute elegy for the American soul. “American Pie” begins with a plane crash in an Iowa cornfield in 1959 that killed rock and rollers Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper.

But the song was never really about the crash. It was about what happened after: the loss of innocence, the corruption of joy, the day a culture stops believing in its own music. McLean called it the day the music died.

It’s so weird how Donald Trump just can’t stop defaming the one woman who’s ever held him legally accountable for his sexual violence.

Trump just can’t be told “no,” so he keeps appealing the case that writer E. Jean Carroll famously won against him after enduring years of his well-documented defamation, both online and off, after she accused him of sexually abusing her — which a jury later found him civilly liable for.

Commenters to this website often lament that too many opinion columns predict Trump's imminent downfall over his latest scandal, yet it has yet to come. But, while some of us do believe there are still things that might tear him down, we know there are people who certainly can. You.

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Corporations can now vote in Delaware. And they’re doing it.

Seriously. Not dystopian science fiction or a new novel by an AI version of George Orwell. Actual corporations — what America’s first Supreme Court Justice, John Marshall, in 1819 called “an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law” — are today voting in elections for everything from the mayor and town council to referendums on corporate taxes and limits on corporate behavior.