Ron Howard sparks political debate by asking Twitter ‘When was America at its greatest?’

It’s meant as a “gotcha” for those wearing “Make America Great Again” hats. But it’s still a fair question… if you want to “make America great *again*” that means there was a time when America was great in a way that it is no longer.

This is the sort of question I’ve been asking for a decade or more on another subject… global warming. If the world is going to hell climate-wise and getting progressively worse, that means that if you go back in time there was a point when the climate was optimal. When was that?

But to the MAGA point: When do YOU, dear blog reader, think that America was at it’s greatest if you do indeed think that America needs to be made great *again*? Personally, I’ve never gone for the MAGA thing, because there does not seem to me to have been a singular point in time when I can say “yup, that was clearly the best and it’s all been downhill from there.” In some ways, the first half of the 60’s was a golden age: the US was going gangbusters in aerospace, the future looked awesome, nuclear reactors were sprouting up everywhere. But then there was Viet Nam and Great Society and race riots and hippies and every other damn thing. The 80’s under Reagan were a golden age of sorts: a return to pride, and again things looked up in aerospace, with SDI and NASP and all the rest… that didn’t actually come to fruition. And there was the late 40’s an the fifties… the US stood atop the world like a colossus, our power and enthusiasm were unmatched. But then there was Korea and the Red Scare and things kinda sucked if you were black.