Rex Smith

We all support free speech – or say we do, anyway. A poll last year found that 93 percent of Americans consider the First Amendment vital. But what do we think about misinformation and intentional disinformation – which now runs rampant, especially on social media, with potentially deadly consequences? What happens when our right to free speech runs smack up against lies that can put people and whole nations at risk, and that can alter history?

There was a telling moment in Donald Trump’s first press conference after returning to the Oval Office, when he encountered a sharp line of questioning by a network correspondent about his pardons of the January 6th rioters.

That guy Will Shakespeare gave us a lot of phrases that now come trippingly to the tongue. (Get it? That’s one of Shakespeare’s phrases.) But Shakespeare often gets credit for a line that actually was not his, namely, “All’s fair in love and war,” to which some folks now add, “and politics.” The attribution to Shakespeare is wrong – as is any countenancing of politics as a no-holds-barred brawl.

At a fire department garage in northern California, there’s a light bulb that has burned continuously for more than 120 years. So you may wonder, “Why have my bulbs at home been burning out while that one has kept shining?” It’s because a handful of powerful men decided a century ago that light bulbs should be made worse — that is, less long-lasting and dependable. And there’s a lesson in that for all of us.

At a fire department garage in northern California, there’s a light bulb that has burned continuously for more than 120 years. So you may wonder, “Why have my bulbs at home been burning out while that one has kept shining?” It’s because a handful of powerful men decided a century ago that light bulbs should be made worse — that is, less long-lasting and dependable. And there’s a lesson in that for all of us.

Not to sound like a grouchy old coot – though I have to admit to being part of that, anyway – but I miss those Upstate winters of deep snow and crystalline flakes cascading from the sky. It’s cold now, yes, but climate change has made wintertime beauty only a sporadic thing – a fact that I’m working on accepting, since spiritual leaders often counsel that acceptance will bring us peace. In the words of the New York-born Buddhist nun Pema Chodron, “Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.”

Probably about once a week or so during the nearly three decades that I led newsrooms, somebody would call me to gripe that the media was too focused on bad news. So it’s the media’s fault, the reasoning would go, that people are angry about the way things are going in America.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that the days are getting longer. Well, maybe not; the change is only by seconds so far. So probably you’re still grumpy about how it gets dark before you’ve even finished work, and then how it’s still dark when you get up and your dog wants to go for a morning walk.

On a steamy morning in the Philippines in 1975, Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier fought for the third time. The rematch is remembered as one of the greatest bouts in boxing history. Perhaps a billion people watched worldwide. Ali called it the “Thrilla in Manila.”

In the aftermath of the election, there’s a consensus in the commentariat – that is, the gaggle of people with big audiences paying attention to what they say about public affairs. And the commentariat says that we’re in a new era. The Trump Era doesn’t have a name yet, but there’s talk that the MAGA tide has swept away the last vestiges of Reaganism, which itself had replaced the government activism that FDR inspired.