OPINION:
Perhaps the best tweet from all of the twitterings that tore up Twitter during and after the already-infamous Stormy Daniels sex tell-all on “60 Minutes” on CBS went, in part, like this: “This is the news cycle America deserves.”
That was from Business Insider’s Josh Barro, and he’s quite right: The America of today, the one that’s culturally sick and morally depraved, can be summed in a single phrase, Stormy Daniels.
If America weren’t so loose with the godly morals, this story would never have seen the light of day — because the consumption wouldn’t be there for it. America’s ears wouldn’t stand for it.
The press wouldn’t cover it because there wouldn’t be an audience that wanted to hear it. Stormy Daniels: What a sad reflection of ourselves.
Times sure have changed since even John F. Kennedy.
The nation’s grown much coarser, weaker in the spiritual realm, hungrier for the stuff of gossip and tabloid fodder. So Stormy’s the news cycle. A porn star’s taken front and center in the public’s eye.
When Mimi Alford, a young White House intern of 19 years, allegedly lost her virginity to the predatory Kennedy during a 1962 bedroom encounter — an incident that in a court of law could very well have been called rape — little was said. And by little, that means nothing. Decades later, she wrote: “Friends invariably said, ’You must see it, Mimi — you were set up! He was a predator.’ A few went a step further and brought up the words ’rape.’ I didn’t see it that way. That night, in the midst of my shock and confusion, I felt for the first time the thrill of being desired.”
Nobody would’ve listened to her then, anyway.
Can you imagine the CBS of the early 1960s putting a Mimi on national television to talk about her sex life with the president?
The American public wouldn’t have it. The media wouldn’t touch it.
Stormy?
She’s got the attention of the media, the nation, even the world.
From Kennedy to President Donald Trump may be just a few short years, but it’s a world of difference in terms of culture and politics. The moral compass, the moral pursuits, the moral interests and tastes of the nation have dramatically changed.
But as Barro’s tweet finished: This may be the news cycle a culturally rotted America deserves, “but [it’s] not the one it needs right now.”
Indeed. It’s not the one America needs at all.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.
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