Singing the Sequester Soap Opera

THERE are cracks in time when history bends and for an instant it seems as if the world itself stops turning, from that Sunday afternoon when our parents learned Pearl Harbor had been bombed to the football drill I was in the middle of coaching in Pensacola, Fla., when I first got the news that the Challenger had exploded. We may not agree on many things in this era of reflexive polarization, but here is one: nobody will remember where they were and what they were doing when the Great Sequester of 2013 kicked in.