The Fourth of July has come and gone, and two months of summer stretch invitingly ahead. When I was young in Ohio, this meant storms off the lake, lazy days of green, bike rides to the municipal pool, ball games, hot days, more temperate nights, window fans and fresh produce from roadside stands.

Now, 500 miles farther south and 50 years closer to climate cataclysm, it means scorching days, uninterrupted soul-sapping humidity, and air conditioning turned up high. But some things never change. Summer is still about sweet corn, blue water and bikes. In this case, the yellow jersey of the Tour de France.

I don’t frequent the neighborhood pool because I’m too ancient to enjoy being buffeted by boisterous kids, but I am a few hours from an actual ocean where I can float luxuriously off an uncrowded beach, buoyed up by salt water, until eaten by a shark whose usual lunch has been overfished to extinction.

Sweet corn is already in, three weeks before it would ripen back in Ohio. My purveyor then was the Rosbough farm. I was in school with one of the Rosbough girls. The farm now lies buried beneath an I-71 cloverleaf. My purveyor now is the Rudd Family Farm, and their milk-and-honey style hybrid is glorious. Far superior to yesteryear’s Seneca Chief.

I am a child of the Corn Belt, and there’s a picture of me in a high chair chomping contentedly on an ear of corn, the king of summer cuisine. The corn, not me. Sure you can feed corn to the pigs, grind it or cream it or distill it into corn liquor. You can make it into corn relish or fritters or pone or hush puppies or tortillas, or even render it into corn syrup, but that’s all sacrilege.

Corn is fresh sweet corn, and another product of the Corn Belt, Calvin Trillin, once described a corn maven’s perfect recipe for its preparation. Here’s the secret, which I am happy to share. “He always waits until dinner is precisely three and a half minutes away before snapping a few cobs off the stalk in his backyard and passing them to his son, who is faster at short distances, to shuck as he proceeds at a dead run to the pot of boiling water on the stove.” Shakespeare said, “Ripeness is all,” but when it comes to summer produce freshness is everything.

Fortified by sweet corn and a dip in the ocean, I am able to loll contentedly in front of a big screen TV and immerse myself in the greatest, extreme sporting event ever conceived by the mind of man – three weeks, two thousand miles around the hexagon of France in killing heat, lashing rain, mountain chill, through cities and countryside, up bleak escarpments, plummeting down to bucolic byways alongside languid rivers and through twisting ancient streets.

Part of the pleasure is seeing the beautiful country of France whiz by from bike level or float beneath the helicopter cameras covering the action. This year’s race began with a three day prelude in the Netherlands and Belgium before heading into Picardy, Normandy, Brittany and on to Alps and Pyrenees.

America has always been careless of its natural heritage. The state of our frowzy rivers alongside the manicured banks of Europe’s are a disgrace. But our built environment used to challenge the world in the years after World War II when our roads and bridges, ports and airports were odes to modernity. But for the last 40 years under the feckless parsimony of a philosophy that damns all government investment as creeping socialism, visiting Europe or Japan, Australia or even China has become an embarrassment for Americans.

Our country looks like the Third World alongside the sleek new bridges, the beautifully maintained cities and towns, the gleaming airports and bustling ports that are on display as the cyclists flash across the continent of Europe. The Old World looks new and our New World looks like bankrupt, bombed out, gutted Detroit.

If, at a time of low interest rates and high unemployment, we cannot summon the will to maintain our homeland, when will we do so? And what kind of future does such short-sightedness portend? A sadly diminished one, I fear. American visitors abroad are regularly shocked by the contrast. One can only imagine the contempt foreign visitors must feel for our crumbling roads, dysfunctional airports and collapsing bridges. We have squandered our birthright for a mess of tax cuts.

A century ago Oswald Spengler, brooding about the Decline of the West, was asked about America. Might it not prove to be the savior of Western civilization? He summed us up dismissively as “a bunch of dollar grabbers. No past, no future.” Once this might have seemed like the sour grapes of an Old World threatened with obsolescence. Now it seems prophetic.