Mort Report is a labor of love by old-style correspondents with lifetimes on the road and young ones with fresh eyes. Our philosophy is simple: we report at first hand with analysis based on non-alternative fact, not opinion. If we get something wrong, we fix it.
MIGENNES, France — A great joy in life has been keeping my noble old boat afloat. Her teak and oak planking evokes early civilizations venturing across a bounteous planet. But after a long refit, she is in troubled waters, either a Noah's Ark or the Titanic.
This is less of a Mort Report than just Mort, a cri de coeur from the deck of Almeria. I've learned much about people on rivers that Caesar's legions followed to build an empire that fell from hubris, greed and cruelty. The world changes. Human nature does not.
Crippled nations once had time to recover from imperial overreach or a madman's folly. No longer. All eight billion of us are in the same boat, headed in the wrong direction.
I call these dispatches "non-prophet." Reporters ought to focus on the present based on the past rather than speculate on the future. But what seasoned world-watchers see from hard facts is dead clear. We are rudderless, awash in perilous cross currents.
PARIS — Beyond the bullying and buffoonery, Donald Trump is fast reshaping the United States into his own cruel, greed-driven image. Americans have only months left to snap awake and pitchfork their delusional despot into history.
By now, anyone who enables his ambitions without the excuse of cognitive impairment is complicit. Hillary Clinton's impolitic "basket of deplorables" remark was premature. A decade later, it is a tepid understatement.
That "shining city on a hill" Ronald Reagan exalted is darkening fast. The Soviet empire had collapsed. China was in turmoil. India was a poor backwater. Today, they are united to muscle aside America's hegemony a year before its 250th anniversary.
I'm just 82, with only 70 years of watching nature turn hostile as dictators and zealots veer toward nuclear terrorism if not doomsday war. But nonagenarians with sharp memories ought to scare the crap out of anyone who takes the time to listen.
Consider my poet pal Willis Barnstone, now 97. We met during Argentina's dirty war in the 1970s. Plainclothes police grabbed people off the streets on mere suspicion of whatever and locked them away in secret, or worse, with no judicial niceties.
He was there to translate Jorge Borges, who later remarked: “Four of the best things in America are Walt Whitman’s Leaves, Herman Melville’s Whale, the sonnets of Willis Barnstone’s Secret Reader, and my daily Corn Flakes."
