NEW YORK – I think I’ve figured out the American penchant for bombing the crap out of airfields in so many places around the world. It’s just our innate generosity. We want to bring them to the level of La Guardia.

This began as another traveler’s tale of spending 48 woeful hours on what should have been a 90-minute American Airlines hop to the Carolina beaches. But then I stepped back to consider causes and implications. It’s time, as Seth Meyers would say, for a closer look.

Like Abe Lincoln said, you can’t fool all the people all the time. But in a fleeced, flocked-up nation of sheep, you only have to fool enough of the people enough of the time. And as Ben Franklin warned Americans at the outset: “Make yourself sheep and the wolves will eat you.”

Big business understands this, and so do lawmakers who depend on corporate largesse for their jobs. The Democrats have picked an apt campaign slogan for 2018, harking back to those crucial three words in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: for the people.

First, the basic facts.

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PARIS - When it comes to fish, you can't keep a good plunderer down. Take the 50,000-ton Lafayette, a floating factory four times the size of the biggest super trawler, able to process a half-million tons a year as it prowled off South America, northern Europe and Africa.

Pacific Andes, a global ocean-emptying empire based in Hong Kong, spent $100 million to refit the old oil tanker in China and launched it under a Russian flag in 2008. It was banned on southern Pacific high seas for cheating on quotas a few years later, so the company bought its way into Peru and kept it within territorial limits.  

In Peru, it was renamed the Damanzaihao and reregistered in Mongolia, which is not picky about enforcing regulations. It switched to Belize, which later withdrew its flag. After legal battles in Peru, among travails elsewhere, Pacific Andes went belly up last year. Its former flagship was sold for a dime on the dollar to Russian owners seeking other waters to plunder.

The Lafayette-Damanzaihao saga reflects how the big players operate. A small-scale vignette shows the other extreme. Paris markets offer vanishing wild Atlantic salmon from the Basque country at up to $60 a pound. Fishermen net them as they swim back inland to spawn.

As fisheries collapse, industrial fleets and small-fry artisans alike work all the harder while there is something left to catch. Rather than enforce strict limits, governments help them with subsidies and legal loopholes.   

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DRAGUIGNAN, France – My global ocean saga will have to wait. I got sidetracked by TV, watching a blow-dried clownfish interview an orange octopus who seems oblivious to the hammerhead shark circling around, sizing him up as a lunchtime snack.

As Tucker Carlson tossed puffballs at Donald Trump on Fox “News” last week, their exchange on tiny Montenegro shed harsh light on how isolated so many Americans have become from the actual world – and how few seem troubled by the perils of ignorance.

Stick with me; this is about much more than Montenegro. But let's start there.

“They're very aggressive people,” Trump said. Prime Minister Dusko Markovic, in fact, was gently accommodating when Trump aggressively shoved him aside without a word or even a glance to bull forward for a group photo at the Brussels NATO summit last year.

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WILD OLIVES, France — When Redcoats landed at Boston to quell an upstart revolution, as the poem goes, Paul Revere galloped from Lexington shouting, “The British are coming!” A militia mobilized swiftly, and today Americans don't have to drink tea every day at 4 o'clock.

Imagine that now. “Fake news,” a mob mutters, piling sticks at a stake to burn a Rachel Maddow ancestor. “Quiet,” guys shout, watching the Patriots' Jedediah Brady heave a leather ball. Others fight over who gets to play the fife. A merchant raises the price of Union Jacks. Kids wait for someone to invent smart phones so that they can exchange selfies when the fun starts.

For what they're worth, here are some real-news observations from an old-crocodile reporter after what may be the most ignominious five days the United States has seen since the Civil War.

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ALASSIO, Italy - If you hate those salted fishy slivers on pizza, Giuseppe Cormaci has encouraging news. Mediterranean anchovies tanked this year. But that means you won't find much succulent sea bass, branzino, let alone bluefin tuna. Try, perhaps, linguine alle jellyfish?

“The anchovy catch is down by half,” Cormaci told me. Adjusting his battered hat, he continued, with the rueful smile of an unconvinced optimist: “It might get better again. Then again, it might collapse entirely.”

Like the name on his 24-foot boat — Lupo — he is a lone wolf. His son helped for two seasons but quit to tend bar on the beach. With the few euros' profit left after fuel, repairs and nets during a 90-hour week, he can't pay a crew. At 50, he belongs to an endangered species: the artisan fisherman.

The sea he knew so well is now full of surprise. Warming water brings jellyfish plagues, including the venomous Portuguese man o' war. A great white shark just cruised the Spanish island of Majorca. Mostly, he sees high-tech foreign trawlers scoop out whatever they find.

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