ORO VALLEY, Arizona – It is lunacy to open schools too early, the Fruit Lady told me, and after driving a school bus for 41 years she ought to know. “Those kids are all arms and mouths,” she said. “Tell them anything, and their first word is, ‘Why?’”

“You think they’ll keep safe distances?” she asked. It wasn’t a question. “Little ones are all over each other. They hug you, sneeze on you. Middle-school kids are the worst, spoiled by busy parents. How do you protect teachers, staff – or bus drivers?”

The Fruit Lady is the sort of voter Democrats need in purple states like Arizona. She is 69, retired and divorced after 45 years when her husband got fed up with peaches. With part-time hired help, her pick-‘em-yourself orchard hasn’t made money in two years.

Rising prices eat into her pension and social security checks. Tax cuts for the rich paid for more fancy houses along the highway north of Tucson but did not trickle down to her hardscrabble acre or the clapped-out ex-mobile homes on rutted roads behind them.

And now a killer plague stalks the state, getting steadily worse despite nonsensical happy talk from a president who allowed it to run wild yet demands that schools and businesses get going again. She sticks close to home with her trees and tomato vines.

After we talked for a while, the Fruit Lady sniffed out a likely liberal. “I should tell you,” she said, “I’m for Trump.”

I left Tucson in 1967 for a life as a foreign correspondent, eager to probe all those corrupt dysfunctional societies I’d read about. After poking into the depths on six continents, I have found the strangest of them all right here where I started out.

MORE

WAUWEEP, Arizona — The young guy at the helm wasn’t thinking about a raging pandemic, a raving president, or anything else beyond submerged logs and sand bars as we flashed past spectacular rock formations on Lake Powell. That morning, his wife said she was leaving him.

Sparing him questions, I reflected instead on a conversation in Paris with a visiting editor pal as we watched flotsam drift down the Seine through the heart of a city that has seen so much during its 2,000 years.

Americans once saw news as a lake, he said. With a sense of its shape and depths, they shared a common idea of reality when the water suddenly got rough. News is now a river. People see only what floats by if they happen to be watching, with little thought to its origin or import.

If black type suddenly screams, “China Invades Taiwan,” it is too late to react. Stories that matter are part of a continuing process that confounds headlines. Reporters on the ground, permanently in place with solid sources, need to watch closely as ripples build into waves.

We need correspondents to warn us of smoldering conflicts ready to flare into flame and runaway pathogens leaders try to hide. We need local reporters to expose authorities who betray our trust and erode the underpinnings of democracy. But we’re losing both.

Solid reporting competes for attention with infinite crap, from outright propaganda to well-intentioned karaoke journalism, off-key with garbled lyrics. Closed borders, official harassment and government coverups mask truth. Today’s watchword is caveat lector. Reader beware.

MORE

TUCSON, Arizona – Whether Donald Trump slips into history as a bitter laugh line, or he weasels his way into a second term, his ham-handed hubris toward China has done more to change the shape of global geopolitics since the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.

Trump lost face in China by alternately bullying and fawning over Xi Jinping in full public view. That turned an essential ally in confronting global crises into a wary hostile adversary bent on muscling aside the United States for world supremacy.

Previous American policy, engagement, was a discreet minuet. Both partners took intricate steps at arm’s length. Trump’s approach was estrangement. He berated China in public for dirty dealing, declared a trade war. Yet when it suited his needs, he shifted to abject flattery.

As Trump charges, China steals intellectual property, knocks off American products and infringes on copyrights. But his tariffs and taunts reversed decades of progress toward common accord. Now scapegoating China for his failure to contain Covid-19 provokes unmarked anger.

Trump repeats a one-word sneer, “‘Gina,” and talks of “kung flu.” Republicans follow his lead. In a crucial race in Arizona, Sen. Martha McSally’s ads berate “those communists.” She says her favored opponent has “Chinese investments.” So do most Americans with mutual funds.

Republicans slur Joe Biden as being close to China. Democrats explain why a lifelong statesman steeped in history knows better than to jab sticks at a dragon that is waking from a long sleep, eating our lunch and getting hungry again an hour later.

MORE

TUCSON — A whiff of spice can take me back to a sundown in Sana’a, sprawled on carpet cushions, chewing khat with zonked-out Yemeni pals under bright stars atop a six-story skyscraper made of mud. A haunting chorus of muezzins wailed their call to prayer as they had for a thousand years.

We ate fahsi served on ornate brass platters: lamb cutlets stewed with chickpeas in cardamom, coriander and cumin (that is just the c’s), laced with fiery pili-pili. Honey-pistachio pastries came with cups of green coffee I won’t attempt to describe.

I left Tucson in the 1960s to roam the world in pursuit of news but also on a quest to find tucked-away treasures — to watch, listen, breathe in aromas and linger late at night to learn how the other 95 percent lived. Far and away, Sana’a was the jackpot.

That magical city, which legend dates back to Noah’s son Shem, nestled in a valley, 7,500-feet-high, among dramatic peaks. Narrow lanes dotted with donkey plop wound among the carved doorways, stained glass and alabaster façades of high-rise mud mansions. From above, it was an Arabian Nights fantasy in gingerbread.

In a warren of souks, alive with noise and color, we talked politics over hubble-bubble pipes. North Yemen was open to all comers. China built roads; Taiwan looked after F5 jets from America. North Korea did the stadiums; South Korea did the sewers. South Yemen was a Soviet vassal, but Moscow also sent financial and military aid up north.

Today, Sana’a is largely rubble, partly because of Raytheon Corporation bombs built in Tucson. Yemen, now unified but at war with itself, is the world’s worst humanitarian disaster. Half of its 30 million people are starving, and Covid-19 spreads. Perhaps 200,000 combatants and civilians have been killed, perhaps many more. No one knows.

I am partial to old mud walls and tile, lost long ago to Tucson when developers tore out its old Mexican heart. But so much else in the world has been destroyed or closed off by conflict. Today, a world map with no-go areas inked over would look like the Mueller report redacted by William Barr.

As Yemen makes dead clear, Donald Trump’s foreign policy is wreaking new levels of irreparable havoc in an interconnected world. And it exposes his single-minded pursuit of profit and his own personal interests.

MORE

TUCSON — I used to say the only difference between 23 and dead is all in the mind. Now, a lot closer to the latter than the former, not so much. But today age looms large in an America facing its most crucial elections ever.

A recent Atlantic headline asked, “Why Do Such Elderly People Run America?” Good question. Lots of young people with fresh ideas and new skills see their options in November — two men, 150 years old between them — as total wastes of space.

But the writer, 38, lost me fast. He called Donald Trump, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders “three candidates divided by ideology but united in dotage.” Dotage? Webster defines that as “senile decay marked by decline of mental poise and alertness.” Fuck off, punk.

Ageism is a small-bore bias. Mostly, it reflects callow, shallow thinkers who generalize in data-clump shortcuts like their computers (which, BTW, their elders invented). Some people are couchbound rutabagas by 50; others remain brilliant into their 90s.

For the CEO of an imperiled “free world,” being old has value, even if he, or she, says “malarkey” for “bullshit.” Founding Fathers fixed the minimum age for president at 35 back when male life expectancy was near 38. They wanted the oldest bulls in the herd.

A long life reveals over time how confronting the present requires an understanding of the past. Diplomacy demands an acquired feel for reading faces and anticipating how action might trigger reaction. Situations vary; human nature remains constant.

Age isn’t Trump’s problem. He has been a self-obsessed lying cheat since childhood. Biden may not fire up audiences that expect entertaining bombast, but he excels at what matters now: calmly finding common ground at home and abroad.

MORE