TUCSON — By now in past Januarys I had already broken a long list of New Year’s resolutions: quit pipe smoking, escape Facebook, learn to say fruit in French with the right “r” and the like. This time is different. All of us, everywhere, need a New Year’s Revolution.

It is beyond urgent. If enough of the 7.5 billion people who share an overheated and over-armed planet cannot get it together fast, neither the meek nor anyone else will be around to inherit the earth. As endgame looms, conflicts inevitably deepen.

Yet now when the world badly needs the United States, it is at war with itself. Audio tape reveals a soundly defeated president’s hour-long criminal, subversive attempt to cheat. Invoking party loyalty, he told Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” the votes.

If America is hardly “first” among 195 countries, it is best able to affect change, for better or worse. But while nearly half the nation clings to a distorted view of reality, China muscles it aside with a colonial approach that stamps out whole cultures as well as individual rights.

Americans waste time quibbling over small stuff like those four-letter words, fuck and shit. Both are as innocuous these days as punctuation marks. We need to focus on two others, news and fact, along with two five-letter words: truth and its polar opposite, Trump.

I began the Mort Report to sketch big-picture frameworks around linked global challenges with brushstrokes of quotes and color to bring stories to life. But it got sidetracked in 2016 by a self-obsessed madman with boundless greed and demagogic designs.

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Cartoon Courtesy of Jeff Danziger

TUCSON — Think of the possibilities. The near collapse of American democracy, increasingly dysfunctional for decades, offers a perfect chance to do what a new president proposes: build back better. But to heal, we need to focus on why we are so badly in need of healing.

What makes America great is the spirit of its people, not some obese nutcase who humps their flag at rallies, guts their Constitution, squanders their global goodwill and incites armed howling hyenas in stupid red caps to bully those who oppose their destructive ignorance.

A fresh cast of characters offers something better than the Shakespearean tragedy we booed off the stage. But a deposed mad king is heaving brickbats from the wings. They will need enthusiastic audience participation to pull off All’s Well That Ends Well.

We have lost our way since those founders who studied Latin saw the difference between republic and empire. Those lessons still apply. We suffered an annus horribilus in 2020 because of what my thin grasp of linguistics would mistranslate as “horrible asshole.”

No democracy can survive without a common grasp of observable facts. And more, enabled by self-focused legislators and greed-obsessed oligarchs, Trump has sold his cultists an alternate reality by undermining scientists, economists and reporters committed to truth.

Had Trump not allowed a pandemic to wreak such havoc, odds are that he would have four more years to remake America in his own image, a plutocracy of hypocrites with partisan zealots in the courts and Robocop police who murder with impunity.

Abroad, he jabbed sticks into hornets’ nests on five continents. And now in an orgy of vindictive folly, he devotes his waning days to worsen conflicts, embolden enemies and poison alliances so that even Joe Biden’s seasoned statecraft risks failures that Republicans will exploit.

He dismissed as “fake news” a devastating Russian cyber invasion, undetected since March because he crippled the office charged with countering such attacks. Not that he cares; aides speaking anonymously say he has not read his daily security brief since early October.

Osama Bin Laden killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11, and a distraught nation set ablaze much of South Asia and the Middle East in response. Trump’s reckless disregard to the pandemic is now taking that many lives every day, yet 73 million people voted to reelect him.

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TUCSON — The French, for most of three centuries, pursued la mission civilisatice, its mission to civilize the world whether the world liked it or not. Mostly, persuaded by bayonets if not by forks, less enlightened peoples fell into line.

Now, as President Emmanuel Macron unleashes police to enforce tough measures to thwart terrorist threats and to quell domestic discontent, those hallowed pillars — liberté, egalité, fraternité — are eroding fast. If they crumble, we will all feel the consequences.

Conflict, climate and hunger swell human tides of millions seeking refuge. America shuns them, protected by oceans and guns at its borders. Because of its colonial past and its traditional role as a land of asylum, France is overwhelmed.

Most newcomers obey laws and refugees work hard to rebuild their lives. But many of them refuse to blend into French society or grow radicalized when they can’t find their niche.

Fanatic Islamist groups are joined by rebels with a cause who act out against what they see as indifference to oppression in places they had to flee. Disaffected loners with nothing to lose decide to go out with a bang.

At the same time, what were once noisy but orderly street demonstrations over wages and social demands now often erupt into tear gas, mass arrests and bloody clashes.

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TUCSON — “With satellite dishes snipped from tin cans, Afghans can sit back in the Middle Ages and keep tabs on the 21st century,” I wrote from Kabul in an Associated Press dispatch two months after 9/11. “Their bad luck is that this optical miracle works only one way.”

A teacher named Shahla Paryan had made the point as she poured me tea in her book-lined parlor. “I’m afraid the world just doesn’t understand us,” she said. “It is wrong to believe we are the same as those horrible people who brought terrorism to America. It is very wrong.”

Nineteen years and only Allah knows how many lives later — perhaps 500,000 — that still stands. And now Donald Trump has chosen to cut and run, leaving Joe Biden with an ungodly mess in a collapsed state of hapless victims ruled by violent factions that see America as a bitter enemy.

Trump is leaving behind only 2,500 troops, easy targets for a Taliban that America only ended up strengthening after its longest conflict in its history. With tragic irony, that is nearly the same number of men and women, U.S. armed forces volunteers, who died in vain since 2001.

Shahla was a university graduate who taught young girls to read, as much a part of Afghanistan as the more familiar women in body-bag burqas that evoke most Westerners’ stereotypes. She saw Osama bin Laden as a plague that was no more welcome than locusts or cholera.

She was grateful to Americans for the hope of badly needed change, but she feared they would abandon Afghanistan as they did after the Soviets were driven out in 1989. “This is our great opportunity,” she said. “We cannot miss it.”

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TUCSON — “Isn’t it terrible about this Trump story?”, a much-admired New York Times columnist wrote. “All the attention it's getting? Newspapers, television, magazines all pumping out Trump gossip. They ought to be ashamed…”

That was Russell Baker, 30 years ago, when Trump was merely an ego-mad upstart clamoring for attention, building gaudy erections, conning people with serial scams, going bankrupt to stiff creditors and treating women like sex toys.

“You have heard this on the talking furniture and read it in newspapers and magazines,” Russ wrote. “The tone is always disapproving, the question always the same: Why is America wallowing in piffle when the world is being remade by truly momentous events?”

He had an answer: “The country is nearly brain dead.” And if Russ came back today to sum up the past four years, seeing how far Trump’s bullshit-slinging has gotten him since then, he would almost certainly drop the “nearly.”

As we wring hands about whither democracy and guess about the next act in Trump’s perennial circus, we might focus on a simple word at the heart of it all: schools.

Those 70 million Americans who voted for a man who has crippled America and much of the world beyond aren’t (all) stupid. But ignorant? Too many of us miss the crucial difference.

Forrest Gump nailed the former: stupid is as stupid does. Ignorant, hardly pejorative, simply means unaware or uninformed. We all know a lot about things we have studied or experienced. We’re all ignorant about the rest.

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Illustration Courtesy of Jeff Danziger