TUCSON — The other day I flashed back 60 years to William R. Mathews, my red-faced, bald-pated boss, shoulder high to full-sized people, who on occasion burst from his forbidding cave off the newsroom to scream bloody hell at a reporter’s dumb mistake, not infrequently mine.

God, I miss him.

As the world moves fast into deepening hydra-headed “unconventional” conflict, “news” is all over the place. And without a traditional fourth estate to get the story straight, a fifth column threatens to defeat America from within.

I’ll get to the big picture in upcoming reports. For now, a focus on how my hometown paper has changed over the decades — with a hard-pressed staff that faces odds stacked against it — goes to the heart of the problem.

Bill Mathews’ Arizona Daily Star outshined Bill Small’s afternoon Tucson Citizen – except when it scooped us, and that crimson face went deep purple. Mathews was publisher but also simultaneously among the best war correspondents and editorialists of his time.

The Pulitzer family in St, Louis bought the paper when he died in 1969, then sold it to Lee Enterprises in 2005, which has aggressively cut costs – and corners. Meantime, Gannett took over the Citizen and in 2009 scrapped it for parts.

The Star’s weekday circulation is near 100,000, only twice what it was in 1965 when Tucson had one-fourth the population. And now a hedge-fund hog snuffles at what is left of the only daily in a city of one million inhabitants. Writ large, it is the same across the United States.

Last month, CBS’s “60 Minutes” focused on Alden Global Capital, which is trying to add the Star to the 200-plus papers it has stripped to bare bones while jacking up subscription rates. It is the worst of what the industry terms vulture capitalists, an insult to self-respecting buzzards.

CBS never got to Heath Freeman, Alden’s 41-year-old president, fashionably unshaven with a self-satisfied smirk. No one does. The company website offers some palpable untruths about noble intentions. After 21 senators sent a letter asking him to show civic responsibility, he doubled down. The segment ended with a shot of his $19 million Miami mansion.

The piece focused on unreported local news and jobs lost as Alden shoots for 30 percent profits. The New York Times’ margin is a third of that. But the problem is far greater than that.

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TUCSON — Watching the rape of Ukraine – and listening to so many people in America shrug that off as less important than the price of gas -- I hear John Prine’s reedy voice singing in my head: “Some humans ain’t human…”

From Ivan the Terrible to Vladimir the Barrel Bomber, Mother Russia has mourned a lot of her children. And it is only one patch on a world map bloodstained over millennia by senseless wars. When elephants fight, an African proverb says, the grass gets trampled.

Now we are at the limit. Lost amid war news, the latest U.N. climate report warns that without drastic global action over the next seven years, Homo sapiens are headed toward massive die-offs. That is moot if war in Europe escalates to nuclear showdown.

After four years of ignoble lunacy, America now has leaders to help get the world back on track. But it is dangerously short of followers. If the United States can’t live up to basic standards of democracy and decency, inhuman humans set the tone.

Putin’s onslaught is unambiguous naked aggression. A brave nation of 40 million can be overrun only at horrendous cost and “occupied” only by harsh repression. But all major conflicts result from hubris: misjudged “power” that leads to failed diplomacy.

Prine’s lyrics, from 2005, make the point: “…you're feeling your freedom and the world's off your back, (then) some cowboy from Texas starts his own war in Iraq.”

When Saddam Hussein seized Kuwait in 1989, coalition forces took it back. George Bush the elder stopped them short of Baghdad, knowing what would happen if he pushed Humpty Dumpty off the wall with no plan in place to clean up the mess.

In 2003, Bush junior aimed his war on terror at Saddam, who had dismantled his arsenal of mass destruction and had no role in 9/11. Dick Cheney and neocon ideologues predicted a “cakewalk” would democratize the Mideast, with rich oilfields as the spoils of holy war.

That resulted in perhaps a million needless deaths and millions more refugees. Brutality and outlawed torture by U.S. forces impelled minority Sunnis to create an Islamic State. Now ISIS and other terrorist groups, still growing, infest much of Africa and South Asia.

Today, Cheney’s conservative daughter is an unlikely Joan of Arc, defending America from corrupted Republicans who control what is no longer a grand old party — not neocons, just cons.

My guess is that Americans are more human than not. By November, when the stakes are clearer, even many now enraptured by a treacherous, narcissistic draft dodger will cleanse Congress of Trumplicans who snuffle at his feet for their own selfish purposes.

But that may be wishful thinking.

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TUCSON — Orwellian satire is enough to explain Donald Trump’s worldview: hogs walk upright, declaring that some animals are more equal than others. They convince trusting old plow horses that trucks taking them to a glue factory are headed to pig heaven.

But Vladimir Putin, a far smarter despot with grand imperial dreams, adds Machiavelli to the mix. We face far more than barnyard animal behavior.

Pondering Russia’s cruel assault on Ukraine, I found a few YouTube clips of bears attempting to lunch on a porcupine. Even if the links somehow managed to reach the Kremlin, no one is left inside Vladimir Putin’s bubble with enough stones to show them to him.

A determined bruin can eventually get to a porcupine’s soft underbelly, but the snootful of quills left behind to fester drives it crazy. And your average bear does not have 4,477 nuclear warheads that risk accidental Armageddon.

I’m now in Arizona, left to guess about outcomes on the Russian frontier from 7,000 miles away. But my extensive reporting in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union that Putin wants to remake into a fascist-capitalist empire, eviler than ever, suggests terrifying possibilities.

My grandmother is from Odessa, not far from where 16 border guards just committed suicide by bombardment. They told a Russian warship captain who demanded they surrender to go fuck himself.

On my last trip to Kyiv, for a global gathering of investigative journalists, I met courageous Ukrainian reporters who dig deep to expose faithless leaders. Like many of their countrymen, their resolve to resist, no matter what, is no empty boast.

In an unhinged appeal for Russians’ support, Putin declared Ukraine a non-state run by neo-Nazis and druggies. President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish, like his prime minister, and he lost family in the Holocaust. If he is on drugs, I’d like a supply of whatever he is taking.

Likely marked for death, Zelensky is in Kyiv streets rallying Ukrainians ready to face tanks with Molotov cocktails and small arms. He declined an American offer of asylum: “I need ammunition,” he said, “not a ride.”

And, clearly, Ukraine is only a first step in whatever a delusional despot has in mind.

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TUCSON — Between the skating and skiing, cameras flashed on what really mattered at the Olympics: two thugs in silk ties and shit-eating grins in the owner’s box plotting a new world in which their flags — one with stars, another with stripes — muscle aside America’s Old Glory.

And because a simpleton megalomaniac in Washington spent four years fixated on Monopoly, playing checkers in what Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin know is an elaborate chess game, the United States faces existential danger beyond description.

I call this Mort Report non-prophet; correspondents can only speculate on the future based on the present in light of the past. I am scared witless about far more than Ukraine — less because of Russia or China than of treacherous politicians, greedheads and useful idiots at home.

Ukraine’s history is long and complex. Just start with the Orange Revolution that began in November 2004 while George W. Bush was wading deeper into needless quagmire in Iraq, which had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack that triggered his all-out war on terror.

Ukrainians, who had fought hard for freedom and democracy, spent two months and a day in freezing weather until they overturned what so many saw as a rigged election. Police held back, fearful of violent response. Casualties amounted to one man who suffered a heart attack.

Contrast that to America in 2016. A plainly evident narcissist demagogue won because so many Democrats sulked when their candidate lost the primaries, and so many others did not bother to vote. He would still be president, I am convinced, had it not been for the Covid-19 pandemic.

We all watched Donald Trump toady up to Putin, taking his side against America’s own intelligence services’ assessments. Congress approved urgent aid to Ukraine, but he held it up in an attempt to extort dirt on Joe Biden. High crimes don’t get higher than such blatant treasonous treachery.

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TUCSON — Tom Kulka was going to be 90 in July, and, for once, a big family blast in Akron would be all about him. All his life, he was the sweetly smiling uncle, brother or friend who stayed in the background, making sure everyone else was happy — and sated to the gills.

When Jeannette and I were married on a North Carolina beach in 1999, Tom and his two sisters spent most of the three-day party huddled in the kitchen of a rented house stuffing cabbages — their renowned beloved golumpkis. And, of course, pierogis.

The Kulka-Hermann clan offered a warm welcome when Jeannette first brought home to Ohio a Jewish guy from Paris. The men indulged dumb questions about the Cleveland Browns’ game blaring in the background. We bonded over Cuban cigars I’d smuggled in. Mostly, I hung out with Tom.

He wanted to talk about needless wars, famine, poverty and all the rest that few people in a rich country bothered to notice. By phone last month, the subject was Covid-19 that has raged on for so long, impacting everyone’s lives.

In his gentle voice, which no one recalls ever rising in anger, Tom wondered how so many Americans could have gotten so stupid and selfish. He had his shots and a booster, masked up and kept careful distances. But still. He felt sick last week. Within 48 hours, he was gone.

His grandniece, Emily Pataki, a nurse at Summa Hospital, stayed with him. “We had polkas playing into his room,” she said, recounting his last moments. “He even gave us a little shoulder-wiggle dance at ‘Roll Out the Barrel.’”

Tom’s priest hurried over for last rights. He didn’t want life support, not even the cumbersome oxygen mask, the final step before a ventilator. “I’m ready to go be with the Lord,” he said at the end. “Now give me that Pepsi. I’m sorry but I have to go.”

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