TUCSON — My planned flight to Paris in two weeks could take longer than usual. If Marine Le Pen upsets Emmanuel Macron on April 24, it could land 60 years ago, back to when fear and fascism after the Algerian war nearly undid France’s bedrock liberté, égalité and fraternité.

The first-round results on Sunday made plain that the France I’ve known since 1968 is now something entirely different. Coming at a time when a modern-day megalomanic is committing war crimes that amount to targeted genocide, that is deeply troubling.

Le Pen is unlikely to win. But a map of the primary results showing the départements (states) she carried in the first round evokes a line William Faulkner wrote in 1950: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

She swept the Mediterranean south, heavily settled after 1962 by pieds noirs, families forced to flee Algeria after a vicious war of independence. Until then, Algeria was as French as Alaska is American. Diehard soldiers tried repeatedly to assassinate Charles de Gaulle in coup attempts.

And she took the entire industrial north, dominated by workaday families who suffer badly from rising prices and stagnant wages. Most see Macron as favoring big-money interests and tearing gaps in the social safety net that has protected them for generations.

Macron skunked Le Pen in 2017, 66 percent to 33. After François Hollande’s bungled policies crippled the Socialist Party, Macron appeared from nowhere, a 44-year-old silver-tongued investment banker with grand ideas. But this time could be a cliff hanger.

SAN FRANCISCO – American life, present and past, gets no more real than in the Mission District, where I occasionally escape into a hidey-hole off 24th Street to try making sense of it all. This time, I emerged half full of joyous inspiration. My other half is damn near suicidal.

It is my sister’s place, chock full of wise, witty old books, from Virginia Woolf to MFK Fisher’s “How to Cook a Wolf.” Henry James is on one shelf, James Thurber on another. Our grandma’s samovar from Ukraine sits under a colorful Twins Seven Seven painting I sent her from Nigeria.

Jane Kay, a celebrated environmental reporter, cooks sumptuous meals on an ancient enamel stove and laughs a lot with friends. She is the glass-half-full one in the family, seeking solutions while her brother catalogues glass-half-empty doom and gloom. But even she is troubled.

Two deranged men, vastly different yet eerily similar, have our world hanging on for dear life. It is no wonder Donald Trump is Vladimir Putin’s fanboy. Despots are despots, whatever the human toll of their self-obsessed depredations.

People in authoritarian countries mostly suffer in enforced silence. Americans only need vote for leaders who put the nation above themselves. But for a range of reasons, many don’t. And many others don’t bother to show up at the polls. The potential consequences are unthinkable.

Trump, increasingly buffoonish, may float off in hot air. But others preening in his shadow — bad shepherds eager to fleece a nation of sheep — could be worse. Jane and I watched Republican senators grill Ketanji Brown Jackson with blatant hypocrisy, an appeal to ignorant bigotry.

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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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