PARIS — The familiar clash of symbols was stirring. Bearded Legionnaires in leather aprons hefted axes. Guardsmen in silver helmets pranced their horses. Heavy metal clanked down the Champs-Elysées after jets, wingtips nearly touching, trailed blue, white and red overhead.

But this Bastille Day reality bit hard. A precarious present overshadows past glory, from blazing wildfires in heat-parched provinces and lingering plague at home to a cruel war raging 2,000 miles to the east. The French, like the rest of us, have no more margin to get the future right.

The parade’s star was the Jaguar, a Star Wars 6-by-6, 26-ton battle wagon “jeep” with a 40mm cannon on a turret, missile launchers and high-tech gadgetry for combat and gathering on-the-spot intelligence for air strikes and advancing infantry.

This year, firefighters and rescue teams marched along with the military. Canadair tankers for dousing flames joined the flyover.

President Emmanuel Macron, looking back, told TV interviewers what had changed since his first Bastille Day in 2017. “We invested little on defense because the threat was minimal. Now we are catching up fast.” He wants to spend $26 billion in coming years to fortify France’s nuclear arsenal, submarine fleet and cyberwar capabilities.

He did not have to detail why the world has since gone so horribly wrong.

Donald Trump was at the parade in 2017 on his first presidential state visit. He watched with palpable envy at the display of national grandeur and what he called “military might.” The draft-dodger president wanted to do the same next July 4. The Pentagon dissuaded him.

By the time Macron returned the visit in April 2018, allies were alarmed. Trump’s “America First” campaign revealed itself as America only, a thuggish leader’s paean to himself. Macron tried a nice-guy approach. Then in a joint address to Congress, he deftly fileted Trump with rapier strokes.

DRAGUIGNAN, France – No one pulls off evocative eyerolls like the French, and André Bernard, my 82-year-old cheese guy, replied with his best when asked about legislative elections that just reduced the Gaullist Fifth Republic into a Gallic Game of Thrones.

“Political posturing,” André said with his usual half-smile, slicing a sample of ripe Reblochon in our Saturday market ritual dating back 40 years. “What still matters is what always has: a comfortable place to sleep, enough good food to eat, an occasional extravagance. And family.”

Younger eyes roll for different reasons. A fresh generation sees a traditional social safety net shred as prices soar. The rich inherit an Earth they despoil at an alarming rate. So why bother to show up at the polls? Overall, only 46 percent of eligible French voters cast ballots on Sunday.

Between the opposition’s activism and public apathy, the results were stunning. Le Parisien’s front-page banner caught the essence in big black letters: “Ungovernable.”

Emmanuel Macron’s reelection two months ago made him the de facto leader of a European Union faced with a cornered Russian bear rattling nukes on its doorstep. He champions NATO, ties with America, global action against climate collapse, dialogue with China and freer trade.

In 2017, he came out of nowhere to sweep the boards. Now, without a clear National Assembly majority, his party needs inconstant allies to hold off leftist and far-right blocs led by zealots who concur only on vitriol for what they call an arrogant patrician who betrays the nation.

Unlike America, today’s fractured France goes far beyond two parties at war. Turmoil in an old society that shaped much of the world over centuries is about the human condition, a term André Malraux popularized in his 1930s novel, “Man’s Fate.” It is not looking good.

A deadlocked France unable to take decisive action in a perilous world is serious cause for alarm. But, as André the cheese guy says, life is more than geopolitics and disputed economics. France, these days, is being shaken to its core. I’ll get back to this. First, the election.

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PARIS — “This time they have him,” Bob Woodward remarked after the Jan. 6 committee’s prime time indictment of an ex-president whose handpicked CIA director likened to a 6-year-old throwing a tantrum when his coup attempt went wrong. “They have him cold.”

But as he does so painfully often, Stephen Colbert caught the essence of America’s reaction to 1,000 witnesses and reams of irrefutable documentation: “Hanging over the hearings is one question that could define the future of our republic: Who cares?”

Above the Atlantic not long ago, I looked back at what is now the looniest country I have seen in a lifetime of reporting, and I recalled a line in “Lawrence of Arabia.” So long as tribes fight among themselves, Peter O’Toole says, “so long will they be a little people, a silly people.”

The complexities are clear at 30,000 feet. Donald Trump’s Republicans are what T. E. Lawrence described: “greedy, barbarous and cruel.” Yet Democrats squabble over grievances and social reforms that can’t fly because their left wing repelled enough voters to deadlock Congress.

In Loony Land, neither yesterday nor tomorrow matters much. Informed voters face an apparent majority — some silent; some obnoxiously boisterous — who make snap decisions based on dubious sources within their own echo chambers. Others just don’t care.

Analysts I respect remain upbeat. At crunch time, they say, Americans do the right thing. Joe Biden won with the largest popular vote margin since FDR in 1932. But despite spectacular reversals of Trump’s folly at home and abroad, polls say two-thirds of voters want him gone.

Crunch time is now. Even if Trump implodes in a whoosh of hot air, a fractured nation is left with others who court a base that shares his twisted values. Those 2016 rivals who called him an unfit race-baiting sexist who lies whenever he opens his mouth now grovel at his golf shoes.

Trump defends gun slaughter and medieval abortion laws that thwart women’s most basic rights while criminalizing doctors’ Hippocratic Oath. He embraces preposterous conspiracy theories and flouts asylum conventions America drafted for the world.

But it is far worse than that. House testimony amplifies what Maggie Haberman reported in the New York Times. During those hours when he did nothing to stop his Capitol assault as a mob chanted, “Hang Mike Pence,” he told aides that might be a good idea: “Mike Pence deserves it.”

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GREEN VALLEY, Arizona — This golf-and-gardens mecca is Brown Valley when dust blows from mine-waste bluffs looming over it. With new open pits in the spectacular sky-island Santa Rita mountains nearby, paradise lost may be a harbinger of Hell.

Whether the pen is still mightier than the sword is a tossup. But bulldozers beat them both hands down. Once monster machines ravage nature, there is no going back. And in the American West, nearly out of water, squandered Eden is the least of it.

The bigger picture reflects all the linked facets of global climate collapse. It is starkly evident here in Green Valley, halfway down I-19 from Tucson to Mexico, and across southern Arizona. I’ve watched it happen, slowly then suddenly, since I was a kid.

Worsening endemic drought after so much past folly has left hydroelectric turbines on the Colorado River perilously close to shutting down, threatening power to millions. Suburban sprawl and thirsty crops in arid places deplete the last ancient aquifers.

Snowpacks no longer swell rivers in spring or recharge aquifers. Rigs dig deeper for fossil water under parched lakebeds. Unprecedented wildfires in dry forests, fought by aircraft that gulp up surface water, burn undergrowth that holds what rainfall there is.

A spiking demand for copper adds yet more straws that suck even harder from the same hammered sources. Authorities and politicians cut deals for temporary fixes to buy time. When taps run dry, it will be someone else’s problem.

Crises extend from Mexico through the seven-state Colorado River basin and up into California to the Pacific northwest. Despite a half century of increasingly dire warnings by scientists and journalists, “water wars” is no longer an abstract figure of speech.

In 2000, the Associated Press sent me around the world for a hard look. In Israel, the Sea of Galilee was so low Jesus could have walked across it by stepping on the rocks. Africans and South Asians abandoned ancestral villages when wells ran dry.

My own home ground hit me hardest. Until the 1900s, steamboats paddled 150 miles between the Gulf of California and Yuma, Arizona. A century later, I followed a pathetic trickle into Mexico, where it vanished into salt marshes long before reaching the gulf.

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TUCSON — It will take some time to see where France goes next. But that old saw — plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose — is for sure out the window.

Emmanuel Macron beat Marine Le Pen soundly on Sunday, but the turnout of 72 percent was the lowest in decades, a shade below 2017 when he skunked her by a far wider margin.

Now France faces parliamentary elections in June. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far-left contender who tipped the balance toward Macron, wants to be prime minister. And an awful lot of workaday Frenchmen are hopping mad.

All National Assembly seats are up for grabs. If Le Pen’s National Rally party scores big in legislative voting, Fifth Republic loopholes would force “cohabitation,” and a coalition could conceivably make her prime minister.

But for now, I can almost hear the “oouf” of relief from eight time zones away.

Elated messages poured into the Elysée Palace from European Union leaders who feared Le Pen would hamstring NATO by pulling out of its unified command structure and thwart a united EU stand against Vladimir Putin’s genocidal assault on Ukraine.

Volodymyr Zelensky called Macron “a true friend of Ukraine.” Tweeting in French, he said “I am convinced that we will achieve new joint victories toward a strong and united Europe.”

Le Pen’s promise to ban Muslim women’s headscarves and crack down on les immigrés portended raucous mayhem in the streets. Her off-the-wall ideas, such as legislating by referendum, would likely have tied up the Constitutional Council indefinitely.

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