PARIS — If you’re a reporter on the job, authoritarian rule gets starkly real when goons with badges clap you in restraints, shove you into a van, strip you for a cavity probe, and then lock you in a cell incommunicado with no idea of what to expect next.

Foreign correspondents accept the risk. “It’s traumatic,” Jon Lee Anderson of The New Yorker once told an interviewer and then added: “I’ve been grabbed a few times, but I haven’t had to live as a kidnapped hostage in fear for my life for weeks or months—only a few hours.”

I’m less sanguine about it after ugly experiences in Africa and Central America. Bad luck or a tragic misstep can take a heavy toll. Most often, you can persuade someone up the chain of command to turn you loose. But that sense of injustice and impotence burns deep.

I always felt a wave of relief as wheels touched down at JFK after working in dicey places. Police in America, as departmental credos say, are meant “to serve and to protect” all citizens. Courts and review boards are supposed to hold them to account for any excesses. It is different now.

The Second Amendment is fast overshadowing the First. Law officers at times act as private thugs for big-money corporations. Individual cops are often swayed by personal or political prejudice. That ballyhooed “day in court” can go badly with overzealous prosecutors and partisan judges.

This is a national crisis. During police crackdowns in the Trump years, a protest sign evoked that post-Holocaust verse which ends: “Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.” It read: “First they came for the journalists. We don’t know what happened after that.”

My pal Alan Weisman faced exactly what that first paragraph describes in Minnesota last year while covering a protest for a Los Angeles Times op-ed about Line 3, a Canadian company’s pipeline that threatens waterways, aquifers and traditional Indian tribal rice fields.

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SANTA BARBARA—In this enclave of California good life, I fed eight quarters into a box for a “newspaper” best suited to wrap fish off the nearby boats. Then it hit me. This was where I first began watching American dailies abandon their vital mission.

In 2000, a rightwing socialite with big bucks and an ego to match bought the venerable Santa Barbara News-Press from the New York Times and gutted it like a sea bass. It was a limited cause célèbre at the time, but it foreshadowed what is now destroying America.

Nothing matters more to a democracy in a world on the brink than a daily dose of reliable news prioritized by skilled editors from their own staffs but also news agency correspondents near ground truth. Voters need to know how — and why — reality over the horizon shapes their lives.

In a single term, a sociopath miscreant let Covid run wild and gutted NATO as Russia plotted vicious potentially nuclear war. He made China a bitter foe. Defeated, he sent armed mobs to the Capitol bent on lynching the vice president. The world saw a pitifully weak and divided nation.

Yet a thumping majority of voters obsess on inflation caused almost entirely by Donald Trump’s folly. With no platform beyond their master’s voice, Republicans are likely to control Congress and state houses next year. If 2024 goes badly, expect the unimaginable.

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AMPUS, France — “Just call me Jean de Florette,” a rueful farmer told me, displaying only a few measly carrots and potatoes on a rickety table. We both wished he was joking. Marcel Pagnol’s book on a Provence water war 100 years ago now ought to be a current-affairs bestseller.

Bargemon, an expats’ favorite retreat down the road, has run dry. People fill jugs with water trucked to the old fountain, just as in the sequel, “Manon des Sources.” Jean de Florette died blasting a well. When his daughter learned villagers had diverted his source, she took revenge.

Back then, that was just a vagary of l’eau des collines, a skein of underground water fed by melting winter snows. The Durance ran wide and deep, with a network of irrigation canals. Until recently, drillings crews provided water for rich vineyards and extensive farmers.

No longer. What French meteorologists call a heat apocalypse is a clanging alarm with echoes across much of the world. Water tables plummet, wildfires rage and and altered weather patterns shrivel crops that depend on seasons man’s heedless folly has thrown out of whack.

Data bases tell the global story in distressing detail. But wherever you happen to be, just look out the door. Earth is a closed ecosystem, and we are all very nearly screwed. Experts say it is still not too late. But they add significant ifs, which the main culprit governments ignore.

In Washington, a faithless Democratic senator, an industry-funded coal baron who represents only 1.8 million West Virginians, just thwarted Joe Biden’s ambitious plan to slow climate collapse after Democrats worked nights and lots of weekends for more than a year to satisfy him. “Rage keeps me from tears,” Sen. Edward Markey of Massachusetts tweeted.

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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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