PARIS – America’s ship of state is besieged by mutineers on board while it plows through melting ice floes and mined waters. It is in range of Russian nukes, buzzed by Chinese jets, and bedeviled by terrorizing pirates. This is no time to jettison a steady-handed old salt captain.

Leaders are judged by their moment in time. Considering what Joe Biden inherited and what he has managed to do so far at this perilous juncture in history, it is hard to recall a more effective American president. Yet a lot of voters want him gone.

He may slow down before 2024 and step aside. But hamstringing him months before midterm elections is a godsend to whomever the Republicans choose to finish Donald Trump’s mission to turn America into a selfish one-party kleptocracy run by ideologues and plutocrats.

Biden flashed steel last week, excoriating Republicans who now weasel their way toward authoritarian rule with tactics borrowed from Goebbels, Machiavelli and Bozo the clown. He called them semi-fascists. Trump’s House puppet, Kevin McCarthy, demanded an apology.

True, Biden misspoke. There is nothing semi about it. Fascism is now the most looked-up word on Websters: “A political philosophy…that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by dictatorial leader.”

It adds “forcible suppression of opposition”; for instance, a murderous insurrection or such recent savagery as a barrage of calls to Democratic congressmen threatening to cut off their wives’ and children’s heads.

Trumplicans replied in typical funhouse-mirror distortion. Here is Tucker Carlson: “Yeah, (Republicans) are a threat, says the guy with the blood-red Nazi background and Marines standing behind him. It's a complete outrage…totally immoral."

The only red was in the bricks of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where colonials drafted the Bill of Rights, which Republicans – you know, red – seek to suppress. A pair of ceremonial Marines signaled that “Sleepy Joe” was out of his basement and loaded for elephant.

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WILD OLIVES, France—Jean-Jacques Sempé died Thursday at 89 just up the rutted road from this patch of Provence mountainside that I owe entirely to him and his sidekick-wife Martine Gossieaux. His fabled drawings and books say it all. To those, I can only add sacre Sempé.

In the 1980s, Gretchen Hoff, my then sidekick non-wife, came up with a perfect cover idea for “Mission to Civilize,” a book I was writing on how France civilized the world, like it or not: a Sempé version of that Joe Rosenthal photo of GIs planting an American flag on Iwo Jima.

I wrote him. He jumped at the idea, and we went to visit his Haut Var hideaway. We almost gasped at the raw beauty as the road wound up from Draguignan among soaring pines and leafy oaks, past an old stone hamlet, to a mile-long track among ancient olive groves.

Jean-Jacques was at work on a vast white board. On that, and at his soaring roofed Saint Sulpice studio in Paris, he gave the world Petit Nicolas, a whimsical modern-day Petit Prince, nearly an album a year of his dessins, about 100 New Yorker covers and so much else.

But it was the man behind his oeuvre that loomed so large. Over long dinners with friends, his eyes actually twinkled as he lanced gentle barbs and played with words. In serious moments, his grasp of human irony and geopolitical folly ran deep.

I sometimes translated his captions but to my burning regret couldn’t make time for a book idea he had. Just back from an Associated Press reporting trip to Soviet Eastern Europe, I told him about how workaday families resisted heavy-hand authority with humor and strength.

At a park in Prague, I had searched frantically for the notebook that had dropped from my back pocket. A bearded young guy in hippie gear got up from a bench and handed it to me. He was a “homeland security” goon, keeping watch on local Czechs and foreign journalists.

Those Sempé eyes lit up by another 1,000 watts. He wanted us to go back to capture anguish and absurdities behind a rusting Iron Curtain.

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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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