TUCSON — Paul Simon’s long-ago South African trip echoed in my head as I flew to Arizona from Paris after votes were finally tallied. Human nature hasn’t changed since Aristotle pegged it. When decent people synchronize, hatemongering demagogy hasn’t got much chance.

“Thank you, Pima County, for saving America,” I said with mock formality to the deeply suntanned rental car lady. She smiled. It was hardly just Arizona. We both knew a nation at war with itself is far from saved. But still. America seems to be inching toward Graceland.

Simon’s original “Graceland” single was about Nashville, but he used the name for 1985 recordings in Soweto that called out social injustice. Concerts in blazing color went far beyond black and white. Joyful sounds and painful lyrics exposed what Apartheid had masked.

The unmissable message: harmony, not wealth, puts diamonds on the soles of our shoes.

Simon ignored a U.N.-imposed cultural boycott, a decision that nudged history hard. Five years later, Nelson Mandela was freed from Robben Island, and a fractured society began to heal.

As the doomsday clock ticks ever louder, a sense of global harmony is growing among Americans who see what is at stake beyond their narrow issues at home.

Young voters made a difference, yet only 27 percent of them cast ballots — 4 percent fewer than in 2018 midterms. Two years remain to make up for decades of insular schooling and news coverage. Americans need to synchronize with the other 95 percent who share a dying planet.

With all its problems, America is hardly comparable to South Africa at its worst. But I see troubling parallels between today’s rural Republicans with radios spotwelded to fact-free bullshit, and rural “rock spiders” — Afrikaners fearful of “replacement” — I covered in the 1980s.

MORE

PARIS — Ukraine faces a potentially nuclear winter. Europe again fears fascism. Taiwan girds for assault. People cry freedom from Iran to Myanmar. And next week a dis-United States may relinquish its shining-city-on-a-hill democracy over $4 a gallon gas.

Americans fixate on prices without considering that the previous president is almost entirely responsible, and nearly every other country suffers from them more. Polls put global climate meltdown far behind. Foreign policy, around which most crises turn, is barely mentioned.

In the final stretch, I heard Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, favored against Stacey Abrams, refer on CNN to “Joe Biden’s inflation.” Whether he is a dope or, more likely, a disingenuous cynic, people like that have no business in public office. Yet look at the Republican field.

These mid-terms are no usual referendum on a party in power. If Republicans prevail, two more years of preposterous big lies, electoral sabotage, censorious ideology and outright terrorism are all but certain to put an unchecked authoritarian in the White House.

Donald Trump has savaged truth, decency and the rule of law. Ron DeSantis and others in the running exploit his tribal know-nothing base, which ignores Biden’s serial successes against lockstep Republican opposition. A fired-up minority wins when apathetic voters opt out.

If Americans don’t look beyond partisan politics, narrow interests, blind ambition, religious fundamentalism and simplistic reporting, U.S. elections could produce the greatest human folly since, as the Book of Genesis has it, Esau gave up his birthright for a bowl of lentil stew.

In 60 years of reporting, I’ve seen nothing close to what is now at stake. In the millions of words that I’ve spewed out over the decades, none have mattered more.

MORE

BAYEUX, France — A hard truth was brutally plain as reporters gathered near the Normandy beaches, a global crime scene in vivid memory, to celebrate their living and mourn their dead. “Never Again!” is an empty promise in the heart of Europe and across an imperiled planet.

In this noble little city that miraculously escaped allied bombing, heart-stopping images and eyewitness accounts made reality crystal clear: humanity is nearly out of time to save itself. Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine onslaught is the worst of it. But there is so much else.

For 29 years, the annual Bayeux Calvados-Normandy War Correspondents Awards has singled out reportage by insightful old pros and gutsy young ones with new skills. This time, entries far surpassed that overworked word of the day: horrific.

The irony defies belief. America waded in to help stop genocidal Nazis from ruling the world. Now a far different country may soon enable a seditious, bigoted, lying, isolationist Trump-besotted minority to destroy a 234-year-old democracy when it is so badly needed.

Elections next month, already corrupted by treachery in Republican-run states, could make the world safe for murderous despots, a fascistic far right and oligarchs who abandon principle for profit. A massive turnout can sweep them into history. And, still, that would only be a start.

Climate calamities push ever-larger human tides to besiege closed borders. But the immediate challenge is conflict. The military-industrial complex Dwight Eisenhower foresaw has waged unwinnable war since the 1960s, full-on or by proxy, with scant regard for millions who suffer.

America, though hardly the only culprit, has the wealth and wherewithal to wage peace. When diplomacy and targeted aid fail, muscular military coalitions need to confront threats before they spiral out of control. Solid up-close reporting is crucial to get that right.

Bayeux winners this year were mostly fresh faces. Ukrainians depicted their own tragedy. A Burkina Faso freelancer described rape and terror in a former bright spot on a dark continent; she wept on a video link at the award ceremony, overcome that the world had finally noticed.

A Sudanese Spiderman enthralled the jury with a 19-minute television piece for the Guardian that ended with optimism. A single brave soul can inspire revolution against tyranny. But not without support from outsiders who care. We’ll get back to Spidey; please read on.

MORE

AMPUS, France–My first encounter with the Queen ended with an Indian Ocean odyssey to polar opposite archipelagos: Maldives, still a medieval Muslim time warp hidden among coral fantasia, and Seychelles, then fun-loving islands where Sex on the Beach was not a bar drink.

That was in 1972 after a five-week visit to Southeast Asia in a world entirely from today. Elizabeth II and Prince Philip sailed on their yacht, Britannia. A few reporters flew ahead on a Royal Air Force transport. We had an awful lot of fun, but I don’t think the queen did.

Britannia tied up at Male, Maldives’ minuscule capital, in water clear enough to see parrotfish frolic on the sea floor. Instead of jumping in, the royal couple traipsed off to a fish plant, gamely ignoring the stench, and then hobnobbed with officials, schoolkids and the four resident Brits.

On that trip, and others like it in various far-flung places, I watched a purely symbolic monarch work hard to fortify humanity in a world bent on destroying itself. She dined with dictators, only subtly appealing to their better natures. In remote villages, she lit up lives.

Fifty years later, her impact can’t be measured. But her mark is indelible. People who waited 30 hours to file past her casket and all those who now gather in London for a last goodbye show her legacy. Great Britain, though diminished these days, still punches far above its weight.

This is no paean to a faultless queen. A costly archaic monarchy in a parliamentary democracy with a class-based society is no easy fit. And the House of Windsor has a lot of dark corners.

MORE

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.

MORE