TUCSON – Alarm whistles on our pressure-cooked planet are ever-louder echoes from 1980, when America dumped Jimmy Carter after a single term. Smoldering embers Ronald Reagan left behind now fan into flame, and combustion threatens to blow Pandora’s box all to hell.

Carter, at 98, prepares to slip away while his worst nightmares from the past take real shape. This is no time to replace yet another effective president committed to finishing his job.

Carter’s much-remembered “Crisis of Confidence” speech in July 1979 (link below) foreshadowed the self-interested, money-fueled dysfunction that now divides America. He dissected a glum national funk and, point by point, mapped the way out of it.

But Kai Bird’s biography, “The Outlier,” captures the reaction: “He insisted on telling us what was wrong and what it would take to make things better. And for most Americans, it was easier to label the messenger a ‘failure’ than to grapple with the hard problems.”

As a reporter based in Argentina, then Europe, I watched the rise and fall of perhaps the most underappreciated U.S. president in history. The brutality he tried to stop soon spread into Central America, then to the Middle East and beyond.

Carter injected humanity into statecraft. He worked with the Kremlin to stem a nuclear arms race. He brought Israel and Egypt together and pushed hard to find peaceable co-existence with Palestine. He tried to wean America off fossil fuels and protect the global environment.

His brain trust included Samuel Huntington from Harvard, who famously warned after the Soviet Union imploded that the world’s greatest threat was a “clash of civilizations.”

Reagan is lauded for that theatrical flourish: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall.” But Carter’s diplomacy and Soviets’ 1979 Afghanistan invasion had already rusted away the Iron Curtain. Today, Republicans want that wall in Arizona.

Looking back, I see a lot of Carter in Joe Biden – decency, integrity and a smiling folksy exterior over hard steel. But there is a difference. With a lifetime in Washington and dealings abroad, Biden does not have to learn on the job.

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TUCSON – If Joe Biden has done as much for America as he claims, a snide Wall Street Journal editorial asked after his uplifting 73-minute State of the Union report, “why does most of America not seem to appreciate it?”

Well, one reason is the Journal itself. A carpetbagging ex-Australian Darth Vader weaseled his way to control of the once stately financial daily while weaponizing Fox News and the New York Post. But, of course, Rupert Murdoch is only part of it.

Too many voters today are easily conned, deeply biased, impervious to fact and bereft of survival instincts. Contrary to myth, frogs leap out of heating pots. Stampeding cattle stop at a cliff edge. Lemmings don’t really commit mass suicide. We’ll find out about Americans in 2024.

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NOGALES, Arizona – Tony Estrada spoke hard reality in a soft gentle voice:

“If you haven’t lived on the border, you don’t know what it’s all about. As long as you have a demand for drugs, a demand for labor, people will come across. As long as people need to make a future for their families, they will take whatever risks they have to. It will never stop.”

He would know. Estrada, 80, was a Nogales cop for decades and Santa Cruz County sheriff for seven terms until 2021. He has seen an open friendly frontier evolve into a Berlin Wall. I scribbled notes, nodding as he triggered my memories of mornings in an earlier Mexico.

People who demand a Concrete Curtain miss the point. That won’t stop anyone determined to go over it, under it or around it. Instead, it seals off Americans from a richly human culture with deep family values and a back-breaking work ethic just out their backdoor.

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TUCSON – This is an urgent note to friends everywhere – and eight billion others. In the unlikely event that some in that last group may not receive this message directly, please pass it around. Considering what we’ve seen in America so far in 2023, we need a New Year’s Revolution.

Homo sapiens have been at odds since we first began lobbing stones at each other. If we can together settle differences and repair the damage, human ingenuity can create an unimagined future for those to come. If not, we will be the generations who switch out the lights on Earth.

This is not hair-on-fire hyperbole, but rather the considered conclusion of a working reporter who has spent 60 years covering war and peace firsthand on seven continents. I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect I’m not.

After the Great War left 200 million people dead from conflict, hunger, influenza and genocide, T.S. Elliot wrote in “The Hollow Men”: “This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper.” Unless we collectively lower the heat, literally and figuratively, it will be both.

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HEREFORD, Arizona — Doug Ducey’s last erection as governor was a three-mile makeshift barricade of shipping containers, a fitting monument to himself and the elephants he rode in on: an illegal, idiotic, destructive, short-lived, transparent con job to exploit gullible voters.

It typifies irreparable damage caused by Donald Trump’s futile attempts to build his Wall on a border already fenced off or protected by mountainous terrain. Even if completed, it would have been no more effective against human tides than sandbags piled up against rising seas.

Governor-elect Katie Hobbs was blunt: “It’s not our land to put things on. It’s a political stunt.” Plus, she added, “I think it’s a waste of taxpayer dollars.” And how.

By the time trucks chew up yet more desert to haul it away, it will have cost well over $100 million, or 2,500 “TGTs,” the Mort Report parallel currency based on third grade teachers’ annual pay. That would cover Arizona’s classroom shortfall and allow for long overdue raises.

Had the stacked containers remained in place, their only practical purpose would have been as staging modules for smugglers. Holes cut into them on the Mexican side with camouflaged exits on the other would help them traffic migrants, drugs and perhaps a few terrorists.