PARIS — Ronald Reagan moistened every eye within earshot atop that Normandy cliff in 1984, mine included: “In this place where the West held together, let us make a vow to our dead. Let us show them by our actions that we understand what they died for.”

He was an actor who played president masterfully but had little grasp of the world he steered off course. On D-Day four decades later, Joe Biden was brief and low-key. An actual statesman, he said what is essential at the most perilous time in human history.

The men who died capturing Pointe du Hoc, he said, now summon us: “They ask us what we will do. They’re not asking us to scale these cliffs, but they’re asking us to stay true to what America stands for.”

As a reporter, I’ve watched “morning in America” darken toward midnight in a wider world spinning out of control. Americans have four months to do what Samuel L. Jackson urged when the danger was only George W. Bush: Wake the Fuck Up.

DRAGUIGNAN, France – This is likely the most important, urgent dispatch I’ve ever written, and I hope it’s wrong. But two wise sources — Solomon the Saguaro in Tucson and Emiliano the Olive Tree in Provence — concur. In 2024, we heedless humans will decide our fate.

Terrifying evidence is indisputable. Perturbed nature reacts with wild weather and deadly pathogens. Heat tops 120 degrees, 50 in Celsius, in unlikely places. Crops shrivel — or drown in floods. Warming, acidified seas rise as ice shelves melt. Carbon poisons the air.

Hardly a passing anomaly, scientists confirm, this is worsening at a pace few predicted. Yet, overwhelmed, we block out the unthinkable.

Elections this year across the world fortify false prophets whose simplistic solutions push societies far to the right. Rather than unite against common crises, most turn inward. Some enable unwinnable war.

If Donald Trump and his Republican climate deniers prevail in November, neither the meek nor greed-focused “masters of the universe” will inherit the earth. It has already begun sloughing off the two-legged species that befouls it.

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MIGENNES, France — The African Queen ran roiling rapids under German guns. Fitzcarraldo’s 320-ton steamboat was hauled over a mountain in the Amazon. Our slog up the Seine in Almeria was a bit easier — yet still a love-hate voyage for the books.

This report was meant to be a light palate cleanser before doubling down on despots and dumbasses. But four days on waterways at the crux of the Old World ever since Gauls battled Caesar brought today’s global turmoil into sharp focus.

Heeding history averts crises. Ignoring it creates new ones, made progressively worse by new weaponry and technology. Far too many people today barely remember last week.

Hop aboard for a look at the ship’s log, reportage on the approaching Olympics and flashbacks from the 1980s when I moved onto my home afloat in the heart of Paris, then a livable, laid-back haven in a manageable world.

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PARIS — Terry Anderson and Don Mell drove home after tennis on the Beirut corniche, a beautiful seafront by bombed-out rubble in a city where in 1985 it was hard to hear the penny drop. That green Mercedes reappeared yet again. Don said, “I don’t like the look of this.”

Too late. Men bundled Terry into the Merc. One stuck a gun in Don’s face and waved him back. He chased them in his own car but lost them. In any case, what could he do with a wooden racket against assault weapons? 

Don, an AP photographer, later spoke with Hassan Nasrullah and asked why he was spared. “Do you fish?” the Hezbollah leader replied. “If you catch a big one, you throw the other ones back.” He wanted prisoners freed in Kuwait, and AP’s Middle East bureau chief was a bargaining chip. 

Terry spent 2,454 days in dank cells, often chained to a radiator. Like so many hostages who were eventually freed — and survivors of those who weren’t — he saw the fast-worsening risk to reporters as the reason it is so essential for them to stay at their jobs. 

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PARIS — After months in a Barbie-bedazzled America heedless of Oppenheimer’s dark warnings, approaching elections terrify me. I’ve covered Trump-type despots who con their way to power since the 1960s. Almost invariably, they do what they say they will, then follow with worse.

Nations that learn the hard way why history matters share what the French call a longue mémoire. Too many Americans with the attention span of fruit flies on fentanyl may soon dump a remarkably effective president to bring back a monster.

I heard an MSNBC anchor tell a panel, with an amused laugh, “Yes, we don’t want to relitigate Covid.” Why not?

Ukraine and Gaza wars sparked by Donald Trump’s folly have taken 60,000 lives. His depraved disregard for a deadly virus killed well over 10 times that many in America alone. It caused the soaring inflation and global bedlam that so many people blame on Joe Biden.

As if insurrection, purloining state secrets, election tampering, fraud and sexual assault were not enough, that is a clearcut crime against humanity. Americans ignore at their peril his favorite catchphrase: “blood bath.”

A brash outsider had a reasonable appeal in 2016 to Americans eager for change. Today, he aims to replace democracy with demagogy. Eight billion people share a fragile lifeboat; he is chopping holes in the hull. November 5 will amount to a national referendumb.

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