BAYEUX, France — This gem of a medieval Normandy town, nearly flattened by allied bombers in 1944 to stop a power-obsessed madman from swallowing Britain and moving on, puts looming American elections into sharp, stark focus.

Today, Bayeux encapsulates a hoary adage now fraught with urgent meaning: There are none so blind as those who will not see.

Conflicts flare across an overheated, hungry planet that already sloughs off humans like dead skin. A patently deranged narcissist uses Hitler's playbook to con the clueless into giving him absolute control of a dis-United States at war with itself.

Donald Trump has no ambition to conquer the world. He wants to ignore it behind closed borders while using America's economic and military heft to exploit the other eight billion people who share an imperiled planet.

Whether he succeeds depends on how many eligible voters decide to opt out — to be deserters — or to support Trump, in effect, by wasting a ballot on a third-party candidate because of a thin grasp of the world as it is.

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PARIS — Polls say about 25 million eligible voters remain undecided as Kamala Harris and Donald Trump run neck and neck. A handful of states will determine the winner, in some by margins in the low thousands. The House and Senate are both tossups.

Wherever you are in the world, if you aren't terrified you're not paying attention. Just consider this:

Trump triggered wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, which so far have taken at least 250,000 lives. His self-focused pandemic response abruptly and painfully killed more than twice as many Americans he was sworn to protect.

This is a brief on what the world faces if he comes back, cushioned by sycophants, with the power to plunge Earth into nuclear winter. That is an unlikely extreme. But at the minimum, a delirious ignoramus intends to implant an autocracy ruled by the rich.

It all depends on how many of those 25 million persuadables think of their own families' future — along with everyone else's — and show up to cast a ballot.

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FREJUS, France — Sen. JD Vance keeps on slandering legal Haitian immigrants who his constituents welcomed to fill crucial jobs. Truth from outraged townsfolk, local officials and the Republican governor of Ohio fails to dim his headline-grabbing lunacy.

"If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people," he told Dana Bash on CNN, "then that's what I'm going to do." A telling measure of a man who would do anything to be president.

Miss Sassy, the wayward feline who started the fuss, came home to the woman who told police she feared it had ended up as cat creole. No matter. At least 35 bomb threats and racial taunts at anyone black paralyzed peaceable little Springfield.

TV screens continue to show a hate-spewing Donald Trump: "They're eating the dogs!" When he rants at rallies, "We've got to get them the hell out of there," crowds chant, "Send them home."

As this running non-story sucks up national attention, few Americans take note of the overriding global crises that fearful, godforsaken Haiti encapsulates.

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VEYRIER, Switzerland — In a leafy glade straddling the French border, among headstones chiseled with the Star of David, it aches to see a world sleepwalk toward what may be another great war with the same intolerance and apathy that sparked the last one.

Reality bites hard in haunting silence at the Cimetière Israélite among victims of an elected madman who during my lifespan exterminated millions of Jews and other “non-Aryans.”

In nearby Annemasse, France, the municipality is restoring torture cells Nazis built in the old Hôtel Pax. Peace Hotel. Young women in the Resistance imprisoned there chose awful death rather than reveal escape routes that saved Jewish children.

The Maison de Mémoire recalls those forgotten words: Never Again. Yet in Israel and Gaza, opposing forces kill innocents en masse. Some soldiers under that Star of David use torture to interrogate. In the West Bank, Jewish settlers evoke a dreaded memory: pogroms.

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AMPUS, France — Hulking boar called sangliers and assorted rodents dominated high-country Provençal fauna when I came here in the 1980s. The pigs trampled rock terraces and uprooted plants. Rats infested homes and barns. They were no big deal.

Olive groves, amber waves of grain and vineyards thrived with reliable winter cold snaps and tolerably hot summers. Rivers swelled in spring. Snowmelt recharged the eau de la montagne subsurface water that Marcel Pagnol made famous.

All creatures great and small ate their fill. Hunter friends grilled sanglier chops on olivewood coals. Miranda the cat kept rodents on the run. We barely noticed early shifts in biodiversity as nature began culling humans from the mix.

Today, Porcus trumpus and Rattus muskiana, invasive subspecies from North America, threaten Provence and everywhere else. The risk goes far beyond ecological balance. Donald Trump and Elon Musk have my vote as the two most dangerous men on Earth.

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