PARIS — Our world is awash in crises as the holidays approach, but spare a thought for André Daguin, the chef whose gastronomic gift of foie gras chaud lifts my spirits even when a despot-in-waiting and craven senators try to turn America into an unprincipled boobocracy.

Daguin died this week at 84 in Auch, the ancient Gascony town west of Toulouse he made famous with creations in his Michelin-starred kitchen at the Hotel de France. He is known best for magret de canard, sliced rare duck. But his warm foie gras was hardly chopped liver.

Caesar famously noted that Gaul is divided in three parts. It still is today: butter up north, olive oil in Provence and goose grease or duck fat in the southwest. For celebrated Gascon plats de resistance, duck is the fowl of choice. And Daguin was the duke of duckdom.

Finishing university, he headed to Scotland to study law. But as often used to happen among old-school French restaurateur clans, he was soon back in Auch spending 18-hour days in local markets and his kitchen.

Daguin took over the family's hotel-restaurant in 1959 back when duck was a bit player, mostly potted in confit de canard. He grilled succulent breasts like steak, thin and rare. After he added his green peppercorn sauce in 1965, international foodies beat a path to his door.

He could get fancy, skewering foie gras with sea scallops or serving it with langoustines. He made flash-frozen prune and Armagnac ice cream with liquid nitrogen. He earned a Michelin star within a year and then a second one a decade later.

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PARIS — It comes down to this: Donald Trump says Adam Schiff committed treason, potentially punished by execution, because he accurately depicted that ultimatum to Ukraine's new president as a “classic organized-crime shakedown.”

The case is open and shut. Ukraine would lose $400 million it needs to hold off Russians on Europe's eastern flank if its young corruption-averse leader didn't help him slime Joe Biden. Such self-serving treachery is exactly why Congress was given the power to impeach.

Trump invokes lèse-majesté No one questions a monarch. His phone call was perfect. And beautiful. Nancy Pelosi is corrupt. Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee chairman and seasoned prosecutor, is ten times worse. Never-Trump Republicans are human scum.

“Read the transcript,” Trump intones over and over. There is no transcript, only a call memo that establishes guilt. He shifts focus to Hunter Biden, whose role is beside the point. Partisans want to out a patriotic informant, putting him in peril, although high-level witnesses under oath to Congress confirmed his report in damning detail.

And yet half the nation is prepared to flout the Constitution, favoring political gaming over an impeachment process to uphold the rule of law. This is exactly how representative democracy gives way to demagogy.

In America, reality is lost as words are flung around by two extremes deaf to one another. But in Europe, people who learned the hard way how the Big Lie leads to Blitzkrieg see the United States abandoning values that protect a wider world from tyranny.

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PARIS - Half awake, I hoped it was a jetlag nightmare, but no. Donald Trump was boasting on TV that he alone had made the world safe. And for nearly an hour he splashed kerosene on embers, which America-hating zealots are now likely to fan into flame.

I just returned to the real world after a month in a dis-United States that is today lost in a galaxy of its own. The raid on Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi succeeded in spite of Trump, not because of him, and the worst may be yet to come.

Yes, this is yet more commentary about an over-covered episode. But step back and consider the bigger backdrop.

Too many Americans beyond Trump's hardcore take him at his word. Terrorism, he assures them, is now only Europe's problem. In fact, his ham-handed personal approach to policy swells extremist ranks and alienates essential allies.

And this reflects a cognitive disconnect that suggests Trump may well be reelected despite his flagrant impeachable offenses, abuse of power, enrichment at public expense, divisive partisanship and sociopathic narcissism.

A broad coalition defeated the Islamic State's caliphate, but terrorism is a state of mind, a borderless reaction to perceived injustice. Taunting a revered martyr goads new leaders and loners to seek payback in America, the belly of the beast.

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ATAGONIA, Arizona - A 12-year-old reporter famously outdrew the marshal in this Old West town last February, and she showed that a pencil in the right hands is still mightier than a lawman's sidearm. These days, however, it is best not to count on that. Or much else.

Patagonia, once a railway whistle stop for miners and ranchers on a shady creek near the Mexican border, is now timeout territory for dropouts, diehards and deep thinkers who listen to different drums. It says much about what's going wrong – and what isn't - in America.

That marshal ordered young Hilde Lysiak to stop tailing him on her bike. She said she was on a story. He replied that she was just a kid and in any case was obliged to obey a police order. She stood her ground.

In her print and online monthly Orange Street News, Hilde quoted the marshal as saying, “I don't want to hear about any of that freedom of the press stuff…I'm going to have you arrested and thrown in juvey.” He let her go with a warning not to circulate her video of the encounter.

She immediately published the video. The Town Council apologized profusely for what it called a First Amendment violation. “We are sorry, Hilde,” the mayor said in a long statement about citizens' rights. “We encourage and respect your continued aspirations…”

Score one for the good guys. But a free regional monthly and Hilde's paper, which is heavy on stabbings and shoplifting, are it for news. Some of Patagonia's 1,000 residents read voraciously online. Others own no TV and pay little attention to the world beyond their happy valley.

Townsfolk, a little more blue than red, can be evasive when asked where they stand. Arguing politics tends to foul the air in a small community. But as in all small towns, there are notable fixtures like Charlie Montoy, happy to speak his mind with all comers.

Montoy’s garage is emblazoned with neatly painted letters, PIGS, for politically incorrect gas station. “Yes, I’m for Trump,” he said. “He’s a businessman. I spent thirty years here, working every day. These liberal fuckers want something for nothing.”

TUCSON, Arizona — The scary part of America's descent down a rabbit hole is less the mad ruler who bellows, “Off with their heads!”, than so many salt-of-the-earth guys like Tony, my friendly plumber, who accepts his denial of damning evidence that he himself produced.

That Ukraine phone call ought to impact like planes leveling the World Trade Center. Far more destructive than a terrorist attack, it shows an American president undermining democracy at a time when emboldened dictators plunder a world faced with mass extinctions.

Yet Tony tunes out impeachment fervor as just more noise from a corrupt liberal media monolith. “Hillary and Obama did the same thing,” he tells me. I don't argue. He's a good guy at heart with an immutable viewpoint: journalists, like plumbers, make a living by stirring up shit.

Donald Trump is gambling that enough people like Tony believe him over their own eyes and ears. History warns us to worry. In the 1500s, a British writer coined a phase that sums up human reality dating back to the Bible: There are none so blind as those who will not see.

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