CAVE CREEK, Arizona - A sign at the outskirts, “Where the Wild West Lives,” is hyped up horse flop. Despite old cowboy décor, people in this Disneyesque Frontierland and biker hangout mostly tune out a wider world in their United States of Bubble Wrap.

Like so much of America today, Cave Creek lives in comfortable ersatz reality, isolated from crises and conflict across an increasingly unlivable planet. Apathy condones outrages by elected leaders who in earlier days would have been tarred and feathered.

Cavalry troops wresting land from Apaches built an outpost here in the 1870s. Ranchers and gold miners followed. In 2000, the town, county and state bought the nearby Spur Cross Ranch to protect its 2,154 acres of unique Sonora Desert splendor.

At sunset on Spur Cross, pastels tint the tangled arms of giant saguaro cacti. Trails wind up rocky outcrops sheltering ancient Indian relics. Mule deer lurk in lush sage-scented greenery along the rippling creek. Soon wildflowers will burst into color.

But suburbia encroaches everywhere. Swimming pools evaporate as temperatures soar. Lawns suck up water. Gas-gulping power wagons stand ready to tear up pristine desert not yet bulldozed for new lots. An awful lot of TVs are tuned to Fox News.

In town, the mood is quickly evident. “I don't talk about politics,” one young woman told me. Elders tend toward a familiar smirk that delivers a clear message: My brokerage account is doing fine, and I know what I believe. Butt out.

Max Boot captured the national picture in a Washington Post op-ed, a twist on the paper's watchword: Democracy Dies in Darkness. “This is how democracies die,” he wrote, “not in darkness but in full view of a public that couldn't care less.”

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TUCSON — After the Senate kangaroo court delivered its verdict, Mike Pence crowed, “It's over.” No, it's not. Weapons of mass destruction — Donald Trump's thumbs — have attacked America from within, and they seem to be winning.

Trump, who takes his transparent distortions as divine truth, sees any challenge as lèse majesté. Americans have less than 10 months to set him straight before another term entrenches monarchal oligarchy — or worse.

Yet Democratic candidates snipe at one another to attract voters guided by emotional impulse as though the most crucial election ever was simply picking a winner on Dancing With the Stars.

The world badly needs the wherewithal and moral compass of an America that works with others to fend off global calamity. But too many voters ignore this big picture to obsess over day-to-day political horseraces and nitpicking sidelights.

Having covered self-obsessed demagogues since the 1960s, I know one when I see one. Some are far less brutal than others, but all have one basis in common: they do whatever they want and take vengeance on dissenters.

Upon acquittal, Trump strutted through the White House behind a military band playing “Hail to the Chief.” He heaped praise on his sycophants then spewed vulgar invective and threats at “sick, horrible” Democrats who made his family suffer.

His unhinged hour-long ramble treated assembled Republican legislators like a dog trainer tossing biscuits at his neutered poodles. He lavished encomiums on Mitch McConnell for blocking bills and packing the Supreme Court.

Later, he told reporters that Nancy Pelosi broke the law by tearing up a copy of his lie-laced State of the Union speech, an “official document.” It was, he said, “so disrespectful to our country, and actually very illegal.”

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Illustration courtesy of Jeff Danziger

SAN FRANCISCO — Michael Getler, perhaps the wisest editor I've ever known, once warned me, “You can go awfully wrong betting against the American people.” That rumbling in the background is not the Big One. It's Mike backflipping in his grave.

Even Joseph Stalin feigned more legitimacy than the U.S. Senate's contemptible show trial. The predetermined verdict, with neither witnesses nor documents, gave a mercurial, power-obsessed president free rein to ignore the Constitution.

Donald Trump held up vital aid to an ally at war, seeking dirt on Joe Biden, and then blocked a congressional inquiry. The defense rested on his last call to Kiev: “no quid pro quo.” That was after a courageous insider made his extortion public.

John Bolton's leaked manuscript nailed down any niggling doubts. Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee called Trump's actions “inappropriate” but not impeachable. Inappropriate is farting in a buffet line. This is more.

Yet much of America shrugged it off, failing to see the incalculable damage done not only to basic values at home but also to a world facing despotic manipulation of “truth,” widening conflict and climate chaos that threatens unimaginable consequences.

The Superbowl was great, but we are in trouble when a football game with no real lasting impact draws ten times more television viewers than a sham impeachment.

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PARIS — The Seine, that lovely little river looping through the heart of France, offers an illuminating view on 2020, already playing out as the year that was, a defining point on whither humanity. The view is bleak, yet a few French lessons could help tip the balance toward hope.

The French have punched above their weight since obstreperous Gauls confounded Caesar, alternating between imperial glory and ignominious defeat. They’ve had enough idiot kings. Now a tumultuous, effective democracy can show America what “We, the people” really means.

Entente is easily defined: no good comes from a foreign policy that jabs sharp sticks into hornet nests. France has buried enough millions to know the costs of conflict. Tough commandos fight hard when they must. A nuclear force de frappe delivers a clear message: Don’t screw with us.

At home, that holy trinity – liberté, égalité, fraternité – rests on a concept Jean-Jacques Rousseau outlined in 1752: le contrat sociale. Money is not how you keep score. Pitched battles today in city streets recall the point of pitchforks at the Bastille: Rich people do not own poor ones.

Down on the Seine, metaphor amounts to fact. If everyone in a sinking boat fails to bail together, they all go down.

World leaders gathered in Paris during 2015 to head off an inexorable slide toward climactic doom. They made solemn promises to take modest first steps and build on those. Despite some progress, an overall assessment today comes down to the ever-popular expletive: merde.

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TUCSON, Arizona — “Damn,” a saddening email began, “we have lost one of the truly greats; a great reporter, a great man.” Ward Just has died at 84. No one I've known epitomized like he did good journalism at the farthest extremes of its outer dimensions.

This is a tribute to him and a reflection on what we are losing at the top end of a vital profession that has never been more essential.

Ward spent 18 months in Vietnam as war began to widen, sidelined briefly when grenade fragments lodged in his back. His Washington Post dispatches exuded futility. In 1967, back home, he wrote an analysis months before the Tet Offensive. America didn't listen.

“This war is not being won,” it began, “and by any reasonable estimate it is not going to be won in the foreseeable future. It may be unwinnable.” It ended in close focus on a 19-year-old grunt named Truman Schockley.

“Smoking a Lucky Strike and staring off into the mountains, Schockley died with a sniper's bullet through the heart and stopped breathing before the cigarette stopped burning. The company commander sent a platoon into the underbrush to look for the sniper, but the sniper had left. Schockley was put in a green body bag and sent to Bongson for transport to Saigon and then home.”

Ward was from a newspaper family, steeped in the old tenets. He had surely chuckled like all of us at A.J. Liebling's answer when asked why he never tried writing a novel. “What?” the iconic old correspondent sputtered. “And make things up?”

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