TUCSON — “Isn’t it terrible about this Trump story?”, a much-admired New York Times columnist wrote. “All the attention it's getting? Newspapers, television, magazines all pumping out Trump gossip. They ought to be ashamed…”

That was Russell Baker, 30 years ago, when Trump was merely an ego-mad upstart clamoring for attention, building gaudy erections, conning people with serial scams, going bankrupt to stiff creditors and treating women like sex toys.

“You have heard this on the talking furniture and read it in newspapers and magazines,” Russ wrote. “The tone is always disapproving, the question always the same: Why is America wallowing in piffle when the world is being remade by truly momentous events?”

He had an answer: “The country is nearly brain dead.” And if Russ came back today to sum up the past four years, seeing how far Trump’s bullshit-slinging has gotten him since then, he would almost certainly drop the “nearly.”

As we wring hands about whither democracy and guess about the next act in Trump’s perennial circus, we might focus on a simple word at the heart of it all: schools.

Those 70 million Americans who voted for a man who has crippled America and much of the world beyond aren’t (all) stupid. But ignorant? Too many of us miss the crucial difference.

Forrest Gump nailed the former: stupid is as stupid does. Ignorant, hardly pejorative, simply means unaware or uninformed. We all know a lot about things we have studied or experienced. We’re all ignorant about the rest.

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Illustration Courtesy of Jeff Danziger

TUCSON — On a downer evening in 1882, Edvard Munch watched the setting sun turn clouds blood red over a Norwegian fjord. “I sensed a scream passing through nature,” he wrote in his diary. “The color shrieked.” Tonight, the Arizona crimson sunset is screaming.

Munch captured the deepest anxieties of the human condition with an agonized gaunt face in his painting, “The Scream.” Those hands clapped tightly over ears might be blocking out the poisonous lying harangue of a cruel despotic narcissist who threatens unspeakable calamity.

This sounds overdramatic, and that’s the problem. It isn’t. If the worst of human nature muscles aside the best of it on Nov. 3, we can only guess at the unavoidable consequences for America and the wider world it is abandoning.

More than 90 million early ballots are already cast, and few made-up minds are likely to change. Still, enough undecided or apathetic eligible voters remain to sway the results either way. We have only hours left to persuade everyone within our reach to consider the stakes.

My last Mort Report, a flat-out rant, detailed a range of overriding issues. At this point, we need calmly reasoned conversations within our own circles, by phone if not in person, to focus on their personal concerns. Every minute counts.

There is the obvious: carpools for people who need a ride or moral support to brave long lines and the menace of goons trying to steal their most valuable asset: the right to choose leaders who faithfully represent the citizens they are sworn to serve.

But more, we need a firm grasp on what Donald Trump and his enabling Republicans have already stolen. For the quarter-million victims of a plague he purposely let run wild, it is too late. If he is reelected, far more will be lost.

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ORACLE, Arizona — I’m mostly here for the dateline, but clear mountain air in this old mining town also inspires oracular reflection on impending doom. Screw my attempts to keep recent Mort Reports from excessive raving. This is a flat-out rant.

It was touched off by a clip of Mitch McConnell debating Amy McGrath in Kentucky. She evoked a nation in misery from a pandemic Donald Trump allowed to run wild. He just chuckled, laughing off an insignificant female who dared to call him out.

A totally sane and yet indescribably evil organ grinder has allowed his sociopathic King Kong primate to tear apart a democracy that successive presidents have held together for 244 years.

Roughly equal camps of Americans throng to the polls in record numbers. But another 20 percent remain in doubt, either clueless of what is at stake, confused by specious arguments or simply not caring enough to cast a ballot.

There are a hundred reasons to vote out self-serving Republicans, all of them at every level, and hose down piles of toxic elephant droppings stinking up America. But three issues loom largest: Covid-19, the courts and climate.

We have only a week left to persuade the undecided to put aside partisan fiction and consider what Republican rule has done so far — and what it means to our future.

TUCSON — I should be in the Mediterranean now tracking refugee flotillas and Mafia fleets poaching the last bluefin tuna. But my back porch, where the birds and the bees duke it out over drops of water, offers an alternate view of a world facing endgame.

America’s referendumb will determine soon whether sentient citizens can rescue democracy from an unhinged megalomaniac who shreds its Constitution, sides with its enemies and encourages people to die in droves for his own political advantage.

Donald Trump praises terrorists who plotted to behead a governor and armed militias bent on civil war. He embraces QAnon candidates who believe Democrats torture and eat children in satanic rites. With Hitlerian tactics, he has assassinated truth in America.

Joe Biden, he thunders at rallies, should be jailed for running an “organized crime family.” And so, even now, should Hillary Clinton.

Yet that’s not the worst of it. If he thwarts global action against climate collapse for four years more, we will near the tipping point. As T.S. Eliot foresaw a century ago in “Hollow Men,” the world we know would end not with a bang but with a whimper.

This is not apocalyptic doomsaying, simply observable fact. Only the time frame is in doubt. Soaring temperatures shred Earth’s ecological web. Oceans rise, storms rage, forests burn, crops shrivel. Crocodiles and cockroaches will survive, but humans won’t.