PARIS — As Bogey told Bergman when they parted in Casablanca, we’ll always have Paris. Sort of. Hemingway’s “moveable feast” today is often Big Macs on the fly. And when choked by fuming gridlock and scooter swarms, the world’s favorite city is an immovable beast.

There is still much to love, with new surprises. The 18th-century Hôtel de la Marine at the Concorde, no longer the Navy Ministry behind forbidding doors, is stunning, an open-air café and museum. Replicated ships evoke France’s mission to civilize the world, like it or not.

But new colors replace the dappled pastels at dawn and dusk that once defined the fabled City of Light. Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s campaign to turn Paris green has created a maddening palette of red no-entry signs, flashing blue on police cars and gray polluted air.

Elected in 2014, Hidalgo laid out plans to “reinvent Paris” with an eye toward Amsterdam in a city with 10 times the population, twice as many visitors, and neither canal boats nor a circulatory system of hop-on trams. Instead, she added a tenth circle to Dante’s Inferno.

Paris traffic was always a balance between the minuet and bullfighting. Drivers looked out for motorcycles blasting between lanes. Bikes sped along at the edges. Pedestrians understood survival of the swiftest. Now it’s a free-for-all breakdance.

Hidalgo closed arteries along the Seine, narrowed others for bike lanes, slashed parking and routed one-way streets into labyrinths. Barriers section off traffic circles that eased the flow.

Cameras enforce a citywide 30-kilometer (18-mile) an hour speed limit, even after midnight. At peak hours, you can make better time on a walker.

Her plan is a ”ville de quart d’heure” — a 15-minute city — in which people walk or bike to shops, restaurants and services close to home. “We must forget about crossing Paris from east to west by car,” she told Le Parisien in 2020. But delivery vans, repair trucks, ambulances, the old and invalid, exurbanites whose only option is driving to work?

And now with all-out preparation for the 2024 Olympics, heavy machinery chews up the city’s heart, adding yet more chaos. “Breathe Paris in,” Victor Hugo once wrote. “It nourishes the soul.” As paralyzed traffic spews toxicity, it also savages the lungs.

Hidalgo is running for president in April, a Socialist among left-leaning contenders in a right-leaning France. Polls put her below 5 percent. But, at 62, she can try again in five years, and she is going all out to dazzle her city. The impact is monumental.

The weekly L’Express just ran a cover showing the mayor perched on an ornate chair under the headline, “Queen of Disaster.” Brutal Twitter posts at #saccageparis show homeless camps, garbage heaps, and savaged landmarks in a city already $8 billion in debt.

PARIS — Okay, enough now. Climate scientists wring their hands but are not yet without hope. America’s Constitution, if fraying, is still intact. Paris is torn up and choked with traffic, but it’s not burning. We can save the world, but we had damned well better get started.

As it turns out, Chicken Little was right; the sky is falling. Particulates poison the atmosphere. And herd impunity allows governments, industry and individuals to ravage what’s left down below. We face the unthinkable if enough sensible people cannot get a grip and take action.

The Ship of Fools, as Plato labeled humanity, is sinking fast. Rather than bail hard and head toward a safe harbor, we gouge yet more holes in the hull. Millions go hungry as a feckless few hoard dwindling food stocks. Each year, more turn violent in desperation.

I took a break from the Mort Report to ponder my last 40 years in the wilderness watching the world fall on its axis. Sorting out thoughts on how we benighted shipmates can get back on course, I realized the answer is embroidered in faux-Latin on my canvas desk chair.

In 1981, when a new breed of “media” executives began sacrificing principle for profit, Paul Theroux’s whimsical son Marcel was studying classics. I asked him to translate a maxim for reporters not willing to play piano in whorehouses: Make the Assholes Pay.

Marcel came up with “Facete Rectos Pagare,” which back then was mostly for laughs. The news business, though flawed, was self-correcting. Profit still depended on credibility. That suffered when competitors called out honest mistakes, let alone blatant lies.

Today, the assholes aren’t paying; the rest of us are. Partisan “news outlets” spew cesspools of falsehoods that enable faithless politicians and tax-averse moguls to replace democracy with small-f fascism. Just hold your nose and reflect on, say, Tucker Carlson.

MORE

PARIS — The Glasgow climate summit, likely humanity’s last shot at averting the unthinkable, is nearly upon us with a tidal wave of harrowing data and a backwash of deluded denial. For a quick look at why the outlook is so troubling, take a paddle up Schitt’s Creek.

One exchange in that incisive Canadian TV series says it all. When her veterinarian flame tells Alexis Rose (the spoiled diva who turns cool) he has a research grant to the Galapagos, she asks: “Can’t we go someplace less spooky and scary, like the Maldives?”

The Galapagos aren’t scary. Neither is Maldives if you pay resort costs — up to $30,000 a night. But the hyper-spooky string of Indian Ocean atolls exports more jihadists per capita than the Mideast or Afghanistan. And it is likely to be the first state lost under rising seas.

Ignorance is hardly bliss. Only informed public pressure can force governments to think beyond short-term political survival and take urgent joint action. Yet too many Alexis Roses tune out what they can’t wear, eat, bed or talk about with friends.

Maldives illustrates why so much has gone wrong since 2009 when President Mohamed Nasheed nearly united world leaders to avert climate collapse, confront Islamist extremism and nudge despots toward democracy. It is a long story; first some background.

COP-26 in Glasgow is the latest “conference of the parties” to a U.N. framework set up in the 1990s. I covered the last big one here in Paris in 2015 and labeled it COPout-21. Most delegates’ pledges dissipated not long after the exhaust clouds from jets that flew them home.

Planned fossil fuel use through 2030, largely in China and India, is twice the level agreed in Paris to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Since then, heat is up by 1.1 degrees. At 2 degrees, scientists say, floods, fires and storms will overwhelm our ecosystem.

Climate is only part of it. Fresh U.S. intelligence and defense estimates warn of massive migration, financial breakdown and armed conflicts over territory, food supply and water. Major powers already face showdowns over resources as ice melts in the Arctic and Antarctic.

All this was unimaginable when I visited Maldives in 1972.

MORE

BAYEUX, France — The Prix Bayeux jury was somewhere between Afghanistan and Gaza, deliberating over war coverage as we do each year, when my phone buzzed news as crucial to the world’s fate as those noisier battles on Normandy beaches up the road a lifetime ago.

With tepid understatement, the Nobel Peace Prize committee cited “increasingly adverse conditions” for newsgathering, as it singled out Maria Ressa, the fearless Filipina who runs Rappler, and Dmitry Muratov, the Russian editor who has buried seven reporters since 2000.

A growing penchant to silence journalists has finally made headlines. In separate responses, both laureates made the same point: If trusted, truthful reporters cannot hold autocrats to account, we are all toast. And we are fast running out of time to react.

Those endless rows of graves near here, dug during my lifespan, make clear what havoc a self-obsessed megalomaniac can wreak. That war killed millions. If we get climate collapse, peaceful coexistence and runaway pandemics wrong, the likely toll defies imagination.

Over a photo of his newsroom, Muratov wrote: “The whole Novaya Gazeta and everyone who worked and works there. Alive and dead. This is their prize.” He started the paper in 1993, helped by Mikhail Gorbachev. His bloodhounds still pursue the culprit who ordered the 2006 poisoning of Anna Polikovskaya, whose Chechnya reporting infuriated Vladimir Putin.

Maria Ressa’s online Rappler has dogged Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines since he took power, fending off 10 arrest orders, brutal harassment and countless death threats. Among independent journalists worldwide, she is Joan of Arc without the political-religious baggage.

They are two among many determined to get the story straight at any cost to keep the rest of us from being blind, deaf — and dumb — as our world spins out of control.

MORE

PARIS — Last week I watched 16 hours of back-to-back Senate and House hearings on Afghanistan in stunned disbelief as Republicans displayed stone stupidity, treacherous truth-twisting, or both at the same time. Most harangued, few questioned. Then there was worse.

Some insightful reporters captured the essence. Mostly, Washington watchdogs snuffled around the surface, hounding the wrong quarry. Overall coverage blamed a doddering old Joe for a shameful debacle of historic proportions because he rejected military advice.

The Afghanistan story reverberates around the world all the louder because so many Americans overlook its implications.

Unless a failsafe “fourth estate” gets stories straight and focuses harsh light on politicians with the morality of rabid jackals, Republicans may soon control Congress and more statehouses. A madman could be back in the White House, unbound by checks or balances.

U.S. forces pulled off a masterful evacuation despite circumstances created by Donald Trump’s abject capitulation. Until Gen. Mark Milley convinced him to delay, he planned to withdraw all troops by Jan. 15, with no evacuation plan and few visas for vulnerable Afghans.

Republicans savaged Biden because a suicide bomber killed 11 Marines, a soldier and sailor. Few of them had lamented losses over the years as U.S. defense contractors amassed fortunes, and American casualties rose steadily to far surpass Osama bin Laden’s 9/11 toll.

Whether or not Americans grasp the enormity of the real debacle, terrorist groups do. This was no carefully planned blitzkrieg behind overwhelming armor and artillery. Ragtag zealots on motorcycles overran the proxy army of a space-age superpower, hardly firing a shot.

Republicans say Biden diminished the United States in its allies’ eyes. In fact, allies see them as the problem: venal politicians who parrot fabulist insanities of a defeated president intent on a creeping coup d’etat. In much of the world, America is scorned and pitied, if not hated.

MORE