MIAMI — Heading to Miami airport for a plane to Paris and the real world after four months in America, a pleasant Uber driver from Colombia — let’s call her Marta — scared me senseless. Her driving was fine. It was our conversation.

In Washington, the belly of the beast, trusted old contacts were upbeat. Cherry trees blossomed; blast barriers were gone. Unarmed tourists thronged the Capitol where vengeance-obsessed Republican buffoons revealed themselves as unfit for reelection.

Then I flew down to South Florida, the beast’s lower colon. Marta had lived here for eight years. I asked her about Ron DeSantis’s diatribes against immigrants and Democratic initiatives to help struggling families like hers. She was oddly reticent.

I suspected she was wary about talking politics with a stranger, a troubling thought in a nation that champions free speech. But English is optional in southern Florida, and I tried again in Spanish. That sparked a rapid-fire 40-minute soliloquy.

“I love DeSantis almost as much as Donald Trump,” she said. “My family is devoutly Catholic, and they share my values. I don’t want school to turn my daughter into a homosexual. We Latinos believe in God and freedom.” Ay Dios mío.

If decent but credulous people like Marta cannot see that the Republicans’ Golden Calf and other bovine buttheads are playing them for fools, the stench of cow flop in America could be permanent after elections only 18 months away.

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COOLIDGE, Arizona — “Dristan,” a 1960s TV commercial exulted, “is like sending your sinuses to Arizona.” Lots of people did that and insisted on coming along with them. Today, the Grand Canyon state is at serious risk of drying up and blowing away.

Carpetbagger crazies from elsewhere now infest politics in Arizona, which squanders water on runaway “development”: urban sprawl with lush gardens and lawns, retirement meccas, thirsty crops, orchards, golf courses, spa resorts, surf parks and monster malls blasted with frigid air.

In the short run, Florida is more frightening. A mob-style megalomaniac and a self-proclaimed God surrogate vie for the Republican presidential nomination, each bent on crippling democracy. Yet politics are reversible. Heedless humans in Arizona are playing for keeps.

The mercury soars, wildfires rage, land sinks into depleted aquifers, freak floods that punctuate endemic drought devastate homes built in the wrong places. Unlearned lessons in the American West are vital on a planet where climate chaos fast approaches a point of no return.

Here’s a suggestion: No one should be allowed to settle in Arizona before visiting the Great House in Coolidge, remnants of Hohokam Indians whose desert-dwelling civilization thrived for a thousand years before mysteriously vanishing just before Columbus “discovered” America.

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TUCSON – Alarm whistles on our pressure-cooked planet are ever-louder echoes from 1980, when America dumped Jimmy Carter after a single term. Smoldering embers Ronald Reagan left behind now fan into flame, and combustion threatens to blow Pandora’s box all to hell.

Carter, at 98, prepares to slip away while his worst nightmares from the past take real shape. This is no time to replace yet another effective president committed to finishing his job.

Carter’s much-remembered “Crisis of Confidence” speech in July 1979 (link below) foreshadowed the self-interested, money-fueled dysfunction that now divides America. He dissected a glum national funk and, point by point, mapped the way out of it.

But Kai Bird’s biography, “The Outlier,” captures the reaction: “He insisted on telling us what was wrong and what it would take to make things better. And for most Americans, it was easier to label the messenger a ‘failure’ than to grapple with the hard problems.”

As a reporter based in Argentina, then Europe, I watched the rise and fall of perhaps the most underappreciated U.S. president in history. The brutality he tried to stop soon spread into Central America, then to the Middle East and beyond.

Carter injected humanity into statecraft. He worked with the Kremlin to stem a nuclear arms race. He brought Israel and Egypt together and pushed hard to find peaceable co-existence with Palestine. He tried to wean America off fossil fuels and protect the global environment.

His brain trust included Samuel Huntington from Harvard, who famously warned after the Soviet Union imploded that the world’s greatest threat was a “clash of civilizations.”

Reagan is lauded for that theatrical flourish: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall.” But Carter’s diplomacy and Soviets’ 1979 Afghanistan invasion had already rusted away the Iron Curtain. Today, Republicans want that wall in Arizona.

Looking back, I see a lot of Carter in Joe Biden – decency, integrity and a smiling folksy exterior over hard steel. But there is a difference. With a lifetime in Washington and dealings abroad, Biden does not have to learn on the job.

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TUCSON – If Joe Biden has done as much for America as he claims, a snide Wall Street Journal editorial asked after his uplifting 73-minute State of the Union report, “why does most of America not seem to appreciate it?”

Well, one reason is the Journal itself. A carpetbagging ex-Australian Darth Vader weaseled his way to control of the once stately financial daily while weaponizing Fox News and the New York Post. But, of course, Rupert Murdoch is only part of it.

Too many voters today are easily conned, deeply biased, impervious to fact and bereft of survival instincts. Contrary to myth, frogs leap out of heating pots. Stampeding cattle stop at a cliff edge. Lemmings don’t really commit mass suicide. We’ll find out about Americans in 2024.

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