WILD OLIVES, France — Finally, a gleam of hope tinged with euphoria cut through despair down my rutted road in deepest Provence.

America soon might have a leader who speaks plainly and carries a big law book. Its porcine ex-president, intent on an Orwellian Animal Farm where self-anointed pigs rule hapless beasts of burden, now faces a border collie with a taste for pork chops.

Kamala Harris is ready to take on the world. She works hard in the shadows to rally allies and face down adversaries. Joe Biden, spared backbiting from faithless politicians and gotcha reporters, can be a wise old dog who teaches her his old tricks.

MORE

GENEVA — On a planet already gasping for air while playing nuclear chicken in unwinnable wars between the despotic and the desperate, shunting aside Joe Biden as a doddering has-been would be about the dumbest thing imaginable.

His normal aging is different from the pathology of a malevolent sociopath who feeds off vengeful destruction. Yet the media mainstream relays Donald Trump’s venom with little comment while zeroing in on every tic and twitch of a remarkably effective leader.

In today’s world, there is no time for on-the-job training. If Biden must cede the Oval Office to Kamala Harris, she is ready. Allies and adversaries alike take her seriously. With his counsel, contacts and aides already in place, she can provide vital continuity.

But Democrats squabble over untested candidates — that circular firing squad Barack Obama warned of in 2016. Too many unreliable sources confuse inattentive voters. That favors Trump and a corrupted party with elaborate plans to cripple democracy.

MORE

PARIS — Ronald Reagan moistened every eye within earshot atop that Normandy cliff in 1984, mine included: “In this place where the West held together, let us make a vow to our dead. Let us show them by our actions that we understand what they died for.”

He was an actor who played president masterfully but had little grasp of the world he steered off course. On D-Day four decades later, Joe Biden was brief and low-key. An actual statesman, he said what is essential at the most perilous time in human history.

The men who died capturing Pointe du Hoc, he said, now summon us: “They ask us what we will do. They’re not asking us to scale these cliffs, but they’re asking us to stay true to what America stands for.”

As a reporter, I’ve watched “morning in America” darken toward midnight in a wider world spinning out of control. Americans have four months to do what Samuel L. Jackson urged when the danger was only George W. Bush: Wake the Fuck Up.

DRAGUIGNAN, France – This is likely the most important, urgent dispatch I’ve ever written, and I hope it’s wrong. But two wise sources — Solomon the Saguaro in Tucson and Emiliano the Olive Tree in Provence — concur. In 2024, we heedless humans will decide our fate.

Terrifying evidence is indisputable. Perturbed nature reacts with wild weather and deadly pathogens. Heat tops 120 degrees, 50 in Celsius, in unlikely places. Crops shrivel — or drown in floods. Warming, acidified seas rise as ice shelves melt. Carbon poisons the air.

Hardly a passing anomaly, scientists confirm, this is worsening at a pace few predicted. Yet, overwhelmed, we block out the unthinkable.

Elections this year across the world fortify false prophets whose simplistic solutions push societies far to the right. Rather than unite against common crises, most turn inward. Some enable unwinnable war.

If Donald Trump and his Republican climate deniers prevail in November, neither the meek nor greed-focused “masters of the universe” will inherit the earth. It has already begun sloughing off the two-legged species that befouls it.

MORE

MIGENNES, France — The African Queen ran roiling rapids under German guns. Fitzcarraldo’s 320-ton steamboat was hauled over a mountain in the Amazon. Our slog up the Seine in Almeria was a bit easier — yet still a love-hate voyage for the books.

This report was meant to be a light palate cleanser before doubling down on despots and dumbasses. But four days on waterways at the crux of the Old World ever since Gauls battled Caesar brought today’s global turmoil into sharp focus.

Heeding history averts crises. Ignoring it creates new ones, made progressively worse by new weaponry and technology. Far too many people today barely remember last week.

Hop aboard for a look at the ship’s log, reportage on the approaching Olympics and flashbacks from the 1980s when I moved onto my home afloat in the heart of Paris, then a livable, laid-back haven in a manageable world.

MORE