For kind readers who have asked about my extended silence on the Mort Report, this snap at Wild Olives is one quick explanation. It is Candide time; I’m tending my garden. We’ve finished picking a meager crop left by altered climate, new pests and a long absence forced by a global pandemic that human folly let flare beyond control. We’ve spent months felling pines and burning brush lest a lightning bolt or someone’s flicked cigarette butt reduce our Provençal hideaway into paradise lost.

But there is more. I’ve waited to assess the Glasgow copout, the insane immorality plays back home in America, and the depredations by authoritarians who seize on undefended democracy to reshape what’s left of a reasonably good planet into hostile territory where genocide, mass starvation and plunder go unchecked. And I’m reading mountains of thoughtful old stuff that explains how past follies got us into this mess.

Ironically, the outlook is hopeful. Aristotle pegged us humans a long time ago. Most are basically good but too easily distracted by daily lives. The bad ones, if fewer, know what they want and how to get it. When the danger was only George W. Bush’s neocons, Samuel L. Jackson offered a rallying cry: Wake the Fuck Up. But we didn’t.

The Mort Report began as emailed briefings to friends and family from an old-crocodile reporter still cruising the swamps. After a lifetime with the Associated Press and as a past editor of the International Herald Tribune, I have tried hard to analyze observed fact and filter out personal opinion to preserve hard-earned credibility. Now it is time to rant.

We need to think beyond Donald Trump, whose animal instincts brought out the worst in our worst. He is no Hitler or Mussolini, each of whom read books, enlisted for combat and had an actual plan for a world shaped in his own twisted image. Down here, wild boars known as sangliers are a closer fit. They blindly trample anything in their path to feed themselves, heedless of the destruction.

America’s power to do good depends on its two parties’ ability to find common ground. Grand Old Party presidents fought a war to free slaves, protected wilderness and resources, tried to curb a “military-industrial complex,” opened a closed China and much else. Today, the “GOP” is closer to Greed-Obsessed Pigs. If that doesn’t change, America is over.

Expect a new sort of Mort Report soon. I’ll try to find what’s left of my sense of humor. But my aim is to probe global crises and connect the dots into big pictures to help readers make decisions based on reality. I’ll need your help for a wide reach. Please encourage friends and family – especially young ones – to sign up at mortreport.org. If you can, donate on the Get-Involved link below, or email mort.rosenblum@gmail.com to make a tax-deductible contribution. My editors and I aren’t paid, but firsthand reporting comes at a cost.

Thank you.

Mort

(if you’re reading this in French via no-humans-involved translation, I’m not Dead yet)

Mort Rosenblum has reported from seven continents as Associated Press special correspondent, edited the International Herald Tribune in Paris, and written 14 books on subjects ranging from global geopolitics to chocolate. He now runs MortReport.org.

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