Mort Rosenblum: In a darkening world, U.S. fades as a force for good

DRAGUIGNAN, France — Andre Bernard, the cheese guy, is still right where I first found him 40 years ago, at the Saturday market, beaming behind his double-wide cheese stand. It has always been the same drill.

“Gôutez-moi celá,” he said back then, slicing off a generous sample of his latest find. “Taste this for me.” Soon, it was the more familiar: “Gôute ça.” He remembered my penchant for a creamy Reblochon or a sharp tomme de Savoie from his mountain home region.

Whatever he offered, I bought. He handed me the package and declaimed with a flourish: “Ah ... a good cheese, a fine wine and a beautiful woman. What more could the people want?”

Andre has been my bon-vivant barometer in Provence and most of France. People worked to live, not the other way around. Lunch breaks were two hours. Dimanche midi, Sunday lunch with family and friends, took most of the day.

Last Saturday, his smile was dimmed. He is nearing 90 and shows it. He’d had what the French call a “coup de vieux.” All bodies age. Younger people tend to mistake a slower gait and senior moments for dementia. Minds are far more complicated.

We just saw that in America. An aging admiral with a capable crew was steering the U.S. ship of state off the rocks. An unhinged draft-dodger predecessor, nearly as old, had gone far off course at full steam ahead. Look now.

Andre, still sharp as his honed knives, could have retired on a decent pension and free health care. This is Europe. Instead, he loads up at dawn and comes to markets, his happy place, where life is not virtual and electronic clones do not pretend to be people.

He was bummed because so much is vanishing fast. Robert, the butcher with a bedside manner, is gone along with his source of Sisteron lamb raised on lush clover. So is my Breton pal, whose sea bass and sole had barely stopped flapping. And so many others.

The French are losing that phrase which requires no translation: joie de vivre. And the reasons apply across a wider world, which is knocking the edges off the best parts of what made humans human.

I thought of Andre yesterday when Sally Bundock, a veteran BBC business specialist, reported with mock horror how France is drifting away from fromage. A poll shows 9 percent of young people eat only over-processed commercial stuff, if any at all.

France, her expert witness declared with a grimace, is getting to be like America.

Big Macs with cheese are everywhere. Supermarkets sell processed yellow slices encased in plastic. There is still good stuff for those who want it. But as costs soar and tastes change, artisans struggle to survive.

Charles De Gaulle famously once asked: “How can you govern a country which has 246 kinds of cheese?” Versions of that vary; 246 is clearly a low-ball number. But for all its maddening extremes, it worked. People followed the news and outvoted inept leaders.

Yet again, another disappearing phrase: vive la difference.

Today, the internet, airwaves and air travel melt away borders. Lots of young French kids speak more eloquent English than their American counterparts. European Union dweebs in Brussels knock the edges off freewheeling France with strict new laws.

Much of it remains. In summer, big roads along the Riviera are paralyzed with traffic jams: bouchons. And for a gigot d’agneau, there are plenty of sheep: moutons. Not long ago, on a winding, narrow road, I got stuck in a bouchon de moutons. I loved it.

My old Citroen 2CV was jostled on both sides by tough old shepherds with border collies headed to high ground for summer grazing. Their young helpers likely all had smartphones but mostly used them to keep in touch with friends.

That woolly encounter was near a village named Tourtour by a favorite restaurant named Les Pins Tranquilles, flanked by two noble pines. Forest fires are a danger now, and culling is vital. But the trees were isolated by a large parking lot.

No matter. Facing a stiff fine, the owners savaged them, leaving only bare trunks for attaching a tarp to protect outdoor tables from sun that gets hotter by the year.

Space here is too short for a political and economic postmortem of a different world. But adding up these vignettes of transition into a new one, it is clear we are in very deep trouble.

Andre had a surprising lament: so many “Arabs” and “Turks” refuse to blend into the national pot-au-feu and demand that France be like the Islamic homes they left behind. Not far away, a Frenchman had killed his Tunisian neighbor and wounded a Turk.

I doubt he is racist. He reflects a deep malaise among close friends I know are not. In a new national mood, a football victory in Paris sparked deadly clashes with heavily armed police. That is just France. Countless factors feed far worse crises elsewhere.

A world on the boil demands leaders with uncommon diplomacy and human empathy. People are individuals, not lumped together in meaningless national or ethnic collectivities.

Desperate families need help to stay home. Governments that seize others’ territory and commit war crimes must be stopped at any cost.

Last time, Trump’s Muslim ban was reversed. Now he bars entry from 11 Middle East and African countries labeled as terrorist threats, including ancient, multifaceted Iran where many bitterly oppose extremist mullahs. Also, as inexplicably as cruel, Haiti.

Vicious gangs terrorize Port-au-Prince, endangering rich and poor families desperate to escape. But they pose no external threat. Nearly 12 million others struggle to survive after earthquakes, violent storms and crop failures on an island 700 miles from Miami.

Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormack, a Haitian American, is livid. “Are we going to help Haiti or punish the Haitian?” she asked on CNN.

The Draguignan market is only a peek into the real challenge. Just down the road, 851 graves from World War II at the American Cemetery reveal what a different sort of United States can do when its people live up to their promise.

Troops from Sicily and North Africa came from the south, a pincer movement, while Germany focused on Normandy. Then America took the lead in stitching up a mutilated world, shaping international mechanisms to thwart despots’ ambitions.

We can survive the loss of good cheese. But not likely the rest of it.