The Washington Post National Weekly. November 10, 2019

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2019

. IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE National Weekly

California burns.

Always has.

Welcome to the Golden State’s war without end. PAGE 812

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Perspective

KLMNO Weekly

Democrats tighten hold on suburbs BY

D AN B ALZ

T

here was mostly bad news for Republicans in Tuesday’s elections, but the most concerning of all for party leaders should be the Democrats’ steady march in converting suburban America into a political stronghold during the era of President Trump.

Virginia’s dramatic and rapid transition from red to purple to blue is a story of the growing support for Democrats in the suburban areas of the state, particularly around Washington and Richmond. The apparent defeat of Republican Gov. Matt Bevin in Kentucky was powered in part by the strength of support Democrat Andy Beshear attracted in that state’s suburban counties.

For the president, the results underscore that his best hope for reelection in 2020 will be to expand the electorate as much as possible in the small-town, rural and exurban areas of the battleground states. Scouring those areas for every vote possible will be the campaign’s highest priority.

For Republicans looking beyond the Trump reelection effort, the deterioration of support in the suburbs should be cause for major alarm. Democrats won control of the House in 2018 by flipping suburban districts, and there was nothing in the results Tuesday night to suggest that the anti-Trump energy that fueled those victories has slackened.

Trump is the master of motivating voters — both those for him and, clearly, those against him.

“This is an overwhelming Trump phenomenon,” said a gloomy Republican strategist who spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer a candid assessment of the party’s plight.

“Trump has accelerated everything. There is no path in a swing, suburban district for a Republican — male, female or minority. . . . It’s not a challenge, it’s a hill. . . . There’s no strategy to climb it.”

This strategist said she worries about the GOP losing more suburban swing districts in 2020. If

Bryan Woolston/Associated Press

Results point to narrow path for Trump in 2020 and give GOP reason to fear more seats may flip so, she said, the diversity of the GOP conference in the House will be reduced to “white men with white hair and white men with gray hair and a few token women, and when [Rep.] Will Hurd [Tex.] leaves, no African Americans and only a couple of Latinos.”

The Republican problem in suburban America is a Republican problem among female voters, particularly college-educated white women who long have been targets of persuasion efforts by both parties in national elections.

The latest Washington PostABC News poll highlights the current state of suburban voters.

In a head-to-head test between Trump and former vice president Joe Biden, suburban men side with the president 51 percent to 43 percent. Among women, however, Biden leads by 28 points, 63 percent to 35 percent. Matched against Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Trump is leading among suburban men 54 percent to 42 percent but losing among women 60 percent to 34 percent.

“Republicans have a big problem heading into 2020 — and that could impact states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, North Carolina, Arizona and so on,” Christina Reynolds of Emily’s List wrote in an email Wednesday morning. “We saw those persuasion swings in 2018, and based on last night we feel good we’ll see them again in 2020.”

The depth of the anti-Trump sentiment in the suburbs extends down the ballot, as Tuesday’s results showed in races in places such as the Indianapolis and Philadelphia suburbs. Even with a historically low national unemployment rate in these areas, voters have chosen to send a message of displeasure with the president, and the spillover is hitting the Republican Party at many levels.

“Every election, in every locality, is played in the key of Trump,” Russ Schriefer, a GOP strategist, wrote in an email Wednesday.

Tuesday’s results come with the normal caveats about off-year

Andy Beshear speaks on election night in Kentucky.

His showing against Republican Gov. Matt Bevin was powered in part by support in suburban counties.

Beshear’s father, Steve Beshear, served as governor before Bevin.

elections. It’s always risky to read too much into the outcome. Kentucky isn’t turning from red to purple as a result of the apparent election of Beshear, whose father, Steve Beshear, served as governor before Bevin. As many Republicans, including the president, pointed out late Tuesday, the rest of the statewide races in Kentucky went to the GOP. Nonetheless, you can be certain that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who is up for reelection and whose favorable ratings are net negative, will be taking nothing for granted.

Trump’s path to reelection will not depend on states such as Kentucky or Mississippi, where the GOP won the governor’s race on Tuesday. Those are givens in his column. But there are few states he lost in 2016 that are likely to flip in his direction next year. His campaign is focused on Minnesota, New Hampshire and a couple of others.

Instead, he must replicate the path he took in 2016. He needs to win Florida and North Carolina and then somewhere among the three northern states — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — that gave him his electoral college majority. Tuesday’s results represented another reminder of the obstacles that may lie ahead.

“The biggest red flag I’d be worrying about is Pennsylvania,” Schriefer wrote. “Key, targeted state and critical to the Trump coalition. Yet Democrats cleaned up in the suburbs, sweeping in Delaware County — a county with a 30,000 [Republican] plurality and under [Republican] control since the Civil War, an area filled with college-educated, upper/ middle income, primarily white voters that were once the bedrock of the Republican Party.”

That’s the broad message from Tuesday’s results, just as it was the broad message from the 2018 midterm election. It’s certainly possible that Trump can win reelection in 2020, but he will have to do it over the opposition of many suburban voters. n

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World

KLMNO Weekly

Cartel wars shatter Mormon peace BY

K EVIN S IEFF

T

he Americans rolled down their windows at the cartel’s checkpoints.

They nodded to the sicarios at local horse races and shared pomegranates during the harvest. When the cartel vehicles needed repair, La Mora’s American mechanic fixed them for the same fee he charged his neighbors.

Until this past week, living as an American in one of Mexico’s most lawless areas meant maintaining an uneasy truce with the traffickers: “Basically, it was ‘We won’t bother you if you don’t bother us,’ ” said Adam Langford, whose greatgrandfather was one of the first American Mormons to move to Mexico in 1880.

Then, on Monday, it became clear that no agreement could insulate La Mora from Mexico’s rising violence. That morning, gunmen stopped three vehicles on a dirt road outside of town and killed three women and six children.

The Mexican government has suggested that the vehicles were attacked by mistake. But here in La Mora, that explanation makes little sense — and has infuriated residents.

They believe the families were targeted intentionally by a cartel from the neighboring state of Chihuahua — maybe as revenge for the community’s proximity to the local cartel in Sonora, where La Mora is located. The massacre comes amid an intensifying turf war between the cartels that residents had watched nervously for over a year.

La Mora was established in the 1950s, part of a movement of fundamentalist Mormons who broke away from the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints. For decades, they remained largely cut off from the United States and the rest of Mexico, without electricity or running water. Children welded their own bicycles with metal rods.

Residents developed pecan farms and ranches and brought money back from seasonal work

Kevin Sieff/The Washington Post

The Mexican American residents of La Mora had existed without incident alongside local drug gang across the border, and by the 1990s, the community was thriving.

When friends in the United States asked about their safety, many explained that they rarely locked their doors. They allowed their children to roam free in the foothills of the Sierra Madre. They had two schoolhouses — one for Spanish and one for English — and the students, fluent in both languages, divided their time evenly.

But amid the idyll, the residents of La Mora recognized their community’s strategic importance. It was directly off an unpatrolled dirt road that led to the United States border, a gem in the crown of any trafficker.

In 2009, two men related to the La Mora families but living in Chihuahua were kidnapped and killed, allegedly by the state’s biggest drug cartel. It was a shock, suggesting that maybe the community’s dual citizenship wasn’t

enough to insulate them.

But many here believed that their unlikely relationship with the cartel in their state would protect them. Although there was little police presence in the area, some felt the cartel — sometimes known as the Sonora cartel — had come to serve as a kind of shadow police force.

“The fact is that the state didn’t provide law and order, but the cartel did,” said Adam Langford, a two-time mayor of the municipality.

Sometimes, the men at the checkpoints would apologize after stopping them.

“They would say, ‘Sorry guys, we are just guarding our territory,’ ” said Kenneth Miller, 32.

In recent months, there were signs the peace was deteriorating.

For the first time, the local cartel demanded that the families of La Mora stop buying fuel in Chihuahua, which would fund the rival cartel. Unfamiliar men manned

Residents of La Mora build coffins for community members who were shot to death Monday on a dirt road outside town. The victims were three women and six children.

the usual checkpoints. They appeared jumpier, sometimes pointing guns at passersby. Rumors spread about the intensifying turf war between criminal groups.

“People started asking each other, ‘Is it time to move back to the U.S.?’ ” said Amber Langford. The population dwindled to about 100.

Across much of Mexico, the strength of the cartels — and the inability of the government to control their influence — has been on daily display.

The number of homicides climbed to 33,341 last year. Another 40,000 people are missing.

The cartel attacks have become particularly brazen. In August, 27 people were killed in a Veracruz bar when the doors were locked and the bar was set alight. Last month, 14 police officers were killed in an ambush in Michoacan.

Through it all, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has resisted calls to toughen his security policies. Instead, he’s trying to provide jobs to lure people away from the cartels. He has handed out millions of scholarships to keep kids in school.

“We aren’t going to change the strategy,” he reiterated Thursday.

“We are going to continue to address the causes behind insecurity and violence.”

Residents of La Mora have taken their own precautions. They began traveling in convoys when moving between Sonora and Chihuahua. They decided it was time to secure legal firearms.

On Monday, when the three women and their children left town, Rhonita Miller paused before leaving. She told her motherin-law Loretta Miller: “I have a bad feeling about this. Maybe I shouldn’t go.”

Less than an hour later, Rhonita Miller was killed with her four children. When residents found her car, it was on fire, apparently set alight by gunmen.

The other victims were found later. Two surviving children walked for hours through the wilderness after escaping. One of them recounted that gunmen had fired at him as he ran into the brush. n

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KLMNO Weekly

Health

How to combat constant anxiety When worry gets excessive, these sciencebased strategies can help

BY

J ELENA K ECMANOVIC

son’s positive beliefs about it and a possible ambivalence toward change.

By modifying those beliefs, a path toward less worrying often can be cleared.

‘W

orry has consumed my life. I have worried about everything and everybody, and am always preparing for the possibility of things going wrong,” said Marla White, a 55year-old publicist from Los Angeles.

She is not alone. A 2018 Gallup poll found that 45 percent of Americans said they felt worried a lot, more than in any year since 2006.

As a clinical psychologist in the Washington metropolitan area and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, excessive worry is one of the most pressing psychological problems I see.

My patients worry about work, relationships, children, health and money. When worrying becomes persistent, long-lasting and difficult to control, it can seriously affect daily life. And if the unrelenting worry is accompanied by anxiety symptoms such as irritability, difficulty concentrating, muscle tension, fatigue and poor sleep, that person may be suffering from something called generalized anxiety disorder (GAD).

GAD is one of the newer anxiety diagnoses, appearing in the American Psychiatric Association’s manual of mental disorders for the first time in 1980. Research and recognition of excessive worry and GAD have lagged behind other disorders that have been acknowledged longer, such as depression, or have captured the public’s attention more, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Worriers often suffer in silence.

Melisa Robichaud, co-founder of the Vancouver CBT (Cognitive Behavior Therapy) Centre and co-author of “The Generalized Anxiety Disorder Workbook,” said many of her patients are concerned that seeking help for GAD is self-indulgent because they’ve been told that worry is just a part of life.

And many people suffer for a long time.

“I often see people who have

Catastrophizing

Illustrations from istock

struggled with it for 10, 20, 30 years,” said Robert L. Leahy, founding director of the American Institute for Cognitive Therapy in New York and author of “The Worry Cure.”

How does it feel to have GAD? One of my patients told me: “I am frustrated by my mind always moving 100 miles per hour and going down a rabbit hole. I feel constantly on edge and unable to relax.” Another said, “I am exhausted and unable to enjoy life.”

Studies show that between 5.7 percent and 11.9 percent of U.S. adults experience GAD at some point, yet less than half get treatment. Many people with GAD also have other anxiety disorders and depression, as well as significant work and interpersonal problems. GAD also represents a significant risk factor for cardiovascular problems.

Recent decades have brought new understanding about the factors that make worry turn into GAD and those that perpetuate GAD. Targeting these negative factors directly can help people who worry too much.

Holding erroneous views

People with GAD hold more positive beliefs about the usefulness of worry than the general population. They frequently view worry as motivating, as helpful in preparing them for bad outcomes. They even see it as a positive personality trait. Some believe that worry shows to others how much they care.

White said she and her bosses loved that she worried about every detail when organizing work events, and always had a Plan B — and C and D. Two frequent manifestations of GAD, perfectionism and workaholism, often are rewarded in our culture.

But research shows that worrying does not help people better prepare for the future, nor does it inoculate them from feeling bad when negative events come to pass.

Moreover, worriers are often not good problem-solvers. They frequently procrastinate, and that, as well as having perfectionistic tendencies, has been linked to worse performance. When tackling excessive worry, it is important to acknowledge a per-

Worriers tend to predict that things will turn out worse than they actually do.

A recent study found that 91 percent of worries held by people with GAD did not come true. Psychologists Daniel Gilbert from Harvard and Timothy Wilson from the University of Virginia have found that humans generally are bad at predicting how we will be affected by future events.

Their research shows that people tend to overestimate the emotional effect of bad events and underestimate their ability to cope with those events.

“When negative outcomes materialize, most people — at least 70 percent — handle it okay,” Leahy said.

One way to minimize catastrophizing is by distinguishing between worrying and problemsolving — and then improving the latter.

Everything that you have control over calls for problem-solving.

Worriers often view problems as threatening, doubt their ability to solve them and distrust potential solutions. Being aware of potential problems allows for early detection, which allows worriers to tackle those problems before procrastination sets in. Basic problem-solving steps, laid out in many worry self-help books and cognitive behavior training protocols, include defining a problem, generating multiple solutions, choosing the best one, implementing it and assessing the result.

Not being ‘mindful’

Worry is by definition a cognitive activity, meaning it’s happening in the mind. When we are preoccupied by worry, we are unable to focus on what is in front of us. Habitual worriers have a hard time being mindful of what is happening in their present moment and shifting attention

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CULTURE away from recurrent thoughts.

Extensive research suggests mindfulness training can help reduce problematic worry. In a small study of 40 worriers presented at a recent conference, University of Pittsburgh professor Lauren Hallion and colleagues investigated the usefulness of various mindfulness approaches. They found that the “focused attention” approach, in which the participants redirected attention from their worries to an external sound, decreased worrying the most. In comparison, accepting thoughts without trying to change them helped less.

Engaging in regular guided mindfulness mediations more informally or practicing a mindful way of being can also be beneficial.

and can even lead to GAD. One type consists of “approach strategies,” which include excessive information- and reassurance-seeking, double-checking, hypervigilance and failing to delegate. Another type includes “avoidance strategies,” attempts to stop worry through procrastination, evading uncertain, novel or worry-provoking situations, and failing to commit to people or events.

Instead of checking your teenager’s location for the seventh time, for example, try abstaining and see what happens. Try the same technique the next time you feel an urge to ask your partner to ease your worries. If that sounds like a tall order, at least delay the behavior.

When sensing an urge to procrastinate on a hard project at

‘Choosing the devil you know’

Intolerance of uncertainty has been shown to be one of the most powerful drivers of worry. Worriers have an extreme dislike and fear of uncertainty, and the act of worrying is an attempt to reduce it. They also tend to avoid uncertain situations whenever possible — even when it means missing out on life.

Douglas Mennin, a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University who has researched worry, said people with GAD are more fearful of and distressed by negative emotions. Consequently, he said, “they tend to organize their lives in very predictable, routinized and structured ways, effectively choosing the devil they know [worry] over opening up to new possibilities.”

Taking chances on new possibilities might bring about more anxiety in the short run. But joy and vitality are also likely to increase as someone engages in a richer, more meaningful existence. Eventually, worry and anxiety will decrease, as well.

Robichaud said intolerance of uncertainty is like a psychological allergy, and that just as gradual exposure to a small amount of allergen can cure an allergy, gradual and small exposure to uncertain situations can significantly reduce the fear of uncertainty and consequent worry.

Sticking with bad behaviors

Safety behaviors are actions that help us feel better in the moment, but exacerbate worry

work, take a first step as soon as possible. Or push yourself gently to do what your irrational worries tell you not to.

You might be surprised to discover that, although you feel quite anxious, you can avoid relying on safety behaviors, Mennin said.

The more you are willing to reduce safety behaviors, the more likely you will become worry-free.

So, don’t worry: The factors that turn worry into GAD and the strategies that can help alleviate them are part of a standard cognitive behavioral therapy approach.

Following self-help books, videos, and apps can be beneficial.

For those who need or prefer professional guidance and help, cognitive behavior therapists are recommended. The Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (abct.org) is a good place to start. n

KLMNO Weekly

Looks and grades: The ugly truth BY

C HRISTOPHER I NGRAHAM

A

new study finds that good-looking kids do better in school than their less striking peers.

The research, by Barnard College economist Daniel Hamermesh and colleagues, finds that people whose looks are “one standard deviation above average” attain nearly five more months of schooling than an “otherwise identical average-looking individual.”

The finding is surprising, they write, because prior research has shown that many of the factors of educational achievement on which policymakers tend to focus, such as teacher quality and program effectiveness, have a relatively small effect on student achievement.

To explore how looks affect educational performance, Hamermesh and his colleagues turned to separate data sets that track the academic achievements of children over several years: the U.S. Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, which followed more than 1,300 kids who ranged from 6 months to 15 years old; and the U.K. National Child Development Study, which tracked 17,000 Britons born during a single week in 1958.

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but social scientists still need a way to measure it. For each kid in the American study, looks were assessed by a panel of at least 10 undergraduates who watched segments of video interviews with the children collected over the course of the survey. The raters assessed each one’s looks on a scale from 1 (not at all cute/very unattractive) to 5 (very cute/very attractive).

For the U.K. study, attractiveness was assessed by the children’s teachers, who assigned each child to one of four categories: attractive, unattractive, “abnormal feature” or “underfed or scruffy and dirty.”

When it came to looks, the chil-

dren in both studies were wellabove average, with raters issuing scores that leaned toward the high end of their respective scales.

Hamermesh has noted in previous work that this tends to happen when people rate adults as well: There’s something of a universal bias toward rating people as attractive.

Ratings in hand, the researchers then analyzed the relationship between a child’s looks and academic achievement, as measured via various standardized tests administered throughout the two studies. The studies revealed the same general pattern: Better looking children performed better on tests of academic achievement, even when controlling for ethnicity, gender and parents’ education and income.

To determine why, Hamermesh and his colleagues tested a number of theories. They found some evidence that teachers report better relationships with the more attractive students. They also found that youngsters rated as unattractive were somewhat more likely to report being bullied by their peers, with detrimental spillover on their academic performance.

Similarly, they found that there were fewer reports of behavioral problems at school among the highly rated children.

But the effect of looks on grades remained much larger than all three of those factors combined.

That means that the ultimate mechanism by which looks affect schooling remains a mystery and thus fertile ground for future research.

Nonetheless, the study offers a persuasive answer to one question: Why has previous research shown that better-looking people earn more money than their average-looking peers? Based on this new information, Hamermesh and his colleagues write that “20 to as much as 80 percent of the economic returns to beauty arises from its prior indirect effects on educational attainment.” n

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KLMNO Weekly

books

A Marine’s hard road to recovery N ONFICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

D AN L AMOTHE

W

YOU ARE WORTH IT Building a Life Worth Fighting For

By Kyle Carpenter and Don Yaeger William Morrow.

320 pp. $27.99

illiam Kyle Carpenter knows the pain will come.

Nine years after throwing himself on a Taliban hand grenade in Afghanistan to protect a fellow Marine from injury, Carpenter is a blur of motion. At 30, he is still the youngest current recipient of the Medal of Honor, the nation’s top award for valor in combat, five years after receiving it in a White House ceremony.

He has run marathons, skydived and recently launched a nationwide tour to promote his new book, “You Are Worth It: Building a Life Worth Fighting For” — all after nearly dying three times and undergoing more than 40 surgeries to reconstruct his face, right arm and other body parts torn apart by the explosion. He’s painfree now, he said, but he realizes that as he gets older, the catastrophic nature of his injuries is likely to cause other problems.

But that’s for another day.

On a recent Friday, Carpenter — who goes by his middle name — was sitting in a dark suit and tie on a blue easy chair in front of 300 people at the National Museum of the Marine Corps near Quantico, Va. He spoke casually about his injuries, saying that doctors put “Humpty Dumpty back together again.” But he also shared struggles he has faced since receiving the Medal of Honor in 2014, including discovering that some people weren’t sensitive to his personal limits and would add surprise events to his travel schedule without asking him. He was briefly hospitalized a few months after receiving the award in a state of exhaustion, he said.

“My mind-set was that I’m going to say yes to as much as possible, therefore disappointing as few people as possible,” he said. “Now I realize now I had no time to feel. I had no time to think, self-reflect — anything.”

There’s a lot of reflection like

Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press

President Barack Obama awards William Kyle Carpenter the Medal of Honor in 2014. While serving in Afghanistan, Carpenter used his body to shield a fellow Marine from a grenade blast.

that from Carpenter in “You Are Worth It.” While it might look on the surface like a self-help book, it’s a memoir of gritty recovery and a thank-you letter to the many people who kept him alive and focused on healing.

In some of the most striking scenes, the generally upbeat Carpenter describes suffering through nightmares and hallucinations while on pain medication and breaking down in tears in front of his mother, Robin. He was overwhelmed that his injuries would not allow him to eat a bowl of cereal.

“Through sobs, I managed to choke out one devastating question: ‘Look at me. Who is ever going to love me again?’ ” Carpenter recalled.

It’s a striking admission for a wounded veteran who has been admired for his pluck and grace in the public eye and celebrated as a modern medical miracle. Carpen-

ter has drawn more than 436,000 followers on Instagram and 50,000 on Twitter while eschewing politics in favor of encouraging kindness and gratitude. (Handle: @chicksdigscars.)

For me, as a journalist covering the military, Carpenter’s tale has long resonated.

I became aware of him in 2011, after he accepted an invitation to appear at the South Carolina General Assembly a few months after the explosion. Lawmakers had decided to recognize Carpenter, who spent his last years of high school in South Carolina, for his actions.

The images of Carpenter, still badly scarred and wearing a prosthetic eye while in his dress uniform, circulated widely online. But few knew his story or how the Marine Corps might decorate him for his valor. If his actions were as compelling as described, I reasoned, certainly he could merit the nation’s high-

est award for valor in combat.

While working for the Marine Corps Times, I called his parents’ house in South Carolina one night.

To my surprise, Carpenter himself picked up. He had more treatment left at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland, and he said he’d be glad to tell me his story there if it gave him a chance to highlight the sacrifices that his infantry unit — 2nd Battalion, 9th Marines — had made in Afghanistan.

The Marine Corps probably could have scuttled the interview, but with Carpenter in favor of it, we proceeded. I gently warned him that I would need to investigate what happened and speak to as many people who knew him as possible. He didn’t hesitate. Instead, he offered phone numbers as a starting point for me to talk to others who were there.

The story was published in January 2012. Carpenter has checked in occasionally since and recalled when we met again recently that when he sat down with me to tell his story for the first time, “it wasn’t clear what was going to happen” in the Marine Corps’ investigation of his actions.

He said that with two years of work on the book now complete, he’s still trying to figure out what to do with his future. He called it a “mystery.” For now, he’s not sure whether his message of overcoming adversity can break through in a country facing deep divisions, but he wants to try.

“Now, that’s truly the milliondollar question,” he said. “I truly hope so. I truly hope so.”

Carpenter said that “by no means” has he lost hope in the United States, but he thinks “we need a heavy dose of perspective” and to remember that “we are all human beings” and Americans.” n Lamothe covers the Pentagon and U.S. military for The Washington Post. He previously was a senior writer with Marine Corps Times.

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books

KLMNO Weekly

Exploring the long shadow of abuse

Glimpses of the Purple One

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

R

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REVIEWED BY

E LIZABETH H AND

ene Denfeld is a public defense murder investigator who has gazed fearlessly into the dark parts of people’s lives, including her own. Her 1997 book “Kill the Body, the Head Will Fall” drew on her experience as an amateur boxer who became the first woman to win the Tacoma Golden Gloves title. Elsewhere, she has written about the man she once thought of as her father, who turned out to be a sexual predator: “At nights I slept with Johnny and my mother. . . .What happened in that bed? I cannot remember now, and have never remembered.” By the time she was 15, Denfeld was homeless.

Denfeld’s 2014 fiction debut, “The Enchanted,” is a remarkable novel centered on a death-row prisoner and the female investigator involved in his case. At once terrifying and transcendent, the novel received the ALA Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the French Prix Award. It also set the stage for Denfeld’s breakout 2017 bestseller, “The Child Finder.”

That novel introduced readers to Naomi Cottle, a private investigator who specializes in missing children. Set in Oregon (Denfeld lives in Portland), its tone is eerie and dreamy, as readers hear the alternating narrations of Naomi and the abducted girl she hopes to find in the Oregon wilderness.

Naomi Cottle returns in Denfeld’s latest novel, “The Butterfly Girl.” This time, she’s in search of her younger sister. As children, Naomi and her sister were abducted and held prisoner for several years. Only Naomi managed to escape. Ever since, she has been haunted by her sister’s fate: Did she survive to adulthood? Who was their captor?

Naomi focuses her search on Portland. There she crosses paths with Celia, an 11-year-old runaway who has fled sexual abuse at the hands of her heroin-addicted mother’s vile partner, Teddy. Like Naomi, Celia had abandoned her own younger sister when she left

home. Celia now takes refuge in a ravine beneath a highway overpass with other homeless children who dumpster dive for food and prostitute themselves for a few dollars or the promise of a hot meal or drugs. During the day, Celia finds solace in the city library, absorbed by natural history books about butterflies. Sometimes, she returns home to check on her sister, Alyssa, and their mother, always leaving before the violent and predatory Teddy returns.

As in “The Child Finder,” the tale unfolds from the perspectives of an imperiled girl; her captor; and the dogged, damaged Naomi.

The cynical, steadfast, streetwise Celia does much of the novel’s heavy lifting. Bright and devoid of self-pity, Celia is bent on saving her sister. Having seen her accusations against Teddy dismissed, she steels herself to rescue Alyssa from Teddy’s predations, knowing all too well what she’s up against.

Denfeld reminds us that storytelling remains one of the most powerful means we have of confronting our darkest human impulses, and sometimes overcoming them. It’s unfortunate that this time, while her pacing is swift, her prose, unfortunately, is often workmanlike, lacking the sheer bravura strangeness of the previous novel.

Naomi, intent on both her missing sister and the increasingly vulnerable Celia, too often seems merely diligent than indefatigable. The tale’s resolution relies heavily on coincidences, a few of which strain even a seasoned suspense reader’s credulity. Still, few people write as well about childhood sexual trauma as Denfeld does — its origins, the legacy that can extend for generations for both victim and perpetrator, and especially the coping strategies that victims develop to ­survive. n Hand’s 15th novel, “Curious Toys,” was published in October.

I The Butterfly Girl

By Rene Denfeld Harper. 264 pp. $26.99

THE BEAUTIFUL ONES

By Prince Spiegel & Grau.

288 pp. $30

l

REVIEWED BY

A LLISON S TEWART

n January 2016, Prince flew writer Dan Piepenbring out to Paisley Park, his office-parklike compound in suburban Minnesota. Prince had decided to write a memoir and was auditioning potential co-writers. Piepenbring, a young editor at the august literary journal the Paris Review, and a lifelong fan, had made the shortlist.

There were late-night phone calls and invitations to join Prince’s Australian tour, and a private screening of “Kung Fu Panda 3.” Prince was cheerful and inquisitive, and occasionally frosty when one of Piepenbring’s answers displeased him.

Piepenbring soon got the job.

Prince had already settled on a title, “The Beautiful Ones,” named for an iconic song from “Purple Rain.” He wanted to write the biggest music book in the world, one that would serve as a how-to guide for creatives, a primer on African American entrepreneurship and “a handbook for the brilliant community,” he told Piepenbring, “wrapped in autobiography, wrapped in biography.” He hoped the book would solve racism.

Prince began work on the book’s early chapters, eventually turning almost 30 handwritten pages over to Piepenbring. They last spoke on April 17, days after the singer collapsed on his private plane. Prince called his co-writer to reassure him he was fine. Prince would die four days later, the victim of an accidental fentanyl overdose.

Prince had not written enough material to fashion a conventional memoir, and Piepenbring returned to Paisley Park the summer after the singer’s death in search of supplementary material from the vaults. He pored over Prince’s personal archives looking for anything that would bring him to life, for “things that communicated some intimacy,” Piepenbring says.

Those unearthed pieces, including Prince’s handwritten song lyrics, photos captioned by the sing-

er, personal mementos and an early treatment of the “Purple Rain” script, serve as the book’s heavy, heartbreaking center of gravity.

“The Beautiful Ones” is a curious, fantastically moving hybrid of scrapbook and fragmented memoir, bookended by Piepenbring’s recollections about working on the project before and after Prince’s death. That it exists at all is remarkable. Prince’s carefully tended air of mystery had served as a force field, repelling any serious attempts at biography during his lifetime. During his later years, journalists were not even allowed to record interviews or take notes and could only ask him about his present day life.

A memoir, Piepenbring writes in his introduction, might have enhanced the singer’s sphinxlike persona. Prince did not necessarily want to be understood, merely misunderstood in a new way, a desire that would seem to be at odds with the business of memoir writing.

But the chapters written by Prince, with his familiar abbreviations faithfully replicated (“2” for “to” and “Y” for “why”), are appealing and frank explorations of his childhood and high school romances and his parents’ troubled marriage and divorce.

Prince’s chapters end with the singer still an adolescent. The book uses photos and memorabilia to trace the singer’s path to “Purple Rain” and effectively picks up again as he and Piepenbring meet at Paisley Park. Piepenbring and Prince only collaborated for three months. Piepenbring knew nothing of Prince’s struggles with opioids. But his minute observations of Prince at home in his compound, in the waning days of his life, contribute almost as much to our understanding of what Prince was really like as his own writings do. n Stewart writes about pop culture, music and politics for The Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune.

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Where there’s smoke, there’s California

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SUNDAY, November, 10, 2019

Cover story

BY D A N Z A K in Simi Valley, Calif.

You smell it, or think you do.

Like a bonfire on a beach.

Then you see it in your headlights. Ash. Or maybe insects? The signs are coy at first, on the westbound 118 Freeway, cleaving through sandstone crags that are 70 million years old. The thunderhead of smoke, a purple lesion on the orange twilight, is mysterious but not alarming. But you round a bend near the Santa Susana Pass and the fire is suddenly before you: rubyred ribbons of flame coiled around dark hills of sagebrush and sumac, accented by the snaking brake lights of Simi Valley traffic. It is unnatural and natural, simultaneously.

Flames from a backfire consume a hillside as firefighters battle the Maria Fire in Santa Paula, Calif., on Nov. 1.

Noah Berger/Associated Press

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KLMNO Weekly

Cover Story

“The fear comes around every year. It happens between October and November when the winds pick up. ... Each year we get a little better at it. Prior to any wind warnings, I have our cars packed up. It becomes a way of life.”

Alexia Baker, works at a family-owned ranch in Somis, Calif.

Richard M. Nixon soaks the wood-shingled roof of his Brentwood rental home as a wildfire consumes the hills around him in 1961.

Nixon had rented the home while engaged in research for his book “Six Crises.”

This is the Easy Fire, the one that gnawed the to play defense. In November 1961, Richard M. Nixon, a perimeter of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, year after losing the presidency, found himself on the and it quickly disappears from sight. It’s nighttime now, roof of his Brentwood rental home on North Bundy and the winding roads and staggered hillsides perform Drive, wearing a dress shirt and tie, hosing down cedar sleights of hand. A wildfire can be hard to find and easy shingles as a wildfire barbecued the hills around him. to lose. Hunting for one, you stumble upon another.

At 1:30 a.m. on Oct. 28, in the 1800 block of North Farther west in Somis, there is a soft orange glow over a Sepulveda Boulevard, high winds knocked a eucalyptus ridge. A sunrise from the north. A newborn wildfire. It’s branch into a power line. A couple of white flashes of so new that police officers — mapping evacuations on electricity turned into the Getty Fire. A few hours later, the hood of a cruiser on East La Loma Avenue — aren’t eight houses up from Nixon’s old rental, developer sure of its name.

Ramtin Ray Nosrati found an inferno advancing on the It will be christened Maria. Fingers of flame clutch the palatial lumber frame of his 20,000-square-foot contop of the ridge, then embers cascade over the near side of struction project. He had already activated a sprinkler the canyon. Parts of the hillside resemble erupting volcasystem remotely to douse the property, and credits it noes in miniature. Helicopters roar overhead and unleash with helping to spare the house. curtains of water. The fire stabs west, searing a path In those moments, Californians can feel in control. toward the Santa Clara River, fueled by hissing Santa Ana Fire, and fate, can be outmaneuvered. “You can’t make winds that drown out the crackle. Trees spasm in the an earthquake stop,” Nosrati says. “A hurricane, it’s wind, then catch fire. Smoke rolls like a fast- ­moving fog going to go where it’s going to go. With a fire there’s a lot past Ventura County firefighters on East La Loma. you can actually do.”

Capt. Steve Kaufmann is surveying the fire. UnpreOver the decades, Californians have gotten good at dictable, he calls it. Erratic. Its movement reminds him of dealing with wildfires. There are brush-clearing regulathe Thomas or Woolsey fires, which over the past two tions and no-parking rules on narrow roads during years burned 600 square high-risk weather. In Malmiles in the greater Los ibu, mansions get built Angeles area. Humidity’s with underground water at 3 percent. Winds are at cannons that rise to meet 30 mph. That means “exa blaze, and residents plosive fire behavior,” train to activate hydrants Kaufmann says. on their streets. Choppers If you have nothing at snort water from the surf stake but yourself, it’s posand dump the Pacific sible to stand within Ocean over the flaming 100 yards of this wildfire Palisades. Homeowners in and just watch it. It is an Hollywood strip their eerie, mesmerizing expeproperty of pines and rerience. place them with succuIf you do have somelents. Insurance compathing at stake, you are innies dispatch private side your own little apocateams to foam clients’ lypse. On one side of the property lines. Architects street, a farmer and his and Realtors use terms crew are yanking an insuch as “defensible space” dustrial hose around, and “fire resilience.”

Allan Grant/LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images spraying the tree line of But the fires still start, the property in a last-ditch and the fires still come, attempt to protect his lemon and avocado orchards. On and panicked Angelenos still chuck the good silver into the other side of the street, Alexia Baker, 28, is evacuating their saltwater pools before fleeing. In the past two alpacas, pigs and horses from her family’s ranch. years, at least 17,000 wildfires have burned 5,000 square She is dressed as a mermaid. It is Halloween. miles of California. Since 1972, the state’s annual burn Baker’s husband and father stay behind to extinguish area has quintupled, which is probably driven by the trees one by one, using their own water trucks, as human-caused global warming, according to a research firefighting crews encircle homes along East La Loma article published in August in the journal Earth’s and begin the defense.

Future. Large autumn fires will probably become more “The fear comes around every year,” Baker says two frequent. days later, after the evacuation order is lifted. “It happens Into this anxious moment comes a man named Jim between October and November when the winds pick up.

Moseley, who looks like Richard Dreyfuss from the And the winds in Somis are unbelievable. They’re hurri“What About Bob?” era. Moseley is a trombonist who cane-level winds, every year. And that alone is terrifying has played with Frank Sinatra. He is also an entreprefor the kids and animals. And us. Each year we get a little neur who offers a suite of fire protection services, better at it. Prior to any wind warnings, I have our cars including a spray called SPF3000, which he claims can packed up. It becomes a way of life.” give your home a fighting chance when other defensive measures have failed. It’s about $4 per square foot of coverage. He has sprayed Neverland Ranch. He has Living with wildfires sprayed the home of a “Star Wars” actor, he says. And on California burns. Always has. Purposefully, in some Halloween afternoon, another “red flag” day of high fire cases: A thousand years ago, the Sierra Miwok used fire risk, Moseley paid a visit to writer-actor Bo Svenson, to stimulate grasslands and cultivate acorn production. who in “Kill Bill: Volume 1” plays the reverend at the But often the fire has come unbidden, forcing residents massacre of Uma Thurman’s wedding.

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Cover Story “You have so much fuel around your house,” Moseley told Svenson, whose backyard overlooks a canyon in the Pacific Palisades. There are homes up narrow, twisting roads that have breathtaking views — and driveways that don’t accommodate firetrucks.

“I suspect this hill could be a gold mine for you,” Svenson said in his Swedish baritone, name-checking an Oscar-winning actress with a neighboring abode.

“There’s money here. And everyone’s nervous.”

Across the L.A. area, cars are parked facing out.

Plastic tubs are loaded with important documents and priceless mementos. Power is cut to thousands of people, to avoid live wires going down in the Santa Ana winds.

Wildfires are happening anyway. The Saddleridge Fire, Oct. 10 in the San Fernando Valley, forced 100,000 people to evacuate. The Tick Fire, Oct. 24 near Santa Clarita, destroyed 24 homes. At a winery in Northern California on Oct. 26, a bride and groom took wedding photos wearing face masks; the orange haze of the Kincade Fire illuminated the vineyard behind them as it consumed 120 square miles of Sonoma County.

In the first minutes of Halloween, at 12:18 a.m., police identified a stolen Dodge Dart traveling on Van Buren Boulevard in Riverside. The driver refused to pull over, led officers on a high-speed chase, crashed into a field and sparked a brushfire. By dawn, the 46 Fire had swallowed more than 200 acres in Jurupa Valley, destroyed three homes and prompted evacuations. It was a man-made fire fueled by scrub like chaparral, which requires fire to germinate and propagate. Unnatural and natural, simultaneously.

This is the dissonance that has settled in Southern California. Schools announce closures on balmy autumn days. Generators hum as residents try to maintain continuity through blackouts. Families become temporary refugees at evacuation centers. Window shoppers catch a whiff of smoke in Beverly Hills.

The ‘threshold of control’ “There’s no promises in this life.”

Thirty miles southwest of the 46 Fire, Dean Koontz, the mega­ selling novelist, was standing outside his enormous new home the morning after Halloween.

“We had friends who wouldn’t move to California because of earthquakes.”

Like other Californians, he has stood on a roof with a garden hose and a stance of defiance.

“They moved to the Gulf Coast and got hit by a hurricane.”

It costs a fortune to insure some homes in California.

This is why Koontz invited Moseley and his team for a consultation about a defensive sprinkler system and his SPF3000 spray. Local authorities have challenged the effectiveness and safety of the product, but Moseley has

testimonials from grateful clients and documentation of test results.

He also has his on-the-go demonstration. On Koontz’s front stoop, Moseley blowtorches one end of a piece of wood. It ignites, burns, starts to disintegrate.

Then he torches the other side, which has been treated with SPF3000. It blackens but does not ignite. Then Moseley scrapes the charred veneer with a car key to reveal intact wood underneath.

“Impressive,” Koontz says. His Tuscan-style villa is in a gated community near Irvine. This is a place of Bentleys and catering trucks, and an air of invincibility.

Koontz knows that nothing is invincible. If he were younger, maybe he’d move to a place that wasn’t quaking and conflagrating so much. Arizona, perhaps.

But he loves it here.

“None of us live forever,” he says. “And you have to weigh the quality of life with the risk.”

Southern California is a preposterous paradise, a luxurious dystopia. Over this past month, fire crews made of criminals were released from prison to protect mansions in Brentwood. In Whittier — where you can actually hear the power lines fizz overhead — a brushfire displaced an encampment of homeless people that residents had complained about for months. In recent decades, California has sprawled rapidly into the “wildland-urban interface,” or WUI, where the views are pretty but the ecosystem bridles at our presence.

On Nov. 1 in San Bernardino, a lone firefighter sat in his truck, right in the WUI. In front of Capt.

Matt Topoleski was a scorched slope leading up to national forest. Behind him was a house that was totaled by the Hillside Dan Zak/The Washington Post Fire. He had been on the job for 19 days straight, and had just finished mopping up the scene. The shadows were long. The wind kept trying to shut the door to his truck.

“For thousands of years, fires have come down these canyons, long before man,” said Topoleski, 57, his hands sooty. “Now here we are. We’re the intruder.”

California burns. Always has. Topoleski remembers the Panorama Fire in 1980. The Old Fire in 2003. Same hills here. He mentions the “threshold of control,” the point where the capability of a firefighting force meets the power of the fire itself. It’s fire jargon, like wildland-urban interface, but it sounds in this moment like a natural truth. With a fire you can exert some control. You can build a home out of board-form concrete instead of stucco. You can pay for the remote-control sprinkler system. You can take a chance on a spray with a cute name. But there’s no sure thing in the WUI, Topoleski says. He pronounces it “woo-ee.”

“We all want to prosper and appreciate beauty,” Topoleski says as his radio crackles with a bulletin about someone setting off fireworks across town. “You’ve just got to be prepared to leave.” n

KLMNO Weekly

“For thousands of years, fires have come down these canyons, long before man.

Now here we are.

We’re the intruder.”

Capt. Matt Topoleski, of the San Bernardino County Fire Department

Jim Moseley demonstrates his fire-protection spray for best-selling author Dean Koontz at Koontz’s house near Irvine.

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Opinions

Examples of the devastation on Uighur sacred sites

China has been demolishing Uighur religious sites as part of its campaign against the ethnic minority in Xianjiang.

BEFORE

AFTER

A mosque in Aksu, Xinjiang, was replaced by a parking lot in 2017.

Sultanim cemetery in Hotan was wiped out between 2018 and 2019.

The dome of a Uighur mosque in Artush was removed in 2018.

Source: Satellite images via Google Earth; image analysis by Uyghurism.com/Bahram Sintash

For Muslims in China, every day is Kristallnacht Fred Hiatt is editorial page editor and a columnist for The Washington Post.

China has been demolishing Uighur religious sites as part of its campaign against the ethnic minority in Xianjiang.

In China, every day is Kristallnacht. ¶ Eighty-one years ago this past week, in what is also known as the “Night of Broken Glass,” hundreds of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries in Nazi Germany were damaged or destroyed, along with thousands of Jewish-owned businesses. It was in a sense the starting gun for the genocide that culminated in the extermination camps of Auschwitz, Sobibor and Treblinka.

In western China, the demolition of mosques and bulldozing of cemeteries is a continuing, relentless process.

In a cultural genocide with few parallels since World War II, thousands of Muslim religious sites have been destroyed. At least 1 million Muslims have been confined to camps, where aging imams are shackled and young men are forced to renounce their faith. Muslims

not locked away are forced to eat during the fasting month of Ramadan, barred from praying or studying the Koran or making the pilgrimage to Mecca.

And — in possibly the most astonishing feature of this crime against humanity — China has managed to stifle virtually any reporting from the crime scene.

Which makes all the more significant the publication of a heartrending compendium of

THE WASHINGTON POST

evidence: “Demolishing Faith: The Destruction and Desecration of Uyghur Mosques and Shrines,”

by Bahram K. Sintash.

Sintash, 37, lives in the United States but grew up in what is now, he says, “a police surveillance state unlike any the world has ever known.” Sintash knows: China took his father into custody in February 2018, and Sintash has not heard from him since.

Unable to help his father — who, if he is still alive, turned 69 this past month — Barham has channeled his anguish into documenting the destruction of the Uighur heritage.

Uighurs are an ethnically Turkic and religiously Muslim people. For decades, they found a place in Communist China.

But in the increasingly intolerant rule of Xi Jinping, nothing that competes with party loyalty can be tolerated.

Previously vetted clerics, even octogenarians, receive 20-year sentences. Anything that looks too “Islamic” — even a dome atop a store — is flattened.

Based on satellite imagery and interviews with recent exiles — escapees might be an apter term

— Sintash estimates that 10,000 to 15,000 religious sites have been destroyed, he recently told a conference at the National Endowment for Democracy.

Many of these are village mosques, too small to stand out in Google satellite imagery, and no one on the ground will send pictures, because to do so would guarantee confinement in the camps. But Sintash has documented the destruction of more than 150 larger mosques in before-and-after, shrine-toparking-lot photographs.

Even starker are the images of cemeteries, such as the centuries-old Sultanim burial ground in Hotan, replaced by what look like fields of mud.

Workers in human rights tend to be highly reticent when it comes to Nazi analogies. The Holocaust was a unique event.

Yet at the unveiling of the report a few weeks ago, the Holocaust kept pushing itself into the conversation as the only adequate point of comparison.

Omer Kanat, director and cofounder of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, noted the Kristallnacht anniversary.

Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy, likened the brave reporters of Radio Free Asia to Jan Karski, the Pole who tried to alert the West to Nazi atrocities.

Those RFA reporters are living in exile, but dozens of their family members in western China have been imprisoned in retribution.

And what is the impact of such destruction of sacred spaces?

Rahile Dawut is a respected scholar who in 2017 was preparing to travel to Beijing from her home in Urumqi when she was taken away. Years before she disappeared, she said, “If one were to remove these . . . shrines, the Uighur people would lose contact with earth. They would no longer have a personal, cultural and spiritual history.

After a few years we would not have a memory of why we live here or where we belong.”

Sintash himself says he fears this is China’s “final solution” to destroy the Uighur people.

“I don’t know if my father died or is alive right now,” he says.

“But I can see the mosque where we prayed is gone.” n

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Opinions

KLMNO Weekly

Tom Toles

We need America first on climate John F. Kerry and Chuck Hagel Kerry was U.S. secretary of state from 2013 to 2017.

Hagel was U.S. defense secretary from 2013 to 2015.

On Monday, President Trump took the step he promised in 2017 to officially withdraw the United States from the Paris agreement on climate change, which every other country on Earth has signed. This is not America first; once again, it’s America isolated.

Climate change is already affecting every sector and region of the United States, as hundreds of top scientists from 13 federal agencies made clear in a report the White House itself released last year. The past five years were the warmest ever recorded.

Without steep pollution reductions, climate change will risk tens of thousands of U.S. lives every year by the end of the century. Rising seas, increased storm surge and tidal flooding threaten $1 trillion in public infrastructure and private property now along U.S. coastlines. The United States has experienced at least $400 billion in weather and climate disaster costs since 2014. The recent hurricanes that slammed America’s southern coasts, as well as historic wildfires in California, resulted in more American victims of severe weather juiced by climate change than ever before.

Climate change also threatens national security. As we testified to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in April, this link has been clear for decades. Our military bases, and hence our security preparedness, are threatened by sea-level rise and other impacts. If you put a map of places with high political instability today over a map of places with high climate vulnerability, the two would be nearly identical. The American Security Project, an organization of retired flag officers who spent their careers in uniform and other leaders, calls climate change a “ring road” issue, meaning that climate change will worsen other threats facing the nation. “It will change disease vectors. It will drive migration.

These changes, in turn, could affect state stability and harm global security,” the ASP reported.

Other major powers will

benefit economically from the U.S. withdrawal from Paris. By putting up roadblocks to the necessary transition to a lowcarbon global economy, Trump is making American businesses less competitive and leaving new jobs and economic opportunities up for grabs to other countries. The 2018 report by the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate details the evidence that between now and 2030, policies and measures aimed at solving this problem and building resilience could generate at least $26 trillion in economic benefits worldwide in industries including renewables and energy efficiency.

The clean-energy economy already employs 3.3 million Americans, with solar employing twice as many people as coal. But the United States is lagging far behind other countries that are determined to capitalize on this low-carbon market. For every dollar the United States invests in renewable energy, China puts in three. India has the largest solar and wind targets in the world, and the nation is making steady progress in achieving them. And the European Union announced last year that at least 25 percent of its next budget will go toward transitioning to a low-carbon economy.

The Paris agreement was a start, not a finish line. But it was the best ignition switch the world could agree on to spark international cooperation on this critical issue, something that many leading Republicans agree is essential to do because the United States can’t solve this problem alone.

Monday marks a dark day among those of us who believe in working with allies to share the burden of solving tough problems — especially a climate crisis that demands a World War II-style mass mobilization. But there’s a silver lining: Even as the Trump administration submits the paperwork to surrender our leadership on a climate accord we wrote, we won’t officially exit the agreement until Nov. 4, 2020. We have an election in our country on Nov. 3, 2020.

The United States can rejoin the agreement at any time once we have a leader willing to do so.

We must all mitigate the damage Trump does to the United States before then, but if there was ever an election in which U.S. leadership and the nation’s security were on the ballot, 2020 is it. Americans can pull the lever for the clearest choice ever on climate action to ensure that on Day One of a new administration, America will be back. n

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KLMNO Weekly

Opinions

BY OHMAN FOR THE SACRAMENTO BEE

Ok, boomer. Gen Z is fighting back.

Molly Roberts is a Washington Post editorial writer covering technology and society.

Two words have launched a thousand tweets and opened a new front in the generational wars.

Feeling completely clueless? OK, boomer.

The New York Times and NBC News last week picked up a trend from high-school halls and teens’ TikTok accounts and deposited it in the national news. The Gen Z-generated phrase “OK, boomer” has turned into an epithet rallying the country’s young against their forebears in collective mockery. The allpurpose reply is designed to disarm oldish people who dispense condescension dressed up as wisdom.

Your mom tells you that your peers’ phones are rotting their brains, and that they should spend some time outside mowing the lawn. “OK, boomer.”

Your grandpa tells you that kids these days have lost all sense of civility because they yelled at Ellen DeGeneres for going to a football game with George W. Bush. “OK, boomer.” Some random grump in your replies on Twitter tells you Greta Thunberg should go to school back in Sweden instead of gallivanting across the 50 states spreading the green gospel. “OK, boomer.”

It’s glib, it’s short, and it’s not at all sweet, but “OK, boomer” also reveals something about each of today’s generations. So does the

response the words have wrought.

The mainstreaming of a meme that was making its way onto $36 Redbubble-style sweatshirts sold by entrepreneurial 17-year-olds has, apparently, made boomers mad — which basically proves Gen Z’s point. Conservative radio personality Bob Lonsberry took to the Web on Monday to not-sopatiently explain that “being hip and flip” does not excuse “bigotry,” and that “boomer” is in fact “the n-word of ageism.”

OK, boomer.

Then there’s Gen X, dubbed by the media at various intervals as baby busters and 20nothings. The names all imply a depressing sort of emptiness. So it’s fitting that some in Gen Z

BY HORSEY FOR THE SEATTLE TIMES

seem to have forgotten that this in-between cohort exists at all and instead is lumping them in with the rest of the (relatively) elderly. Gen X is helping out by lumping themselves in with the boomers, and against those ungrateful kids.

Millennials have allied with Gen Z, and managed to vitiate the meme in the process by, basically, overdoing it. “OK, boomer” was fun and funny, so we said it about a million times on Twitter in the space of one day, and now it has become unfunny and lame. That’s appropriate, too, for a generation that supposedly kills every good thing.

It makes sense that millennials are taking up arms with our Gen Z comrades — because we’re the ones who have been maligned the most for the sin of our birth years. Gadgetry has stripped us of the capacity for meaningful human connection, or so the argument from self-help gurus, newspaper columnists and U.S. senators goes. The losers among us are basement-dwellers; the cool ones are profligates who refuse to contemplate the future. Blah, blah, avocado toast.

“OK, boomer” is appealing because, on the simplest level, it flips the script. Old people have

been telling young people for years that they don’t get it because they just haven’t had the chance to learn. Now, young people have developed a cryptic code for telling old people that they’re the ones who don’t get it, and that failure is all the more flagrant because they have had countless chances to learn.

But the flipping is craftier than just that. What’s important isn’t that the kids are fighting back. It’s that the kids are fighting back without really fighting at all. “OK, boomer” indicts not an argument and not an individual but an entire generation, or an entire generation’s attitude — and it does it with two words dripping with dismissal. The Gen Z progenitors of this insolent slogan say they use it because they’re inheriting a collapsing climate, an unequal economy and endless battles overseas that they didn’t start.

They’re saying a lot with very little, and by saying very little they end up saying even more.

“OK, boomer” sends the message that the grown-ups have screwed up so totally, and are veering so speedily into irrelevance, that convincing them of anything is a waste of keyboard characters. n

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KLMNO Weekly

Five Myths

The Kurds BY

R AMZY M ARDINI

AND

M ORGAN L . K APLAN

The Kurds are the largest stateless ethnic group in the world. They were promised autonomy by world powers after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, but the Allies rescinded and carved up their population, subjugating them as ethnic minorities across Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. In each country, Kurds have experienced varying degrees and forms of oppression but have also encountered opportunities for political expression. “The Kurds” are not a single entity with one common political aim. And President Trump’s decision last month to pull back U.S. troops from the Syrian border, exposing the Syrian Kurds to a Turkish incursion, has revived a raft of myths about them.

Myth No. 1 The Kurds are a nation fighting for independence.

While the Kurds in Iraq have sought to separate themselves from Baghdad, the aspiration for statehood is not held by all Kurds, and independence is not always an immediate goal. For the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey, founded in 1978, the initial goal of its insurgency was to achieve an independent Kurdish state, but the PKK eventually dropped that ambition and now seeks equal rights and regional autonomy. In Syria, the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) has been explicit that it does not seek an independent state — just regional autonomy within Syrian borders. The Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) in Iraq commenced a process toward independence in 2017, approving a referendum, but since then it has moderated that goal after Baghdad responded to the vote with violence.

The broader political goals for Kurds are some form of regional autonomy, self-governance within the confines of the state and basic national rights, such as recognition of their identity and language.

Myth No. 2 The Kurds are superior soldiers on the battlefield.

Given their long experience in

armed resistance against governments in Iran, Iraq and Turkey, Kurdish populations have generated seasoned war veterans.

But Kurdish military culture remains largely grounded in traditional guerrilla warfare, and units often lack the type of organization and resources required to fight conventionally.

Syrian and Iraqi Kurds absorbed heavy casualties fighting the Islamic State and would have lost many more troops without foreign air support, training and military hardware. In fact, recent spurts of global security cooperation with the Kurds came at times when Kurdish forces faced potential collapse.

Myth No. 3 The Kurds are friendless.

Kurds have had a long and lonely struggle for domestic security and international recognition, especially at times when the Kurds have felt betrayed by foreign powers.

Yet Kurdish leaders grasp that security politics in the Middle East is a shrewd business and have embraced a realist approach to foreign policy. Just as foreign powers sometimes use Kurdish groups to advance their regional goals, Kurdish groups are equally savvy in taking advantage of foreign partnerships to advance their interests at home. Some Kurdish organizations,

Delil Souleiman/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Syrian Kurds in Qamishli a few weeks ago protest the Turkish offensive in northeastern Syria, where they had been working to build a semiautonomous enclave — but not an independent state.

particularly in Iraq, form important relationships, including with the United States and Russia, Iran and (unofficially) Israel, and Western Europe and Turkey.

Myth No. 4 The Kurds are stalwart pro-American allies.

But U.S. relations with Kurdish groups vary widely across the four countries. In Iraq and Syria, Americans and Kurds have worked together closely. But in Turkey, the PKK — founded as a Marxist separatist group — has been designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department since 1997.

The other major Kurdish group in Turkey, the Peoples’ Democratic Party, is represented in parliament and has an office to promote its interests in Washington. Even Kurdish entities with strong ties to the United States have opted for an “open relationship”: During the Cold War, for instance, Iraqi Kurdish parties simultaneously solicited support from the United States and the Soviet Union.

Myth No. 5 Thanks to Trump’s betrayals, the Kurds are doomed.

By indirectly greenlighting a Turkish incursion against the Kurds, Trump effectively sold out his an But Kurds will continue to make pragmatic choices for the sake of self-preservation, and this move does not even spell the end of Kurdish selfgovernance. The Syrian Kurds have already adapted, forging partnerships with Damascus and Moscow while attempting to renegotiate with Washington. Because it would be incredibly costly for the Syrian regime to try to dismantle Kurdish selfgoverning institutions and reimpose its own, inviting the state back in will probably not be the end of Syrian Kurdish self-rule. n Mardini, a USIP-Minerva peace scholar at the U.S. Institute of Peace, is a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago. Kaplan is executive editor of international security at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

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THE 2019-20

FALL & WINTER VISITORS GUIDE Valley e e h c t a n We 019-20 2 e d i u G r Visito

Fall& r e t n i W

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