The Washington Post National Weekly - February 12, 2017

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2017

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life, DEATH AND DEMOLITION This block in Baltimore saw decades of change and generations of families. Now it’s being torn down.

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Politics Mattis calms allies 4

Nation Dead trees are like gold 9

5 Myths About Anti-Semitism 23

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THE FIX

Where Dems are on life support BY

A ARON B LAKE

A

cross the 49 state Senates in the United States, 20 are at least two-thirds Republican, and eight of those 20 are more than 80 percent GOP. Such is the dominance of the Republican Party in state legislatures. President Trump’s popular-vote-losing win and the GOP’s congressional majorities are huge for the party — don’t get me wrong — but they actually undersell the GOP’s unprecedented dominance at the state level. As previously noted, the GOP has complete control over about half the states in the union, while Democrats have only a handful.

But not all those GOP-dominated states are equally dominated. In some of them, the dominance is so complete that the Democratic Party barely has a pulse. And some of the states on this list might actually surprise you.

I ran the numbers and found 10 states that meet each of the following criteria: l At least 70 percent Republican in both the state House and Senate. l At least 75 percent Republican in statewide offices (governor, Senate, attorney general, etc.). l At least 75 percent Republican in their delegations to the House of Representatives.

Included in this group are Missouri and Indiana, both of which were swing states as recently as 2008. (Barack Obama won the latter.) And while some might expect a bunch of Deep South states, they actually don’t make the cut — in large part because they have more diverse populations that help keep the Democratic Party in business.

Here are the 10 states, along with their percentages of Republican officeholders in each category:

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THE WASHINGTON POST

State

Senate

House

l WY l SD l ID l UT l OK l ND l AR l TN l IN l MO

90% 83% 83% 83% 88% 81% 74% 85% 82% 74%

85% 86% 84% 83% 74% 86% 76% 75% 70% 72%

Statewides Congress

100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 93% 100% 100% 89% 75%

100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 78% 78% 75%

In the map, I’ve averaged each state’s percentage for state House, Senate, statewides and Congress and assigned them an average percentage — or what I’ll call a “Republican dominance” score.

Wyoming is tops in the nation. Fully 85 percent of its state House and 90 percent of its state Senate are Republican, as are all of its statewide officeholders and its lone member of

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Congress. It gets a Republican dominance score of 94.

Missouri is our No. 10 here. It pulls down the curve a bit, but it narrowly makes the cut for its state House (72 percent Republican), state Senate (74), statewides (75) and Congress (75). It seems a notable inclusion given its former swing-state status — and the fact that it had a Democratic governor until last month.

Democrats, by contrast, wield such control over just three states: Hawaii (where Democrats are 25 for 25 in the state Senate), Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Apart from those, in no state do Democrats have at least 70 percent of both state chambers.

And just as the GOP is largely invisible in those three states, the Democratic Party is missing in action in many states across middle America — states in which the Republican Party is basically the only game in town. n

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY CULTURE BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS

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ON THE COVER The sun rises on the last rowhouse on North Bradford Street in Baltimore.

Photograph by BILL O’LEARY, The Washington Post.

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POLITICS

Soothing allies anxious about Trump

AHN YOUNG-JOON/ASSOCIATED PRESS

In his first weeks, Defense Secretary Mattis has taken the unlikely role of quiet diplomat BY

M ISSY R YAN

A

s President Trump’s new defense secretary, Jim Mattis has a long list of tasks ahead, including devising a more aggressive campaign to combat the Islamic State and restoring military readiness after years of budget cuts. But a few weeks into his tenure, the retired Marine general’s most visi-

ble role has been of a different sort: soothing Americans and allies unnerved by the president and some of his top advisers.

Mattis, wrapping up an overseas visit to Japan and South Korea recently, the first trip abroad by a Trump Cabinet member, carried a message of constancy and restraint on many of the foreign policy issues that have generated anxiety since Trump’s

election.

In Seoul, Mattis told South Korean leaders that the United States would maintain a tough stance on North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, predicting a lasting partnership despite Trump’s repeated questioning of the two countries’ military alliance. In Tokyo, he said the United States would stick to a mutual defense treaty, allaying Japanese concern

about whether the United States would maintain its backing in a territorial dispute with China.

He also acted to stanch speculation that the United States, as suggested by White House officials, might act more precipitously against perceived threats from China and Iran, declaring that military steps were not currently required. This past week, Mattis spoke with Mexican defense lead-

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ers, highlighting cooperation in the wake of Trump’s high-profile feud with President Enrique Peña Nieto.

Derek Chollet, who was a senior Pentagon official under President Barack Obama, said that allies were following Mattis’s statements closely for clues about whether the new administration would follow a course set by Trump’s campaign statements, or stay broadly within the borders of established U.S. foreign policy.

“Trump may tweet up a storm, but if there is little or no connectivity to what happens on the ground, they may start discounting it,” Chollet said.

Although he has been held up

by Trump critics as a bulwark against the president’s whims and praised by supporters for his military record, it’s not yet clear as the rest of Trump’s Cabinet moves into place what sway Mattis will ultimately hold in shaping major decisions. In addition, the role of quiet diplomat is an unlikely one for a longtime combat commander whose brash commentary has occasionally generated controversy.

But Mattis, who has already shown himself willing to disagree with the president’s preferences, now occupies a key position in the Cabinet of a man with little foreign policy experience. Unlike Trump and some of his White House advisers, including chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon and son-inlaw Jared Kushner, Mattis has worked within the U.S. military and security establishment for virtually his entire career. While he appears to share the alarm that senior White House officials see in potential threats from Iran’s missile program and North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, his path has been shaped by different forces.

His affinity for working with allies is a product of his experience in the NATO mission in Afghanistan and the 1991 Persian Gulf War. As head of the U.S. Central Command, he conferred closely with Arab nations about terrorism and Iran’s actions in the region, and he oversaw the U.S. military’s exit from Iraq in 2011.

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SUSAN WALSH/ASSOCIATED PRESS

“Secretary Mattis has found a way to reaffirm alliances without disagreeing explicitly with his commander in chief.

That is enormously important.”

Michael O’Hanlon, scholar at the Brookings Institution

His views on Iran were shaped by the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon. Mattis’s hawkish approach to Tehran eventually alienated him from some in the Obama White House before his departure from Centcom in 2013.

Trump, who has surrounded himself with former generals, has already shown he is willing to defer to Mattis on issues such as whether the United States should employ waterboarding on detainees. In his confirmation hearing, he suggested a less friendly attitude toward Russia than the president has espoused and stressed the importance of NATO, despite Trump’s questions about the alliance’s relevance.

“Secretary Mattis has found a way to reaffirm alliances without disagreeing explicitly with his commander in chief,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a scholar at the Brookings Institution. “That is enormously important.”

The president’s apparent sup-

port for Mattis’s military judgment may enhance the new secretary’s standing in internal discussions or with allies, potentially putting the Pentagon boss in a position similar to that of former defense secretary Robert M. Gates, who wielded significant influence in policy debates under Obama, sometimes to the frustration of the White House, Chollet said.

His power could be enhanced if he and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson develop a relationship allowing them to jointly advocate for policy positions, as Gates frequently did with Hillary Clinton during her tenure as secretary of state.

But already Mattis, like other senior officials, has appeared to have been on the outside of some White House decision-making in the administration’s first weeks.

He was widely reported to have gotten little notice that Trump, in his first visit to the Pentagon on Jan. 27, would sign an executive

President Trump, with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, right, discusses the executive action on extreme vetting on Jan. 27.

FAR LEFT: U.S. Mattis, left, and South Korean Defense Minister Han Min Koo salute during a welcome ceremony for Mattis in Seoul on Feb. 3.

Mattis told South Korean leaders that the United States would maintain a tough stance on North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs.

order barring entry by immigrants and refugees from certain majority-Muslim nations, including Iraq.

Pentagon officials subsequently pushed to clarify that Iraqis who obtained special visas after working with the U.S. government would be admitted.

In other areas, Mattis has already used his access to the president to secure approval for actions put forward by the military, notably the deadly Special Operations raid in Yemen that occurred just a week after Trump took office.

JV Venable, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said that Trump was likely to give Mattis “strategic direction” and then allow him greater rein than recent defense secretaries to manage military matters, despite potential disagreement over particular decisions.

“I don’t think he hired mice,” Venable said. “He hired people with bold backgrounds who aren’t afraid to stand up to him.” n

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GOP gives a megaphone to Warren BY

D AVID W EIGEL

T

he high-profile battle between Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and now-Attorney General Jeff Sessions would never have happened if both had not, earlier in their careers, been blocked from jobs they wanted by strong opposition in the Senate.

Sessions’s story of being denied a federal judgeship is well known, and it was reprised after Warren was prevented from reading Coretta Scott King’s letter of opposition to Sessions’s 1986 nomination.

The more recent impediment of Warren was instructive, too.

After the passage of the DoddFrank financial overhaul law, Warren, who had advocated for the creation of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau under the law and worked with the Obama administration to set it up, was seen as the obvious candidate to run the CFPB. But in 2011, Republicans held 47 Senate seats, and the filibuster rules of that time allowed them to block any nominee who could not earn every Democratic vote and seven of their own.

Republicans made it clear that they would not confirm Warren unless the CFPB was scaled back — something Democrats would never do. In May 2011, all 47 Republicans signed a letter promising to block a recess appointment to the CFPB. The letter’s chief author — in small irony — was then-Sen. Jeff Sessions.

“Never in history had a minority in the Senate ‘pre-rejected’ a presidential nominee just because they didn’t like the agency he or she was due to run,” Warren wrote in her 2014 memoir, “A Fighting Chance.” “Progressives were outraged, and a number argued that this was the right moment for the president to fight back: He should nominate me, have a showdown with the Senate Republicans, and then, if needed, make a recess appointment.”

That didn’t happen. The

BILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST

In conservative media, it’s believed that raising the liberal senator’s profile will hurt Democrats Obama White House made what seemed, at the time, to be a compromise with Republicans — Warren would not be nominated, replaced by former Ohio attorney general Richard Cordray, whom Warren had hired to run the CFPB’s enforcement arm.

Not becoming the CFPB director freed Warren to run for the Senate. Had Republicans let her take the CFPB job — a compromise that would have alienated plenty of donors, who considered Warren a threat — Democrats might not have found a strong enough candidate to unseat Massachusetts’s senator, Scott Brown.

The full-court press in 2011 is also instructive about Republican messaging in 2017.

Some of President Trump’s most popular campaign rhetoric

was purloined from Warren: Where she said that “the system is rigged,” referring to the financial system, Trump pronounced a whole “globalist” system rigged against the working class.

On the other hand, Republicans have attempted to portray Warren as a left-wing, alienating figure. They’ve latched onto a poll from early January that found 51 percent of Massachusetts voters viewing Warren favorably and just 44 percent saying she “deserves reelection” in 2018. America Rising, the proRepublican opposition research group, has focused an unusual amount of fire on Warren, whose state gave just 33 percent its vote to Trump last year.

In conservative media, it’s widely accepted that raising Warren’s profile will be bad for

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) talks to reporters Wednesday, the morning after being silenced in the Senate chamber during confirmation hearings on Sen. Jeff Sessions for attorney general.

Democrats: A Fox Business segment on Wednesday featured host Stuart Varney calling her “the outspoken socialist senator from Massachusetts” and assuring that “Democrats are making a mistake by putting Senator Warren out front in a very attacking, moralistic mode.”

Republican strategist Ron Nehring tweeted on Wednesday, “Elizabeth Warren’s shrill rhetoric turns off many people who are potential Dem voters. So, keep it up! Helps the GOP.” For some, it’s easier to think that Republicans cleverly elevated Warren to tie Democrats to “the left” than it is to believe that they have repeatedly stumbled and elevated her as an effective opponent. But that largely relies on a equivalence of the “right” and “left” as equally extreme, and equally upsetting to centrist voters, and that might not reflect reality. In December, for example, Morning Consult asked a polling sample of Trump voters if they favored elimination of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau: 50 percent of Trump voters wanted it expanded or left alone; just 7 percent agreed with nearly every Republican politician in calling for it to be scrapped.

And recent history suggests that partisans are not always the best judges of what the opposition might do to alienate voters.

The hack of John Podesta’s email recovered a memo from April 23, 2015, from Hillary Clinton’s precampaign organization to the Democratic National Committee.

Among the early goals of any campaign, they believed, was to “force all Republican candidates to lock themselves into extreme conservative positions that will hurt them in a general election.”

“We don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates,” wrote the memo authors, “but make them more ‘Pied Piper’ candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party.”

Three candidates were named: Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), Ben Carson and Donald Trump. n

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FROM LEFT: THE WASHINGTON POST, ASSOCIATED PRESS, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)

The past is a weapon in the present BY

M ICHAEL S . R OSENWALD

O

n social networks and talk radio, in classrooms and at kitchen tables, the country’s past is suddenly inescapable. Many, many people — as President Trump would put it — are sharing stories about key moments and figures in American history to support or oppose one controversial White House executive order after another.

Andrew Jackson and Huey Long are alive in Facebook feeds.

Twitter is afire with 140-character bursts of historical moments — the St. Louis steaming toward Miami in 1939 with Jewish refugees fleeing Germany’s Third Reich, or the “Saturday Night Massacre,” President Richard Nixon’s firing of a special prosecutor in 1973 during the Watergate scandal.

Trump may or may not make America great again, but he has certainly revived interest in U.S. history. It has been a long time since Woodrow Wilson, Abraham Lincoln and Susan B. Anthony were in the news, not to mention import taxes, the Revolutionary War, Japanese internment camps and the Immigration Act of 1917.

“I’ve never seen so many people desperate to refer to historical examples,” said David Bell, a Princeton University history professor who last month moderated a panel on Trump at the American Historical Association’s annual conference. “Everyone seems to have an example.”

While Barack Obama’s election renewed discussion of the nation’s tortured racial history and Hillary Clinton’s would have spawned a look back at women’s rights, historians say the speed and breadth of Trump’s policy pronouncements have prompted the electorate to deploy history as an offensive or

defensive rhetorical weapon.

“History really feels explosive to many people right now,” Harvard historian Jill Lepore said. “People are reaching out for whatever twig is streaming by to give some meaning to what they’re seeing.”

Decades and even centuries are jumbled together. Frederick Douglass became a trending topic on Facebook after Trump talked about him as if he were still alive.

Alongside news feeds, the 19thcentury abolitionist was listed between the Cheesecake Factory and the Johnson Amendment, the 1954 law that restricts political activity by tax-exempt religious groups. Trump has vowed to “totally destroy” the amendment.

The historical references are not limited to this country. A recent headline on Breitbart News, a conservative website that was run

by Trump White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon, said, “Why Saint Thomas Aquinas Opposed Open Borders.”

Even Adolf Hitler is hard to avoid. Last week, a student in Norway tweeted that the Nazi dictator was being discussed in class.

“Someone will bring up Trump before class ends,” he wrote. “I just know it.” Less than 20 minutes later: “YEP THERE WE GO.” Last month, a guy named Eric in Ohio — fearful of reprisal, he would not give his last name — posted a video on YouTube titled “Donald Trump, import taxes, History and left wing insanity.”

Eric’s passion is economics and history. “I have three bookshelves filled with books on that topic, so when you combine those two things with posts on Facebook, I tend to respond because it pisses me off.”

The Trump administration, just a few days in office, proposed adding tariffs to imports. Suddenly,

Eric began reading posts about how import taxes had led the country to war.

This confused him. So he started asking the posters what they were talking about — the Revolutionary War, they said.

“Who the hell is telling you this stuff?” Eric said into the camera.

“Did you get your American history off the back of a Cracker Jack box?”

Putting aside the question of who is right, Eric’s rant illustrates how Trump’s supporters and detractors are drawing on historical moments in a prosecutorial way.

Lepore, the Harvard historian, said that “in more normal times,” she becomes frustrated when complicated, nuanced history is used in “deceptive, misleading” ways. But she is sympathetic to how befuddled people are.

“These moments from the past are enticing because of the depth of uncertainty,” she said.

And they are being used to argue both for doubling down on and disavowing current events.

Take immigration. Those who support Trump’s executive order restricting travel from seven Muslim-majority countries point to previous eras when the country was more restrictive.

“The news channels are overrun with liberals claiming Trump’s ban violates the constitution and is contrary to our traditions,” a Trump supporter wrote on Facebook. “Like it or not, ‘our traditions’ have been to use immigration law to keep out people of other races and cultures, whether they were considered dangerous or not.”

A half-hour later, someone replied, “Thanks to all on this thread for being an oasis of sanity in a wasteland of partisans railing about what is and isn’t constitutional.”

Those appalled by Trump’s actions see it differently.

“The overall effect of Trump’s latest executive order would be to put the U.S. back on to similar footing as the 1930s, when refugees most needed our help to escape persecution,” the Human Rights Campaign wrote in a widely shared blog post that retold the story of the St. Louis being turned away.

Others cut and pasted a long post that Heather Richardson, a Boston College history professor, put on her personal Facebook page, describing the executive order as a “shock event.”

“Such an event is unexpected and confusing and throws a society into chaos,” she wrote. “People scramble to react to the event, usually along some fault line that those responsible for the event can widen by claiming that they alone know how to restore order.”

But shock events, in Richardson’s telling, can ultimately change the country for the better.

“If people realize they are being played,” she wrote on Jan. 29, “they can reach across old lines and reorganize to challenge the leaders who are pulling the strings.

This was Lincoln’s strategy when he joined together Whigs, Democrats, Free-Soilers, anti-Nebraska voters, and nativists into the new Republican Party to stand against the Slave Power.”

Although Richardson writes frequently on politics for several news organizations, she did not intend her post to be read by a large audience — only friends and family on both sides of the debate.

She posted it, then went to dinner. When she came home, she discovered it had been shared 17,000 times.

A week later, it was at more than 80,000. n

Both fans and critics of Trump turn to history to prove their points FROM LEFT: Richard Nixon, Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln have all seen renewed interest lately.

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When resistance meets resistance BY

T OM J ACKMAN

T

he protests of 2016, against pipelines and police shootings and a presidential candidate, have sparked lawmakers in eight states to consider bills boosting penalties for unlawful demonstrations.

They include one that would protect drivers who “unintentionally” run over activists blocking roads and another aimed at forcing protesters to pay up to three times the costs of any damage they cause.

In Washington state, a lawmaker termed some protests “economic terrorism” and introduced a bill that would permit judges to tack on an additional year in jail to a sentence if the protester was “attempting to or causing an economic disruption.”

In Minnesota, a person convicted of participating or being present at “an unlawful assembly” could be held liable for costs incurred by police and other public agencies.

And in Indiana, a proposed law would direct police encountering a mass traffic obstruction to clear the road by “any means necessary.”

“We’re not trying to restrict people’s right to protest peaceably,” said Iowa state Sen. Jake Chapman (R), in comments similar to those by legislators involved with each of the measures. He introduced his bill, increasing the penalty for blocking a high-speed highway from a misdemeanor to a felony punishable by up to five years in prison, after an antiDonald Trump protest by high school students in November blocked one direction of Interstate 80 for 30 minutes. “But there’s appropriate places and times. And the interstate is not one of those places. . . . Right now they’re going to get charged with jaywalking and fined $35. That doesn’t fit the crime, in my opinion.”

Lee Rowland, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union specializing in First Amendment issues, said she has seen occasional attempts to crack down on protests over the years. “But I’ve never seen a coordinated attack on protesters’

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Lawmakers in multiple states consider measures aimed at protesters they consider disruptive rights anywhere near this scale,” Rowland said. “What all of these bills have in common is they may be dressed up as being about obstruction or public safety, but make no mistake about it: These are about suppressing protests with draconian penalties so that the average person would think twice before getting out on the street and making their voice heard.”

Cody Hall, a member of the Lakota tribe who was arrested while protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota, said the measures would set back civil rights.

“We’re going backwards 60 years,” Hall said. “It’s okay to use your vehicle to run down protesters? How is it that protesters are not considered human beings? It’s my free speech — we can do this.

You’re going to get people who say, ‘Hey, the law backs us. We can run people over.’ ” None of the measures have passed yet. All have been proposed

by Republicans. Rowland called them “undoubtedly unconstitutional” and said the ACLU would challenge any that are signed into law.

But their sponsors said they reflect the public’s frustration with prolonged, disruptive protests, such as those at the Dakota Access Pipeline, where demonstrators have camped for months, and the Black Lives Matter protests around the Minneapolis area, which have at times closed parts of the famed Mall of America.

Most states have laws restricting protests at funerals, after protests outside military services prompted outrage, and federal law and some states regulate protests near abortion clinics. But Jonathan Griffin of the National Conference of State Legislatures said he had not seen a spate of bills addressing protests in general.

The standing protest of the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota began last April and has annoyed many residents because it

Demonstrators block Interstate 94 during a protest for slain black motorist Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minn., in July. Castile was shot and killed by a police officer after a traffic stop.

involves people interfering with traffic on a nearby highway, Rep. Keith Kempenich said.

He introduced a bill, which states that any driver “who unintentionally causes injury or death to an individual obstructing vehicular traffic on a public road . . . is not guilty of an offense.”

Sentiments about keeping the roads clear, particularly for public safety and emergency vehicles, were voiced by officials in Iowa, Minnesota and Indiana.

“The object of this measure is very simple,” said state Sen. Jim Tomes of Indiana in a statement about his bill directing law enforcement to use “any means necessary” to clear roads. “An ambulance needs to be able to get to an individual who is having a heart attack, and law enforcement needs to be able to respond to a call to attend to someone who needs help.”

In Washington state and Colorado, lawmakers filed bills after activists targeted oil refineries to protest the continued use of fossil fuels. Colorado’s bill would make the crime of tampering with oil or gas gathering equipment a felony instead of a misdemeanor.

In Missouri, legislators are considering a bill that would make it illegal to conceal one’s identity “by the means of a robe, mask or other disguise” while committing the crime of unlawful assembly. And in North Carolina, an incident which occurred in Washington shortly after the inauguration caused a legislator to say he would introduce a bill making it a crime to “threaten, intimidate or retaliate against a present or former North Carolina official in the course of, or on account of, the performance of his or her duties.”

Activist DeRay Mckesson, a member of the Black Lives Matter movement, said the proposals are all aimed at muzzling opposition.

“People in power benefit from silencing dissent, and these laws function to silence those willing to challenge those in power,” he said.

“If passed, these laws would penalize citizens who are willing to speak out against injustice. . . .

Protest is a core American right.” n

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California’s new gold rush BY

D ARRYL F EARS

T

he giants outside Dana Smith’s office in Shaver Lake, Calif., are spindly like the neck of a brachiosaurus, so tall that he has to throw back his head to see all the way to the top.

They are 10 majestic ponderosa pines that grew 200 feet over about 250 years, a regal presence that lured Smith to the spot where he runs a business renting vacation cottages a few miles south of Yosemite National Park.

The trees are also dead, marked with bright spray paint by state contractors, destined for a date with a chain saw. They are victims of a massacre, a five-year drought — the longest and worst in state history — that has wiped out 102 million trees in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

But this ecological tragedy has a silver lining. California is in the middle of a $50 million effort to get rid of tens of thousands of dead trees that threaten roads, power lines and homes. Loggers from across the country are flocking to the state in search of a huge payday from tree-removal companies under contract with the state and a few private firms.

“They’re coming from Iowa, Texas, Florida and Pennsylvania,” Smith said. “They tend to be young, people in really good shape — climbing trees, using chain saws six or seven days a week. It’s been rather fascinating. It’s been quite an experience.”

For this new gold rush, workers need a place to lay their heads, and for a few months last year, they filled Smith’s rental properties, studios to eight-bedroom luxury cottages that rent for $75 to $800 per night.

The jobs are so good and seem so stable that some loggers are uprooting their families from states such as Oregon and Georgia and relocating to California. Ron Henson, a real estate agent who works for Smith at Shaver Lake Vacation Rentals, said he knows some who moved to Clovis, outside Fresno.

As the number of dead trees

ROBYN BECK/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Loggers from around the country are coming in to remove dead trees from drought-stricken forests grew, so did the tree-cutters. They started arriving in a trickle in 2015, when the U.S. Forest Service counted 66 million dead trees. After the mortality skyrocketed to more than 100 million trees and Gov. Jerry Brown (D) attached tens of millions of dollars to an emergency order last year, loggers started arriving in droves.

At least a half-dozen public and private agencies are offering money to clear them away to be used as biofuel or as chips for emergency offramps that help slow runaway trucks.

The California Department of Transportation allocated $11 million to slice away massive trees before they keel over onto two key roads, in an attempt to keep them from blocking busy traffic headed to and from Yosemite or killing a motorist.

“You could easily have traffic on a two-lane road backed up 20 or so miles in both directions,” said Cory Burkarth, a spokesman for the

agency, known as CalTrans. “And State Route 41 is the main road in the area. That’s a major concern, what a fallen tree can do to the safety of motorists and passengers. In the middle of the night, you can’t see those trees on the side of the road, and you might not see it fall.”

As of January, CalTrans had identified nearly 30,000 trees it wanted removed along State Routes 41 and 168. The agency pays up to $1,000 per tree, Burkarth said. About 8,000 have been removed at a cost of about $6.5 million.

The Forest Service also is spending millions of dollars to remove trees, as are at least two utilities, Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas and Electric. They are worried about trees that threaten electrical lines.

What befell some of California’s most magnificent trees is a haunting story. They slowly parched from thirst, year upon year. Weak

A five-year drought in California has parched millions of trees, making them susceptible to pests such as the western pine beetle.

and near death, their immune systems, which create sap that helps keep away harmful pests, failed.

And when that happened, beetles moved in for the kill.

The western pine beetle was one of several insect species that flourished as they fed, leaving eerie feeding grooves beneath the bark, branding the trees like tattoos. As the trees succumbed, their emerald leaves turned the color of rust.

The scale of the devastation has shocked Forest Service workers who count them and U.S. Geological Survey scientists who perform autopsies — 8 million acres of death across the California mountain forests.

Workers typically count hundreds of dead trees in an area, then move to others. But often, when they returned to the same spots weeks later, trees that seemed fine had died. It took time to realize that beetles were eating the healthy but drought-stricken trees alive under their bark, Burkarth said.

“It’s actually going to take months and months and months to complete the work, as the bugs kill more trees,” said Len Nielson, a forester for Cal Fire, a state agency that battles wildfires.

Fires that race through dead trees are another reason to remove them, officials say.

“This has never happened in California before, not at this level,” Nielson said. “At home, I look out my back door and see thousands upon thousands of dead trees.”

The logging jobs are stable for years to come, even though California’s drought appears to be ending, as snow piles up in the Sierra Nevada range and rain pours on arid Los Angeles and Orange counties. Only Santa Barbara County, which relies on a reservoir that has a low water level, is technically still in drought.

Healthy adult trees will absorb the precipitation and strengthen.

Young trees are safe from pests because their bark is not ripe and nourishing. And dead trees will keep leaning, keeling over and threatening people, traffic and wires. n

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WORLD

Pakistan’s search for middle ground P AMELA C ONSTABLE Islamabad, Pakistan BY

T

o U.S. and international officials, Hafiz Mohammad Saeed is a terrorist who orchestrated a bloody urban siege that killed 166 people in India in 2008. But to his many followers in Pakistan, he is a champion of Islamic values and Kashmiri independence from India.

To U.S. and international officials, Shakil Afridi is a courageous man who helped the United States track down and kill Osama bin Laden. But to many Pakistanis, he is a traitor who sold his services to a Western adversary of Islam and should remain in prison.

Therein lies the conundrum facing Pakistani officials today as they scramble to forestall punitive actions by the Trump administration — and ease pressure from other partners, including China — without provoking turmoil at home, especially among Muslim militants the state has long coddled as proxies against India.

Suddenly confronted with a U.S. president who has declared war against Islamist extremism and has expressed little interest in the long history of political accommodation and security alliances between Washington and Islamabad, officials here are struggling to find a middle ground that may no longer exist.

Since the draconian travel ban imposed by Trump on all visitors from seven Muslim-majority countries, Pakistan has taken steps to tighten legal nooses around both Saeed and Afridi, confining the firebrand cleric to house arrest and denying travel documents to the imprisoned doctor’s family.

Taken together, these moves send a double message: The government is serious about reining in a high-profile Islamist militant with a U.S. bounty for his arrest, but it is also serious about keeping an alleged traitor — whom Trump once vowed to set free — behind bars and under wraps.

The crackdown on Saeed and his group, which has been allowed to function freely for the most

ANJUM NAVEED/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Nation takes steps against both a firebrand cleric and imprisoned man who helped get bin Laden part, is seen by many here as a hasty conciliatory gesture to the new administration in Washington. But Pakistani officials insist it was the product of long internal deliberation — and further proof of a permanent shift from official tolerance for extremists who once served as Pakistan’s deniable agents in India and Afghanistan.

“Pakistan is not merely an aspirant for cooperation with Washington, it is a serious and credible partner,” Tariq Fatemi, a senior aide to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, said in an interview. He said Sharif’s government is determined to clear the country of all militants. “We will kill them or drive them out,” he said. “Any willingness to look the other way is no longer there.”

Some analysts said that while Pakistan is concerned about the Trump administration expanding its travel ban or cutting off aid, it also faces other sources of pressure to clamp down on extremists.

One is China, Pakistan’s giant neighbor and major economic partner, which does not want its investments threatened by violence.

The other is an intergovernmental watchdog agency, the Financial Action Task Force, which monitors money laundering and terrorist financing. The group, which can blacklist countries that don’t have enough safeguards in place, has reportedly raised new alarms about “gray payments,” or money funneled as charitable donations to or from militant groups in Pakistan, including Saeed’s.

Some commentators say that to prove it is serious about curbing Islamist extremism, the government must stop sending mixed signals to groups like Saeed’s as well as to hard-line sectarian movements, which are often banned but then allowed to regroup under new names. Saeed once headed a militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, that was accused

Pakistanis gather to mark Kashmir Solidarity Day in Islamabad on Feb. 5.

The handwritten poster says, “The message of Hafiz Saeed is Kashmir will become Pakistan.” Saeed is considered to be a terrorist by the United States, but he is seen by others as a champion of Islamic values and Kashmiri independence.

by India of staging the Mumbai siege. Now he heads two other groups that claim to be charitable and educational but are also fiercely anti-India.

Fatemi said that the government also intends to counter extremist ideas with persuasion, registering radical seminaries and “bringing them into the mainstream” through a National Action Plan established by Sharif. “We are going to bring about a major shift in the thinking process of people on the fringes,” he said.

But that message is not so easy to spread in an impoverished country of 180 million people, about 80 percent of them Muslims. Today, more than 2 million youths are studying in seminaries, and groups like Saeed’s enjoy wide popularity. The cause of Kashmiri oppression has been a national rallying cry for decades, and many Pakistanis have been taught to believe that India, Israel and the U.S. are mortal enemies of Islam.

Among the few Pakistanis who express hope for sympathy from the Trump administration are the relatives of Afridi, who has been in prison for six years on charges of abetting Islamist militants. His family says it believes the real reason was his role in locating bin Laden, by conducting a medical survey in the city where the alQaeda leader was found and killed

by U.S. Navy Seals.

This month, relatives and attorneys for Afridi said the government had refused to renew identity documents for his family members and had placed their names on a list of Pakistanis who are banned from leaving the country.

In an interview, his younger brother, Jamil Afridi, 55, said he hoped the Trump administration would come to the doctor’s aid.

“My brother did nothing wrong.

He was a true American hero who helped the United States eliminate the world’s most wanted terrorist,” Afridi said. “I congratulate President Trump and I am optimistic about him, because he said he would help free my brother once he was elected to office. He is a man of action who does what he says.” n

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2017

11

WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

‘It’s as if we’ve all forgotten about Zika’

BY M ARINA L OPES AND N ICK M IROFF

Recife, Brazil

I

n this city at the heart of the Zika outbreak, the gloom and dread have lifted from hospitals and delivery rooms.

The scary government posters with giant mosquitoes have mostly come down. Fertility clinics are busy again. At one public hospital that has delivered 1,700 newborns over the past five months, doctors haven’t seen a single case of Zikarelated birth defects.

“It’s as if we’ve all forgotten about Zika,” said Erika Alcantara, 17 weeks pregnant, who waited for the epidemic to pass before having a second child.

A year after U.N. health officials declared Zika a global emergency, the city that produced some of the outbreak’s most terrifying and indelible images of badly deformed infants feels like a place that has mostly moved on.

But not everyone has bounced back so fast. Not the parents of the babies in those heartbreaking photographs.

Initially, many feared that the infants would be merely the first wave of Zika victims, with many more to follow. Yet as the virus spread across the Americas and infected hundreds of thousands, it did not inflict the kind of damage seen in northeast Brazil, where three-quarters of Zika-related birth defects have been reported.

Today those families are like the survivors of a natural disaster.

Though Zika scared many, its lasting harm fell on a relative few.

Those families have developed new routines. Eliane Paz ferries her son, Davi Lucas, to five different hospitals a week for visual, motor and auditory therapy. The 1-year-old was diagnosed with severe microcephaly when he was born in October 2015, weeks before doctors connected the condition to Zika. Paz, a former maid, wakes up at 4 a.m. to make the 90-minute journey to the rehabilitation centers where specialists work with her son.

Recife’s rehab clinics are crowded with children who have

JOAO PINA FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

The Brazilians hit by the worst of the outbreak face new obstacles in raising children with birth defects microcephaly, a congenital condition defined by undersized heads and impaired cognition. Now toddlers, they struggle to swallow, roll over or simply hold up their heads. Many languish in a semivegetative state.

Their parents say they live for milestones that others take for granted. When their children learn to smile, laugh or grip, it’s just enough to stave off despair.

At Davi Lucas’s motor therapy appointment, doctors insert cold bits of papaya into his mouth and stroke his cheeks to try to stimulate chewing. The mashed fruit mostly falls out. For months after he was born, the boy cried constantly, his mother said, but he wasn’t able to produce tears.

“The day he shed his first tear, I started crying, too,” Paz said. Having quit her cleaning job, she receives a $300 monthly stipend from the government and devotes all of her time to the boy. It stings when strangers stare at him or she overhears their comments: “Mos-

quito Boy.” “Devil’s child.”

Sixty families come for treatment to the IMIP public hospital’s clinic, the largest rehabilitation center in Recife for children with microcephaly. There are 40 more children on a waiting list.

A year ago, Zika was spreading rapidly across the Americas, prompting governments to warn women to avoid or postpone pregnancy. Today, Zika is waning virtually everywhere in the Western Hemisphere. Epidemiologists say the pattern fits the typical trajectory of a virus that spreads explosively at first but fizzles out as it runs out of new hosts to infect.

What researchers still don’t understand is why the majority of Zika-related birth defects have been so concentrated in one region of a single country.

Of the more than 2,600 cases of Zika-related congenital syndrome confirmed so far in the Americas, nearly 2,400 are in Brazil. The vast majority are in a cluster of northeastern states, including Pernam-

Gleyse Kelly da Silva and Felipe da Silva had a child with microcephaly in Recife, Brazil, in late 2015. She formed a WhatsApp chat group for mothers of children with microcephaly. It now has 400 mothers who support each other in various ways.

buco, where Recife is located.

Today, the panic has mostly lifted. Alcantara, the mother who delayed pregnancy because of Zika, said she and her husband, Wilton, made that decision after the couple and their 3-year-old daughter, Lara, were infected in early 2015.

But new research on the disease and its virtual disappearance convinced Wilton that it was safe enough to have a child in Recife again.

Gleyse Kelly da Silva had never heard of microcephaly when her unborn daughter was diagnosed with it in late 2015. “I was shocked by what I saw on Google,” she said.

The hopelessness gave way to action. A few months after her daughter Giovanna was born, she formed a WhatsApp chat group for mothers of children with microcephaly. Within a week, the group had 100 members. What started out as a way to share tips on treatment facilities and navigating the bureaucracy became a source of 24-hour support.

When her daughter kept her up all night crying, da Silva would turn to the group and find other mothers also awake. “They would tell me, you’ve got this, keep going,” she said.

Today, 400 mothers from across the state have joined the chat group. It has become their best megaphone whenever they need to amplify pressure on government health officials. And when one mother is tight on cash and can’t afford medicine, others step in to help. They share tips on which anti-seizure drugs work best and which sleeping positions can soothe inconsolable babies.

Giovanna, now 15 months old, is still unable to hold up her head for long. She eats better now but doesn’t sleep much. At night, da Silva and her husband, Felipe, settle onto the couch with the baby. She doesn’t cry if her father keeps her bouncing on his knee.

He quit his job as a security guard. But he has learned to sleep this way: head slumped into the armrest, television on mute, with Giovanna draped across his leg, bouncing, bouncing, bouncing. n

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2017

12

COVER STORY

C l e a r i n g For more than a century, hundreds of people called this patch of East Baltimore home.

Now this block is about to be torn down as a city with 17,000 boarded-up houses lays waste to its blight and its history.

BY

S TEVE H ENDRIX

The nine rowhouses a few blocks from Johns Hopkins Hospital stood for more than a century, through waves of immigration, two world wars, the upending of the city’s economy and a shift in its racial makeup.

The arched windows along the 900 block of North Bradford Street reflected both the boom and the decline of a great American city: the prosperous midcentury, when all nine households could afford the Formstone that covered their brick fronts; the tumult of 1968, when residents could smell the smoke from nearby riots; the white flight that would open the street to African Americans and the drug wars that would drive many of them away.

o u t

Since it was built on an old brickyard in 1905 by the “two-story king of East Baltimore,” hundreds of people have called the block home.

But only one of them was there to see that history end.

Mable Olds, 69, the last resident of 936 N. Bradford, was on hand to see the governmentpaid excavator roll up to the house where she — and many mothers before her — had raised her family.

“I don’t know,” Olds said on a sunny summer morning, standing by the manhole cover that had been home plate when her son played baseball on the narrow street. “I just don’t know about tearing down good houses.”

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2017

13

BILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST

t h e

p a s t

She was not the only one uncertain about the intentional destruction she was about to witness. Baltimore, like Detroit and other aging American cities plagued by abandoned housing, is spending millions of dollars tearing out blighted pieces of itself in the hope that, like a pruned tree, the rest of the city will bloom.

As Maryland’s largest city has dwindled from a peak population of 950,000 in 1950 to about 620,000 today, the receding tide has left behind 17,000 boarded-up houses and buildings, unoccupied, unwanted and unstable. They are scattered throughout the city, with major concentrations on the east side, as well as in battered West Baltimore, where 25-year-old Freddie

Gray’s death from an injury suffered in police custody triggered riots in 2015.

Some of the vacant houses are brick hulks, roofless and irreparable, in such danger of collapse that the city keeps a demolition crew on standby 24 hours a day. But many are structurally sound, artifacts of Baltimore’s rich history and the craftsmanship of its earlier days.

City planners hope the demolitions will give a boost to its struggling, often crime-plagued communities. Others are skeptical or downright suspicious.

“I hope it’s not just to move black people out,” Olds said.

That’s a common fear in a neighborhood where Hopkins, a world-renowned and everexpanding hospital, has just built a public charter school a block away and where millennials moving into rehabbed rowhouses play with their pets on a grassy, demolition-created field.

“People need houses, not dog parks,” declared Olds’s son, Barak Olds, who said the hospital has long been open about its desire to remake the area.

“When I was a kid, they used to have a model of the whole neighborhood at Hopkins, how they wanted it to look,” he said. “This is the continues on next page

A panoramic view shows a row of houses on North Bradford Street in Baltimore in June.

The block, which was built in 1905, has since been demolished.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2017

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KLMNO WEEKLY

COVER STORY

from previous page

fruition of that plan.”

Mable Olds raised her 44-year-old son and two daughters at 936 N. Bradford while working at a laundry plant. She moved into the 760-square-foot rowhouse in 1974, bought it in 1978 for $4,000 and lived in it until there were only three other homes still occupied on the block.

Olds was the last owner. The first was Lewis Crossont, a German American glass-factory worker who paid about $800 for the house in 1906 and moved in with his wife and sister. In the decades between, a factory foreman, barrelmaker and house painter made No. 936 home.

“So many families here,” Olds said quietly.

The glittered and glued letters C-H-L-O-E-E were still stuck on her granddaughter’s bedroom wall.

A workman took up a fire hose, ready to spray down the demo dust. He grew up four blocks away from Bradford. Another worker, ready to stack salvaged bricks on a pallet, had an aunt who lived across the street. These were not strangers taking down the neighborhood.

“Oh, I knew Miss Emma very well before she went to the nursing home,” said Jerome “Reds” Banks, pointing at one of the houses as he got ready to climb into the cab of his Hitachi excavator and knock it down. “She was a good friend of my mother’s.”

Across the street, as he waited in the shade to load his dump truck with the 10 tons of debris each house would produce, “Big Mike” Saunders, 59, remembered his own mother. She cleaned stoops on these streets for seven hours a day, going door to door with a bucket and a can of Ajax.

He described the end of the milkman era and the bags of furnace coal you had to shove through basement windows. He learned to make sausage from the Polish butchers in the market, hunkered down during the riots and saw his black neighbors begin to move out when drugs came and crime soared in the 1990s.

“I seen this whole neighborhood change, man,” Saunders said.

A diesel engine revved to life across the street. Saunders leaned back on a stoop. He was going to watch it change some more.

When the 900 block of North Bradford Street was built in 1905, Baltimore was growing. It was the sixth-biggest city in America, and the great wave of European immigration was still depositing Poles, Germans, Italians and others in ethnic enclaves all over the city.

A good many Czechs — then described as Austro-Bohemians on census documents — gathered in “Little Bohemia” north of Patterson Park, where a young builder named Frank Novak was putting up rowhouses fast enough to earn the “two-story king” moniker. He built the homes on North Bradford for about $700 each, with bricks produced around the corner on Eager Street and lumber brought up by ship from Georgia and North Carolina.

They were “alley houses,” just 10 feet wide with shallow window arches and wooden

JOHN DUBAS/MARYLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY

The homes were built on North Bradford for about $700 each, with bricks produced around the corner.

A store at 929 N. Bradford St. in 1907.

The block was home to many immigrants, and Baltimore was the sixth-biggest city in the United States.

stoops, and their three tiny bedrooms were crammed with big families like the Mifkovics.

Peter Mifkovic, a young laborer who came over from a village just north of Bratislava in what is now Slovakia in 1905, and his new wife, Agnes, moved into 930 N. Bradford, where all six of their children grew up. The house was a boisterous gathering place for the next half-century as the Mifkovic children married into German, Italian and Irish families.

“It was a league of nations around that dining-room table,” remembered Mary Mifkovic, 91, who lives in a suburban retirement community. She was married for 62 years to Ed, the youngest Mifkovic boy, who was born in 1923 in one of the upstairs bedrooms.

The two met at Martin Aviation, the airplane manufacturer where both worked just after World War II. Ed’s mother, who never learned much English, worked at a tomato cannery.

One sister worked in a textile plant, two others for McCormick, all downtown factories.

But after the war, Ed and Mary Mifkovic joined the growing migration to the suburbs.

“Everybody was sold on the idea that you wanted to live in an environment with grass and trees and new schools,” said Francis O’Neill, a Baltimore historian at the Maryland Historical Society. “They built new roads making it feasible to commute back to the factories, but then the factories began to move out, too.”

In a growing city, a vacant house is an asset.

In a shrinking one, it is a menace. The empty yard becomes a dump; plywood sheets do little to keep out squatters, drug dealers, prostitutes and arsonists. Fires started in abandoned buildings cause hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage and kill 45 people a year, according to the U.S. Fire Administration.

Worse, blight is contagious. An abandoned house saps the property value of its neighbors and can trigger more decay.

“People start to lose faith in the block,” said Alan Mallach, an economist at the Center for Community Progress and the former housing director of Trenton, N.J. “People begin to care less. Those who can think about moving.”

The country’s inventory of abandoned homes grew by more than 4.5 million between 2000 and 2010, fueled by the foreclosure crisis.

Rust Belt mayors, confronted with neighborhoods that looked like deserted movie sets, started talking less about growth and more about “right-sizing.”

Akron and Toledo, Ohio; Flint, Mich.; Buffalo; and other cities began demolishing vacant structures as an alternative to managing them.

Detroit has torn down almost 11,000 using more than $580 million from the federal government’s Hardest Hit Fund, a program targeting the states most stricken by foreclosures.

The promise of demolition is twofold. It eliminates the hazards associated with abandoned buildings and boosts the values of the houses that are left. It also creates green space — sometimes urban gardens, sometimes weedy lots.

Mallach has been bullish on demolition, touting its potential in a 2012 Brookings Institution report. He cites two recent studies that show healthy effects in Detroit and Cleveland.

In Detroit, researchers found that each house that was knocked down boosted the value of nearby properties by more than 4 percent.

But as more cities tear down more houses, he has become less certain. Neighborhoods that are largely intact can clearly benefit from having the vacant structures pruned out, he said.

But sometimes, the bulldozers leave too many holes in the community fabric.

“In some cases, demolishing a lot of houses might be removing that neighborhood’s chance to revive in the future,” he said. “There’s still a lot of ambivalence about it.”

Baltimore, still struggling to recover from the chaos and soaring crime that followed Gray’s death, has spent about $40 million laying siege to blighted neighborhoods since 2012. About 500 rowhouses were knocked down in 2016, about the same pace as the previous year. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) has pledged $74 million in state money. It would take about $500 million to clear away all of the boarded-up properties.

City officials said residents of the affected neighborhoods have been overwhelmingly supportive, including those who have to be relocated.

“We have people saying ‘When are you going to get around to our block?’ ” said Baltimore Acting Housing Commissioner Michael

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2017

15

COVER STORY Mable Olds talks with Jonathan Todd inside her former home at 936 N. Bradford St. Also present, from left, are Thomas, Christopher and Chester Crossont, whose grandfather was the house’s first resident in 1906.

PHOTOS BY BILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST

Braverman.

Bradford, after requests from neighborhood leaders, made it onto the list in 2013.

The block began to shift from white to black during the postwar migration to the suburbs.

David Bell, 64, an African American who has lived on the opposite side of the block at 909 N. Bradford for most of his life, can remember when black families and aging immigrants lived side by side. The newcomers called the immigrants “Germans,” no matter where they were born.

“We had an old German man next to us for a long time, used to give us candy,” Bell said. “All the white folks went to St. Wenceslaus [Catholic Church], and the black folks went to Israel Baptist.”

On a hot afternoon the week before the demolition was scheduled, Bell was sitting on a Bradford stoop with another longtime neighborhood resident, Alvin Gentry, 64. A commuter train roared by, close enough to make the pavement quiver.

“We used to walk those tracks before Amtrak came,” Gentry said. “Remember those smoky trains?”

“Yes, I do,” Bell replied.

“My grandmother would beat me for coming out of that tunnel all covered in soot,” Gentry said.

The Bradford of their boyhoods had clean sidewalks and flowers in the alley. Miss Ethel sold candy apples from her dining room and frozen ice pops from her kitchen. Mothers swept their stoops first thing every morning.

Agnes Mifkovic, long widowed and still living at 930 N. Bradford, died in 1968 at 83. She lived to see the riots that year, with the National Guard there telling residents to stay indoors.

Bell spent three years in prison for armed robbery in the 1970s. “When I came out,” he

said, “all the white folks were gone.”

Back then, Mable Olds knew everybody on the block and was known by all as “Miss Beekee,” a childhood nickname. Her three children rode bicycles on the street, went barefoot in the alleys and roamed freely.

But by the mid-1980s, drug dealing was growing more common and more blatant.

“You’d hear gunshots all the time,” Barak Olds said. “All. The. Time. Every night.”

One night in the mid-1990s, his family was in the living room when the pop-pop-pops seemed closer than usual. They went out to find a woman lying dead at the end of the block. “She stayed there for a couple hours,” he recalled.

The groups of men on the corners became more menacing. When a renter moved out, it took longer for a new tenant to move in. By the end of the 1980s, several houses on the block were empty. By the end of the ’90s, some were uninhabitable. When the city listed Mable Olds’s house for demolition in 2013, it was one of only three on the block that was not boarded up.

They offered Olds a renovated rowhouse just around the corner on N. Montford Avenue, a key-for-key swap. Financially, she traded a house with a resale value near zero to one on a block where rehabbed houses like hers have sold for $200,000.

“It’s fine,” she said of her new house, shrugging. She hasn’t put up any of the photographs from No. 936. She’s worried about water stains on the living room ceiling. “There are pigeons in the eaves.”

The city and state contract with multiple firms to demolish houses. But only one does more than knock them down and dump the remains. Details, a branch of the Baltimore nonprofit Humanim, deconstructs them and salvages the material for resale. To do the work,

A view inside one of the rowhouses slated for demolition in the 900 block of North Bradford Street.

KLMNO WEEKLY

they hire ex-offenders, former addicts and other hard-to-employ residents. Many are from the neighborhood.

Bernadette Buckson, 53, was tearing down the plasterboard in the tiny bathroom. A recovering addict with an arrest record, Buckson had been turned down for jobs 32 times before being hired by Details. Even if she weren’t grateful for the work, she thinks it’s good to clear away the empty houses.

“I got clean and turned my life around,” Buckson said. “I think change is good.”

Lewis Crossont, the first resident of Mable Olds’s house at No. 936, also has descendants in the area. His grandson Chester Crossont owns a racing garage in Baltimore County with his two sons.

Reached by phone, Crossont, 70, said his knowledge of his family history is sketchy. His grandfather started as a furnace tender and worked his whole career in the Carr-Lowrey glass bottle factory. His dad, Ernest Lewis, was born in the house and grew up to be a steelworker at Bethlehem Steel.

Crossont had never heard of North Bradford Street but knew that his father had grown up in East Baltimore. Told the block was going to be demolished, he said, “I’d like to see it.” His family avoids the city, he said, usually passing through only on the way to Ravens games. “Is it safe?”

A few days later, he, his wife and two sons walked into the living room of No. 936. Mable Olds walked in shortly after.

It took a few minutes for the white descendants of the rowhouse’s first owner and its black final owner to feel at ease with one another. But they formed a connection from their common experience raising children, knowing Baltimore and, mostly, sharing the heritage of the petite front room, the cramped kitchen, the narrow stairs.

They talked amid the exposed plaster lathing for nearly an hour, then for half an hour more in the street out front. They hugged each other goodbye, families linked by an address. An address about to disappear. n

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2017

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KLMNO WEEKLY

CULTURE

She’s big in Japan — literally A NNA F IFIELD Tokyo BY

N

aomi Watanabe is huge in Japan. She’s got almost 6 million followers on Instagram, she’s a regular on television shows and magazine covers, she has her own fashion line, and a Japanese railway company even created a “Naomi train” last year.

She’s also literally huge. At 220 pounds, the 29-year-old comedian is double the average weight of Japanese women her age.

“My ideal body is that of a sumo wrestler — big but muscular,” Watanabe laughed during an interview at a production company studio in Tokyo, where she’d been doing a photo-shoot for an upcoming Thomas the Tank Engine movie in which she does a voice-over.

In this country of overwhelmingly thin women — most fashionable stores don’t even stock sizes above M, and that’s a Japanese M — Watanabe is challenging deeply ingrained perceptions about body image, showing that it’s possible to be confident and happy even if you aren’t svelte.

“Japan is not like the U.S. You don’t see many plus-sized women around here,” she said, this day sporting pink and blue curls through her long pigtails. “But rather than trying to change other people’s minds, I would like to help change the minds of bigger women, to help them feel good about themselves.”

Bigger women are definitely in the minority in Japan. Only 3 percent of Japanese women are classified as obese, according to the World Health Organization, compared with 34.9 percent in the United States.

The government even has a law setting out maximum waist sizes for company employees over the age of 40: 33.5 inches for men and 35.4 inches for women. Those with wider girths are ordered to attend nutrition and exercise lessons.

But many young women are dangerously thin. Government health data show that 22 percent of Japanese women in their 20s can be categorized as under-

NAOMI WATANABE

Star aims to change perceptions in skinny nation weight or malnourished.

Watanabe offers another way.

She’s not promoting weight gain but instead wants to encourage body positivity. And she delivers her message in hilarious bright colors on Instagram. She posts photos of herself in crazy outfits or funny poses — with ice cream, or trying to eat people.

While in Milan, where she appeared at Fashion Week for the Italian brand Furla, she posted a photo of her feet on the scale, approaching 100 kilograms, or 220 pounds. “Um . . . Did I eat too much pizza? I believe I weighed 45kg before I came to Milan.”

Another photo, posted on her 29th birthday, showed her in a swimming pool wearing a pink bathing suit with bagels on the breasts. It got more than 620,000 likes, earning her the title “Most Valued Instagrammer” in Japan last year, with the tech company saying her “daring yet humorous expressions” had captured wide attention.

It would be an understatement

to say that Watanabe doesn’t take herself too seriously.

Asked who she’d want to play her in a film, she said Arnold Schwarzenegger or perhaps John Travolta, since he can sing and dance. She told a Japanese fashion blog that her workout routine involves lying on her back, eating curry and rice while doing leg lifts.

She was also named one of Vogue Japan’s “Women of the Year” in 2016, partly because she’d set clear goals and achieved them, notably going on a “world tour” to Los Angeles, New York and Taipei last year.

Watanabe, who was born to a Taiwanese mother and Japanese father who divorced when she was young, had always wanted to be a comedian.

Against her mother’s wishes, she made her debut when she was 18. Three years later, she got her big break, appearing on a television show doing an outrageous Beyoncé impersonation. She soon became a regular on Japanese shows, lip-syncing to “Crazy in

Japanese comedian Naomi Watanabe posted this photo from Ibiza in 2015, along with a story about a hot guy she thought was hitting on her but was really just trying to tell her she had lipstick all over her teeth. “I just jumped straight into the ocean,” she said.

Love” and earning the title “Japan’s Beyoncé.”

Her repertoire now includes Beyoncé’s Super Bowl routine, complete with black leather costume, and Lady Gaga impersonations.

In 2013, she became a regular cover girl for a new magazine aimed at plus-sized women, part of a trend to make “pocchari” — “marshmallow girls” — more accepted. The following year she launched her own clothing brand, called Punyus, a play on the Japanese word for “squishy” or “bouncy.”

“In Japan, larger-sized women couldn’t wear what they wanted.

They couldn’t wear skirts, they would wear only black and would never show any skin,” Watanabe said. “Of course, larger women want to be fashionable too, but there weren’t any fashionable clothes for us.”

So she started Punyus, offering a range of cool styles, from street and hip-hop to “kawaii” — Japanese cute. “Sometimes women come up to me in the street and start crying, saying, ‘Thanks to you, I have clothes that make me feel cool,’ ” she said.

On Instagram, followers say they’re encouraged by Watanabe.

“I want to learn from you and have more self-confidence,” Hitomi Yamamura wrote on one recent photo that Watanabe posted.

The comedian says she’s noticed some change in attitudes even in the past few years.

“Japanese women are changing, and there are loads more women who can express themselves and many fewer women who just say yes to everything like before,” she said. “I see more women becoming superstrong and confident, and it helps me grow, too.”

In the overwhelmingly male world of comedy, there’s a prevailing sentiment that women are to be seen and not heard, she said.

“This is normal in Japanese society in general. This idea that you’re a woman so you shouldn’t work, just stay home,” Watanabe said. “. . . I just don’t like it that there’s no other choice but that.” n

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Now pets can really travel in style BY

A NDREA S ACHS

W

e human travelers have airport lounges, wine bars, massage chairs and in-terminal yoga classes. Our pets have a crate and water.

In an effort to improve equality among the species, the world’s first privately owned animal terminal and quarantine recently opened at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. The ARK at JFK offers round-theclock service to animals with flight plans. The $65 million center occupies a hulking 178,000square-foot cargo building that is intimate enough for a munchkin kitten and roomy enough for a Belgian draft horse.

The new facility’s mission is to provide a safe, healthy and Zen environment for animals on the go. To ensure the highest standards of care, Racebrook, the company behind the project, partnered with such experts as Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine and the Agriculture Department.

“Transporting live cargo by plane can be a complex and stressful process for owners and animals alike,” said John J. Cuticelli Jr., chief executive of Racebrook and founder and chairman of Ark Development. “Our goal is to create a more efficient and safe process by reducing the need for additional travel and offering trained animal care staff pre- and post-flight.”

In early January, Racebrook/ Ark Development unveiled the first phase of its Dr. Dolittle enterprise — the Ark Pet Oasis and the Equine and Livestock Export Center. The company, which expects the Ark to be fully operational by the second quarter, will next roll out the Equine Quarantine/Import, Grooms’ Lounge and Aviary, which are all part of the Ark Import-Export Center.

In November, during a visit to the 14.4-acre facility, Cuticelli explained that the Ark caters to travelers who send their animals as cargo and don’t want Precious

ARK DEVELOPMENT

Animal terminal opens at JFK Airport to provide first-class care languishing in the holding tank before or after the trip. (By comparison, owners who carry their pets onboard or check them as luggage have quick access to their animals.) He showed off the area where the majority of companion animals will stay: the Pet Oasis, an airy space with 47 kennels for dogs and a dozen spots for cats.

The Oasis welcomes pets arriving, departing or in-between flights for an accommodation fee starting at $125. Before takeoff, the owners can drop off their animal at the facility, which will prepare the pet for travel — a preflight walk and survey of the crate for airline compliance, for instance. The staff will transport the pet to the aircraft and coordinate with the airline on the departure time to minimize the wait at the boarding area.

On the arrival side, the staff picks up the four-legged traveler from the airplane and handles the customs details. Once at the Oa-

sis, the animal receives the full-on pampering treatment: bath, meal, fur-coat brushing, stroll on a wide strip of lawn. The staff also cleans the travel crate and tucks the pup into an individual kennel until his or her ride arrives. The cats are also fed and groomed.

Owners itching to see their bestie can, for an additional fee, receive a photo and update of their pet’s Ark holiday. (Feel free to share with everyone in the taxi line.)

The Equine and Livestock Export Center is dedicated to horses and livestock scheduled for transport. Who travels with their horses, you might ask? Generally, breeders, jockeys and grooms.

The center serves as a rest area for inspection before horses travel internationally from the United States. The 24 covered stalls come with nonslip flooring (on certain materials, hoofs slide like skates), cushy bedding and the Veuve Clicquot champagne of hay.

Meanwhile, the Equine Import

A rendering shows stalls at the Equine and Livestock Export Center, which is part of the world’s first privately owned animal terminal and quarantine. The facility offers preand post-flight care for animals at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.

and Quarantine area will care for horses that have just landed and are subjected to a three- to sevenday quarantine, per USDA orders.

Equine guests stay in one of 48 stalls and receive two daily feedings. In a separate section of the building, the Aviary will house birds required to undergo a 30day quarantine. The Ark has built specialized habitats for birds of all wing stripes, such as waterfowl, gulls and parakeets.

A vet clinic is also on the horizon, as is Paradise 4 Paws, a luxury pet resort that already operates near airports in Chicago, Denver and Dallas/Fort Worth.

(The latter occupants are subtenants.) At the resort, prices range from $55 to $125 a night for dogs and $30 to $45 for cats. The lodging doesn’t skimp on amenities: There is an indoor grassy area, a playground for cats and a dog bone-shaped swimming pool.

We human travelers don’t get such great perks. n

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BOOKS

Echoes of Vietnam era in today’s protests N ONFICTION

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REVIEWED BY

S ARAH J AFFE

T HELL NO The Forgotten Power of the Vietnam Peace Movement

By Tom Hayden Yale. 159 pp. $25

he United States has long had a problem with historical memory.

The protesters who recently flooded the country’s airports, in response to President Trump’s ban on refugees and travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries, carried handmade signs declaring the United States a nation of immigrants, and some of those signs took a longer view of the latest immigrant backlash. Some, for example, noted that the current wave of Islamophobia was ginned up after Sept. 11, 2001; others reminded viewers that there is already a border fence, begun in 1994 under President Bill Clinton. The urgency of the protests and the sense of violation engendered by Trump seem so immediate that we can feel disconnected even from the recent past, missing the threads of how we got here in the first place.

On the campaign trail last year, Bernie Sanders breached what often appears to be a silent understanding that politicians should not bring up history more distant than a year or two. His target: Hillary Clinton’s chummy relationship with Henry Kissinger, the architect of much of the Vietnam War. “I happen to believe that Kissinger was one of the most destructive secretaries of state in the modern history of this country,” Sanders declared.

The reaction to his comment was a stark reminder of our tendency toward historical amnesia.

It was seen as almost rude to point out that past actions — actions that cost thousands of lives — have relevance today. Kissinger was just another elder statesman to be courted, while any discussion of his deeds was off-limits. For Sanders to disobey the dictum, made famous by Barack Obama but that certainly predates him — look forward, not backward — felt radical.

Tom Hayden’s final book, “Hell No: The Forgotten Power of the Vietnam Peace Movement,” is a strike against such forgetting. To remember the power of the move-

CHARLES TASNADI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Vietnam veterans protest the war at the Lincoln Memorial in 1971. In his final book, Tom Hayden calls on readers to value resistance.

ment, Hayden argues, is to remember that there were those who at the time accurately saw the Vietnam War for what it was. It is to remember that our actions have echoes, that our present is shaped by the choices of the past.

Hayden, who died Oct. 23, 2016, may have considered that this book would be landing in a United States that had just elected Donald Trump president. After his death, with Trump in office, Hayden’s call to remember the value of resistance is even more poignant.

“Hell No” is brief yet rambling.

Reading it feels as if one is listening to Hayden reminisce, wandering backward and forward in time, recalling some events in great detail and others with the barest mention. For a book concerned with memory, perhaps its biggest flaw is that it tends to assume that Americans have a knowledge of their own history — that they know, for example, about the moratoriums, as those massive marches against the Vietnam War were called.

It’s understandable: U.S. politics continues to exist in the shadow of the 1960s. Figures like Hayden still play a strong role in discussions and debates, and for a

while have been the generation with the money and the power.

But the call to remember obscures the fact that these days, many of us never knew.

Hayden argues that the generalized disruption that the antiwar movement caused was akin to a general strike, a widespread refusal to take part in “the regnant political culture.” In particular, he draws on W.E.B. Du Bois’s argument that the refusal of enslaved people to work any longer under the Confederacy brought about victory for the Union in the Civil War. It’s a rather strained analogy, but it contains the seeds of an important lesson: Protest derives its power from its ability to halt business as usual. To shut down the war, the antiwar movement and the country as a whole had to become ungovernable.

In acknowledging this fact, Hayden does not shy away from the controversial and even violent tactics used to resist the war. He discusses the firebombing of ROTC offices; the attacking, known as “fragging,” of officers by troops serving in combat; and the urban rebellions of the period as part of the broader resistance to the war. The antiwar movement, in Hayden’s telling, is the over-

arching narrative that makes the ’60s make sense.

But in order to sweep up all of the threads of the 1960s and ’70s movements, he gives short shrift to the work by organizers around civil rights, Black Power, feminism and economic equality.

However important the antiwar movement was, however much it served as an umbrella for the analysis of the New Left, it is as critical to remember the distinct movements against racism, poverty and exploitation as it is to remember the resistance to the Cold War consensus that a massive amount of blood was worth shedding to contain communism.

Some of that blood was shed at home, Hayden reminds us, as massive state power was expended to silence the movement. He details the trials of activists and whistleblowers, and does not let us forget the student protesters killed on their campuses, the police assaults, the growth of a massive surveillance apparatus that sees the general public as suspects to be spied upon.

Honor is best given to the antiwar movement by those who take up its torch of resistance, and that is everywhere. Tactics such as student strikes and teach-ins have been revived in the days since Trump’s election, and millions took to the streets after his inauguration.

Looking at this, it is a shame that in his meditative final chapter, Hayden does not spend more time connecting the dots between our recent age of protest and the one that formed him. Surely there are lessons from the Vietnam era for our own time of armored vehicles and tear gas on American streets.

Still, Hayden’s most important takeaway resonates powerfully today: “Of one lesson I have no doubt: peace and justice movements can make a difference.” n Jaffe is a reporting fellow at the Nation Institute and the author of “Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt.”

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BOOKS

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Lincoln’s search for better angels

Biographer tells own tearful tale

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

T

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REVIEWED BY

R ON C HARLES

he long wait for a novel from short-story genius George Saunders is finally over. And as anyone who knows Saunders’s work would expect, his first novel is a strikingly original production, a divisively odd book bound either to dazzle or alienate readers.

Distinct from the poignant satires he has published in the New Yorker and elsewhere, “Lincoln in the Bardo” is an extended national ghost story, an erratically funny and piteous seance of grief. The Lincoln of the title is our 16th president; the Bardo is probably far less familiar. That Tibetan concept refers to an intermediate plane between our world and the next, a kind of Buddhist limbo experienced just after death.

The spirit of this story arises from a tragic footnote in American history: During the second year of the Civil War, in February 1862, the Lincolns’ 11-year-old son, Willie, died of typhoid fever. The horror of that loss was compounded by cruel circumstances: Encouraged by their son’s doctor, Lincoln declined to cancel a party in the White House, which later gave rise to accusations that the president and his wife were celebrating not only as their country was bleeding but even as their own child lay dying upstairs.

But “Lincoln in the Bardo” is no solemn work of historical fiction.

This is a book that confounds our expectations of what a novel should look and sound like. It seems at first a clever clip-job, an extended series of brief quotations from letters, diaries, newspaper articles, personal testimonies and later scholars, each one meticulously attributed. We hear from people who worked for the president, his friends, colleagues and enemies, 19th-century biographers and more recent ones such as Doris Kearns Goodwin.

The quotations gathered from scores of different voices begin to cohere into a hypnotic conversation that moves with the mysteri-

ous undulations of a flock of birds.

This form, though, is not the novel’s only radical element.

Stirred heavily into the mix of what Saunders calls “historical nuggets” are the voices of fictional characters, invented witnesses and commentators. And the majority of these are dead people.

Yes, the lead characters in “Lincoln in the Bardo” are corpses in Georgetown’s Oak Hill Cemetery, where Willie is laid to rest. From the moment the little body arrives, the shades gather ’round and strike up a boisterous conversation that lasts all night.

Indeed, the ghosts threaten to overtake the novel. Clearly, Saunders enjoys their macabre antics — but the heart of the story remains Abraham Lincoln, the shattered father who rides alone to the graveyard at night to caress the head of his lifeless boy.

In the darkness of that cemetery, the president realizes as never before that his own grief has already been endured by tens of thousands of fathers and mothers across the country. He hovers perilously between giving up or transforming that sorrow into renewed determination to bring the national crisis to conclusion. Finally, he realizes that “though on the surface it seemed every person was different, this was not true. . . . Whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact.”

That’s essentially Saunders’s Golden Rule, the same moral advice he gave at a commencement speech in 2013 that went viral online. But now in the pages of this fantastical book, rooted in the soil of a cemetery and watered with the blood of so many Americans, that advice feels harder won and more necessary. n Charles is the editor of The Washington Post’s Book World.

C LINCOLN IN THE BARDO

By George Saunders Random House.

341 pp. $28

THE MEN IN MY LIFE A Memoir of Love and Art in 1950s Manhattan

By Patricia Bosworth Harper.

377 pp. $27.99

l

REVIEWED BY

E LLEN M C C ARTHY

.S. Lewis famously said that writers “don’t write in order to be understood; we write in order to under-

stand.”

And Patricia Bosworth confesses in the very first pages of her new memoir, “The Men in My Life: A Memoir of Love and Art in 1950s Manhattan,” that comprehension — and healing — were the dual forces driving her latest project.

“Writing this book has been cathartic,” she says in the author’s note. “It’s finally caused me to feel.

I’ve cried and cried as I’ve written it, but that’s good.”

Bosworth is best known as the author of intimate biographies of Diane Arbus, Jane Fonda and Marlon Brando. But Bosworth’s own life — which includes a charmed and troubled childhood, an acting career, and the suicides of two family members — is as intriguing as any of her subjects.

In her 1997 memoir, “Anything Your Little Heart Desires,” Bosworth chronicles the travails of her father, an activist lawyer who defended the Hollywood Ten, a group of writers and directors targeted during the communist paranoia of the mid-20th century; he then fell under FBI scrutiny.

If that book was designed to unravel the mysteries of her father’s life, this one is an attempt to comprehend the misfortunes, advantages, choices and motivations that shaped her own frenetic existence.

Bosworth spent the early part of her childhood in California, where her father’s legal career was ascending as her mother’s writerly ambitions stalled. But the bulk of Bosworth’s time was spent in the company of her younger brother, Bart Jr., whom she adored, despite their wildly different personalities.

Bosworth’s new memoir recalls an early marriage and other love affairs, but the men in her life — at least the ones at the heart of this book — are her father and brother.

Bart Jr. killed himself with a shotgun while attending college in

Portland, Ore. Her father overdosed on pills and booze six years later.

As a young woman, Bosworth was haunted by questions about her brother’s suicide. Later she would learn that in adolescence, he was spied in a naked embrace with another boy at an elite boarding school. And that the day after they were seen together, her brother’s amour hanged himself from a tree near the schoolyard.

Bosworth remembers depression blanketing her brother in the months and years that followed.

At times, he would barely speak to her or anyone else. Still, Bart Jr. tried to warn her off marrying a man who would become her abuser and picked her up on a corner when she finally fled the violence.

And long after his suicide, Bosworth’s brother would be the voice of reason and constancy in her life.

“Over the next decade my brother and I would go on talking to each other, and each time I heard him, it would be a comfort,” she recalls of the period after his death.

Bosworth would hear her brother implore her to take herself — her talents and her life — more seriously. And a great deal of the book is devoted to that endeavor.

Bosworth takes readers inside the audition process at the renowned Actors Studio, where she studied under Lee Strasberg and encountered bright lights of the day, including Marilyn Monroe and Steve McQueen.

By the time the book ends, we learn that Bosworth has married a nice man and found success and satisfaction in writing nonfiction books. It seems unlikely that “The Men in My Life” will go down as the most important book in Bosworth’s career. But perhaps, privately, it will be the most important one in her life. “I’ve been carrying around a huge burden of grief and guilt for much too long,” she writes.

“Now it’s almost gone.” n McCarthy is a feature writer in the Style section of The Washington Post.

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OPINIONS

Welcome to Canada! Unless you have a disability.

CAROLYN ZAIKOWSKI is the author of “In a Dream, I Dance by Myself, and I Collapse” and “A Child Is Being Killed.”

It’s no secret that many progressive Americans fetishize Canada as a northern utopia: It has universal health care, it legalized same-sex marriage a decade before the United States did, and it has a cute, lefty prime minister (complete with a tattoo and a literature degree). After President Trump restricted refugees, immigrants and travelers from seven majority-Muslim countries, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted: “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith.

Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada.” Cue collective liberal swoon.

The problem is that Canada’s immigrant policy isn’t quite as dreamy as Americans might imagine. It includes a virtual ban on disabled immigrants that goes back decades: Under Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, foreigners can be turned away if they “might reasonably be expected to cause excessive demands on health or social services.” What this means is families can be rejected for having deaf children and spouses can be denied because they use a wheelchair, a practice too harsh for even the United States’ difficult immigration system.

The number of disabled immigrants rejected by Canada is not known. Most of those turned away do not have the financial means to appeal, and few cases get media coverage.

But the cases that are brought to the public’s attention are eyeopening.

In 2000, multimillionaire David Hilewitz and his son, Gavin, were denied immigration from South Africa to Canada because Gavin has a mild developmental disability. Angela Chesters, a German woman who married a Canadian man abroad, was denied permanent residency after the couple moved to Canada because she has multiple

sclerosis. The Chapman family was stopped at a Canadian airport when attempting to emigrate from Britain in 2008 because their daughter has a genetic abnormality. The Dutch DeJong family was turned down for immigration because one of their daughters has a mild intellectual disability. Felipe Montoya, recruited from Costa Rica to teach at a Toronto university, and his family couldn’t get residency because his son has Down syndrome. In 2015, Canada denied Maria Victoria Venancio health care and attempted to deport her after she became a paraplegic.

According to Roy Hanes, a Canadian social-work scholar and disability advocate, even though Canadian law does not explicitly state that disabled people are banned, the notion of “excessive demands” still guides the immigration process.

Potential immigrants must undergo physical and mental health exams to prove that their bodies and minds will not be a burden on Canada’s socioeconomic structure. The policy, Hanes wrote in a history of Canadian immigration law, makes it “extremely difficult for people with disabilities to become citizens.”

COLE BURSTON/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Americans like Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, seen Jan. 12 in Ontario. Some of Canada’s practices, maybe not so much.

Hanes explains that this exclusionary policy arose from the outdated concept that people with disabilities are not useful members of an economy because they supposedly use too many resources. “The long-held concern of social dependence remained as a major obstacle for people with disabilities and it appears that people with disabilities were continuously evaluated for what they might not be able to do and not what they could do,” he wrote. “In this regard, immigration legislation was based on economic ‘utilitarianism’ and people with disabilities ranked very low when considering their abilities in terms of economic productivity.”

According to some scholars, this anti-disability immigration policy might violate Canada’s constitution, not to mention the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities.

Despite the possibility of future reform — a piece of federal accessibility legislation that could have implications for immigration is in the works — Canada’s discriminatory policies are “entrenched,” according to Global Disability Watch, and “show no signs of abatement.”

The group added that Canada’s practices show “how to build a disability-free country.”

Underlying this policy is the assumption, borne straight from

the West’s nasty marriage of eugenics and capitalism, that a person ceases to matter if they cannot be a “productive” member of society. Worth is determined by contribution to a profit, by independence and by the ability to pull one’s own weight. Of course the idea that anyone is ever truly independent, or that we could possibly survive without one another, is a complete myth. But it’s one of the central pillars of the Western capitalist story — and one that Canada has embraced when it comes to immigration.

In the United States, would-be immigrants must undergo physical and mental examinations, mostly to prove that they will not cause harm to others or commit crimes. The American system deserves plenty of criticism, but disability advocates on both sides of the border tend to see Canada’s policy as considerably more strict in this regard. Yes, Trump is attempting new restrictions on immigration, while Canada advertises its openness. But how many immigrants being rerouted from the United States will be turned away because of disability in Canada, a supposed sanctuary? Let’s not idealize a country that adheres to the ableist idea, rooted in eugenics, that any human being poses “excessive demands.” n

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OPINIONS

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TOM TOLES

Let’s plan for next tech revolution CHRISTINE EMBA edits The Post’s In Theory blog.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the iPhone’s debut, the start of a societal revolution that no one quite expected and a chance, perhaps, to reflect on the impact of the revolutionary technologies to come.

The device was first presented at the January 2007 MacWorld conference by Steve Jobs, who described it as a “revolutionary mobile phone and a breakthrough Internet communications device.” He wasn’t exaggerating. Smartphones were already on the scene — email-capable BlackBerrys had emerged around 2003 — but the iPhone’s consumer focus brought into the ordinary American’s everyday life a level of connectivity previously expected only of high-level corporate executives.

Since Jobs’s announcement and the iPhone’s subsequent release a few months later, its rapid takeover of our everyday lives has been nothing short of astonishing. Roughly threequarters of Americans now own a smartphone. We rely on these devices to navigate almost every aspect of our lives.

It’s probably too late to peel ourselves away from our screens: Who, after all, wants to give up instantaneous contact, the Internet at our fingertips, a GPS in every pocket and self-portraits on demand? But it might be the right moment to pause, recognize just how quickly and thoroughly smartphones upended our ways of being, and consider whether a

more intentional approach might be merited when the next “revolutionary” tool arrives.

After all, while we could have anticipated that the iPhone would transform our ability to communicate, we didn’t consider its implications for our workforce and society at large. Smartphoneenabled technologies such as Uber have flattened industries and helped usher in a precarious new “gig economy” in which rates, hours and employment altogether are contingent on the whims of others. Constant connectivity has made leaving the office a thing of the past, to the point of normalizing a workweek of 72 hours or more. The easy accessibility of social media

means that our president can casually spark an international crisis at any hour.

No, we couldn’t have prepared for all the eventualities, but it also seems as though we never thought to try. And today we’re on the brink of making the same mistake with the next wave of technological change.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are poised to take over not only deep computing but also many of the jobs that underpin our economy.

The impending era of self-driving cars could make travel cheaper and safer but could also affect millions of jobs. Virtual reality is lauded as the next frontier — although what we’ll do there is still anyone’s guess. These are technologies whose uses may be more unpredictable and more revolutionary than what, at its heart, is still a souped-up telecom device.

A small amount of antismartphone sentiment still aligns with our social norms of politeness, of valuing mental focus and the time of others. But in a growth-obsessed economy that values cost savings and efficiency as the highest goods and celebrates innovation for innovation’s sake, there’s unlikely to be support for a “no robots on weekends” rule or for a regulation

deeming that new forms of artificial intelligence be curtailed to leave space for human work.

I’m not a Luddite: I don’t suggest that we go back in time, halt change or attempt to preserve in amber an economic structure that already suffers from myriad flaws. But we might consider pausing before our headlong embrace of the next exciting new things already bearing down on us. Have we anticipated the changes they might bring? And are there ways to mitigate the negative effects that might come with the next technological revolution?

While various analysts have begun to ring alarm bells about how automation-led job loss could create a massive underclass, neither government nor society seems ready to offer more than token solutions: “retraining,” perhaps, or, from fringier advisers, a universal basic income to cushion the blow of lost income. There has been even less of the larger discussion, of defining what we value most as a society and how to preserve it.

We may have time to prepare for the future, but so far it seems that we’ve preferred to wait and see. Yet if the iPhone has taught us anything, it should be that change comes quickly. We should try to get ahead of the curve. n

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BY LISA BENSON

Trump can re-Reaganize the GOP HENRY OLSEN is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His book “Ronald Reagan: New Deal Republican” is scheduled to be published in June.

This past Monday would have been Ronald Reagan’s 106th birthday. President Trump’s election has caused many observers to bemoan Reagan’s supposedly waning influence on today’s Republican Party. But these people start from the same flawed assumption, that Trump’s election means the United States and Republicans have rejected Reagan’s legacy.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, Trump’s election does not represent the de-Reaganization of the Republican Party; it presents Republicans with their last, best hope to re-Reaganize it.

This flawed common wisdom flows from a flawed understanding of Reagan’s philosophy that accepts the myth that Reagan was an antigovernment ideologue.

Reagan’s conservatism was not a more attractive version of Barry Goldwater’s anti-statist ideology. From the moment Reagan started speaking out as a conservative in the late 1950s, he endorsed an active role for government. He believed that government should care for those who could not care for themselves, build public housing for the poor and expand public universities. Where Goldwater attacked Republican President Dwight Eisenhower and Vice President Richard Nixon for supporting Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, Reagan

enthusiastically backed both men in their presidential campaigns.

Reagan’s conservatism even supported the idea of universal health coverage. He opposed Medicare only because he felt it unnecessary in light of another federal bill, the Kerr-Mills Act. That long-forgotten program gave federal funds to states to construct programs that paid health-care bills for poor seniors.

He believed deeply, as he said in 1962, that “any person in the United States who requires medical attention and cannot provide for himself should have it provided for him.”

Reagan did not shrink from endorsing government action when needed as governor or as president. He raised the gas tax in 1983 to fund road

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY DARKOW FOR THE COLUMBIA DAILY TRIBUNE

construction and repair. He also imposed sanctions on Japanese industries and companies for what he believed were unfair trade practices even as he sought to extend free-trade agreements throughout the world.

Even Reagan’s support for immigration was limited by a belief in protecting U.S. workers.

He supported taking in genuine refugees fleeing communism or dictators, but he opposed open borders. He wrote one correspondent in 1981 that he favored immigration quotas because “there is no way that we could, without limit, take all who want to come here simply for the opportunity this country offers.”

Each of these positions has a clear analogue in Trump’s early acts or statements.

That’s not to say Reagan would have agreed with everything Trump says or does.

But the overlap in their views on these issues stems from a broader overlap in philosophy.

Trump seems to believe the federal government should act forcefully to protect the interest of the U.S. worker. Reagan’s philosophy was broader and deeper, but it stemmed from the same source: that enhancement of the life, dignity and freedom of the ordinary American was the proper role for the government.

Republicans have too often forgotten this principle in the years since Reagan’s presidency.

They have tended to shy away from forceful action to help ordinary Americans in limited circumstances in favor of a more purist free-market ideology that can overlook the genuine suffering markets can create. Too often the person who loses his or her factory job has been treated as collateral damage in the march toward globalization.

Reagan never believed government alone or even primarily was the solution, but he also didn’t believe it was never the answer. Republicans have lost that belief, and with it have lost the presidency for most of the post-Reagan era.

A re-Reaganized Republican Party would, like Reagan, meld this belief in limited but forceful government action with the traditional belief in the private sector. Like Reagan, it would reduce burdens on private economic activity while ensuring that the government did not stand idly by when average Americans were hurt. It would finally bring into being that “New Republican Party” Reagan spoke of in 1977, a party that would give “working men and women of this country . . . a say in what goes on in the party.” n

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FIVE MYTHS

Anti-Semitism BY

Y AIR R OSENBERG

For a phenomenon often dubbed “the world’s oldest hatred,” anti­ Semitism is not well understood. But given the prejudice’s longevity, virulence and recent resurgence in Europe and America, it’s worth de­ bunking common misconceptions that impede our ability to fight it.

MYTH NO. 1 Anti-Semitism largely subsided after the Holocaust.

This is profoundly, depressingly wrong. According to the FBI, Jews in the United States are annually subject to the most hate crimes of any religious group, despite constituting only 2 percent of the American population. The picture is considerably darker in Europe, where Jews were the target of 51 percent of racist attacks in France in 2014, even as they made up less than 1 percent of that country’s population. In recent years, synagogues and Jewish schools and museums have been subject to terrorist attacks in France, Denmark and Belgium. NonWestern examples abound as well. Populations of Jews in Arab lands, which once numbered nearly 1 million, have been reduced to only a few thousand, having been persecuted to the point of expulsion or flight in the past century.

MYTH NO. 2 Anti-Semitism comes predominantly from the right.

This past election season, the ascendant alt-right, a band of reactionary white nationalists with a penchant for harassing Jewish journalists, filled Twitter with neo-Nazi memes, Photoshopped reporters into gas chambers and concentration camps, and chanted anti-Semitic slogans at political rallies.

But anti-Semitic outbursts were taking place on the left, too.

At liberal Oberlin College, a writing instructor named Joy Karega shared Facebook memes about Jewish control of the global economy and media, alongside

posts asserting Israeli responsibility for the Islamic State and 9/11. Yet when school officials and others criticized her conduct, the student council dismissed it as a “witch-hunt.” In New York, despite a local outcry, the hip leftist hub Brooklyn Commons hosted Christopher Bollyn, a conspiracy theorist who argued that “Zionist Jews” were behind 9/11.

This bipartisan bigotry shouldn’t surprise. Anti-Semitism could never have attained its impressive influence without forging coalitions across ideological and religious lines.

Hatred of Jews has long thrived on its ability to ensnare utterly opposite worldviews. Thus, the 2013 E.U. survey found that Italian and Swedish Jews perceived more anti-Semitic statements coming from the left, Hungarian Jews heard them overwhelmingly from Christians and the right, and French Jews reported abuse largely from Muslim extremists.

MYTH NO. 3 Criticism of Israel is generally anti-Semitic.

Much of this confusion stems from the conflation of all Jews with the state of Israel, its government and its policies.

Criticism of Israel, however, is not necessarily anti-Semitic. In fact, it is a popular pastime in Israel and among Jews across the globe. Objections to settlements, for instance, or even calls to boycott them are debatable political positions, not bigoted slurs. Dovish proponents of such views are no more promulgating anti-Jewish prejudice than those security hawks and religious

ABIR SULTAN/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

The Hall of Names at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum in Jerusalem in January. Anti-Semitism didn’t go away after the Holocaust.

nationalists who have opposed Israel’s land concessions for peace. Israel is a democracy — and can be held to account for its actions, just like any other country.

MYTH NO. 4 Criticism of Israel cannot be anti-Semitic.

At the same time, criticism of the Jewish state can mask malice toward Jews. Some cases are obvious, such as when the organizers of a 2010 flotilla that aimed to breach Israel’s maritime blockade of Gaza subsequently denied the Holocaust and claimed that Israel was behind the Charlie Hebdo massacre.

In other, less-blatant cases, Israel is subjected to criticism leveled at no non-Jewish country.

Consider the United Nations, whose Human Rights Council has condemned Israel more often than all other countries combined, including Syria, North Korea, Iran and Russia.

What these unfortunate approaches all share is that they treat the Jewish state in much the same way anti-Semites have

historically treated Jews: singling them out for censure and implicating them in outlandish conspiracies.

MYTH NO. 5 Anti-Semitism mostly threatens Jews.

As Bard College’s Walter Russell Mead has put it: “People who think ‘the Jews’ dominate business through hidden structures can’t build or long maintain a successful modern economy. People who think ‘the Jews’ dominate politics lose their ability to interpret political events, to diagnose social evils and to organize effectively for positive change. People who think ‘the Jews’ run the media and control the news lose the ability to grasp what is happening around them.”

For this reason, Mead has warned, “Rabid anti-Semitism coupled with an addiction to implausible conspiracy theories is a very strong predictor of national doom.” n Rosenberg is a senior writer at Tablet Magazine.

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