Worst Week Marco Rubio 3
Politics The GOP’s budget battle 4
History A mystery from World War II 16
Technology Big Brother is judging you 23
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THE EDUCATION OF MAIRA SALIM An American Muslim in Kansas tries to claim her place in her country during a year of the worst Islamophobia she’s seen in her life. PAGE12
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KLMNO WEEKLY
WORST WEEK IN WASHINGTON
Marco Rubio by Chris Cillizza
L
et’s dispel with this fiction once and for all that Marco Rubio is a shooin to be the establishment choice in the Republican presidential race. Marco Rubio is not a shooin to be the establishment choice in the Republican presidential race. Politics can change in an instant. And that’s what happened last Saturday night when Rubio repeatedly, um, repeated a stock line from his stump speech during a debate in New Hampshire. “Let’s dispel once and for all with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing. Barack Obama is undertaking a systematic effort to change this country,” Rubio said. And said. And said. Chris Christie called him out: “There it is, the memorized 25second speech.” A rattled Rubio was still feeling the robotic rap on the campaign trail Monday. At an event in Nashua, he repeated a line about “how hard it’s become to install our values in our kids instead of the values they try to ram down our throats” in about 10 seconds’ time. Voters noticed. After claiming third in Iowa, the Rubio team had been talking about the possibility of second place in New Hampshire — a result that would have probably made him the clear establishment pick. Didn’t work out that way. Rubio finished fifth, behind even the onceleftfor dead Jeb Bush. (Christie, who did Rubio in, was sixth.)
KLMNO WEEKLY
CARLO ALLEGRI/REUTERS
Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio speaks with the media on board his charter plane bound for South Carolina this past week.
And soon he was apologizing for what he had done. “I want you to understand something, our disappointment tonight is not on you,” Rubio told supporters in New Hampshire. “It’s on me.” Yes it is. Yes it is. Marco Rubio, for making even broken records look creative, you had the worst week in Washington. Congrats, or something. n
This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2016 The Washington Post / Year 2, No. 18
CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY LIFESTYLE BOOKS OPINION TECHNOLOGY
4 8 10 12 17 18 20 23
ON THE COVER Maira Salim, shown outside the Unity of Wichita church, has lived in the United States for 19 years, since moving with her family from Pakistan. Photograph by MADDIE MCGARVEY for The Washington Post
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POLITICS
The GOP’s looming budget fight
J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Party leaders ignored Obama’s plan, but they can’t do that to conservative hard-liners BY
K ELSEY S NELL
S
even years of budget headaches ended for President Obama on Tuesday, when he sent Congress his seventh and final spending plan. But this year’s fiscal fights are just beginning for Republicans on Capitol Hill. GOP leaders have already announced they will ignore the White House budget rather than engage in another round of brinksmanship with the president. In an unusual move, they
broke with a four-decade tradition and declined to invite Office of Management and Budget Director Shaun Donovan to give his customary testimony on the spending proposal. “This isn’t even a budget so much as it is a progressive manual for growing the federal government at the expense of hardworking Americans,” House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said of Obama’s proposal. But Republicans have their own problems to worry about. Republican leaders are facing
another conservative uprising over spending that is threatening to derail the two-year budget compromise crafted last year with Obama and congressional Democrats. The spending standoff will test Ryan’s promise to bring regular order — passing a budget, then spending bills — and good governance back to a chronically gridlocked Congress. Both Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) have highlighted moving spending bills through Congress as a major aspect of their 2016
Copies of President Obama’s fiscal 2017 budget proposal are displayed last week by Eric Euland, staff director for Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.), chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.
agenda ahead of the November election — and not much else. But in a reprise of past budget battles, the same group of conservative hard-liners that have held GOP leaders hostage to their demands in past Congresses is threatening to rebel over a $30 billion spending increase approved as part of then-Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) last act. Some conservatives are looking to the new speaker to resurrect the controversial budget blueprints Ryan drafted when he was House Budget Committee
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POLITICS chairman, which would have balanced the government’s books by 2025. “Why would you vote against the [2015] budget deal, against the omnibus and then vote for this new budget that reinforces the things you already voted against?” asked Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.). The problem is this: The first step in the promised regular order is passing a budget, and Ryan needs conservative support to get that done. Stalwart conservatives — many of them members of the House Freedom Caucus — are threatening to reject any budget that adheres to the Boehner-era spending agreement. Ryan can only afford to lose 28 Republican votes, and many hard-liners have already threatened to defect. Freedom Caucus chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said Tuesday that last year’s fiscal compromise is already expected to add $105 billion to the deficit over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That leaves conservatives with no choice but to vote against any new spending. “Let’s do a budget that reflects the environment we find ourselves in,” Jordan said. “There might be an agreement that [former] Speaker Boehner and Obama got last fall but there have been new variables added to the equation.” The idea of compromise has been a nonstarter for outside groups that hold significant sway in conservative circles. Heritage Action, perhaps the most influential of those groups, released a memo Tuesday condemning any talk of supporting the Boehnerera budget numbers. “To be clear, there is absolutely no conservative reason to support a Republican budget at spending levels dictated by Barack Obama and congressional Democrats,” the memo read. The Heritage Action memo encouraged members not to be enticed by “unenforceable promises” of regular order or the prospect of using budget rules to skirt a Senate filibuster and force votes on repealing Obamacare or cutting Social Security spending. Those rules, the memo said, could be just as easily used to pass “establishment” priorities in a lame-duck session.
PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Budget requests since 2000 Here are the top allotments in President Obama’s $4.2 trillion budget for 2017 and how funding requests for those functions have changed over time.
Social Security $976 billion
$1 trillion
800
National defense $619 billion Medicare $605 billion
600
President Obama, seen with Vice President Biden and his advisers, released his spending priorities last week in his fiscal 2017 budget proposal.
400
200
2017
2000 Note: Historical numbers are not adjusted for inflation. Source: Office of Management and Budget
Unlike in the House, McConnell’s biggest challenge is negotiating with Democrats, not members of his own party. “I support what we did last year and we are going to do everything that we can to maintain that,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Tuesday. Regular order has proved difficult to achieve in recent years. Congress has only completed the full budget and appropriations process on time four times since
THE WASHINGTON POST
1977. The task is even more challenging in an election year when many members want to avoid fights that could scare off voters. Spending bills are typically magnets for politically touchy issues, including abortion rights, gun control, immigration and foreign policy. Budget experts say Republican leaders are now trapped between promises to uphold regular order and unrealistic expectations. Many of the party’s most conservative members support con-
“This isn’t even a budget so much as it is a progressive manual for growing the federal government at the expense of hardworking Americans.” House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), speaking about Obama’s proposal.
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troversial policy documents that will be impossible to enact in a divided government — recent GOP budgets, like Ryan’s 2014 Path to Prosperity, repealed the Affordable Care Act and scaled back Medicare to help balance the books. “I think one of the things that made this politically impossible was picking fiscally impossible goals,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. MacGuineas said Ryan’s balanced budgets were always ambitious, but ensuring the federal government’s ends meet has grown increasingly unlikely. Discretionary spending under the annual appropriations process only covers about one-third of the overall federal budget. The other two-thirds comes from mandatory programs, like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, that are growing far more rapidly. Those programs, combined with recently enacted tax cuts, are expected to add $105 billion to the deficit this year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Republican leaders say they expect to stick to last year’s deal, and Ryan has downplayed the severity of the party infighting. So far, Ryan’s solution has been to let members share their concerns, offer suggestions for how to compromise by cutting spending elsewhere and generally give members a chance to vent. Recently, he met with Freedom Caucus members and he planned to continue those talks. Lawmakers also have a shorter than usual time frame to finish the budget process this year. Congress has until Sept. 30 to pass spending bills, but the November election has forced a shorter-than-usual session. Both houses are scheduled to leave Washington in mid-July to attend party nominating conventions, and they will return only briefly in September before an extended recess for campaigning. That means if the budget process gets bogged down in the coming weeks, it will become increasingly likely that congressional leaders will forego “regular order” and instead pass a stopgap extension of current funding levels.n
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POLITICS
An outsider’s view of U.S. politics P AUL F ARHI West Des Moines BY
M
arco Rubio is talking about the decline of the American military. Matthias Kolb can hardly believe what he’s hearing. Standing at the back of a packed and overheated sports bar, Kolb, a soft-spoken journalist, stops scribbling notes when the Republican candidatehitsthispointinhiscampaign speech: “We’re on pace to have the smallest Army since the end of World War II, the smallest Navy in 100 years, the smallest Air Force in our history.” But as president, Rubio pledges, he would rebuild the military, “because when America is the strongest country, the world is a much safer place.” A few minutes later, driving across the frost-laden Iowa prairie, Kolb sounds dubious. “The American military, it’s the most advanced!” he exclaims. “NATO depends on the U.S. military. There’s no need to believe the American military is getting weaker. This whole thing, it’s so overblown.” Things look and sound a little different when you’re a German newspaper reporter covering the American political circus. Kolb, 35, is a digital correspondent for Süddeutsche Zeitung (literally, “Southern German Newspaper”) assigned to his second presidential campaign. If the political process occasionally strikes nativeborn Americans as odd, it can look positively, well, foreign to a journalist from Munich who’s just dropped into the American heartland. For eight days leading up the Iowa caucuses, Kolb crisscrossed Iowa in a rented Jeep, steeping himself in the quadrennial spectacle. Among other things, he covered a raucous rally for Donald Trump in Des Moines, a Bernie Sanders speech in Davenport and a get-out-to-caucus event for Hillary Clinton at the Family Fun Center bowling alley in tiny Adel. Along the way, Kolb forms one strong impression: Unlike the formal, coalition-building, consensus-driven politics of his native land, the American campaign is a bare-knuckle brawl. Other parlia-
CHARLES OMMANNEY/THE WASHINGTON POST
A German reporter covers the campaigns — but doesn’t recognize the America being described mentary democracies tend to see it the same way. Western Europeans typically can’t begin to comprehend, for example, the boorish insults spewed by the GOP frontrunner, Donald Trump. Or even Hillary Clinton’s fervent bashing of Republican economic policies. “The hostility is just something we don’t do in German politics,” he says. When the candidates talk up their faith in evangelical Iowa, it’s also a little strange to Kolb. (“Religion does not play a role at all in our politics or society,” he says. “Germans don’t go to church.”) Ditto Obamacare, gun control and abortion. Those issues are more or less settled in Deutschland, he says. Talk-radio bloviators, polarized cable-news channels? Unknown. Campaign ads? Well, there are some of those, but not many, given that Germany’s national election campaign lasts all of six weeks. Kolb finds Trump’s candidacy eye-opening, too, but not just for his polarizing style, which seems to
intrigue German readers almost as much as it does Americans. It’s that Trump is a candidate at all. German billionaires simply don’t declare that they’re running for national office; politicians dutifully work their way up through the party ranks until they’ve reached leadership positions. For a German to run for high office without any political experience “is beyond belief,” he says, as is a candidate worth “eight or nine figures.” Kolb knows that working for a European news outlet won’t land him many scoops or even much access to the candidates. (“German newspapers don’t bring them a lot of votes,” he notes wryly.) So Kolb’s strategy is to get as close as he can and concentrate on explaining some of the nuances of American politics to his readers. When Trump decided to skip the Fox News-sponsored Republican debate in favor of holding his own event, for instance, Kolb’s article about Trump’s counter-event got to the heart of the matter: “What hap-
Matthias Kolb, a German reporter covering the U.S. presidential campaign for the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, talks with people attending a Donald Trump rally last month in Des Moines.
pens on the small stage at Drake University for an hour is beside the point. Because Trump has reached his goal: For days, the media was just talking about him and his feud with Fox News — and not his rival Ted Cruz. And because more than 100 journalists had been accredited and dozens of cameras were present at Drake (Trump said it was ‘like the Oscars’), Trump proved once again that he better understands the media business than any other competitor.” If the politicians are generally indifferent to Kolb, the people seem to be a different story. “For a reporter, America is really great,” says Kolb, who is based in Washington. “I find ordinary people are open to sharing their thoughts. They talk about their ideas. They’re chatty. It’s easier to get along. In Germany, if people don’t know you, they wonder why you’re coming into their space.” Kolb reasons that the rhetoric in the American campaign is more heated and passionate than in his country because “there are such huge things at stake” in this election, such as the possible repeal of Obamacare, immigration and security, and various foreign crises. Germany’s politics have their fault lines, too — particularly now with the influx of so many refugees — but, he notes, his is a mostly prosperous, largely homogeneous and stable nation protected by American military strength. “During my lifetime, there has always been a consensus” about important national issues, he says. Germany’s multiparty system fosters political coalitions, rather than the winner-take-all combat of the presidential elections. From his reading and his travels, he views the United States as a mighty country, not without its problems and challenges, but filled with strength, diversity, creativity and optimism. After a few days of reporting in Iowa, he confides that he has trouble squaring the tone of the campaign he’s been covering with the nation he’s experienced for the past few years. “It’s astonishing,” he says, “to hear people say America is going down the drain.” n
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POLITICS COMMENTARY
KLMNO WEEKLY
THE TAKE
New challenges after victories in N.H. D AN B ALZ Concord, N.H. BY
A
presidential campaign that already has produced a series of surprises now moves to a new round of contests in the South and West with Republicans no closer to knowing who can emerge as the strongest challenger to Donald Trump and with Hillary Clinton under new pressure to right her shaky campaign and fend off a surging challenger in Bernie Sanders. Trump and Sanders were the big winners in New Hampshire on Tuesday night, a moment of triumph for a pair of candidates who have tapped anti-establishment anger and energy across the political spectrum. Everything that shaped the politics of 2015 came together to produce a seismic result, even though the contours of the finish had been forecast by months of polling. South Carolina and Nevada are the next two states on the calendar, and the battles there are likely to be even fiercer than took place in the closing days here in New Hampshire. After that come 30 contests in the first 15 days of March, a series of Southern states on March 1 — and, by March 15, verdicts from big industrial or swing states such as Ohio, Florida and Michigan. By then, perhaps there will be clarity around the big questions left hanging Tuesday: Can Sanders cut into Clinton’s strength in the minority community and turn his challenge into a genuine threat to the candidate who was once the presumptive nominee? And can any of the Republicans consolidate anti-Trump sentiment in the party in time to stop the billionaire developer and reality-TV star, whose unorthodox, nationalistic campaign has shaken the foundations of American politics? When the Democratic race started last year, Clinton looked like an easy and potentially quick winner. Sanders’s victory in New Hampshire, coupled with his photo-finish second place in Iowa a week ago, virtually guarantees that Clinton has a long fight ahead to secure the nomination, if she is able to do so at all. Sanders has proved to be a record-breaking fundraiser in terms of individual contributions that reflect the grass-roots enthusiasm behind his campaign. Victory in New Hampshire resulted in a new flush of cash rushing into his campaign treasury. But Sanders and his advisers know that the next rounds could be even more challenging than the first two in Iowa and New Hampshire, where the electorates were overwhelmingly white. His next target will be the Feb. 20 Democratic caucuses in Nevada. Sanders will be looking to show his capacity to win over His-
LUCIAN PERKINS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
panic voters, hoping to convert enthusiasm into support that can overcome the organizational muscle of the Clinton operation. But Nevada is a small-scale contest compared with what comes after that — the Feb. 27 primary in South Carolina. Clinton’s strength and Sanders’s weakness are among African American voters, who make up half or more of the Democratic electorate in the Palmetto State. There will be much on the line for both campaigns in South Carolina, but especially for Sanders’s. After that comes Super Tuesday, the March 1 round of roughly a dozen contests, many but not all concentrated in the South. Sanders sees opportunities in Colorado, Minnesota, Oklahoma and Massachusetts, along with targeted congressional districts in many of the other states. Eight years ago, Clinton found herself on the wrong side of a set of numbers and projections that showed the virtual impossibility of her overtaking then-Sen. Barack Obama. Obama’s campaign team stoked that narrative with ruthless efficiency. Clinton’s campaign hopes to employ a similar strategy against Sanders, but that depends on her ability to rebalance her candidacy, fix a broken message and straighten out other problems in her campaign. Despite the competition between Sanders and Clinton, the two-person Democratic contest is a marvel of simplicity compared with the Republican race. In a year of endless talk about candidate lanes, the fall or rise of the es-
MIKE SEGAR/REUTERS
Bernie Sanders, left, and Donald Trump were the winners in the New Hampshire primary. Now the presidential hopefuls turn to South Carolina and Nevada.
tablishment and the GOP’s tea-party-fueled grass roots, the Republican race comes out of its first two contests with a measure of clarity and confusion. The clarity is the mark Trump has left on the GOP race. The confusion is the muddle in the middle, a pack of GOP candidates tugging and pulling at one another in a desperate bid to claim the mantle of finalist. A week ago, two candidates appeared ready to challenge Trump. One was Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who won the Iowa caucuses. The other was Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who finished a strong third and claimed a virtual victory. The results in New Hampshire scrambled the field anew, with Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who had staked his entire candidacy on the state, the story beneath Trump. Kasich burrowed into the state and conducted more than 100 town hall meetings. Where he goes next is his big challenge. John Weaver, Kasich’s chief strategist, said the campaign would plant its flag next in Michigan, a state he described as a must-win. Kasich must survive South Carolina and Super Tuesday to hold on until the campaign moves back to the industrial heartland. Behind Kasich, closely bunched, were Cruz, former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Rubio, Rubio will have to regroup. How serious the damage was to his candidacy from last Saturday’s debate wasn’t clear from the outcome in New Hampshire, but a significant majority of voters said the debate was an important factor in their decision. Cruz, who now stands as the dominant candidate on the hard right, sees the future with some optimism, hoping that the competition among Kasich, Bush and Rubio will allow him to rise up to challenge Trump beyond South Carolina. But Trump moves to the next rounds with two advantages. After months of concentrating on individual battles in Iowa and New Hampshire, the campaign shifts gears into one in which the states come thick and fast. “That benefits a guy with a dominant national lead,” said independent analyst Matthew Dowd. “The only way that changes is if somebody disrupts him in South Carolina.” That primary will be held Feb. 20. Trump’s other advantage is his fractured opposition. The longer the field includes several other candidates, Trump can win states with roughly the same one-third of the vote that brought him a big victory here. The Democratic and Republican campaigns are still in their first phases, and the pace will accelerate in the coming weeks. But the two opening states have set up a pair of contests unlike any envisioned when the campaign began. n
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NATION
After Walmart leaves, what’s left? Contrary to the common narrative, the big-box store didn’t kill this town’s small shops — it had become a lifeline
L YDIA D E P ILLIS Kimball, W.Va. BY
T
o hear Mary Francis Matney tell it, Walmart didn’t kill the once-vibrant cluster of shops next to a railroad and a creek in the faded old coal town of Kimball, W.Va. — the disappearance of the mines had pretty well taken care of that already. But now that Walmart is leaving, too, as one of 154 U.S. stores the company closed in January, the town might be snuffed out for good. “It makes everyone so downhearted they don’t know what to do,” said Matney, 60, browsing the half-empty shelves of Kimball’s massive Supercenter, leaning on her cart, which contains a dustbuster and door crack insulation. Her husband once worked in the coal mines. Now, the couple lives on what little they get from Medicare and Social Security, and with precious few other options she made the hour-and-a-half trip from her home back in the “hollers” once a month to stock up. “It’s like we’re a forgotten bunch of people,” said Matney, her long gray hair loosely clipped into a bun. “It’s about all there was to look forward to. If we had to go any further, there ain’t no way.” She patted the metal shelves full of half-off merchandise affectionately. “I hate seeing it die. I really do,” she said. “You could always find better stuff here.” And two days later, the store was gone. Indeed, in a place so diminished, Kimball’s Walmart had risen like a vision of bountiful modernity, stocked with anything one could ever need. And its disappearance is typical of the rest of the stores that Walmart announced it was shedding. Headlines reflect similar impacts in communities where Walmarts have closed across the country. In Raymondville, Tex., the disappearance of tax income from Walmart could force city layoffs. In Oriental, N.C., the arrival of a Walmart Express had
Walmart closures Most of the Walmart locations being shuttered are in the southeast. Walmart Express (102) Amigo (7)
Neighborhood Market (23) Walmart (6)
Supercenter (12) Sam’s Club (4)
Arkansas 11 North Carolina 17 Not mapped Alaska 1, Puerto Rico 7
Texas 29
Sources: Walmart, American Community Survey, Census
been the final straw for a local grocery store, leaving the community with few options for food — also the case in Juneau, Alaska; Fairfield, Ala.; and Winnsboro, S.C. A Washington Post analysis of the stores on the closure list shows that they are in relatively lower- income, less-densely-populated census tracts. For much of Walmart’s history, the narrative about its role in small-town America has been the opposite: Big boxes plunked down in the exurbs created black holes for shoppers, sucking the life out of main streets that couldn’t compete with Walmart’s market-bending price power. The retailer expanded by filling the gaps between its existing stores until it saturated an area, and then creeping out from the its Midwestern base into urban markets on the coasts. It moved into groceries and smaller formats to counter the threat of dollar stores, closing facilities occasionally to open larger ones nearby. The decision to shutter so many stores at once is unprecedented. The cuts include the abandonment of Walmart’s three-year-old “Express” convenience store pilot, as well as a few planned future locations. Are there any commonalities
TIM MEKO/THE WASHINGTON POST
among the stores targeted for closure? Walmart says financial performance was a primary factor. But here’s one way in which that may have played out geographically: Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, has run an analysis of all the Walmarts in the country and says that 89 percent of those on the closure list were in states with higher-than-average square footage per capita. According to Walmart itself, 95 percent of the closures are within 10 miles of another Walmart. “It’s been part of the way these big retailers have tried to grab market share, by overbuilding markets and creating more retail space than they can support,” Mitchell said. “And, now that we have growing online sales, that overcapacity is going to get quite ugly.” Walmart, which is the largest private employer in West Virginia, took over the building of a former Kmart in Kimball in 2004 to fill a gap between two other towns both about an hour’s drive away. It did so — but in January, the massive retailer announced its “sharpened focus on portfolio management” and that the revenue in Kimball wasn’t quite enough to sustain the location, according to McDowell County
Commission Chairman Harold McBride. “I think the store didn’t reach their expectations,” McBride said. “It wasn’t real bad but wasn’t up to what they expect out of that size store.” The company didn’t get what it wanted in profits. But the store certainly met many needs of the community. Some are obvious: A second option for shoppers who wanted fresh, affordable food in a place with only one other full-service grocer. And jobs — 140 of them that will be difficult to replace. “That’s a lot of jobs for even the county to absorb,” Kimball Mayor Eddie Patrick says. “They gave them the option to transfer, but if you transfer and you’re traveling an hour to work and back, you’ve got to be making good money to travel all that way.” But Walmart’s disappearance will have more subtle ripple effects, such as a drop in traffic to the small neighboring hotel and gas station and the loss of a place to buy phone cards and hire tax preparation help. It was the main donor to the local food bank, and it contributed $65,000 annually in taxes to the county, most of which went to the school district. For shoppers in the area surrounding Kimball who had rejoiced when it arrived a decade ago, the closure is hard to understand. From the number of people in the parking lot every day, the store seemed to have good business. “They’ll never convince me it didn’t make money,” said Phyllis Noe, 62, who bought her sewing and craft materials there. “I’ve always been fond of Walmart, but they can’t look you in the eye and say they didn’t have good feedback. Maybe it’s just what they do: 10 years and then they leave.” For her granddaughter Hailey Noe, a high-schooler with long hair and heavy eyeliner, the Walmart was the last thing that made staying in the immediate area even viable. “You want to leave,” she said. “You feel like, what is there for me now?” n
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NATION
KLMNO WEEKLY
Flint victims sue but face big hurdles BY L ENNY B ERNSTEIN AND B RADY D ENNIS
T
housands of people in Flint, Mich., are turning to the courts to seek compensation for the contamination of their water supply. But, despite clear evidence of widespread lead exposure, they face formidable legal obstacles and long waits for any money they ultimately might receive, according to experts. Ten separate lawsuits, including several class-action suits, have been filed so far in federal, state and county courts, as well as in a special court established by Michigan to hear claims against the state. The remedies sought include compensation for lead poisoning, refunds for water bills and damages for deaths caused by a Legionnaire’s disease outbreak allegedly linked to the tainted water. One class-action lawsuit asks a judge to order the state to quickly restore drinkable water for Flint’s 95,000 residents. Another, which seeks damages, already has attracted 2,000 potential plaintiffs. Yet another was filed by a couple who say their 2-year-old daughter may already have been harmed by lead in the water. “On the face of it, the lead scandal in Flint, Michigan, looks like it should be a billion-dollar mass tort,” said Nora Freeman Engstorm, a professor and expert on tort law at Stanford University. “You have a clear villain . . . and you have very sympathetic plaintiffs.” But, she said, “the most likely thing that happens to you in this country when you are negligently injured is you never see a penny.” A similar saga in Washington, D.C., shows how long the legal journey can take. Half a dozen lawsuits over lead-tainted water, the first of which was filed in 2009, continue to plod through the courts. A judge rejected a bid for a class-action filing in 2013. Though the facts in Washington are different from those in Flint, no one who has claimed harm from contaminated water, discovered as early as 2001, has collected a dime. The main obstacle for the Flint
JAKE MAY/FLINT JOURNAL-MLIVE.COM VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
Experts disagree about odds residents will ever see compensation for contaminated water supply legal actions is the well-established doctrine of “sovereign immunity,” which shields state and federal governments from lawsuits except in a few, narrowly drawn circumstances. “The state of Michigan is immune from suit. Full stop,” said Gil Seinfeld, a professor at the University of Michigan’s law school. “This is recognized as a matter of law.” But attorneys who have filed some of the lawsuits said they are confident they will secure big damages. And an expert not connected to the case agreed the lawsuits could succeed. “The concept is that the government is taking away life, liberty or property without due process,” said John Fiske, a California environmental lawyer who specializes in water-related cases. “What we’re seeing in this case is that the right to clean water, especially if you’re paying for it, should not be taken away.” The number of citizens lining
up to sue grows almost daily. Many are driven by health concerns and plunging property values — and the sense that the legal system might right the wrongs that have occurred in Flint. “The only recourse we have left after all the marching, the meeting, the protesting, the petitioning, the phone calls and the basic begging for them to do their job and help us, is to go to the courts,” said Melissa Mays, a mother of three who has signed on to five lawsuits. But even as people flock to the courts, they face significant legal hurdles in addition to sovereign immunity. Individuals who may be responsible for the catastrophe have a form of protection, known as “official immunity,” that raises the bar for anyone trying to prove they or government insurance policies should pay damages, according to Seinfeld, the University of Michigan law professor. The city of Flint
Flint, Mich., resident Sarah Truesdail holds her daughter Gabriella Venegas, 5, as a health official pricks her finger for a free lead test. The doctrine of “sovereign immunity” may doom many lawsuits.
doesn’t have immunity, he added, but its dire financial straits make it an unappealing target for anyone seeking compensation. But some attorneys behind the lawsuits say they believe that they can overcome the roadblocks. Brian McKeen, an attorney for Luke Waid and Michelle Rodriguez, the parents of the 2-year-old girl, said that one exception to sovereign immunity is gross negligence by the individuals involved. That should be possible to prove, he said, because the state has admitted that it neglected to ensure that anti-corrosive chemicals were added to the water when Flint switched its water supply to the Flint River. Attorney Geoffrey N. Fieger is also accusing several state employees of gross negligence in the four Legionnaire’s disease cases in his lawsuit. Michael L. Pitt, the attorney in another class-action suit, said his goal is to create a fund that would pay to treat the damaging effects of lead on children’s neurological systems. He said the fund could require $1 billion. Yet another suit may skirt the sovereign immunity problem by asking mainly for a judge to order officials to provide Flint’s residents with clean water. “We’re not asking for monetary damages, so we don’t run into the problem of sovereign immunity that other claims might have,” said Dimple Chaudhary, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the groups behind the effort. “What we’re asking for is for government officials to take actions to solve the problem.” David Murray, a spokesman for Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R), said in an email that “it would be inappropriate to discuss pending litigation.” The Flint city attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment. Fiske said settlements should be reached with the people of Flint quickly. “I would want to come to the table right away, regardless of the technical aspects of the law, and morally and legally try to make this right,” he said. “This is not the one you play hardball with. . . . You just do the right thing.” n
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Overwhelming pressures to succeed R AMA L AKSHMI Kota, India BY
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hivdutt Singh left his tiny village of wheat and barley farmers last summer with a dream of becoming the first doctor in his family. Singh, 20, traveled more than 300 miles from the village of Kolari to Kota, a buzzing city in the northern Indian state of Rajasthan where students from all over the country come to cram for entrance exams to India’s highly competitive engineering and medical colleges. More than 160,000 students from across India flocked to Kota’s schools last year, feeding the town’s reputation as the nation’s capital for test preparation. But grueling study schedules, frequent testing and round-the-clock stress are taking a deadly toll. More than 70 students have committed suicide in the past five years in Kota, including 29 last year — a rate much higher than the national average of 10.6 suicides per 100,000 people in 2014, reported by the National Crime Records Bureau. Students in Kota have hanged themselves, set themselves ablaze and jumped from buildings. Two weeks ago, Singh became one of them. He had studied nonstop for six hours in his dorm room. He even called a cousin with a biology question. But then he locked the room and hanged himself from the ceiling fan. He left a note: “I am responsible for my suicide. I cannot fulfill papa’s dream.” “He was very excited. We used to tease him by addressing him as ‘Doctor,’ ” said his father, Mangal Singh, 52. “But after a few months, he began panicking. He was studying all the time, slept very little.” Educators at the private test academies say they cannot explain the rise in suicides, but they concede that the intense psychological pressure is real. “Students are under a constant state of anxiety here. They are unable to study, concentrate, remember, sleep or eat. They complain of headaches and breathlessness. Many just weep in front of
RAMA LAKSHMI/THE WASHINGTON POST
In India’s capital for test prep, suicides are rising among students pushing to attend elite colleges me,” said Madan Lal Agrawal, a psychiatrist in Kota who ran a help line for students for three years. “They feel guilty because their parents have spent so much money and have high expectations. Parents often impose their own unfulfilled ambitions on their children.” “Daddy, I hate maths,” one student said in a suicide note last year. “I am a good-for-nothing son,” another said with a frowny face. Police in Kota blame the news media for hyping up the incidents and prompting copycats. Officials ordered coaching schools to appoint counselors, organize special “fun” days in classrooms and quickly refund fees to students who drop out. “We have also told coaching schools to conduct screening tests to determine if students are really capable of scoring in Kota,” said Sawai Singh Godara, the superintendent of police. The police have also told the schools not to send results of bi-
monthly tests to parents via text messages. “This keeps the students on the edge all the time. The parents keep calling them to scold,” Godara said. Rising middle-class aspirations, parents’ unrealistic ambitions for their children, poor teaching standards in schools and a fiercely competitive college admissions race have spawned a $400 million testprep industry here. Kota, an unassuming city with a population a little over a million, had only a handful of private math and science tutors 20 years ago. But so many private schools have opened that studying in Kota has become almost an essential rite of passage for many seeking admission to India’s top colleges. Aspirants come and study from three months to two years. Many dream of winning admission to the exclusive Indian Institutes of Technology, 16 public colleges whose graduates are lapped
A sign in Kota shows students who took a test preparation class and subsequently gained admission to the Indian Institutes of Technology, prominent public colleges in India. More than 160,000 students from across the country flocked to Kota last year for test preparation.
up by global companies that offer fat salaries. Graduating from one of the IITs, considered the Ivy League of engineering education in India, is a ticket to an elevated social status and a sure shot for a job in a top tech company in India or in Silicon Valley. Google chief executive Sundar Pichai is one of IIT’s most famous graduates. Every year, about 1.5 million students take the entrance exam. Fewer than 10,000 are accepted. The test-prep industry has also motivated modest families from smaller towns and villages to aspire to attend prestigious colleges, which until about a decade ago were largely the reserve of the elite from big cities. In the past two years, sons of a railway station baggage handler, a truck driver and a cycle rickshaw driver studied in Kota and made it to top engineering and medical colleges. “All around Kota, the message is to excel, or be left behind,” the Times of India newspaper said in an article this month. Kota’s skyline is dotted with billboards featuring the faces of students who aced their entrance tests. The best teachers are miniature celebrities. “If you come to Kota, you should be ready for the pressure. After all, if you plan to participate in the Olympics, you know it won’t be easy,” said Ritesh Dahiya, who runs a center called Potential 2 Kinetic, which teaches students to listen better in class, to retain information and to manage time. “I teach them how to manage stress, because you cannot get rid of it in this town.” The top bureaucrat of Kota sent an open letter to students this month that said, “Life is beautiful.” He urged them to “watch the rivers flow” and “see the squirrels,” because “clearing an exam or two is not everything.” Two weeks after losing his son, Shivdutt Singh’s father is still grieving. “Is it wrong to be ambitious? My son wanted to make the village proud by becoming a doctor,” Singh said. “Every parent wants their child to become something big one day.” n
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Move over, male sushi chefs A NNA F IFIELD Tokyo BY
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t’s Friday night in Tokyo and a bunch of men are lined up at a bar, drinking draft beer so cold the glasses have frosted over and eating plate after plate of sushi. So far, so normal. Not normal, though: The chefs making the little slabs of rice and laying the fish on top are all women. In Japan, that’s a sight that’s even rarer than a late bullet train. But a handful of women are challenging the age-old notion that their gender can’t make sushi. “I hope that someday it’s not ‘male sushi chef’ or ‘female sushi chef,’ just ‘sushi chef,’ ” said Yuki Chidui, the manager of Nadeshiko Sushi, Japan’s first and only sushi bar run entirely by women. Sushi chefs, like sumo wrestlers and geisha, are stereotypical personifications of Japanese culture. According to the cliche, they should be old, serious and preferably bald men, as exemplified by Jiro Ono, the owner of a threeMichelin-starred sushi restaurant and the subject of the U.S. documentary film “Jiro Dreams of Sushi.” Called “itamae” in Japanese — literally, “in front of the board” — the sushi chef is supposed to deliver a performance and some banter while wielding the knife. Conventional wisdom has it that women can’t be sushi chefs because their hands are too warm or because they’re unreliable at certain times of the month. As Ono’s son Yoshikazu put it in a 2011 interview: “To be a professional means to have a steady taste in your food, but because of the menstrual cycle, women have an imbalance in their taste, and that’s why women can’t be sushi chefs.” With her flowery blue kimono, long bangs and glittery eye makeup, 29-year-old Chidui certainly does not fit the stereotype. “Sometimes I feel like an animal that’s being watched, but I think of this as a performance and I need to prove myself to them by making good sushi,” she said from behind the counter. Chidui thinks women have strengths that can work in their
KOJI SASAHARA/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Japanese women confront stubborn stereotypes as they try to crack open a culinary boys club favor. “Women have better communication skills, so that helps us connect with our customers and to create a warm atmosphere,” she said. “And because our hands are smaller, our rolls are slightly smaller. So they’re cuter and easier to eat.” Still, the all-female lineup feels like something of a gimmick. Nadeshiko Sushi is located in Akihabara, ground zero for Japan’s “otaku” or geek culture. The streets of the Tokyo neighborhood are lined with anime-fronted electronics stores, sex shops and maid cafes — a peculiarly Japanese institution where a young woman in a maid’s costume asks customers to meow when they want to order and draws ketchup hearts on the food. Customers must pay to have a photo taken with the maids. Curiosity seems to be the main draw at Nadeshiko Sushi. “I’ve
never seen a women’s sushi bar before,” said Tetsu Fuji of Hiroshima, who said he was passing through Tokyo and wanted to check out the restaurant. Another man at the bar, ruddyfaced Shintaro Hori, said he thought the place was a bit like a sushi maid cafe. “Men will think that if the sushi is made by a pretty woman, it will taste better,” he said, reaching for another tuna nigiri. There is some overlap with the maid cafe genre. The sign in front of Nadeshiko Sushi is pink and says “Fresh and kawaii” — the Japanese word for cute — while the menu stipulates that photos with the staff cost $5 and customers must not touch the staff. The chefs also went through several iterations of uniforms — including maid aprons and outfits worn by popular girl bands — before settling on pretty kimono-
“I hope that someday it’s not ‘male sushi chef’ or ‘female sushi chef,’ just ‘sushi chef,’ ” said Yuki Chidui, the manager of Japan’s first sushi bar run entirely by women. Chidui thinks good communication skills and smaller hands work in women’s favor behind the sushi counter.
style robes called yukata. More than a few customers get the intent of the bar wrong. “Sometimes customers come in and think this place is something different. They think this is a girlie bar, and they try to ask for a particular woman to make their sushi,” Chidui said. Wearing a pink kimono and with long curly hair flowing out from under her bandanna, Miyu Kyoda, 19, has received some unwelcome comments. “Sometimes men ask me to cast a spell on them,” Kyoda said. “They think this is a maid cafe. It’s because it’s Akihabara.” Still, she’s happy. “It’s a dream for me to be working here because I want to open my own restaurant,” she said. Women like Chidui and Kyoda are pioneers, said Sachiko Goto, principal of the Tokyo Sushi Academy, where prospective sushi chefs can learn the trade. “There are so few women sushi chefs in Japan,” Goto said. “But when women see good role models, they decide to challenge the preconceptions.” About one-fifth of the trainees at the academy are women trying to break into the field. The very fact that the school exists is proof of changing times: Sushi skills have traditionally been handed down from father to son, and apprentices often spend years doing dishes and taking out the trash before being allowed to hold a knife. But the aging population and the difficulty of the work have led to a shortage of highly skilled sushi chefs. Still, many of the academy’s female graduates see learning how to make sushi as a ticket to finding work overseas. “Generally speaking, kitchens abroad welcome women compared to Japan,” Goto said. “Japanese sushi chefs think their jobs will be taken by women. That’s part of the reason they don’t want to accept women into their workforce.” There was one man working in the restaurant on a recent Friday night, however. The company president was pitching in because they were short-staffed. He was in the kitchen doing dishes, out of sight. n
Grappling with dual identities Young American Muslims are defining their relationship with U.S. and Islam
BY ANNE HULL in Wichita
I PHOTOS BY MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
Maira Salim puts on makeup in her room before hanging out with friends in Wichita in September. Above, she has amassed an impressive collection of hijabs over time.
t takes two hands, a safety pin and two straight pins to turn a scarf into a hijab. Three pins if the wind is blowing across the Great Plains. Maira Salim stands at her dresser mirror with a pin in her mouth and a bedroom full of scarves. Her long brown hair disappears and then her neck. Maira leans in for inspection, making sure not a wisp of hair is showing. Different scarves go with different outfits. She likes a black scarf with her red Converse sneakers. Her emerald scarf is nice with the satin dress she wears on holidays, tottering on gold heels as she walks across the asphalt parking lot of her Wichita mosque. The camouflage scarf makes her mother cringe — “You look like a boy!” — but Maira thinks it’s perfect
with her mirrored sunglasses. “I never wanted to be the weird religious girl,” she says. Without a hijab, she would be a college senior who lives in a subdivision with her parents, two younger sisters and grandfather. She’d be the annoyed oldest daughter who has to pick up her little sister from swimming. She’d be the 21-year-old who works at her father’s used-car lot haggling over Dodge Chargers by a chain-link fence. She would be a business major who binge-watches “Quantico” instead of doing her take-home exam. With the hijab, her country sees a Muslim in a headscarf. Grabbing her purse and keys, Maira — pronounced MY-ra — leaves her house already knowing the questions that are waiting. “Do they make you sleep in it?” “Is it allowed to touch the ground?”
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“Can you hear me in that?” “Does it come from overseas?” Over and over she gives the same answers, trying to be polite and informative when sometimes she wants to say, “Really? Are you serious?” The lack of even the most basic knowledge about Muslims depresses Maira; it became terrifying in a year in which America’s television was stuck on the ISIS channel. One day she was at a traffic light when a woman rolled down her window and screamed, “Go back to your own country.” Nothing like that had ever happened before. The woman drove on while Maira sat there, scared and then angry, wishing she had yelled back that she was in her own country. She started wearing a button that said, “I’m Muslim, Ask Me a Question.” But no matter how many times she said she hated Islamic State and everything it stood for, people were never satisfied. With each new terrorist attack, the mood worsened. After jihadists killed 130 in Paris, a Sedgwick County commissioner in Wichita said in a public meeting that he’d been politically correct long enough and proceeded to show slides of criminals with the name Muhammed. Then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States, with 25 percent of the country in agreement. All the while, there was Maira in her bedroom with a hundred headscarves in a town in the Midwest where she has lived since she was 2, taking family vacations to Branson and roasting halal marshmallows in her back yard. America’s vigil on the borders looks right past a generation of young Muslim Americans
who are here now. By 2050, Muslims will constitute the second-largest religious group in the country after Christians, according to the Pew Research Center. Determining that transformation is Maira’s age group, the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. Muslim population, enduring the worst spasm of Islamophobia in their lifetime as they decide their relationship with America. The other relationship they’re trying to figure out is the one with Islam. Maintaining religious values isn’t easy in a country where the cultural norm is the magazine rack at Walmart shouting, “I Demand an Orgasm Every Time,” next to the Almond Joys. No one in the checkout line bats an eyelash. Not the grandmother with her grandchild. Not the man in a Home Depot shirt. They’re staring at Maira in her hijab. Maira always notices the stares, but she no longer notices the magazines. She has been in the United States for 19 years, since moving with her family from Pakistan. “I grew up with it,” she says. Her imam warns of becoming too assimilated. Her mother preaches the same message. “Don’t go the easy way,” she tells Maira. Meanwhile, her dad would prefer his daughter not wear a hijab. “Go big, this is America!” he says, urging her on in the land of opportunity. Maira would like to go her own way.
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ne night the text goes out: 7 o’clock at Kababs. The restaurant is in a strip plaza, mostly empty until three cars zoom into the parking lot. “Group photo!” someone yells, and Maira lifts her camera in the air. “Get closer, you guys,” she says. They all
Maira walks around the Kansas State Fair with her little sister Dina Salim, left, and Jenna Farhat in September. Maira has had the same friends since they were girls in Islamic school.
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squeeze into the frame, lipstick smiles and burgundy pumps and five hijabs. “Oh, my God, I am cheesing hard-core.” “I already have the caption!” Maira has had the same friends since they were girls in Islamic school. The Wichita of their childhood has grown from a few thousand Muslims to a community of around 9,000, starting in the 1980s, when Boeing, Cessna and other aviation companies based in the city needed skilled engineers. Now the local Costco stocks halal lamb, and their once-small mosque is an eight-acre complex with a minaret as tall as the grain elevators. Although Kansas was one of the first states to pass an anti-sharia law, Maira and her friends thought of Wichita as peaceful until the hostilities of the past year. Besides the incident at the traffic light, another friend was bashed with a shopping cart in a store and called a “sand n-----.” Their parents worry about their safety. But the girls who met in fifth grade are nearly finished with college, and where they fit into the modern Muslim landscape is the search that propels their lives. As observant Muslims, they are supposed to abstain from alcohol, drugs and sexual intimacy of any kind before marriage. Other parts of the Koran are subject to their American millennial interpretation, such as a female’s responsibility to not attract the male gaze. “If a guy says, ‘Why do you wear makeup?’ I say, ‘It’s not up to you to judge me,’ ” says Rabya Ahmed, a first-year student at the University of Kansas School of Medicine. “Do your part, and lower your gaze.” At Kababs, Maira sits beside one friend who confesses her loneliness as “the Muslim” at the University of Kansas two hours away in Lawrence and another who vents about “problematic white boys” who express interest in having a submissive wife, saying, “I’m gonna marry a girl like you.” Maira listens to her friends, trying not to stress out over the fact that she’s the only one at the table who doesn’t have a plan for after graduation. She’s also the president of the Muslim Students Association at Wichita State University, a job fraught with potential missteps. When Maira is alone, she asks God for strength, saying the words out loud. When that’s not enough, she plays “Candy Crush” at 2:30 a.m. The truth is they are all stressed. “If a Muslim kid needs therapy, the answer is, ‘Oh, go pray,’ ” says Maha Madi, a psychology major at Wichita State. “The answer is always prayer. Or ‘I don’t want our dirty laundry aired.’ I feel like our parents don’t understand what mental health is. We’re aware of therapy.” At home, Maira goes through her pictures and posts them, a practice that a conservative cleric from Indonesia condemned as haram, or forbidden. His scolding went viral, but it was no match for selfie-loving hijabis worldwide, who responded with outrage and kept right continues on next page
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along exposing their beauty and Muslim pride. For Maira, the background doesn’t matter; it’s the foreground, and from Kababs, five smiling hijabis mug in front of the reflective glass coating of the strip-plaza storefront. “Super Cheesin’,” she tags a photo.
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nvisible” would be the best way to describe Maira on a rare night she ventures beyond her Muslim crew for a party of white female college students. She’s hired to draw henna, a skill she learned by studying the elaborate tattoo designs on Pinterest, and to make a few extra bucks she occasionally draws at bridal parties for Muslim and Hindu women. A friend of an acquaintance contacts her about a gig, and Maira accepts, thinking she’s going to a party for Turkish women. The apartment complex is a massive sprawl of older units. Maira climbs the stairs with her henna kit. When the door opens, she sees an empty pitcher of sangria on the coffee table and a gurgling hookah pipe. There’s no sign of a Turkish bride or pastries, just several women in little black dresses. “Yay!” one says, seeing the henna artist. They are grad students at Wichita State who plan to go out clubbing later with their henna tattoos. As Maira sets up on the table strewn with paper umbrellas, a bottle of Hpnotiq blue liqueur comes out. “No, thanks,” Maira says politely. Someone asks if she studies at Wichita State. She explains she’s majoring in entrepreneurship and that henna is just a hobby. “So, in your country, do people pay you to do this?” a woman asks. Maira tries again. “No, well, I came here when I was 2,” she says in her flat Kansas speech, “and I just do this for fun.” “Do you plan to stay forever?” “Um,” Maira says, starting to draw the swirling patterns on a woman’s hand. “So, you guys have tattoos?” another guest asks. “Actually, in our religion, we can’t have tattoos,” she answers patiently. Her phone rings. It’s her mother checking up on her. The next woman sits down. “You’re from Wichita?” “Yeah,” Maira says, “I’ve lived here most of my life.”
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he church sign in front of Maira’s subdivision is flashing a message to love Jesus Christ. The road curves through the dark to a house on the corner where inside the kitchen Asima Salim is holding a serrano chili pepper in one hand and scissors in the other. It’s dinnertime in Kansas, Pakistani-style. She worries that her oldest daughter is becoming too American. At least Maira wears a hijab, and occasionally she even wears an abaya, the tunic Muslim women use for modesty. But half the time, the abaya is balled up in Maira’s car or she throws it on over her clothes when she doesn’t have time to iron. Once she wore it over her pajamas and drove to Walmart.
Asima’s main concern is that her daughter seems in no hurry to find a husband. She launched Maira’s marriage preparation training when Maira was 9, believing that every woman should know how to cook. By high school, Maira could make a four-course meal. Now, she and her 19-year-old sister, Mehma, create elaborate dishes for their food blog called the Hijabi Chefs, although posting magazine-quality photos of chocolate ganaches is not what her mother had in mind. Asima tries to lead by example. She gets home from her job as a cardiac sonographer at a hospital, takes off her hijab and starts juggling pans to have a hot meal on the table when her husband gets home from work. While she snips chili peppers in her turquoise housedress, her daughters are downstairs watching “I Am Cait.” Maira comes up to help her mother with dinner. They move around the too-small kitchen with deep familiarity, Asima reaching for the salt and Maira bringing down the plates, always ceding the territory. Her mother’s questions are never-ending. What time is your meeting? Who will be there? Should you be wearing that? Maira’s natural parsimony with language shrinks to nothing. “Uh-huh,” she says. “I’m not sure.” “Okay.” The questions are never-ending because America is right outside the front door. “Here you have to be distinct,” Asima says, checking the oven. “Here everybody wants to look good with the hairstyle. Of course you want to be gorgeous. It makes a big difference if you curl or blow-dry your hair. You look all pretty with
Maira, center, prays at the Islamic Society of Wichita. The city has grown from having a few thousand Muslims to a community of about 9,000.
your hair showing. With my hair covered, I look a little . . . sober.” When Maira sees pictures of her parents in their early days — they met in medical school in Karachi — she sees happiness. She sees romance. She also sees her mother’s gorgeous brown hair. Asima didn’t start wearing a hijab until she moved to the United States. The billboards with breasts, the alcohol, the pleasure-seeking; it all sent Asima into religious conservatism to show her daughters that God and family are most important. Now she’s super-hijab Mom who belongs to a Koran study group at the mosque. “If you have kids, you have to practice or your kids aren’t gonna do it,” she says. “They are going to go the easy way.” The sound of the garage door means Maira’s dad is home. In Pakistan, Salim Sattar was a doctor running a hospital. In Wichita, he became Samm of Samm Motors, a used-car business. “One must adapt” is his motto. While Asima taught Maira to cook, he taught her how to run his business. “We are not living in Pakistan,” he tells his wife. “This is America.” One thing they agree on: Their oldest daughter needs to get serious about marriage. Maira doesn’t want to be rushed. She also doesn’t need help from her parents or busybody matchmaking aunties at the mosque. She wants to find her own soulmate. “You guys can chill out for another 10 years,” she tells her parents.
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n the afternoon of Sept. 11, bright fall sunshine bathes the rolling green campus of Wichita State. Maira walks alone,
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COVER STORY wearing a black hijab. It’s the one day of the year when the scarf on her head feels more obvious, the fabric more scratchy against her skin. Maira got her first death stare that morning on her way to school when she stopped at Walgreens. Going back home to hide was not an option when you are the president of the Muslim Students Association (MSA). Even though Maira is too young to remember many details about Sept. 11, 2001 — she was 7 — she’s spent her life in its shadow. She ran for president of MSA to give the 1,200 Muslim students at Wichita State a stronger voice. Maira’s shy demeanor and stage fright had to take a back seat to her larger ambitions. “It’s time for us to tell our own story,” she says. She vaguely knew of MSA’s controversial history. Started in the 1960s to give international students a place to worship on U.S. campuses, they were funded with Saudi money that encouraged an ultra-conservative strain of Islam. For Maira’s generation, the old MSA — men only, Arabic only — has been replaced with coed poetry slams to raise money for Syrian refugees and her election as the Wichita State chapter’s first female president. But Sept. 11 is a confrontation with every stereotype they’re trying to escape, and in the weeks leading up to it, Maira and her executive cabinet debated how to mark the day. They decided to schedule a Muslim Awareness Week to coincide with Sept. 11. They wanted to host a campus-wide panel on Sept. 11 to discuss how the lives of Muslim Americans have been affected since 2001 until the student vet organization learned of the plan. The vets voiced strong opposition to the university over any such panel. “They think we should be honoring the victims,” said Taben Azad, the MSA vice president. “That’s fair.” “Why do we always have to focus on one side of the pain?” Maira said. September arrived and Maira ran from one event to the next, traveling around with a paper bag of scarves for Hijab Day, geared for non-Muslim women to experience what it’s like to wear a hijab. In the noisy student activities center, she sat at the MSA booth wearing her “I’m Muslim, Ask Me a Question” button. Next to her was a booth for LGBT students. Maira has a gay Muslim friend and thought little of the rainbow flag beside the pocket-size Korans on her table. What she noticed were the three police officers hovering nearby. Between MSA and her calls to family in Pakistan, she wonders if her phone is being listened to. Finally it’s Sept. 11. An offer to co-host a panel discussion with the student veterans group was rejected, so the MSA has joined another event where they’ll present two local first responders with plaques of appreciation. Wearing her black hijab, Maira sits with two other MSA members. They’re making cards to give to the first responders. With their construction paper and markers, they
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They stand outside, not wanting to interrupt, and then open the door to the sight of a woman in the front row wearing a T-shirt that says, “Every second a life was lost.” Up the stairs of the amphitheater they go, six women in hijabs and several dark-haired men finding their seats in the crowd of more than 200. Maira listens quietly until she walks to the stage. She takes the microphone and then a deep breath. She knows every word will be evaluated. The woman in the T-shirt has her arms crossed. “This is not what I stand for,” she says of what happened 14 Sept. 11’s ago, wishing that after all these years people understood. She says she learned a long time ago that to survive, she could not let herself be defined by the fears of others. “You have to show people that there is good in the world,” she says, holding the two plaques. On behalf of the MSA at Wichita State, she thanks all first responders for putting their lives on the line. There’s only one first responder onstage; the second is a no-show. She presents one of the plaques. “Thank you for acknowledging this day,” the rescue worker says to her, shaking her hand. “Thank you for acknowledging a day that’s near to my heart.” PHOTOS BY MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
search for the right words. “They don’t have to be sad, right?” one says. One of the young women makes up a poem about the Islamic State that she wishes she could write on a card. Roses are red, Violets are blue. You hate them, And we do, too. Maira asks the group, “Can I write salaam aleikum?” “In English,” one answers. “In Arabic, too,” Maira says, writing it both ways. On the next card, she writes, “Thank you for your service,” with a henna design. On the last card, she fills an entire page with her careful handwriting. “A couple of months ago, my family and I were vacationing in Branson, Mo.,” she begins. On the drive home, Maira was behind the wheel when a car in the oncoming lane of the highway drifted. The collision sent her family spinning a hundred yards down the interstate, and one of the rescue workers said it was a miracle anyone was alive. “At a moment when we felt so helpless, ya’ll made us feel comfort. Thank you. Maira Salim, president of the Muslim Students Association.” When it’s time for the ceremony, they gather their cards and plaques. The event in Hubbard Hall is called “Global Village Assembly: Enemies Within and Enemies Abroad (Domestic and International Terrorism.)” Maira and a group of MSA members walk across campus in the dusk, no one saying much. The door to the auditorium is closed, but they can hear “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
In her role as president of the Muslim Students Association at Wichita State University, Maira writes thankyou notes to distribute to first responders on Sept. 11.
M
aira gets through Sept. 11, thinking that the hardest moment is over. It hasn’t even started. A few weeks later, a Wichita State alumna discovers that the pews in the campus chapel have been removed. The MSA was one of the groups that had pushed for their removal, arguing that the benches weren’t welcoming to all styles of worship. The president of the university agreed, but no one seemed to notice last spring when 22 oak pews that had been in the chapel since 1964 were unbolted and warehoused. In October, though, after the alumna learns of the empty chapel, outrage follows and the Muslim students are blamed. A Fox News editorial calls it “Christian cleansing,” and soon Maira is reading on the Internet that some people in Wichita want her to burn in hell. The next month is Paris. After that is San Bernardino. “Please don’t let it be Muslims,” she says both times. In the December chill, Maira gets in a car and drives. She turns the radio up loud and closes all the windows. This was supposed to be her year of claiming what it means to be a Muslim American, and instead she is screaming in frustration. No words or phrases, just raw screams until eventually she drives home and goes downstairs to her bedroom with a hundred headscarves. “Is whatever we’re doing not even making a difference?” she wonders. “Is any of this even working?” That night, she says her fifth prayer of the day and checks Snapchat. Her skinny jeans are near her prayer beads from Mecca. It’s an uncertain end to an uncertain year, but the next morning Maira will stand at her dresser mirror, deciding between two pins or three. n
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HISTORY
A coda for the USS Houston BY
M ICHAEL E . R UANE
“Oh, boy,” Brooks, now 96 and one of the few living Houston survivors, said he thought to himself. “This is war. It came so quick.” It was nine weeks after Pearl Harbor, and the tide of Japanese conquest was sweeping across the Pacific. In an interview at his home in Mount Laurel, N.J., Brooks said that when the attack ended, the Houston, damaged but seaworthy, steamed for the friendly port of Tjilatjap on the island of Java.
T
he old, bent trumpet is dripping with water as Shanna Daniel lifts it from its basin in the conservation lab at the Washington Navy Yard. It’s a B-flat horn, made around 1934, with a bell that was smashed in battle, a missing mouthpiece, and brass tubing that is split and pitted. Daniel, in a white lab coat and lavender rubber gloves, rests it on a layer of hard foam and lowers a magnifying light over it. She picks up a surgical scalpel and begins to scrape deposits from the surface. She is very careful. The object has traveled a great distance, and sealed inside may be the DNA of the sailor who played it. The trumpet arrived at the lab 21/2 years ago, handed over by an Australian diver who found it in the wreck of the USS Houston, a World War II cruiser, off the coast of Java in the southwest Pacific. The Houston, which had been President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s favorite vessel, was the elegant flagship of the Navy’s Asiatic fleet when it was sunk in a fierce battle with the Japanese three months after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Hundreds of sailors died as the Houston and the Australian cruiser HMAS Perth blundered into the Japanese warships at night and were illuminated by enemy searchlights and attacked. The Allied ships fought valiantly — the Houston fired flares at the enemy when it ran out of ammunition. But the Japanese pounded away with guns and torpedoes. The Perth sank first, followed by the Houston shortly after midnight March 1, 1942. About 650 U.S. sailors, including many members of the Houston’s band, died. Three hundred others survived and most spent the rest of the war in brutal Japanese prison and labor camps. The trumpet, battered in the “sinking event,” as Navy senior conservator Kate Morrand put it, came to rest about 100 feet down as the Houston settled on its starboard side in the murky waters
MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST
Decades after the WWII ship sank, researchers are examining a trumpet found in its wreckage outside Banten Bay, west of Jakarta, Indonesia. Despite its condition, and its 70 years on the bottom of the ocean, the instrument may hold clues to its owner, said Robert S. Neyland, head of the underwater archaeology branch of the Naval History and Heritage Command. Conservators have found the trumpet’s serial number, which helped track its date of manufacture by the C.G. Conn instrument company of Elkhart, Ind. But they’re hoping for more. There is “the possibility of examining the interior of the [trumpet’s] valves and potentially locating some DNA remains of the individual who played the trumpet,” Morrand said in a recent interview at the Navy Yard. It’s a long shot, but the theory is that the owner may have left his DNA when he took it apart to clean it. And, sealed in when he reassembled it and then by seven decades of marine encrustation, the DNA may still be there, Morrand said. “If we could recover DNA, and if there are descendants that we could match with . . . [we could]
identify who the owner of the trumpet was,” Neyland said. “It kind of pushes the technology and pushes the science . . . but it would be pretty exciting.” *** On Feb. 4, 1942, electrician’s mate Howard E. Brooks, 22, the son of a Tennessee tobacco farmer, was a member of a damagecontrol team near the Houston’s rear turret when Japanese bombers appeared overhead. The Houston was steaming in the Flores Sea, north of Australia, and as enemy bombs straddled the ship, Brooks was called to fix an ammunition hoist elsewhere on the vessel. While he was away from his post, a 500-pound bomb struck near the turret, and when Brooks returned, he witnessed a scene of carnage. Scores of shipmates lay dead or dying. And the massive turret, with its three huge guns, was askew and on fire. Inside, there was nothing left of the turret officer except for his shoes and a hand still wearing a Naval Academy ring, according to a history of the ship.
A Washington Navy Yard lab hopes to find DNA that can help identify the owner of a trumpet found in the USS Houston, which was sunk by Japanese forces in the Pacific in 1942.
*** In the summer of 2013, Australian diver Frank Craven, 68, was diving with a group on the wrecks of the USS Houston and HMAS Perth. The ships were about three miles apart, near the mouth of Banten Bay. The water was warm, the current was strong and the divers had to pull themselves down on anchored ropes. Visibility was poor. And Craven, a retired cattle rancher who lives north of Sydney, was an older, lessexperienced diver. He thought he must be crazy. “Hardest dive of my life,” he texted his son. But his mother’s first husband had been killed on the Perth. She had just died, and he wanted to leave a lock of her hair in the wreckage. The next day, the divers went to the Houston, he said in an email. The ship, which had hosted Roosevelt on four cruises in the 1930s, rested on its side. Its prow was broken off and there were holes in its hull made by enemy torpedoes, according to a 2014 U.S. Navy survey of the wreck. Remnants of its 60-foot-high foremast were present, as well as evidence of damage caused by Japanese shell fire. There were no visible human remains. But the ship’s fuel oil was still leaking and drifting to the surface. As Craven swam along the keel with an underwater flashlight, he noticed hundreds of ammunition shell casings, large and small. “What a battle they must have had,” he said he thought. Then, amid the shell casings and other wreckage of war, he
Percent married two or more times in these metropolitan statistical areas (population estimate 2014):
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2016
TOP 5 LIFESTYLE
spotted a trumpet. He wondered: “Who would be playing a trumpet in the middle of a battle?” He picked it up and brought it to the surface, thinking he might somehow get it back to the United States. *** By Feb. 28, 1942, the Houston and the Perth were two survivors of an Allied force of ships that had been decimated by the Japanese navy. Five Allied ships were lost, along with more than 2,000 sailors. The two were headed west for the Sunda Strait, which separates Java from Sumatra, according to the account of a Houston officer, Walter G. Winslow. If they could get through, they might escape the Japanese onslaught and make for Australia. On the damaged Houston, only six of nine heavy guns were working. Both ships were low on fuel. Suddenly, about 11:30 p.m., there were gun flashes from the Perth as it fired on an enemy vessel it had spotted. “That’s what woke us all up,” Howard Brooks said. “The next thing we knew, the whole sky lit up” with flares fired by the enemy, he said. The battle of the Sunda Strait had begun. The two Allied ships had stumbled on a huge enemy force in the process of landing troops in Banten Bay. The Houston and the Perth found themselves virtually surroundedandassailedfromallsides. Brooks said enemy vessels came so close that Japanese sailors could be seen on the decks of their ships. The fighting went on for less than an hour, when about 12:10 a.m., the Perth was spotted in the distance, sinking, recalled Winslow, the Houston officer. All enemy guns were now trained on the Houston. “From that moment on . . . we began a savage fight to the death,” he wrote. The Houston held its own for a time but then was hit by three torpedoes. It slowed and began to sink. The captain ordered the crew to abandon ship.Brooks grabbed a gray kapok life jacket, and as the ship slowly rolled over, he clambered down the hull and jumped into the water. He reached a life raft filled with injured sailors and hung on. As they watched, he said, the sinking
Houston was illuminated by enemy searchlights, its battle flag still flying from the rear mast, he said. He couldn’t recall whether anybody said anything when the ship sank. But he remembered how silently it went down. Three years later, Brooks and other POWs were finally freed from Japanese captivity. *** When the Houston sank, 11 members of its 18-man band went down with it, according to researcher Marlene Morris McCain, whose father, Edgar, played trombone in the band and survived the sinking. Those who perished included Severyn “Steve” Dymanowski of Gary, Ind., who played trumpet. Three others known to have played the trumpet in the band survived the sinking, but they died in the 1960s and ’70s. The instrument Frank Craven found may have belonged to one of those four. A week after his dive, Craven emailed John K. Schwarz, head of the USS Houston CA-30 Survivors’ Association and Next Generations, to say he had found the trumpet and wanted to give it to the association. Schwarz, whose father, Otto, also was a Houston survivor, thanked Craven but said that the wreck remained the property of the Navy and that it was illegal to remove objects from it. He told Craven to contact the Navy heritage command’s underwater archaeology branch. Craven apologized for taking the instrument, reached a Navy attache in Australia and arranged for the transfer. The trumpet was cushioned in bubble wrap and shipped to the Navy lab in Washington in November 2013, senior conservator Morrand said. The instrument was placed on a foam pillow in a tub of deionized water to start drawing out the corrosive salts eating at the metal. One recent morning, conservator Daniel hunched over the trumpet, scraping off corrosion with a No. 15 scalpel. The deposits came off as a fine green dust. “We feel a lot of responsibility,” Morrand said. “It went through a lot to get here. And we want to make sure . . . it’s going to stick around a lot longer.”n
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41.7% Lake Havasu CityKingman, Ariz. (203,361)
I do . . . again
40.2% Prescott, Ariz. (218,844)
Divorce is not romantic. But hope springs eternal for millions of 38.8% Hotbeen Springs, Ark. twice, and Americans. About a fifth of baby boomers have married (97,322) about 7 percent have been married three or more times, U.S. Census Bureau data show. Rates of remarriage vary by age, race, ethnicity, income and geography. n 38.6% Sherman-Denison, Tex. Shin — Annys (123,534) Percent married two or more times in these metropolitan 37.8% Fort Smith, Ark.-Okla. statistical areas (population (279,592) estimate 2014): TOP 5
BOTTOM 5
41.7% Lake Havasu CityKingman, Ariz. (203,361)
14.9% New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, N.Y.-N.J.-Pa. (20.1 million)
40.2% Prescott, Ariz. (218,844) 15.3% Laredo, Tex. (266,673) 38.8% Hot Springs, Ark. (97,322) 38.6% Sherman-Denison, Tex. (123,534) 37.8% Fort Smith, Ark.-Okla. (279,592)
15.5% San Jose-SunnyvaleSanta Clara, Calif. (2 million) 15.5% McAllen-EdinburgMission, Tex. (831,073) 15.5% Trenton-Ewing, N.J. (371,537)
BOTTOM 5 U.S. TOTAL 14.9% New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, N.Y.-N.J.-Pa. (20.1 million) 15.3% Laredo, Tex. (266,673) 15.5% San Jose-SunnyvaleSanta Clara, Calif. (2 million) 15.5% McAllen-EdinburgMission, Tex. (831,073) 15.5% Trenton-Ewing, N.J. (371,537) U.S. TOTAL SOURCE: 24.6%U.S. CENSUS BUREAU, AMERICAN COMMUNITY SURVEY, 2008-2012; ILLUSTRATION: ISTOCKPHOTO/THE WASHINGTON POST
24.6%
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BOOKS
Healing the body by using the brain N ON-FICTION
I CURE A Journey Into the Science of Mind Over Body By Jo Marchant Crown. 300 pp. $26
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REVIEWED BY
S ALLY S ATEL
n “Cure,” Jo Marchant, a British biologist turned science writer, sets out to show that states of consciousness such as hope, fear, stress and loneliness affect health. She believes that doctors and scientists of the medical establishment “ignore or downplay” this reality and hopes her book will “convince the skeptics [of mind-body phenomena] to reconsider what they might be missing.” “Cure” begins with perhaps the best studied of mind-body interactions:theplaceboeffect.Thatis,the expectation — one’s hope — that a therapeutically intended intervention, even one devoid of any biologically active substance, will work. An impressive example of this endlessly fascinating effect is the response of some Parkinson’s patients to an inert pill. Not only do they experience reduction in hand tremors and muscle rigidity — the same response enjoyed by patients who take their actual dopamineenhancing medication — their brains also manifest an increase in dopamine activity. Remarkably, it appears that the mere expectation of relief alters their neurochemistry,asdemonstratedbybrainscans. A placebo can exert its effects even when the patient knows it’s just a sugar pill — as opposed to knowing that the pill might be the real thing (as is the case in clinical trials). It’s essential, though, that patients be aware they are receiving a placebo if they are to benefit; if it is slipped into food or disguised in some way, it won’t have any effect. Conditioning is another mental phenomenon with a potential effect on symptoms. The mechanism is based on the Pavlovian paradigm wherein a conditioned stimulus (a bell) paired with an unconditioned stimulus (food) comes to produce a similar response (salivation) on its own, absent the food. Consider: Some children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder who take their normal ADHD
ALFRED PASIEKA/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY VIA GETTY IMAGES
medication paired with a greenand-white placebo capsule eventually need only half the active medication along with the fake capsule to control their symptoms. In short, reliably coupling the fake capsule with the real pill signals to the brain that a normal dose is being ingested. Notably, the children are well aware that the greenand-white capsule is inert. This effect works in animals as well. Researchers at the University of Florida, for example, conditioned rats to expect morphine or saltwater by giving injections of one or the other for two sessions. Researchers then gave both groups the saline injection during a third session. In response, about 30 to 40 percent of the group that had previously received morphine acted as if they had received morphine again and showed pain relief. The chapter on conditioning
stood out as fresh and intriguing. The remaining chapters, however, about the promise of neuroplasticity and the perils of chronic stress, have been well-covered in other books. The myriad studies cited in “Cure,” some preliminary and uncontrolled and others well-replicated, underscore how “intangible, immaterial treatments can have real physical benefits.” But, as Marchant notes, placebo effects are largely limited to patients’ subjective symptoms, especially depression and pain. One effect is not equal for all conditions; nor do all patients with a certain condition respond equally. When it comes to cancer, for example, mind-based therapies do not prolong life. Although stress reduction can lead to patients taking better care of themselves and more faithfully sticking to prescribed treatment regimens, the
malignancy itself is unaffected. Despite the title of the book, few, if any, are cured. To be sure, experiencing less misery is a huge benefit for patients and their families. Practices that can bring about such relief should be taken very seriously indeed. “Cure” is for anyone interested in a readable overview of recent findings in mind-body phenomena, a reliably enthralling topic. It is heavy on reporting and presents interesting facts, but is light on original analysis and historical and cultural context. The quirky thing about “Cure” is the author’s lamentation that mainstream medicine dismisses the mind’s influence on health. That mighthavebeenso50yearsago,but it’s far from true today. To the extent that skeptics exist, however, she will probably succeed in opening their eyes. Another problem is that Marchant is a bit rusty on psychiatry. She writes, “The conventional medical view is that depression results from a chemical imbalance in the brain — a lack of the neurotransmitter serotonin.” Scientists now think about depression in terms of defects in brain circuitry while taking account of the effects of environmental factors on gene expression during critical intervals of development. For those seeking an introduction to mind-body interaction, “Cure” is a rewarding read that seeks to separate the wishful and emotion-driven from the scientifically tested. But just as many practitioners of alternative medicine oversell what their ministrations can do, too much of the book presents itself as breaking news when the power of mentality over matter, while far from completely understood, is not an exotic truth. n Satel is a psychiatrist and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. She is a co-author of “Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience.”
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BOOKS
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Plot leaps off page — and into an app
More than the old song and dance
F ICTION
N ON-FICTION
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REVIEWED BY
“A
S TEVE D ONOGHUE
rcadia,” the new novel by Iain Pears, was created for an app. “I had reached the limit of my storytelling in book form,” Pears explained in an article in the Guardian, “and needed some new tools to get me to the next stage.” Pears, best known for his 1997 novel “An Instance of the Fingerpost,” is a master at creating structurally intricate novels, so it is perhaps not surprising that he turned to technology to help readers navigate his latest book, which features multiple overlapping storylines. The app allows readers to create alternative outcomes for his characters. “The idea,” Pears explains, is that readers “can approach the story in the most comfortable way, rather than having a structure decided for them by the author.” What structure did the author have in mind for them? The tale begins simply enough. An 11-yearold boy named Jay is wandering in a wooded wilderness when he encounters a seemingly angelic being bathed in bright light. We then cut to a pub scene in 1960s Oxford, where a group of old friends meets every Saturday to discuss their work. One of those scholars, Henry Lytten, is working on a long and highly detailed fantasy novel set in the realm of Anterwold. He’s counting on his fellow writers to help him perfect the operating rules of that world. The scene then switches to a new setting, hundreds of years from Lytten’s time, when a flinty scientist named Angela Meerson is pursuing “a fascinating experiment that could well metamorphose into the most dangerous discovery in the history of humanity.” Meerson uses that discovery, which at first seems like a way to travel through time or alternate dimensions, to escape the tyranny of her world. Three separate worlds, then: a simple, bucolic setting very much like Anterwold; Cold War Oxford; and the grim future of the hyperbureaucratic Scientific Govern-
ment. So far, so similar to Pears’s 2002 novel “The Dream of Scipio,” which also told stories in three parallel times and places. It quickly becomes apparent, however, that “Arcadia” is playing a deeper game, one more akin to “An Instance of the Fingerpost.” That book was composed of four long parts, each telling the same story from a different character’s point of view. But as complicated as that book was, it nonetheless observed some basic precepts of storytelling. Characters might differ about when or why or how somebody died, but the death itself was incontrovertible. Characters might wax nostalgic about the past, but past events remained immutable. In “Arcadia,” these kinds of narrative tools get knocked away one after the next, even without the help of a plot-your-own app. Pears folds and refolds the texture of his narrative. Characters swap settings and morph identities; they cross paths in the different eras of Jay’s fantasy realm; they meet and know each other in both the past and the present of Lytten’s England; and everything everybody does has the potential to alter Meerson’s soulless future world. The first few of these storytelling high jinks seem forced and somewhat twee. Readers familiar with works such as David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas” and Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” (to say nothing of Sir Philip Sidney’s “Arcadia,” an obvious inspiration for Henry Lytten, and Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia,” an equally obvious inspiration for Pears himself ) may find this postmodern genre-jiggering a bit too familiar. But as Pears steadily builds his multiplicity of stories, his orchestrations become something far more ambitious, a calculated and at times quite droll assault on the very nature of narrative itself. It’s almost as if Pears himself is playing with the app. n Donoghue is managing editor of the online magazine Open Letters Monthly.
ARCADIA By Iain Pears Knopf. 528 pp. $27.95
MASTER OF CEREMONIES A Memoir By Joel Grey Flatiron. 246 pp. $27.99
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REVIEWED BY
L OUIS B AYARD
One night, during an early1950s tour stop in St. Louis, the young Joel Grey went to see a well-known comic. “The hottest thing in town,” people said, but all Grey could see in that smoky room was a hack with a “broad delivery” that “employed every virulent stereotype: take-my-wife jokes, fat jokes, crude sex jokes.” Gay jokes, too, but it wasn’t the guy’s crassness that horrified Grey. “It was his effectiveness. He would do, and did do, anything for a laugh, battering the audience into loving him. . . . They were in his thrall, screaming with laughter.” For an intrinsically crowdpleasing entertainer, the spectacle hit a little too close to home. “He was the epitome of everything I had been trying to escape,” Grey recalls. But a decade later, when he was struggling with a role in a Broadway show, that sleazy old comic returned in the form of a dream. Horror gave way to inspiration as Grey began channeling all that desperate, empty lewdness into the character he was playing, creating something that hadn’t been seen onstage before: a figure of “utter smiling soullessness . . . totally corrupt, desperate for adoration, willing to do anything.” Thus was born the Emcee of “Cabaret” — a starmaking performance that would net Grey a Tony and a best- supporting Oscar. It would seem that not every demon needs to be escaped. But perhaps the real message of Grey’s melancholy talk-therapy memoir, “Master of Ceremonies,” is that the act of escaping never ends. JoelGreywasbornJoelKatz,part ofafractiousclanofClevelandJews. Joel’s father, Mickey, was a klezmer musician who specialized in popular Yiddish song parodies such as “Haim Afen Range.” It was in Mickey’s show, “Borscht Capades,” that Joel first won acclaim as a juvenile star. But niche success didn’t satisfy; he craved the love of the mainstream. So he changed his last name and got a nose job. Through force of
will, he transformed himself into a successful song-and-dance man on the 1950s nightclub circuit. “I was a very good faker,” he recalls. That wasn’t the only thing he was faking. From an early age, he found himself drawn to other boys. Early sexual experiences with a bellboy and a fellow actor led to an affair with a Los Angeles cantor that nearly erupted into scandal. His mother’s succinct response: “Don’t ever touch me again. You disgust me.” From then on, Grey made a point of publicly dating women, always in the hope of finding a wife and mother. The ideal candidate came along in Jo Wilder, a singer-actress whose career Grey immediately set about discouraging — even more so when kids arrived on the scene. Like many showbiz alliances, theirs was happy, fruitful, vexed, wobbly. In the end, though, it couldn’t survive the revelation of Grey’s “complex sexuality.” “Master of Ceremonies” has its share of showbiz unctuousness, but its chief interest lies in how it diverges from the celebrity memoir’s triumphal arc. Yes, Grey’s career soldiers on, with steady film and TV work and well-received stage appearances in “The Normal Heart,” “Chicago” and “Wicked.” And yes, he sort of comes out — but only in the polite, elaborately prolonged way that tends to frustrate younger gay generations. The actual “I’m gay” news release waited until 2015. By then, Grey had come to surprising conclusions: He is “a much better family man than a gay man,” he writes. Although his “true powerful pull to intimacy is with men,” the love of his life is “unquestionably Jo Wilder.” And as hard as he tries to embrace his 21stcentury self, he can “never seem to letgoofthatfeelingofshameorstop looking over my shoulder.” Which is to say that he can never escape that St. Louis comic or that reviling mother or “Haim Afen Range” or, for that matter, Joel Katz. n Bayard is a novelist and reviewer.
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OPINIONS
I’m an atheist. So why can’t I shake God? ELIZABETH KING is a writer in Chicago.
I spoke in tongues when I was a kid. I went to church twice a week with my mom, stepdad and five siblings. I prayed before every meal, every night before bed and at various times throughout the day. I believed in the Bible, and I feared hell. Until my midteens, I was a “born again” Christian who loved God with all her heart. These days, though, I’m an atheist with nothing to prove. The story of my departure from the church resembles those of many others who have abandoned the flock. When I was about 16, I started asking questions during services that my youth pastors couldn’t or didn’t want to answer: Why is it a sin to be gay? Why is it okay to spank children? Where does the Bible say we can’t have premarital sex? Youth leaders at my church smugly told me, when they answered at all, that I must be struggling with some things in my own heart to be so concerned about these topics; sometimes they pointed to a vague Bible passage. When I persisted, I was told to just “have faith.” Soon, I didn’t. I didn’t believe there was a God, or heaven and hell. It wasn’t even a choice that I made. I just slowly stopped believing until all of it was gone. Or so I thought. Although I’ve been a content atheist for a decade, somehow God has found a way to stick around in my mind. Not the God of the Bible who created heaven and Earth — the God that lingers with me is harder to explain. The best way I can think of to describe it is like a character from a movie that I’ve seen over and over, or like the memory of my first friends. He’s not real, but He’s present. The idea of God pesters me and makes me think that maybe I’m not as devoted to my beliefs as I’d like to think I am and would like to be. Maybe I’m still
subconsciously afraid of hell and want to go to heaven when I die. It’s confusing and frustrating to feel the presence of something you don’t believe in. This is compounded by the fact that the God character most often shows up when I’m already frustrated. “Why, God, why?” I ask myself when I’ve procrastinated before a deadline and am scrambling. When I experience mansplaining, I think, “I swear to God . . . ” And I don’t merely say these colloquially or as a joke. It’s more a habit, from having spent so much of my life believing that I could expect answers to these questions. Even though now I know that nobody is “up there” to reply, I can’t help but ask. It’s of some comfort to me, though, to know that I’m not the only one who feels this way. According to a Pew Research Center poll about religion and atheism last year, 8 percent of self-identified atheists believe in God or a “universal spirit.” Not a huge proportion, but considering that an atheist is by definition a person who denies the existence of God, that 8 percent highlights something curious about belief. If asked whether I believe in God, I would answer with a quick and emphatic “no.” But given that I will send a word up to a proverbial heaven if I’m on a turbulent flight, or silently ask that someone make sure my little niece and nephew stay safe, I can appreciate how some atheists may be inclined to say
MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST
they believe. God’s lingering presence in my psyche could be thanks to the inner-workings of the human mind — our brains demonstrate a physical response to spiritual activity. In one study, Franciscan nuns, Tibetan monks and Pentecostals all showed similar brain activity on a scan when engaged in prayer, meditation or speaking in tongues; blood flow changed between different lobes of the brain, inducing powerful emotions. As the researcher on the study, Andrew Newberg, put it, “It certainly looks like the way the brain is put together makes it very easy for human beings to have religious and spiritual experiences.” According to Pascal Boyer of Washington University in St. Louis, research suggests our cognitive systems evolved in a way that makes believing easy. In a 2008 essay for the journal Nature, Boyer wrote that several features of the human brain predispose us to religious belief. Among the psychological tendencies complemented or satiated by religious beliefs are an ability to relate to unreal or unseen figures (imaginary friends, deceased relatives), a desire to avoid danger and the uniquely human ability to be a part of and maintain massive social structures. Boyer’s research also suggests “that people best remember stories that include a combination of counterintuitive physical feats . . . and plausibly human psychological features. . . . Perhaps the cultural success of gods and spirits stems from this
memory bias.” Boyer contends that there is not one part of the brain solely responsible for religious belief, but rather that the particular overlap of several cognitive systems renders religious beliefs desirable to, and easily accepted by, the human mind. This also means that when we opt for atheism, we are doing hard work to battle against what our minds are generally inclined and wellequipped to do: believe. Boyer’s hypothesis rings true for me. Believing in God felt very natural. Internal red flags about logic and the ethical consequences of my faith didn’t start appearing until I was nearly an adult and had begun the difficult work of thinking through my beliefs. This meant research, debate and critical thinking before I eventually arrived at an atheistic understanding of the world. Not only is this enterprise mentally taxing, but for people who move from belief to nonbelief, it can also be painful. I’m not sure what to do about God. If I could figure out a way to banish this figure from my psyche, I would. But psychology is not on my side. Having been conditioned to believe in God for so many years, and having a brain hard-wired for belief, I may be stuck with his shadow forever. While I remain steadfast in my (non)belief, I also feel I have no choice but to accept that I’m an atheist with a sense for God and that without this kink in my beliefs, I might not strive to understand myself better. n
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2016
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OPINIONS
KLMNO WEEKLY
TOM TOLES
Time to end the draft for everyone CHRISTOPER PREBLE is vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute and a former officer in the U.S. Navy.
Top military brass made headlines this month when they called for expanding the Selective Service System — as close as we come, these days, to a draft registry — to include women. Gen. Mark A. Milley, the Army chief of staff, and Gen. Robert B. Neller, the Marine Corps commandant, both framed the issue as a matter of fairness: All eligible U.S. citizens should be included, Neller said, “now that the restrictions that exempted women from [combat jobs] don’t exist.” But a better idea than requiring women to register is to do away with Selective Service altogether, for women and men. When it comes to the draft, or any lingering vestige of it, it’s time for Congress to end it, not mend it. The entire draft architecture is anachronistic and unnecessary. We’ve operated with an allvolunteer force for decades; no one, regardless of gender, expects that they’ll be drafted; and the wars that we fight don’t depend upon conscription. Future wars aren’t likely to, either. Selective service was instituted during World War I, but America’s first peacetime draft, the Selective Service Act of 1940, was enacted as much of Europe and parts of Asia descended into the maelstrom of another world war. Many Americans wanted desperately to stay out, but also understood the need to prepare for it. All told, around 10 million
men were drafted during World War II, but the act expired after the war ended. Selective service started up again in the late 1940s, but notably did not include President Harry Truman’s call for universal military training. Selecting some men via the draft provided the military with the troops it needed to prosecute the wars in Korea and Vietnam. But the idea of forcing all men to serve during peacetime never took hold because the requirements of those wars never called for 10 million-plus men to fight them. The selective nature of the draft exposed the system to charges of unfairness, particularly with respect to exemptions given during the Vietnam era for those able to ride out the war as college students, but it still made more
sense than the alternative: compelling every man to serve in a military that didn’t need them. Compulsory service is even less essential today. America’s wars of the post-conscription era have been fought by far smaller forces, and our mixed track record in those conflicts hasn’t been a function of the number of available troops. Rather, the inability to achieve decisive victory in places like Iraq and Afghanistan reflects the inherent difficulty of nation-building, and our body politic’s understandable weariness with open-ended and costly missions in distant lands. Meanwhile, a draft would probably reduce the military’s fighting effectiveness. Today’s force is uniquely capable precisely because it is composed entirely of volunteers, men and women who choose to join the military for a variety of reasons, including the desire to serve their country, but also because of the exceptional opportunities and benefits available to those in uniform. Overall compensation for troops is more than competitive relative to their comparably skilled peers, and Americans are willing to invest in their professional development because we are confident that many of them will remain in service long enough for our investment to be worthwhile.
I appreciate the sentiment argued for years by Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) — himself a Korean War combat veteran — that a draft would “compel the public to think twice before they make a commitment to send their loved ones into harm’s way.” But the idea that the all-volunteer military explains Washington’s propensity to go to war, or that a draft would force policymakers to rethink their interventionist impulses, overlooks the fact that few, if any, of our conflicts in the first two decades of the postconscription era could be considered protracted ground wars, and likewise cannot explain why other countries around the world with volunteer militaries are far less war-prone than we. In the event that a massconscripted army was ever again required to defend our country from attack, Congress could immediately pass a law to make that happen. But any notion that today’s Selective Service System is what stands between us and military defeat is absurd. And the push to expand combat roles to women signals that more, rather than fewer, Americans are willing, voluntarily, to do their part to defend this nation. We should take this opportunity to recognize that we can get rid of the draft altogether. n
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2016
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OPINIONS
BY KAL FOR THE ECONOMIST
The West’s rising tide of ethnic fear RICHARD COHEN writes a weekly political column for The Washington Post.
Let me tell you about my boat. It has a single mast and a cabin at the stern. It is painted white with a red stripe at the water line. I bought it in Denmark, at the port where in 1943 Danish fishermen and others transported most of the country’s Jews to safety in neutral Sweden. My boat measures 5 inches long. It is as huge as the human heart. The doughty Danes, so wonderful in World War II, have now turned churlish. They seize the jewelry and other valuables of Syrian and other migrants seeking to enter the country. This is not the same as barring the migrants, but it shows what happens when a bighearted people get scared. Much of Europe is now scared. America is little different. Donald Trump urged that all Muslims be temporarily barred from entering the United States, and almost instantly many Republicans followed suit. In announcing for the presidency in June, he cited Mexican immigration as a major problem — a wave of immigrants that supposedly included more than the average number of rapists and other sorts of criminals. They were taking our jobs and our women. It is a message ripped from the heart of white racism. Mexico and Central America
are to the United States what the Arab world is to Europe. In Europe, it is Arabs who allegedly run sexually amok. It is Arabs, too, who purportedly threaten to overwhelm local European cultures, just as the effect of Hispanic immigration here can be seen in signage and heard in public-address announcements — Spanish, as well as English. Trump and the other GOP presidential candidates live in a firehouse that only sounds four alarms. In 1989, Trump took out full-page ads in four major New York newspapers to call for the death penalty after five youths had been arrested for the rape and brutal beating of a woman in Central Park. The five were subsequently convicted and, had Trump’s advice been followed, they would have been executed. Inconveniently for Trump, however, they were later exonerated when another man confessed — and his DNA matched
KLMNO WEEKLY
BY OHMAN FOR THE SACRAMENTO BEE
that found at the crime scene. By then, the youths had been imprisoned, one for 13 years. On a summer day in 2000, more than 50 women were accosted, some sexually — again in Central Park. This followed the annual Puerto Rican Day parade, and it was similar, in its horror, to the mass attack on women at the train station in Cologne, Germany, this past New Year’s Eve. The Cologne attack claimed far more victims, more than 500, but, as in New York, an identifiable ethnic group was blamed — Arabs or North Africans. All Europe was appalled and frightened. In both Europe and the United States, the present moment is touted as the inevitable future. But the Central Park rape, the Puerto Rican Day assaults and other incidents have come and gone — either not what they had seemed or not repeated. Among other things, the cops cracked down. The Cologne incident, too, while larger in scope, has not — or not yet — been repeated. The problem in both Europe and the United States is not just a huge influx of migrants, but a lack of political leadership. The exceptions are Barack Obama here and Angela Merkel in Germany. Merkel showed extraordinary leadership in
allowing about 1 million Syrian migrants to settle in Germany. Obama has been stingy in his welcome — about 2,500 migrants had arrived in the United States as of late last year — but he has been generous in his embrace of the Muslim community. Trump, characteristically, mischaracterized the president’s recent visit to a mosque, saying he had gone to apologize. For Trump, no lie is too low. What both the United States and Europe need now are more leaders who know how to say, “Hold on a minute. Let’s work this out.” Instead, we get calls for mass deportations, closing borders, confiscation of wealth. In Europe, Hungary has veered right and turned ugly. Poland is leaning that way. France is showing a little Vichy, and Germany is shivering with second thoughts. Trump, I’m sure, knows little about history. His boat, until he was forced to sell it, was a huge, bloated affair. My boat is small, very small, only symbolic. It stands for not just what happened, but what can happen — the heroism of some, the political opportunism and cowardice of many. At the moment, too many politicians have their fingers to the wind. A storm is brewing and, aside from a weakened Merkel and an exiting Obama, not a captain is in sight. n
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2016
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TECHNOLOGY
KLMNO WEEKLY
Spot the suspicious activity
“FALSE POSITIVES” BY ESTHER HOVERS
ANOMALY #1: STANDING STILL The photo above shows one behavior smart surveillance cameras are taught to look for — a person standing in a location pedestrians usually continue to move through.
ANOMALY #2: LONELY OBJECTS Did you notice the suitcase in the photo above?
ANOMALY #3: CLUSTERS BREAKING APART In the photo above, a group of people suddenly disperses in different directions.
Surveillance and algorithms can flag behavior that may precede a crime BY
A NA S WANSON
S
topping criminal activity before it happens is usually the domain of science fiction — as in “Minority Report,” where police officers in 2054 use the ability to see into the future to catch murderers before they kill. But some security experts believe a version of that future is much closer than 2054. Increasingly, smart surveillance cameras are monitoring public places in search of suspicious cues, a high-tech version of “if you see something, say something.” By reviewing massive volumes of ordinary surveillance tape, algorithms can “learn” what type of behavior is typical right before a crime or terrorist attack is committed — like a person suddenly breaking into a run or abandoning a suitcase on a subway platform — and alert authorities. Esther Hovers, a photographer, captures some examples of the seemingly deviant be-
havior that these cameras pick up in a photo exhibition called “False Positives.” These photographs, which Hovers took in Brussels, are montages, partially natural and partially staged, which Hovers created by combining images from several minutes of video. If some of these behaviors seem relatively innocuous, that is partly Hovers’s point. While smart cameras offer big benefits in security, they also increase surveillance of behavior that is slightly unusual, but not criminal in any way. Like many new technologies, smart surveillance systems may contain worrying consequences for privacy and public freedom. For one, these cameras currently make a lot of mistakes. Hovers says that nine out of 10 alerts that these systems issue today are “false positives” — what the industry calls false alarms. Part of it is that algorithms are much worse than humans at recognizing context, Hovers says. For example, a smart surveillance system
might alert authorities if foot traffic on a street reaches much higher volumes than normal — but a human would be able to figure out that the cause is a newly opened market or a town festival. Hovers says her project is more about future possibilities than the current state of security, because the vast majority of cameras in use today are not yet smart cameras. But Washington, Boston, Chicago, Amsterdam and other cities have begun testing smart surveillance technology. While everyone wants security, Hovers says she is concerned about the kind of judgments this system imposes on a society, and whether it would restrain some types of “abnormal” public expression — of which art could be considered one. “Not every type of deviant behavior is criminal behavior, and I’m happy about that, actually,” she says. n
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2016
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