The Washington Post National Weekly - March 18, 2018

SUNDAY, MARCH 18, 2018

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY

His American Dream died. His town got over it.

The deportation of a restaurant owner and father caused a national furor, but his memory in Granger, Ind., is fading. PAGE 12

Politics Tillerson’s tenure ends 4

Nation Looking to expand euthanisia 8

5 Myths Gerrymandering 23

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THE FIX

Case closed? For House GOP, yes.

BY

A MBER P HILLIPS

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o hear Republicans tell it, they’ve done their job: They interviewed 73 witnesses over 14 months and looked at 30,000 documents — and they’ve reached a conclusion in their Russia investigation. They concluded there was no collusion between President Trump’s campaign and Russia, but Russia did intervene in the 2016 election — just not specifically to help Trump.

“We’ve found no evidence of collusion,” the investigation’s leader, Rep. K. Michael Conaway (R-Tex.), told reporters this past week.

To hear Democrats tell it, Republicans abdicated their job: They didn’t use their power of subpoena to force key witnesses to talk, such as outgoing White House communications director Hope Hicks, who dodged most of their questions about Trump last month.

“Instead of protecting our democracy, House Republicans have worked overtime to protect President Trump and his family and friends,” said Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.).

As has been the case lately with this particular committee, we’re left to sift through partisanship to figure out whose reality is closest to actual reality. So let’s do that.

Democratic claim No. 1: Republicans are glossing over evidence of collusion.

First, there was the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower in which Donald Trump Jr. seemed thrilled to potentially receive dirt from Russians about Hillary Clinton. Legal experts said it probably met the legal bar of collusion.

Then, Trump ally Roger Stone acknowledged to friends he had communicated with WikiLeaks before it dumped Democratic emails that may have been hacked by Russia.

Democrats look at this and see collusion or

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at least evidence of potential collusion.

Republicans say they see “bad judgment” on the Trump campaign’s part but not any intent to work with the Russians.

What the legal experts say: Until there is evidence of intent to conspire with the Russians, collusion is hard to prove. Watch the special counsel investigation, which also is tasked with figuring out if there was collusion.

“We’ve found no evidence of collusion,” Rep. K. Michael Conaway (RTex.) said.

Democratic claim No. 2: Republicans didn’t conduct a thorough enough investigation.

There is still more to do, say Democrats.

They want the committee to force Stephen K. Bannon to talk by holding him in contempt of Congress or subpoenaing top Trump officials who weren’t forthcoming the first time in the hope they will be the second time. Democrats want to get bank records and other statements to corroborate witnesses’ statements.

Republicans say there’s no point in trying to force someone to talk if they won’t. It’s also a fair assumption that Republicans don’t want to force a fight with the White House if they’re not certain they’ll get something.

What the legal experts say: There’s a gaping hole in Republicans’ conclusions about Russia interference that may back up Democrats on this point. On why Russia interfered in U.S. politics, Republicans came to a different conclusion than the entire U.S. intelligence com-

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. © 2018 The Washington Post / Year 4, No. 23

munity. Intelligence experts have concluded Russia did it to help Trump win — the former head of the CIA during the election testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee as much.

And special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s team issued indictments of 13 Russians alleging they interfered to help Trump.

So Republicans either have evidence that the intelligence community lacks, or they are ignoring key evidence. “The facts in the public record already established that the Russians intervened to help Trump win the election and in return, the administration planned to roll back old sanctions and then blocked new ones enacted by Congress,” Jens David Ohlin, Cornell Law School’s vice dean, said in an email.

Democratic claim No. 3: The committee’s investigation has been partisan from the start.

The chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes, had to step down from the Russia investigation over allegations of impropriety that he briefed Trump on wiretapping claims over his own committee.

Then there is the GOP memo alleging FBI bias in its wiretapping of a former Trump campaign aide, which Democrats said was baseless, the FBI said was inaccurate, and Trump’s own Justice Department said would be “extraordinarily reckless.”

Republicans say they haven’t been partisan, just going where the facts lead.

What the experts say: The GOP memo, in particular, is troubling for an independent investigation. To believe there was some kind of FBI bias, you have to call the whole agency — and mostly Republican-appointed judges who approved surveillance warrants — into question, said former FBI agent Asha Rangappa . n

©The Washington Post

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

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ON THE COVER The Shed steakhouse in Granger, Ind., went through a major transformation after owner Roberto Beristain was deported to Mexico. Photograph by ALYSSA SCHUKAR for The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Diplomats prepare for dramatic shift BY

J OHN H UDSON

A

s they prepared for a new leader, diplomats and civil servants at the State Department expressed relief and trepidation Wednesday after the firing of Rex Tillerson, whose tenure as secretary of state was one of the most contentious in recent memory.

For the hopeful, the transition rids the department of a former oil executive criticized for walling himself off from career diplomats, attempting to slash the department’s budget and returning internal memos from subordinates with grades reflecting typos and other highly technical infractions.

If confirmed, President Trump’s pick to succeed Tillerson, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, would come in with a strong working relationship with the president and a track record of giving broad autonomy to his underlings.

“Pompeo isn’t a micromanager, and he didn’t start his tenure by saying we have to cut the agency by 25 percent,” said a current 30year veteran of the Foreign Service, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to speak publicly.

“That’s a good start.”

The official said fewer people would doubt whether Pompeo speaks for the president, and praised the CIA director’s protection of an institution that, like the State Department, Trump viewed with skepticism at the outset of his presidency.

But diplomats also expressed disquiet over Pompeo, whose origins as a tea party congressman from Kansas leave a long paper trail of inflammatory comments about Islam, torture and hard-line positions that clash with the typical ethos of the Foreign Service.

“In the view of many diplomats, Tillerson was solid on policy and quite horrible on management,” said Ronald E. Neumann, president of the American Academy of Diplomacy. “Now they may get better management but worse policy.”

Pompeo’s hard-line views and blunt demeanor are precisely what endear him to Trump, who

JAHI CHIKWENDIU/THE WASHINGTON POST

Many at State Department are glad to see Tillerson go but worry about Pompeo’s policies explained that his decision to fire Tillerson was based heavily on political differences on several issues, including the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

“I actually got along well with Rex, but really it was a different mind-set, a different thinking,” he told reporters Tuesday. “When you look at the Iran deal, I thought it was terrible, he thought it was okay.”

That will be much less of a problem with Pompeo, who shares Trump’s disdain for the Paris climate accord, from which the president withdrew last year, and the Iran nuclear agreement, which Trump may formally renounce as early as May. After Trump was elected in November 2016, Pompeo took to Twitter, saying, “I look forward to rolling back this disastrous deal with the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism.”

Pompeo, like Trump, has also condemned Muslims in unsparing terms, such as in 2013, when he

said the failure of American Muslim leaders to forcefully denounce the Boston Marathon bombing made them “potentially complicit in these attacks.” The blanket statement drew condemnation from Muslim American organizations, which viewed the remark as a form of guilt by association.

The sudden departure of Tillerson, who served as a brake on many of Trump’s most impulsive decisions, has left diplomats who handle some of the most sensitive national security issues in the lurch.

When Trump fired off his tweet announcing Tillerson’s ouster on Tuesday morning, for instance, some of Tillerson’s top aides were in Europe preparing for meetings in Vienna and Berlin to negotiate a supplemental agreement to the Iran deal. That side deal requires European governments to take a tougher stance toward Iran in exchange for a promise that Trump will not rip up the entire agree-

CIA Director Michael Pompeo is President Trump’s pick to succeed Rex Tillerson as the head of the State Department.

ment, a promise Europeans are already viewing with more skepticism as the president tries to install a self-proclaimed Iran hawk in Foggy Bottom.

The fate of Tillerson’s top aides, such as Policy Planning Director Brian Hook who is en route to Europe for those negotiations, is the subject of intense speculation inside the building given expectations that Pompeo, if confirmed, will clean house. Hook built up a team of 15 staffers in his office who held significant sway over department policy across every geographic region.

“Everyone wants to know what will happen to Hook,” one official said.

Meanwhile, Tillerson’s chief of staff, Margaret Peterlin, and her deputy, Christine Ciccone, offered their resignations Tuesday, which will be effective March 31.

The undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, Steven Goldstein, was fired Tuesday, adding to an already large number of vacancies at the department. Overall, eight of the top 10 jobs are vacant and being filled by officials serving in an acting capacity.

Diplomats scrambling to prepare for a historic meeting between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in May are expressing fears that the nomination of Susan Thornton, a Tillerson ally, could be pulled before her confirmation in the Senate, leaving the department without an acting assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs at a critical juncture.

“There’s a lot of worry about what will happen to the few political appointees who are in place: Will they be removed or simply marginalized, and what will that mean for current diplomatic efforts?” said Jeff Rathke, a former State Department official and fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“At the same time, there’s some relief that the dysfunctional relationship between the secretary and the building is coming to an end,” he said. n © The Washington Post

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POLITICS ANALYSIS

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Republicans get another reason to fret BY

D AN B ALZ

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here is no way for Republicans to sugarcoat what happened in southwestern Pennsylvania on Tuesday. It’s true that campaigns and candidates matter, but fundamentals often matter more.

That’s why Republicans should be nervous about November.

The special election in Pennsylvania isn’t the first data point to show Republicans that they’re in trouble, but if there was any complacency among elected officials, that’s certainly gone now. The all-but-final counts in the congressional race have left Democrat Conor Lamb marginally ahead of Republican Rick Saccone in a district that Donald Trump carried by 20 points in 2016 and that Mitt Romney carried by 17 points in 2012.

The message was clear. In this election cycle, Trump is a great motivator for Democrats, who still feel the sting of the 2016 election and are eager to vote in opposition to the president. Nowhere does this appear more evident than in suburban precincts nationwide, as the counts from the suburban Pittsburgh sections of the district showed Tuesday night.

Taking back the House is no slam dunk for the Democrats. They still lack a clear, positive and unifying message, just as they did in 2016.

But in the nuts-and-bolts category, more than enough Republican seats are at risk for strategists on both sides to see a path toward a Democratic-controlled House starting in January.

Republicans probably will have to consider developing a defensive strategy aimed at checkmating Democrats from picking up the 24 seats needed to take control of the chamber, rather than expecting the underlying dynamics of this election year to change significantly between now and November.

Tuesday’s contest was a special House election like few others, held in a district that will soon cease to exist, because of new boundaries in Pennsylvania that will govern the November elections. So the vanishing 18th Congressional District went out in grand style Tuesday, with a down-to-the-wire contest that kept political aficionados on edge all night waiting for a decisive outcome. For pure theater, it exceeded expectations by a mile.

In the heat of the moment, as the margin between Lamb and Saccone shifted with every update, some Republicans sought solace in what they were seeing. Many had dismissed Saccone as a weak and ineffective candidate. That he fought the more charismatic Lamb roughly to a draw after strategists on both sides headed into Election Day believing that the Democrat would win by several percentage points gave some Republicans a false sense that things might not be as bad this fall as feared.

SALWAN GEORGES/THE WASHINGTON POST

Republicans with longer-term horizons were not blinded by temporal events. They know how challenging the climate is for their party. There is the historical reality that the party in the White House loses ground in the first midterm contest after a president is elected. There is the fact that Trump is a divisive leader with approval ratings in dangerous territory. And there is evidence that the Trump coalition, like that of President Barack Obama, is not necessarily a transferrable asset. Republican candidates must shoulder the burdens of this presidency without necessarily enjoying the benefits.

Although Tuesday’s outcome is only one case and therefore limited for analysis, the first test of Republicans’ hopes of making the economy and their new tax bill focal points of this year’s elections fell far short. Whatever voters think of the tax bill, the issue did not appear to give any significant electoral boost.

Perhaps by November, with persistent effort, that could change. But nervous Republicans probably will be looking to test additional messages to offset the anti-Trump sentiment driving many voters.

The Cook Political Report now lists 47 Republican-held districts in some form of jeopardy — classified as toss-ups, leaning Republican, leaning Democrat and in one case likely to be won by Democrats. An additional 27 GOP seats are on the watch list, considered likely retentions at this moment. By way of contrast, there are just eight Democratic seats listed as either toss-ups or leaning in the Democrats’ direction. Eleven other seats bear watching, according to the Cook team’s analysis.

The Cook analysis rates each district along an ideological scale. The Pennsylvania district showed a Republican lean of plus-11. More than

Democrat Conor Lamb claims victory in Pennsylvania's 18th Congressional District special election on Wednesday.

100 districts nationwide are roughly equal to or far less Republican in their ideological leanings.

Not all of them will be competitive in November, but what Pennsylvania highlighted is that with the right combination of ingredients, particularly in districts without an incumbent in the race, Democrats can be competitive.

Although fundamentals will guide the outcome of most races in November, candidates will make a difference. In Pennsylvania, Lamb fit the cultural and political leanings of the district. He ran away from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). He embraced the Second Amendment in a part of the country that Obama described — in one of his biggest gaffes of the 2008 campaign — as populated with people who “cling to guns and religion.”

Lamb also endorsed Trump’s new tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, which put him in harmony with union voters in the district who supported Trump in 2016.

The Democrats will have to navigate this challenge of finding candidates who fit their districts in upcoming primaries. The balance of power in the party has shifted toward the progressive wing, which could affect intraparty contests in districts that are more centrist or conservative. Republicans will look to exploit any such mismatches and are talking about how to influence the Democratic primaries.

The president plans to be an active campaigner this fall. Republicans think his Saturday night visit to Pennsylvania provided a shot of energy that helped Saccone narrow what was considered Lamb’s pre-election poll advantage. But Trump’s reach will be limited.

With several dozen competitive House races come October, Trump will be able to campaign only in a relative few in the final weeks. The White House political team, in conjunction with congressional leaders and party strategists, will have to pick carefully to maximize his impact.

As the vote counting seesawed Tuesday night, many Democrats were ready to claim a victory even if Lamb were to lose. But there will be no moral victories in November. Either Democrats will take back the House or they won’t. A narrower Republican majority is likely, but only a Democratic takeover would truly upend the balance of power in Trump’s Washington.

Based on Tuesday night, along with the victory by Democrat Ralph Northam’s gubernatorial victory in Virginia in November and the coalition that helped elect Democrat Doug Jones of Alabama to the Senate in December, a consistent pattern is taking shape — that of an energized, Democratic grass-roots base battling a conflicted Republican Party. It’s doubtful that Republicans need any more examples to prepare them for what’s to come. n

© The Washington Post

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NATION

In Oregon, a search for peace at death R OB K UZNIA Los Angeles BY

S

hortly after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease at age 56, Nora Harris moved to Oregon from California with her husband, thinking it would be a place where she could die on her own terms.

Shortly after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at age 58, Bruce Yelle migrated to Oregon from the Golden State for the same reason. This was the state, after all, that pioneered medically assisted suicide when its Death With Dignity Act took effect in 1997.

As it turned out, both Harris and Yelle were ineligible: People with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, multiple sclerosis and a host of other degenerative diseases are generally excluded from the Oregon law.

This is because some degenerative diseases aren’t fatal. People die with Parkinson’s, for example, not because of it. Other diseases, such as advanced Alzheimer’s, rob people of the cognition they need to legally request suicide meds.

Harris died in October at 64, unable to speak coherently, feed herself or recognize loved ones.

Though she had filled out an advance health-care directive instructing caregivers not to feed her if she lost the ability to feed herself, she was spoon-fed until two days before her passing.

“Nora did not have a peaceful death,” said her husband, Bill Harris, who lobbied on behalf of a newly approved bill to update Oregon’s advance-directive law.

Yelle, also 64, is alive and active, trying to change laws in Oregon that would essentially open up more assisted suicide avenues for people with these diseases. He said that unless he can obtain a prescription for lethal meds, “I’m going to have an ugly death.”

Their efforts are among several throughout North America that highlight a quiet but concerted push to bring the right-to-die debates to a new frontier: people with dementia, Alzheimer’s and other degenerative diseases.

RICH PEDRONCELLI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Activists want to expand the state’s euthanasia law to include people with degenerative diseases Relatively modest drives are afoot in Washington state and California, where organizations have launched education campaigns on how people can fill out instructions for future caregivers to withhold food and drink, thereby carrying out an option that is legal to anybody: death by starvation and dehydration.

The boldest bid is taking place in Quebec. Prompted by a 2017 murder case involving the apparent “mercy killing” of a 60-yearold woman with Alzheimer’s by her husband, the government is studying the possibility of legalizing euthanasia for Alzheimer’s patients. Unlike medically assisted suicide, a medical doctor would administer the fatal dose. A survey found that 91 percent of the province’s caregivers support the idea.

Somewhere between these points is Oregon, where several lawmakers are trying to push the right-to-die envelope.

Under the current law, eligible patients can obtain prescriptions for lethal barbiturates. Qualified

Above: People show support for a rightto-die law in Sacramento in 2015.

Left: Bill Harris visits his wife, Nora, in September in Medford, Ore. Nora Harris, who had Alzheimer’s disease, died in October at 64.

DENISE BARATTA/MEDFORD MAIL TRIBUNE/AP

patients must be diagnosed with a terminal illness, have a prognosis of six or fewer months to live, and self-ingest the drug. The vast majority — more than 70 percent, according to the Oregon Health Authority — have cancer; most others have either heart disease or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Washington state, Vermont, California, Colorado and the District of Columbia have passed laws modeled on Oregon’s.

Rep. Mitch Greenlick (D),

chairman of Oregon’s House Committee on Health Care, began looking into expanding the state’s Death With Dignity Act a few years ago, when a well-known 78-year-old lobbyist in the capital, Salem, fatally shot himself in the head after learning that he had Alzheimer’s.

His 2015 attempt to expand the terminally ill window from six months to a year failed. Next year he plans to float another bill that would open up the state’s Death With Dignity law to dementia patients by doing away with all stipulations about terminal time limits.

Some of the efforts have faced opposition from an unlikely adversary: the national right-to-die movement. In particular, groups such as Compassion & Choices, the nation’s largest right-to-die organization, and the Death With Dignity National Center, a main author of the original law, have little appetite for widening access to lethal drugs in states where medically assisted suicide is legal.

Such meddling, they fear, could give ammunition to critics and frustrate their efforts to bring the narrowly defined statute to as many states as possible.

But it’s not all about tactics.

“It’s really important that the person is the decider of how they die,” said Kim Callinan, chief program officer for Compassion & Choices. “And for that reason we would not expand the eligibility criteria for medical aid in dying for somebody, for example, who has advanced dementia. Because when a person has advanced dementia, they’re no longer able to speak for themselves.”

Yelle is working with state Sen. Arnie Roblan (D) to advocate an expansion of Oregon’s Death With Dignity law to include sufferers of not only Parkinson’s, but also Alzheimer’s, dementia, multiple sclerosis, and any “incurable condition that will result in unbearable physical or mental pain.”

“It’s a conversation I think we need to have, and I think Oregon is a place where that can happen,” Roblan said. n ©The Washington Post

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NATION

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Arming teachers? Some already are.

J OE H EIM Riverside, Ohio BY

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he safes were installed last summer. Thirty-two in all.

Spread out among the four elementary schools, the two middle schools, the high school and the administration building of the Mad River Local Schools district here on the outskirts of Dayton.

On Aug. 14, the first day of school for the district’s 3,900 students, each safe contained the centerpiece of the district’s new security plan: a semiautomatic pistol and a removable magazine loaded with bullets.

The guns are not there for law enforcement. There are no armed security guards at the schools. The weapons, paid for with money from the district’s operating budget, are for teachers and staffers who have volunteered and trained to be part of the school’s response team if a shooter enters a building.

Each team member has access to a safe that can be reached quickly in case the unthinkable happens.

Chad Wyen, the district’s softspoken, 42-year-old superintendent, thinks about the unthinkable often. He has twin daughters in Mad River schools. To Wyen, arming staffers and teachers will make all the students in the district safer.

“A bad guy is going to do whatever he wants in that building until someone either addresses him, or he runs out of ammunition, or he shoots and kills himself,” Wyen said in an interview in his office. “Otherwise, you are literally a sitting duck in a school if you are not able to respond. And I’m not willing to do that. I’m not willing to put our kids at risk.”

In 10 states, schools allow teachers and staff members to be armed, with administrators’ permission. After the shooting that took 17 lives at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida last month, pressure is increasing to expand that approach.

The White House has said it would establish a Federal Commission on School Safety chaired

by Education Secretary Betsy De-

LUKE SHARRETT FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

As pressure mounts to train more educators, 10 states have long-allowed local boards to act Vos and will begin working with states to provide “rigorous firearms training” to some schoolteachers.

President Trump and the National Rifle Association have been clear: Make schools fortresses.

Employ every deterrence. Fight fire with fire. Arm teachers.

But gun-control proponents and teachers unions have also been clear: Raise the age to buy guns. Expand mental health access. Ban assault-style weapons.

Don’t make teachers do double duty as volunteer security guards.

The debate over arming teachers is now percolating nationally, but it has been stirring in school districts across Ohio for the past five years. It began soon after the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut that left 26 students and educators dead. A number of Ohio districts, particularly those in more rural areas, worried that their schools were vulnerable and began arming staff members and training them to respond to a

shooter.

“Ohio is really ground zero for this,” said Kate Way, an educator and co-producer of the documentary “G Is for Gun: The Arming of Teachers in America,” which airs this month on public television in Ohio. “My sense after following this for three years is that the move to arm teachers is growing like wildfire here.”

Wyen did not sugarcoat the potential dangers for teachers and staffers in his district who wanted to take part.

“We told them, you have to understand that if you choose to do this, you’re putting your life at risk, and you have to be comfortable with that,” he said. They do not get extra pay.

From his staff of 460 systemwide, 50 volunteered to take part.

All had experience with guns and possessed concealed-weapons licenses. Each was interviewed several times. Why do you want to do this, they were asked. Can you move toward a threat? If a suspect is a student, can you shoot to stop

Firearms instructor Joe Eaton is seen at Premier Shooting and Training Center in West Chester Township, Ohio. “If someone is murdering people in your school,” he tells the teachers he trains, “you kill them as soon as possible and stop the killing.”

him from hurting others?

Wyen selected 32 teachers and staff members for his team. Their identities are known only to Wyen and law enforcement. Their anonymity is part of the district’s security strategy. The only sign to outsiders of their existence is one that greets visitors at every entrance to Mad River schools: “WARNING: Inside this building our children are protected by an armed and trained response team.”

Jade Deis, a freshman at the district’s high school, said she feels safer knowing that teachers are armed. “What’s a stapler going to do against a gun?” she asked.

For Deis and her friends, the new program hasn’t been the subject of much discussion.

But some parents, students and teachers are concerned that having guns in school makes it more likely that an accidental shooting — or worse — could occur.

“It’s good that they want to protect us, but what if a teacher just pops off? Anyone can go crazy, and then they have the gun right there,” said Jalen Yarbrough, a freshman. “Or let’s say a kid gets rowdy. The teacher could say, ‘I feared for my life and I shot him.’ ” In Ohio, the decision on whether to arm teachers is made by school districts, and they are not required to make that information public, so there are no figures on how many of the state’s 610 districts have armed teachers.

One of the first Ohio districts to arm its teachers was Sidney, a rural community less than an hour north of Dayton. The training is extensive and participants are carefully selected, said Superintendent John Scheu, who launched the program five years ago.

“This is not just giving someone a gun. It’s not a hobby. It’s a serious, serious thing,” said a Sidney teacher who participates in the program and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the school’s security protocol. “I love to train for it, and I never, ever want to use that training. If your mentality is to be the cowboy, you don’t belong in this program.” n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, MARCH 18, 2018

A sign last month still called customers to Eddie’s Steak Shed, now renamed simply the Shed.

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‘E v eryon e i s fo rgettin g who he is’

BY ROBERT SAMUELS in Granger, Ind.

T

he goofy red sign off State Road 23 still says “Eddie’s Steak Shed,” just as it always has. The thank-you plaques for sponsoring the county Little League are still in the front entrance, alongside 15 years’ worth of stickers honoring the steaks as the area’s best.

But farther inside, most everything has changed in the year since the old owner was detained, then deported, as part of a crackdown on undocumented immigrants by a tough-talking new president.

Roberto Beristain, a former dishwasher who worked until he could afford to buy the place, is gone. In his place are refurbished wood-paneled walls, a bar with a granite counter and a new pork chop entree. Even the name is something snappier, sleeker — Eddie’s is now simply the Shed.

“I love what you did to the place!” Heather Pepper, 47, exclaimed to the bartender on a recent night. “It looks so updated, and it still feels local.”

As soon as he was detained, Beristain became a cause. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and immigration activists held him up as an example of what they said were exceedingly cruel new actions by President Trump. They said his aggressive efforts would ensnare good people, rip apart families and lead vengeful communities to exact their furor at the ballot box — the same points Democrats have used to argue against deporting hundreds of thousands of “dreamers” and other endangered immigrants.

In Granger, though, there are few signs of lingering resentment. The calls threatening the restaurant stopped long ago, as did the ones in support of Beristain. A local businesscontinues on next page

ALYSSA SCHUKAR FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

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COVER STORY

from previous page

man bought Eddie’s and gave it a new name and a new look. Beristain is now in Mexico, desperate to return.

Few customers in this mostly white, conservative suburb outside South Bend had known that Beristain, 44, was an undocumented Mexican immigrant. He had paid taxes, started a family and employed 20 people. His family says his only crime was living in the country illegally.

“I felt bad for the people in the situation, but the law is the law, no matter how inconvenient,” said Mike Probst, 61, who owns a business selling boxes. “The world was focused on little Granger for a little bit, but the mood in the community is that we had to move on. Everyone has to move on.”

In July, Beristain’s wife, Helen, and their three young children also moved on, leaving Granger to join him in Mexico. “If we are not together, what kind of family is that?” she said in a phone interview. In the municipality of Zamora de Hidalgo, the couple started a small pancake house to offset the lawyer fees. Their children take classes online because their parents fear they’d be bullied as Americans attending school in Mexico.

At the Shed, talk of the Beristains has been narrowed to quiet corners, where employees were unwilling to share their full names, fearing more threatening calls and comments like the ones that came in a year ago.

One of two women on staff named Jackie recalled how Beristain was such a clean cook that he could stand over the grill in his white uniform and not get stained.

Another wondered why so many Latinos were getting deported. “With Trump in office,” she said, “sometimes it just feels like if you’re white, you’re right.”

Cindy bragged about taking a picture with Anderson Cooper, who came to visit for an episode of “60 Minutes.” She hoped that the president, the courts, someone, would grant leniency for Beristain. Zach insisted that there had to be more to the case. “If you do right, then you wouldn’t have a problem,” he said.

The other Jackie was offended by the idea that Beristain’s record was anything but as clean as his kitchen.

“Everyone,” she said, “is forgetting who he is.”

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eristain had owned the restaurant only a few months. He bought it in January 2017 from his wife’s sister and her husband, who wanted to retire after decades of running and selling restaurants in the Midwest.

They had hired Roberto at another restaurant in 2000. He was an industrious dishwasher who worked his way up to head cook, and into Helen’s heart.

“We loved Roberto from the moment we met him,” said his sister-in-law, Effie Limberopoulos, who is 58. “Always smiling, he was always smiling.”

The immigration trouble started in 2000,

PHOTOS BY ALYSSA SCHUKAR FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

when the couple made a wrong turn on the way to Niagara Falls and ended up at a border crossing, according to their attorney, Adam Ansari. Agents discovered that Roberto had no passport, green card or ID, and a judge ordered him to return to Mexico by the end of the year.

But Roberto never left. Helen was expecting their first child, and doctors deemed hers a “high-risk pregnancy.” He didn’t want to leave his wife alone. Then, Maria was born, and they couldn’t imagine raising her in Mexico. Then they bought the family business. They wanted to stay in Indiana.

“I didn’t even see Roberto as Mexican,” said Angela Banfi, a friend and waitress at the restaurant. “He was not one of those Mexicans.

He was like a white boy to me.”

For customers, Eddie’s became the go-to place for an easy breakfast or a good meal.

Granger was growing. Subdivisions were popping up farther south. The Olive Gardens and TGI Fridays of the world were encroaching on the area, but Eddie’s stayed the same. Same old wood panels, same flooring, same waitresses who knew your order and your name and the same chef who would invite you to his wedding.

“It was a steak place, but you felt like it was more of a home,” said Chuck Matheny, 61, a systems engineer who ate at Eddie’s three times a week.

Conversations were usually light and frivolous, he said, until 2016, when customers became captivated by Donald Trump. Matheny and Helen, both Republicans, reaffirmed

each other’s support for the GOP nominee.

Helen’s husband was less sanguine: Trump, he said, would kick out all of the Mexicans.

“Only the bad ones,” Matheny recalled insisting.

“We need to do something to help end prejudice,” Matheny says now. “If there are so many illegal people in the country, then it gives license to believe every immigrant is illegal.”

Matheny knew Roberto was trying to get his green card through his marriage to Helen, a Greek immigrant who moved to the country illegally in the 1970s and has since become a citizen.

What he didn’t know was that Roberto had retained an immigration lawyer in Miami and traveled there to check in with him and Immigration and Customs Enforcement each year. During the Obama administration, his attorney said, authorities deferred action and authorized a driver’s license and a work permit for him.

Less than a month into the new administration, the Beristains drove to Miami, and agents suggested he go to his regional office in Indianapolis instead. They traveled back to Indiana to visit the ICE office. Roberto went inside; Helen waited in the car.

After 45 minutes, an officer told Helen her husband was not leaving the premises.

Banfi was at Eddie’s when she received the text.

“Detained?” Banfi recalled. “I had the worst anxiety in the frickin’ world. I loved Roberto.

He was my family. This couldn’t be right.”

Banfi was so distraught she called Matheny.

A waitress prepares for the first customers of the day last month at the Shed, in Granger, Ind., which reopened in December after its old owner was deported. It remains a popular spot for locals, but the incident was divisive for the area and the restaurant at the time.

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COVER STORY

ALYSSA SCHUKAR FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Boys play basketball last month in Granger. Roberto Beristain, who worked his way up from a dishwasher to owner of Eddie’s Steak Shed, was deported to Mexico.

His family has since moved to be with him and the restaurant sold and renamed.

“It changed my view on how the country treats its immigrants,” he said. “I thought they would go after, like Trump said, those who were bringing in drugs and the rapists. But they went after a regular guy who just cared about living the American Dream.”

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he calls started coming in from the local television stations and then from around the nation. A lawyer took up their case. A letter-writing campaign soon commenced to the mayor of South Bend — the city next door — and to Trump.

The phones at Eddie’s wouldn’t stop ringing, though most callers were liberals who rang to berate Helen for voting for Trump.

Guests dropped off everything from rosary beads to checks, but fewer were sitting down for a meal. The national political conversation had swallowed up the humble restaurant, and diners started to stay away.

This past summer, Helen decided she had no choice but to sell. The employees would be able to stay, but she was leaving to be with her husband.

“I liked the business, I bought the business, and I fixed it,” said Tom Samoilis, the new owner. “I’m not here to solve problems with Trump, or with Obama. . . . I’m here to update a restaurant the community loves.”

Limberopoulos is eager for her sister’s return. Walking through the supermarket, she ran into an old friend, who asked how her brother-in-law was doing.

“It’s a very slow process,” she responded as she shopped with her daughter. “But we can never

lose faith, or hope. Because then we have lost the feeling, the feeling that things can get better in this country. There’s a lot going on in this country, but we have to handle problems one by one, thinking about people.”

Underneath that hope, though, the family said the experience revealed an ugliness in America they did not know existed. “Your father is a criminal!” is how children at school teased Helen and Roberto’s daughter. Roberto’s wife and her sister had both moved to the United States illegally from Greece, but they believed that their ambition led to their amnesty. They couldn’t imagine that would no longer be the case.

“Seven jails,” Limberopoulos’s daughter, Kathy Anagnos, 39, said. “They put him in seven different jails and then deported him and left him with nothing.

“Sometimes, you think about it, and you get a little depressed again,” she added.

“We have to think about it,” her mother replied. “Because it’s not just our family; it’s going to be millions of families who are affected by it. If we don’t think about it, nothing will change.”

T

he customers were slowly returning to the Shed, where Heather Pepper and her husband, Todd, waited for the steak for two on a February night.

Heather, a nurse, and Todd, a medical technician, wondered about the balance between subsidized health care and personal responsibility.

Barely a mile up the road, the fire station was hosting a pill drop-off to help fight the opioid

KLMNO WEEKLY

crisis.

And on television, they watched high school students in Florida, just a little younger than their own children, push for gun control after, police say, a former classmate went to school and killed 17 of their friends and teachers.

The Peppers didn’t want the government taking away their guns, nor did they want to pay for the health care of those who aren’t trying to stay healthy. Those ideas were simple. Illegal immigration, both said, was much trickier.

“The bad ones definitely should go,” Heather said. “But we have so many good ones. Look at all those kids, the dreamers. Who knows what to do with them?”

Todd tried to distance the conversation from people they knew — it was too difficult when they made it about Roberto, or anyone else in their community.

“Let’s imagine there’s a boat and it’s sinking,” he said. “And there are nine people on the boat, but there are three other people who are drowning in the water. You can’t save everyone. . . .”

“But what if those people in the water are doctors, lawyers or teachers?” Heather said.

“Maybe it’s some of the people on the boat who should make room.”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“This boat stuff is too sad,” the man next to them said. “Now I’m depressed.”

The next day, Banfi tied her hair into a ponytail, put on a black uniform and headed for work.

She jumped into her car and drove along State Road 23 to the Shed — and kept driving.

She had taken a new job in a restaurant a quarter-mile down the street.

She couldn’t bring herself to go back to a place that meant so much to Roberto and his family. Still, she wasn’t sure of the reason or whom to blame for his exile.

“They say it’s Trump, but I don’t know if it’s Trump,” Banfi said. “All I know is, I want them back home.”

That day, she worked a double shift at Beef O’Brady’s, where families were starting to pile in for trivia night. In the evening, as the host pitched questions about which country invented the bobsled and what state is the birthplace of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Banfi walked to the soda fountain and filled a red glass with iced tea.

It belonged to Matheny, one of the regulars at Eddie’s. He couldn’t bring himself to go back either. But his fury over Trump’s decision has subsided. Immigration, he said, is more of a theoretical issue, and he believes the government will one day allow Roberto to return.

What he sees around him each day is a stronger country.

“The truth is, we are focused on a lot of the bad in this country, but a lot of things are going great,” Matheny said. “No one wants to admit the economy is better, but it’s better. My taxes are down. Roberto is gone, but there’s reason to be optimistic. I prefer to be optimistic.” n © The Washington Post

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TRAVEL

Shipping pets is complicated, costly BY

M ARTINE P OWERS

W

hen Andrew Bakalar embarked on a recent 10-day business trip to Paris, he left his beloved pooches, Jujee and Elsa Rose, in the hands of a trusted dog-sitter.

But when his trip was unavoidably extended for an additional two months, he decided to send for them to join him.

His plan: Have the dog-sitter ship the pair as cargo from Dulles International Airport to France.

The dogs, a schnauzer and a terrier, are small. It couldn’t be that hard, he thought.

The saga that ensued involved absurdist twists and turns that can be described only as Kafkaesque.

But as the bureaucratic hoops, logistical complexities and costs piled up, Bakalar had an uncharacteristically unprincipled thought: He should have just lied and passed them off as emotionalsupport animals, which would have allowed them to travel in the cabin with the dog-sitter.

“It might have been cheaper, frankly, to tell the dog-sitter, ‘You’re coming to Paris for two days, on me,’ ” said Bakalar, 54, of Silver Spring, Md. The entire process cost him about $2,000.

The world of pet transportation has changed dramatically in recent years. With the advent of emotional-support animals — in some cases with questionable or no certification — pet owners have attempted to board planes with everything from the typical dog and cat to rodents and more-exotic pets, including peacocks, spiders and snakes.

Backlash from other passengers has prompted crackdowns.

Delta Air Lines this month began requiring advance documentation that certifies the owner’s need and the animal’s training before allowing an emotional-support animal to ride in the cabin. United Airlines also recently changed its policy and will require documents confirming that an emotionalsupport animal is healthy and has been trained for public settings.

The new rules are meant to

UNITED AIRLINES

Transporting animals through the proper channels can be stressful for owners, too discourage people who try to pass off their regular pets as support animals, which are intended to provide comfort to their owners but do not require special training like guide dogs or other service animals.

But for those who choose to follow the rules, shipping an animal can be logistically complex and emotionally harrowing, not to mention the exorbitant cost.

According to the International Pet and Animal Transportation Association, a global network of more than 420 companies that help coordinate animal shipments, at least 2 million pets are transported by air annually within the United States, with another 2 million transported in other parts of the world.

And the web of regulations, requirements and fees, enforced by the government or the airlines themselves, is nearly inscrutable.

With American Airlines, United and Delta Cargo, passengers’ ability to ship their pets can depend on factors as wide-ranging as species and breed, weight, age, snout shape, weather and temperature at the departure and destination airports, the arrival nation’s cus-

toms policies, length of the flight, and the make and model of the aircraft.

Once the air carrier accepts a pet as cargo, the next steps are . . . complicated.

Typically, owners must obtain a health certificate for their pet within 10 days of the travel date.

They also need certification of a rabies vaccination and, in some cases, a “certificate of acclimation” to travel in cold weather.

Some destinations require a letter requesting “direct airport release” if someone other than the owner will pick up the animal.

The animal’s crate must meet standards set by the Agriculture Department and the International Air Transport Association, or IATA. (Many of the crates sold in pet stores do not.) Some carriers require pet travel to be booked through a third-party company — you can see the fees racking up here — which helps ensure all requirements are met before the animal arrives at the airport.

Things get even more complicated for international travel or flights to Hawaii. There could be a pet import form, which must be notarized. The animal may need to

United has a pet facility at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. While airlines take more steps to aid pet owners, shipping an animal as cargo can involve a lot of steps and paperwork, requiring preflight quarantines in some instances.

be quarantined before the flight — for example, up to 120 days for Hawaii — at the owner’s expense.

The animal may require a microchip, with documents proving that the microchip was implanted before the date of the most recent rabies vaccination.

In most cases of international travel, the animal’s health certification must be conducted by a veterinarian approved by the USDA, and the certificate must then be delivered by mail or in person to one of several USDA offices to be endorsed, stamped and returned to the pet owner (at a cost of somewhere between $100 and $200). That’s in addition to the health certificate issued upon arrival, which may require hiring an approved veterinarian to come to an overseas airport to conduct an inspection once the animal is removed from the plane.

The price for each of these steps can be anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand.

“It’s very cumbersome and bureaucratic,” said Andrea Gruber, head of special cargo for the IATA, which works with government agencies, air carriers and veterinarians to annually update international standards for pet travel.

“It requires good communication, proper documentation and a lot of preparation.”

Then there are the unexpected steps. For example, as Bakalar orchestrated his dogs’ journey from Dulles to Paris, there were calls to five airlines, fits and starts with several third-party pet transportation consultants, and an emergency trip to the USDA’s satellite office in Richmond, because the agency’s Washington headquarters doesn’t deal with pet travel certification.

At one point, Bakalar had to ship a microchip scanner to travel with the dogs to Paris, only to realize that the batteries to operate the machine wouldn’t be allowed on the plane.

“There’s got to be a way to reduce the red tape here,” said Bakalar, adding that Congress or the Federal Aviation Administration should take steps to reduce the bureaucracy.

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TRENDS

©The Washington Post

WEEKLY

In battle for women’s soles, high heels are falling flat BY

A BHA B HATTARAI

A

37% Increase in sales of women’s sneakers last year. Sales of high heels dropped 12 percent.

manda Powers hasn’t worn high heels in years: Not to work, not to parties, not even to her own wedding.

“They’re not comfortable,” she said. “They’re not fun to wear. Not to mention, I walk fast and they slow me down.”

Around the country, women are trading in their high-heeled stilettos for sneakers and ballet flats.

Workplaces are becoming more casual, and it is increasingly acceptable to wear sneakers to dinner. But analysts say there are other changes afoot, too: More Americans are working from home, and those who do go into the office are more often walking to work. (In Washington, for example, 14 percent of residents now commute by foot, up from 12 percent in 2012, according to census data.) Fitness trackers like Fitbit have also made people more aware of how much they are — or should be — moving.

“Even after we get to work, we’re trying not to sit at our desks all day,” said Katie Smith, director of retail analysis at Edited. “We stand. We take the stairs. We walk to lunch.

We’re constantly counting our steps, so it makes sense to wear

comfortable footwear and clothing.”

Sales of high heels dropped 12 percent last year, while sales of women’s sneakers rose 37 percent, to $2.3 billion, according to the NPD Group’s retail tracking service.

The sales decline wasn’t for lack of options: High-heel inventory rose 28 percent from the year before, according to Edited, a London-based retail technology company. And the sagging sales didn’t have much to do with price: About one-third of high heels had been discounted by an average of 47 percent.

“This is not a burn-your-heels moment — the majority of women still have heels in their wardrobes,” Smith said. “But there isn’t an expectation anymore that if I go to a party, I have to put on my spiky heels, stand for two hours and then want to die. Social mores are changing.”

It doesn’t hurt that flats — which are popping up on runways and the red carpet — are having a pop-culture moment, either. Marc Jacobs’s latest fashion show featured models in silk lace-up brogues and crystal-embellished ballet flats, and actress Gal Gadot wore gladiator sandals to the “Wonder Woman” premiere. Even first lady Melania Trump, known for her love of high-end high heels

by Christian Louboutin and Manolo Blahnik, traded in her stilettos for a pair of white sneakers last year for a trip to Texas after Hurricane Harvey.

Tech companies are also taking note: A ballet-flat emoji is slated to make its debut later this year.

“Across the board, there’s an increasing casualization of every MIMIBUBU/GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCK

It’s no wonder that people are tempted to skirt the rules and simply ask a therapist to declare their pet an emotional-support animal.

“The restrictions that we have for animals as cargo — they don’t apply to service animals, so people have found it to be easier to go with the ‘emotional support’ or ‘service’ route,” said Derek Huntington, president of the International Pet and Animal Transportation Association. “It’s an unfortunate situation, and we’d like to see it change.”

And then there are the horror stories. Animals that die of the stress inside the cargo hold of the plane, or succumb to hyperthermia in warehouses or trucks waiting to be loaded on board. Pets that arrive alive at their destination but emerge traumatized.

“It’s a definite fear that people do have, but it really is a lack of awareness and understanding,” Huntington said. “Animals unfortunately do die in cargo sometimes, but the number is extremely low compared to the number of animals being shipped successfully. And we take every possible precaution to ensure that animals arrive safely.”

Even when pets are in the cabin, problems can arise. This past week, a puppy died after a flight attendant reportedly demanded that it be put in an overhead bin for the duration of a three-hour United Airlines flight. The airline said it will “assume full responsibility” for what happened.

Some airlines have sought to capitalize on the market for safe pet transportation options, extolling the professionally trained animal handlers stationed at the airport, staff veterinarians and special air-conditioned vehicles that carry the animals from the warehouse to the airplane.

But the most stressed-out creatures might be the owners themselves.

Tekin Yilmaz, 27, of Toronto described the excitement and dread as his beloved golden-retriever cocker-spaniel mix, Theo, traveled from Beirut to Qatar, and then to Montreal — a 35-hour trip that cost about $1,500.

“I didn’t want to think about what could happen during the trip,” said Yilmaz, 27, who traveled to Canada from Lebanon as a refugee. “But I had to risk it. He’s my family, and I have to reunite with my family.”

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occasion, including at work,” Smith said. “We’re dressing in jeans and sneakers. We’re dressing for comfort and function.”

Recent surveys show that women are buying more athletic shoes and sandals than they are dress shoes or fashion boots, according to market research firm Mintel.

Nearly half of those surveyed said they are willing to pay more for shoes that are comfortable.

High-heel makers, many of which had their heyday in the “Sex and the City” era of the early 2000s, have weathered a wave of consolidation in recent years. Michael Kors last year paid $1.2 billion to buy Jimmy Choo, the upscale shoe company. Two years earlier, Coach bought Stuart Weitzman for $574 million.

“People are multitasking more these days — they’re going from yoga class to work, then from happy hour to pick up their kids, and they don’t want to change into four different outfits,” said Alexis DeSalva, retail and apparel analyst at Mintel. “Flat shoes have become a staple in multipurpose dressing.”

Nike recently announced a new retail concept called Unlaced that will specialize in women’s sneakers. The company is also expanding its lineup of women’s sizes and earlier this year released its first collection of sneakers designed entirely by a team of 14 women.

There are also signs that Crocs, Tevas, Uggs and Birkenstocks — all known for being comfortable, if less than attractive — are making a comeback.

As for Powers, a marketing director in Los Angeles, she now has just one pair of heels — “very modest” black pumps — left in her closet. She’s given away the rest and has instead stocked up on the shoes she actually likes to wear: a dozen pairs of sneakers and at least 25 pairs of flats.

“I am never going back,” she said. “As soon as I stopped wearing high heels, it was a taste of sweet freedom.” n © The Washington Post

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

A fragile tale, handled with care

A grim tour of the tomes of tyrants

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

A

l

REVIEWED BY

A NNA M UNDOW

minatta Forna’s exquisite 2013 novel “The Hired Man” opened with a hunter on a Croatian hillside training his sights on a stranger’s car. The silence of early morning, the stillness of the watcher, both were palpable on the page, and a similarly arresting scene draws us into Forna’s novel “Happiness”: “Spring snow, still, porcelain bowls in the hollows of the earth.

Blue hour, the outlines of pine trees and houses stood against a deepening sky. The wolfer gazed upon the lights of the town.”

In Massachusetts in 1834, a journeyman hunter is hired to kill a marauding wolf, and the small drama that ensues is a marvel of compression. In just seven pages, Forna evokes a distant time, a timeless land, a stalker and his prey.

Killing done, the prologue closes, but its force seems to echo — this is one of Forna’s mysterious skills — as the narrative shifts to London in 2014: “People walked unswervingly, armed with bags, defended by earphones, looking neither to right nor left.” A fox weaves its way through this rushhour crowd. Attila, a psychiatrist from Ghana, visiting for a conference, pauses on Waterloo Bridge, causing a runner to collide with him. The woman apologizes and continues on. A few hours earlier, just a few miles away, a nursing home worker wheels his patients outside. “By 10.30, eight old folks were parked against the brickwork. . . . Eyes closed as if with the reverence of prayer, faces turned to the sun, they might have been believers awaiting the appearance of their god.” The aide will be fired.

In these few scenes, Forna sets her key characters in motion, connecting them first by chance and ultimately by love. The novel’s title is “Happiness,” after all. But Forna is too subtle and knowing a writer to create a straightforward, let alone inspirational, narrative. The action here may revolve around Attila’s search in London for a

relative’s runaway child — a pleasingly simple mystery — but the novel has a wider orbit.

Traveling elliptically between past and present, it crosses continents and weaves together lives that intersect years later in London over the course of just 10 days.

Each intermittent episode seems to materialize as memories do, with sharp and fragile immediacy.

In the war zones of Bosnia, Sierra Leone and Iraq, Attila works as a trauma specialist and hostage negotiator. Again and again, dread saturates the page. “At the Massiaka checkpoint,” she writes, “a man was sitting on a huge boulder at the side of the road. He was dressed in combat trousers, boots and a black T-shirt, an automatic weapon lay across his knee, he was surrounded by henchmen.” The gunman is one of Attila’s former patients, and the checkpoint is “a door between worlds, where a great many people disappeared.”

Nine years later, in the London nursing home, Attila watches his first love fade into dementia: “Rosie stared at her hand in Attila’s, as though she had never seen such a sight, was making of it what she could.” Yet even here — particularly here — Forna’s plain descriptions have the force of revelation. After a dance in the day room, for example, the nurses applaud, joined by “several of the residents who raised their trembling hands and with great concentration put them slowly, soundlessly together.”

Throughout “Happiness,” Forna stops us in our tracks this way, with the emotional weight of an image or the seductive rhythm of a sentence.

“Happiness” is a meditation on grand themes: Love and death, man and nature, cruelty and mercy. But Forna folds this weighty matter into her buoyant creation with a sublimely delicate touch. n Mundow is a freelance journalist and reviewer in Central Massachusetts. This was written for The Washington Post.

I HAPPINESS

By Aminatta Forna Atlantic Monthly. 312 pp. $26

THE INFERNAL LIBRARY On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy

By Daniel Kalder Henry Holt. 400 pp. $32

l

REVIEWED BY

E RNEST H ILBERT

magine a vast library, its interminable stacks groaning with unread books. Its dusty aisles are haunted by long departed authors who once wielded unimaginable power, now doomed to wander among their forgotten words.

This is not a tale told by Jorge Luis Borges. Far from it, as we learn when Daniel Kalder takes us on a tour of what he calls “The Infernal Library”: books written by (or ghostwritten for) tyrants of the past century (and a few from our current century). These are tomes once forced upon subject populations, printed in vast numbers for no existing markets, resulting in what Kalder terms the “genre of dictator literature,” much of it “aggressively dry, theoretical prose” designed to “distort reality.”

Kalder begins with famous 20th-century dictators, all published authors, though of very different kinds and for different reasons. Lenin introduced a “vision of the text as warfare” with his “awesomely belligerent” style.

Pamphlets such as “The Liquidation of the Liquidationists” posed as theories of political action while paving the way for manmade catastrophes. While still a bookish teenager, Stalin published a nature poem in a textbook that remained in print until the 1960s, while adopting his familiar nickname, “Koba,” from a Robin Hood-style character in a potboiler. Yet given the “Bolshevik reverence for the word,” Kalder notes, one only rose in the party ranks through an appreciation of theory and production of further theory, which in Stalin’s case came in the form of “The National Question and Social Democracy,” his literary breakthrough. While Lenin dispatched his opponents in a few paragraphs, Stalin opted for “a ruthless stockpiling of citations, a plodding, relentless, great heaping up of rhetoric.” Unfortunately, Kalder reminds us, such theories required “massive violence” to be

put into practice.

Mussolini, never beholden to any one philosophy for long, was free to foretell his bloody fate in a variety of genres. Kalder concedes that the prolific Il Duce is at “times highly readable.” A selfstyled man of action, Mussolini nonetheless marched himself through Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel before writing a novel called “The Cardinal’s Mistress,” filled with “lurid fantasies of rape and revenge,” including “the beating of a horse out of sexual frustration,” a far cry from “the sterile, bodiless world of Bolshevik prose.”

Adolf Hitler is the father of what is probably the most famous and dangerous of all dictators’ books, “Mein Kampf,” which not only remains in print but continues to find avid readers, enjoying “a genuine popularity far in excess of any text written by any of his dictatorial peers.” Kalder takes pains to show that the Fuhrer was not really much of a writer, despite being “a keen reader” with around 16,000 books in his library by the end. On the contrary, Hitler saw himself as a great orator. It is likely he started “Mein Kampf” while in Landsberg Prison because he was not free to work the crowds. The book, in which he transformed himself into “a Teutonic super-warrior,” is a rambling, incoherent mess, nothing like the methodical theories of the communists. It did not matter.

Kalder goes on to tell of books by a grotesque cast of dictators. In all, this is a mesmerizing study of books by despots great and small, from the familiar to the largely unknown. Millions of books came off the presses. Then millions of people went to their graves.

These volumes can be as laughable as they are frightening. We do well to study their legacies, even if we never turn their pages. n Hilbert is a poet and dealer in rare books. This was written for The Washington Post.

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Hawking embodied power of mind ALAN LIGHTMAN is a physicist, novelist, and professor of the practice of the humanities at MIT. This was written for The Washington Post.

Carl Sagan, Steve Jobs, James Watson, Jane Goodall, Stephen Hawking. There are more, but the list is short. Even though we live in the age of smartphones, GPS and gene therapy, celebrities in science are rarer than those in music, film, sports and politics.

Hawking, who passed away Wednesday after a 50-year battle with the motor neuron disease called ALS, became a cultural icon after he appeared on the cover of the New York Times magazine in the late 1980s and, shortly thereafter, published his bestselling “A Brief History of Time.”

Later, he appeared on “The Simpsons,” “Alien Planet,” “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” More recently, there was James Marsh’s 2014 film about Hawking, “The Theory of Everything.”

There’s no doubt Hawking’s severe physical disability figured into his celebrity status and impact on the public. Almost completely paralyzed, able to communicate in his last decades only through a computercontrolled voice, Hawking appears to us as a crumpled figure of a man, slumped in a wheelchair, gazing out at the dark night sky and fathoming its secrets — the ultimate image of mind over matter.

And he was that. Hawking worked in the study and application of Einstein’s theory of gravity. Einstein understood gravity as a geometrical phenomenon, as a bending of time and space. Hawking went further. Partly because of his physical difficulty in working with equations as most theoretical physicists do, Hawking developed graphical methods that let him visualize the physics of black holes, the paths of light rays in warped space, and the convulsions of the universe as a whole.

Hawking was one of the first people to apply quantum physics to black holes and predict that these bizarre objects, previously thought to voraciously swallow matter and energy in a one-way path to oblivion, could also expel matter and energy in a process that became known as “Hawking radiation.” His other greatest scientific achievement was in the field of cosmology. Working with

the brilliant British mathematician Roger Penrose, Hawking significantly strengthened the scientific conviction that our universe began in a “big bang” of ultrahigh compression some 14 billion years ago, in which all of the galaxies we see were compressed into a region smaller than a single atom. Previously, such conclusions were based on calculations that assumed highly idealized conditions, such as that the matter of the universe is smoothly spread out in all directions. Hawking and Penrose proved the big-bang hypothesis under much more realistic conditions and assumptions.

The details of this science are formidable, but Hawking was blessed with something else that helped make him accessible to millions: He was a wit. Even in his withered and paralyzed condition, he took pleasure in making jokes, and you glimpsed a slight impish grin pass over his face when he did so. In late 1974, he made a bet with physicist Kip Thorne that a newly discovered X-ray emitting star called Cygnus X-1 was not a black hole.

According to the bet, if Cygnus X-1 did indeed turn out to be a black hole, Hawking would reward Thorne with a subscription to a particular adult magazine. If

Hawking won the bet, Thorne would reward Hawking with a subscription to Private Eye magazine. Hawking later explained that the bet was a kind of insurance policy. If he lost (which he eventually did) and black holes were indeed proved real, then his life’s work would not have been in vain. If he won the bet and black holes were found to be only a theorist’s pipe dream, he would at least have several years of Private Eye as a consolation.

Hawking remained active to the end of his life. Despite the extreme difficulty of moving around with his wheelchair and life-support systems, Hawking regularly made international trips to attend conferences and give lectures. He continued to write books. He continued collaborating with students, postdoctoral fellows and other scientists, although some of the research slowed in his later years.

The passing of Stephen Hawking gives us the opportunity to celebrate the best in ourselves, to reaffirm the power of the human mind and the majesty of our desire to know and to understand this strange universe we find ourselves in. With so much brutish and divisive behavior in the world at the moment, it is good to remind ourselves of who we are. n

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SUNDAY, MARCH MARCH 2018 SUNDAY, 18, 18, 2018

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Gerrymandering BY

A RI B ERMAN

Gerrymandering — in which politicians manipulate electoral bound­ aries for partisan advantage — is emerging as a key issue in the mid­ term elections. The U.S. Supreme Court is weighing whether to out­ law gerrymandering and has three cases on its docket this year from Wisconsin, Maryland and Texas. Gerrymandering has gone from a wonky technical problem to a matter of great political intrigue. Yet there are many misperceptions about how the process works.

MYTH NO. 1 Partisan gerrymandering is an accepted part of U.S. politics.

This argument ignores that America was founded on the basis of fair representation.

Gerrymandering has been denounced as long as it’s been practiced. Moreover, today’s gerrymandering — because of sophisticated technology, increased political polarization and the clustering of partisans in like-minded areas — makes the map signed by Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry look quaint, according to a study by Nicholas Stephanopoulos of the University of Chicago and Eric McGhee of the Public Policy Institute of California. Simon Jackman of the University of Sydney analyzed 786 different state legislative plans between 1972 and 2014 and found that five of the 10 worst GOP gerrymanders had been passed since 2010.

MYTH NO. 2 Gerrymandering isn’t a factor in GOP dominance.

“Because liberals, young voters, minorities, and other members of the Democrats’ coalition tend to be concentrated in cities and/or placed into minority majority districts, this damaged their ability to win congressional districts,” wrote Sean Trende, the senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics.

Yet geography alone doesn’t explain Republican dominance in many states. Political geographers from Stanford and Carnegie Mellon found, for instance, that

there was “less than a one in one thousand chance” that the map passed by Wisconsin Republicans, which gave them 60 percent of the seats in the State Assembly, was based on where Democrats lived. “The partisan asymmetry in the existing map,” they wrote, “. . . was carefully and deliberately created, not a result of the natural clustering of voters in Wisconsin.”

The same was true in Pennsylvania, where University of Michigan political scientist Jowei Chen discovered “a small geographic advantage for the Republicans, but it does not come close to explaining the extreme 13-5 Republican advantage” in the state’s congressional delegation.

MYTH NO. 3 Gerrymandering doesn’t determine political outcomes.

Across the country, both parties have secured airtight majorities for multiple election cycles by controlling the redistricting process. In 2012, Republican legislative candidates received 48.6 percent of the vote in Wisconsin but won 60 percent of the seats in the State Assembly. In 2014, Democratic candidates received 57 percent of the vote in Maryland but won 88 percent of the state’s congressional seats.

MYTH NO. 4 Courts have historically left redistricting to states.

The courts that interpret the Constitution have long overseen the process of drawing district maps. In the 1930s and 1940s,

BETTMANN ARCHIVE

In 1812, Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry approved a contorted state Senate district that to some looked like a salamander. A political cartoon at the time immortalized it as the “Gerry-mander.”

legislative districts were wildly unequal in population; some had 900,000 people, others as few as 10,000. That gave certain voters a much bigger say than others in deciding who was elected. At first, the Supreme Court refused to touch the issue. But in 1962, Justice William Brennan wrote for the majority in Baker v. Carr that “judicial standards under the Equal Protection Clause are well developed and familiar, and it has been open to courts since the enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment.” That led to the “one person, one vote” cases of the 1960s, which mandated that districts be roughly equal in population and, as a consequence, more fair. The Supreme Court has the same power to strike down partisan gerrymandering today.

MYTH NO. 5 There are no standards for gerrymandering.

Political scientists have

developed some concrete tests to measure partisan gerrymandering, such as the number of “wasted” votes for a party (as when Democrats are submerged in a deeply Republican district) or when a party receives far more seats than its share of votes. At the Wisconsin argument, Justice Stephen G. Breyer laid out a workable standard for the court: Were the maps drawn by one party? Do they unfairly benefit one party over the other? Does that partisan advantage last over a series of election cycles? And, if so, was there any good reason for the map other than achieving partisan control? “I suspect that’s manageable,” he said. n Berman is a senior reporter at Mother Jones, a reporting fellow at the Nation Institute and the author of “Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America.” This was written for The Washington Post.

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