The Washington Post National Weekly - April 1, 2018

SUNDAY, APRIL 1, 2018

. IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY

He ‘is my anxiety medication’ Some see ‘psychiatric service’ dogs as saviors, but their use faces scrutiny.

2 SUNDAY, APRIL 1, 2018

3 SUNDAY, APRIL 1, 2018

KLMNO WEEKLY

HISTORY

When Clemente honored King BY

K EVIN B . B LACKISTONE

I

n the shock wave that followed the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. being killed by an assassin’s bullet, Roberto Clemente and his Pittsburgh Pirates teammates found themselves in Houston for baseball’s Opening Day. They were scheduled to play the Astros on April 8, 1968, four days after King was slain and one day before he was to be buried.

A few teams across the country postponed games because their stadiums were in the midst of urban rebellions sparked by King’s assassination. Others planned to play on.

Baseball Commissioner William Eckert told each club to do what it thought best.

As one of the first Latin major leaguers who couldn’t hide his blackness — and didn’t want to — Clemente decided what was proper for him.

“Roberto was more than a ballplayer,” said Luis Mayoral, a longtime mentor for Latin players in the big leagues. “Before becoming a pro, he seriously considered attending the University of Puerto Rico. He had intellect.

The man I knew was aware of the social cancer affecting Puerto Rico . . . many of them based on race.”

So while the neighborhoods around the Astrodome did not erupt, Clemente told his teammates he wouldn’t play.

Clemente had become an admirer of King after meeting him following a speech during one of King’s few visits to Puerto Rico. Afterward, King met Clemente at the ballplayer’s farm, Mayoral said, “. . . in the outskirts of [Clemente’s] home town, Carolina.”

Mayoral didn’t remember what Clemente told him he discussed with King, but one spring training years later, Mayoral said Clemente told him, “Martin Luther King is a man I admired for many years. I know what he stood

KLMNO WEEKLY

for. I liked the ways he went about his business, muy tranquilo [very calm], and I always thought that his accomplishments would not only benefit the USA but the world.”

In “Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero,” former Washington Post writer David Maraniss quoted Clemente’s feelings about King further: “[King] put the people, the ghetto people, the people

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Roberto Clemente helped force Major League Baseball to delay Opening Day in 1968 after the death of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

who didn’t have nothing to say in those days, they started saying what they would have liked to say for many years that nobody listened to. Now with this man, these people come down to the place where they were supposed to be but people didn’t want them, and sit down there as if they were white and call attention to the whole world. Now that wasn’t only the black people but the minority people. The people who didn’t have anything, and they had nothing to say in those days because they didn’t have any power, they started saying things and they started picketing, and that’s the reason I say he changed the whole world.”

With Eckert leaving teams to their own

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. 25

devices, some queried their few black players whether to play as scheduled or postpone.

“When Martin Luther King died, they come and ask the Negro players if we should play,” Clemente told the Pittsburgh PostGazette. “I say, ‘If you have to ask Negro players, then we do not have a great country.’ ” Clemente’s singular resolution was embraced by his teammates, 10 of whom also were black and made up the largest contingent of black players in the game at the time.

It was a decision reached not without potential trouble. Some owners protested to the commissioner to penalize players who refused to play in the wake of King’s assassination. After all, the Pirates’ decision to follow Clemente’s lead meant the Astros couldn’t play, either — not for one day but two.

With the Astros’ home openers already shut down by Clemente, Eckert’s office announced that the entire slate of Opening Day games would be moved to April 10, the day after King’s internment.

“He never spoke to me directly as to the stoppage,” Mayoral told me. “But we in Puerto Rico knew since it happened what he had accomplished.”

Clemente died on New Year’s Eve 1972 on a plane in Puerto Rico loaded with aid for victims of an earthquake in Nicaragua. The plane crashed into the sea on takeoff. Clemente’s body was never found.

But his enduring spirit for social justice was nurtured in 1962 by King, whom Clemente honored 50 years ago when he spurred a shutdown of America’s pastime during its highest holy day. n Kevin B. Blackistone, ESPN panelist and visiting professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, writes sports commentary for The Washington Post.

ON THE COVER Tammie Gillums, who served as an Army human resources officer in Afghanistan, got her black Lab mix, Cross, from K9s for Warriors last summer.

Photograph by SALWAN GEORGES, The Washington Post

3 SUNDAY, APRIL 1, 2018

6 SUNDAY, APRIL 1, 2018

KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

Trump suggests military pay for wall

BY J OSH D AWSEY AND M IKE D E B ONIS

P

resident Trump, who repeatedly insisted in the 2016 campaign that Mexico would pay for a wall along the southern border, is privately pushing the U.S. military to fund construction of his signature project.

Trump told advisers he was spurned in a large spending bill last month when lawmakers appropriated only $1.6 billion for the border wall. He has suggested to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and congressional leaders that the Pentagon could fund the sprawling construction, citing a “national security” risk.

After floating the notion to several advisers recently, Trump told House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (RWis.) that the military should pay for the wall, according to three people familiar with the meeting March 21 in the White House residence. Ryan offered little reaction to the notion, these people said, but senior Capitol Hill officials later said it was an unlikely prospect.

Trump’s pursuit of defense dollars to finance the U.S.-Mexico border wall underscores his determination to fulfill a campaign promise and build the barrier despite resistance in the Republican-led Congress. The administration’s last-minute negotiations with lawmakers to secure billions more for the wall failed and Trump grudgingly signed the spending bill March 23 after a short-lived veto threat.

Four days after that move, Trump continued to express regrets for signing the $1.3 trillion package that funded the government and averted a shutdown, saying it was a mistake and he should have followed his instincts.

In another recent interaction with senior aides, Trump noted that the Defense Department was getting so much money as part of the spending package that the Pentagon could surely afford the border wall, two White House officials said. The Pentagon re-

GREGORY BULL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

President has suggested the idea to Paul Ryan and advisers, but many dismiss it as unlikely ceived about $700 billion in the spending package, which Trump repeatedly lauded as “historic.”

Meanwhile, the $1.6 billion in the bill for some fencing and levees on the border not only fell far short of the $25 billion that Trump was seeking, but it came with tight restrictions on how the money can be spent.

The individuals and officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk freely about private discussions.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders deflected a question about money dedicated to the military being used to fund construction of the wall.

“I can’t get into the specifics of that at this point, but I can tell you that the continuation of building the wall is ongoing and we’re going to continue moving forward in that process,” Sanders told reporters Tuesday.

It would be unlikely for the military to fund the wall, according to White House and Defense

Department officials. The Pentagon has plenty of money, but reprogramming it for a wall would require votes in Congress that the president does not seem to have.

Taking money from the current 2018 budget for the wall would require an act of Congress, said a senior Pentagon official.

To find the money in the 2019 defense budget, Trump would have to submit a budget amendment that would still require 60 votes in the Senate, the official said.

Democrats in Congress would probably chafe at military spending going to the construction of a border wall, and military officials may also blanch, White House advisers said.

Defense hawks in the Republican ranks would balk at steering money dedicated to the Pentagon for new aircraft, weapons and improving the readiness of the armed forces for construction of the wall.

“First Mexico was supposed to

Troops stand guard at a border wall prototype in San Diego during a visit

by President Trump on March 13.

The spending bill passed last month included $1.6 billion for border fencing, but it mostly barred the use of the prototypes that the Trump administration is exploring.

pay for it, then U.S. taxpayers, and now our men and women in uniform? This would be a blatant misuse of military funds and tied up in court for years. Secretary Mattis ought not bother and instead use the money to help our troops, rather than advance the president’s political fantasies,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement to The Washington Post.

Trump has grown frustrated watching constant TV criticism of the spending package and is determined to find a new way to fund the wall, several advisers said, privately grousing that his political supporters could become disenchanted without progress. After a recent trip to see prototypes of the wall in California, Trump has grown more animated by the issue, advisers said.

The president’s comments raising the possibility of using Pentagon funds to build the wall came after the collapse of negotiations with Democrats to secure $25 billion in long-term wall funding in exchange for protections for young immigrants at risk for deportation because of Trump’s cancellation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

The White House offered three years of protections for DACA recipients, according to multiple congressional aides, but Democrats demanded protections for a larger group of “dreamers,” including those who never applied for or are ineligible for DACA. The negotiations fell apart before the $1.3 trillion spending bill was drafted and passed.

The urgency to strike a deal reflected the growing sense that the spending bill represented the last chance for the Trump administration to secure substantial wall funding, at least in his first term. Top Republicans believe it is all but certain that Democrats will gain House seats in November’s midterm elections — and perhaps take the majority — greatly enhancing their bargaining position in future spending negotiations. n ©The Washington Post

4 SUNDAY, APRIL 1, 2018

7 SUNDAY, APRIL 1, 2018

POLITICS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TV pundits find a pathway to Trump BY

J OHN W AGNER

A

s a television commentator on Fox News, John Bolton touted his hawkish views on Iran and North Korea. He’s now been hired as President Trump’s national security adviser.

On his show on CNBC, Larry Kudlow advocated cutting corporate taxes and regulations. He’s now taking over as Trump’s top economic adviser.

Being a pundit is becoming a tried-and-true pathway into the Trump administration, as a reality-show president seeks to surround himself with people who’ve been auditioning for their jobs on television — whether they realize it or not.

It’s a phenomenon that extends beyond top government posts. After seeing Joseph diGenova stridently defend him on Fox News, Trump announced that he would add the lawyer to his personal legal team handling the Russia probe, even though he didn’t know diGenova.

That idea, however, soon unraveled. Last weekend, another Trump lawyer said the hiring of diGenova and his wife, Victoria Toensing, who is also a lawyer, wasn’t happening because other clients represented by their law firm pose conflicts of interest.

But a person who spoke to Trump recently has said there was another reason: Trump didn’t like what he saw as much when he met the couple in person.

Trump, who rose to national prominence in part because of his starring role on “The Apprentice,” has made TV central to his presidency. His mornings typically start with what aides call “executive time” — several hours in the White House during which he consumes cable news, often tweeting his reactions to stories broadcast on Fox News.

What he sees can shape his policy views. In March, Trump took to Twitter to threaten to veto a $1.3 trillion spending bill after it was panned by TV commentators.

RICHARD DREW/ASSOCIATED PRESS

ALEX BRANDON/ASSOCIATED PRESS

ALEX BRANDON/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The president has been filling some key positions with those who defend him or his policies on air For a neophyte politician who arrived in Washington without a deep bench of policy advisers, it’s hardly surprising that Trump is increasingly turning to talking heads to fill key positions, some observers say. He relied on the advice of members of Congress and old Washington hands for some of his initial picks, and some have turned out to be less than loyal, in Trump’s view. And now he’s feeling more liberated.

“Outside his immediate relatives — his children and his sonin-law — I don’t know that there’s anyone he trusts more than Fox News,” said Edward Burmila, a political science professor at Bradley University who has written about the influence of Fox News on the Trump presidency.

Trump aides and allies say a television presence is hardly the sole criteria that guides Trump’s choices, but some say it’s part of a plan to better inform the country.

“This is how most of America communicates,” Jason Miller, a former Trump campaign aide, said of television. “This is not the White House of the 1920s, the 1950s or even the 2000s. He’s adding people to his team who can effectively communicate his

message. In this day and age, you can have the right policies, but if you can’t communicate them, it’s all for naught.”

In the cases of Kudlow and Bolton, Trump’s connection is much deeper than television, a senior White House official said, requesting anonymity to discuss personnel decisions more candidly.

Bolton, an ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush, has been a regular visitor to the Oval Office to discuss foreign policy with Trump. And Trump and Kudlow have known each other for years, running in some of the same circles in New York, the official said.

Sam Nunberg, a former aide who helped guide Trump through the run-up to his presidential campaign, said he would regularly include pieces written by Bolton and Kudlow in Trump’s briefing materials during that stretch.

Nunberg said it would be unfair to dismiss Bolton and Kudlow, who served as an economics adviser in the Reagan administration, as mere television personalities. But he said the fact that both have had prominent roles on

From left: Larry Kudlow, John Bolton and Heather Nauert all had prominent roles on television before being asked to join the Trump administration by a president who made his name in part on reality TV.

television in the past year probably helped them stay in the running for jobs after Trump turned to others when he came into office.

Burmila said there’s certainly precedent for hiring television reporters onto the White House communications team, which he said makes “perfect sense.”

There were several TV pundits and personalities in the early cast of the Trump administration — their fates have been mixed.

Heather Nauert, a New Yorkbased anchor and correspondent for Fox, became the State Department spokeswoman. She was recently promoted to acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs.

Meanwhile, Anthony Scaramucci, a financier who had served a tour of duty as host of “Wall Street Week” on Fox Business, became the shortest-serving White House communications director in modern history, lasting less than two weeks in the job.

Other veterans of the Fox green room who took administration jobs include K.T. McFarland, a former deputy national security adviser who was later picked to serve as ambassador to Singapore. She withdrew her nomination after she became embroiled in the controversy over the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russian officials.

Monica Crowley, another Fox contributor, was named to a senior communications post at the National Security Council. But she stepped aside amid multiple allegations of plagiarism.

Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian at New York University, said there’s another downside to Trump’s proclivity to pick television commentators for administration posts.

“He’s been casting about for cheerleaders,” Naftali said. “He watches pundits, and he likes the pundits who agree with him.

What’s worrisome is he’s putting together a team of yes men who are not going to give him the advice and guidance to make hard choices.” n © The Washington Post

SUNDAY, APRIL 1, 2018

Cover story

Do dogs help veterans with PTSD?

BY KARIN BRULLIARD in Jacksonville Beach, Fla.

A

dam Fuller credits a simple, one-word command — and a black Lab mix named J.D. — with helping to save his life.

“Cover,” he tells J.D., who is sitting to his left in a grassy field next to a park playground. The dog calmly walks to Fuller’s right, then sits facing backward. Were someone coming up from behind, he’d wag his tail. The signal quells the sense of threat that plagued Fuller after serving in Afghanistan, that at one point had him futilely popping medications and veering toward suicide.

“Yes!” he praises J.D. as four women watch closely. They, too, are veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder who are here to be trained and to leave with canine support of their own. All seem to appreciate the strategy behind “cover,” as their goateed instructor demonstrates with J.D. “I wouldn’t be here without him,” Fuller says.

Every month, a new cycle of training begins with yet another class of veterans in a program run by the northern Florida K9s for Warriors.

The seven-year-old nonprofit is one of dozens of private organizations that offer “psychiatric service” dogs to address the military’s mental health crisis — enabling desperate vets to function in society, proponents say.

Yet even as success stories allow these groups to briskly expand their work, their approach faces growing scrutiny from re-

5

6

SUNDAY, APRIL 1, 2018

searchers and debate among veterans groups, politicians and the Department of Veterans Affairs. At issue is whether the dogs truly help, what they should be trained to do and who should pay for them.

For more than 15 years, VA has covered veterinary care for service dogs that assist veterans with physical disabilities. It has declined to do that for PTSD service dogs, however, citing a lack of empirical evidence for their therapeutic value. The agency is now conducting a $12 million multiyear study on the topic, even as it opposes legislation that would require it to pay for dogs in a separate pilot program.

“The numbers are startling on veteran suicides, and this is working,” said Rory Diamond, a former federal prosecutor who quit to become chief executive of K9s for Warriors, where he had been providing pro bono legal services.

On a table in the organization’s cheery lobby these days is a flier that says “research proves” the dogs save lives. It cites a recent first-of-itskind study out of Purdue University that used standard questionnaires to assess PTSD symptoms and other aspects of mental health among 141 K9s for Warriors applicants, half teamed with a service dog and half on a wait list. Those with dogs showed significantly lower levels of post-traumatic stress, depression and social isolation, with higher levels of psychological well-being.

Still, lead author Maggie O’Haire, an assistant professor of human-animal interaction, emphasizes the study’s “preliminary” nature and the need for more research on how service dogs might fit into treatment plans. “There is so much political agenda behind this topic,” she said.

Other investigations are underway, including a clinical trial that O’Haire is conducting with funding from the National Institutes of Health. VA’s study remains the biggest in scope, though, as well as the one that has drawn the most criticism.

Its 2011 start was rocky: Dogs, provided by contracted groups, bit participants’ children, and trainers were “biasing” veterans with talk of the dogs’ healing powers, said Michael Fallon, the agency’s chief veterinary medical officer. The project was halted and redesigned to include VA-hired dog trainers and a control group of veterans provided with emotionalsupport dogs — what Fallon calls a “very well-trained pet.”

All 220 subjects were enrolled and matched

Tammie Gillums shops with her service dog, Cross, at a grocery store on March 22 in Gainesville, Va.

continues on next page SALWAN GEORGES/THE WASHINGTON POST

7 SUNDAY, APRIL 1, 2018

14 SUNDAY, APRIL 1, 2018

KLMNO WEEKLY

Top, from left: Adrianna Ruark and her dog, Crockett; instructor Greg Wells and Utah; Selena Hosier and Zeebee; and Krista Shirey and Bobbi prepare to go into Target as part of K9s for Warriors training in March.

Bottom: Instructor Adam Fuller and his dog, J.D., watch Shirey and Bobbi celebrate a string of successful commands.

Opposite page, top: Tammie Gillums practices yoga as her service dog, Cross, lies near her at home.

Bottom: Zeebee sits patiently by Selena Hosier before they continue their training together.

K9s for Warriors gets its dogs from local animal shelters and adoption organizations.

COVER STORY from previous page

with pooches by late 2017. Initial results are expected in 2019. Officials insist they’re doing the kind of rigorous, controlled research that the field has been lacking.

“We really want to know the answer,” said Patricia Dorn, director of VA’s rehabilitation research and development service. “We want to know for the veterans and the public at large.”

Training and trusting Dogs have provided services to humans for millennia, often as hunting and herding partners. But not until World War I were they systematically trained to assist people with disabilities, as guides for the blind. Service dogs now prompt deaf people when a doorbell rings, retrieve pills for people in wheelchairs and alert people with diabetes to blood sugar spikes.

Psychiatric service dogs are forging a new frontier in this field, and their mission blends those of task-oriented service canines and animals seen as providing emotional support.

While the dogs paired with veterans with PTSD are commonly trained to wake them from nightmares and to “block” the space between their owner and another person, advocates also laud their ability to soothe a panicking vet and provide companionship and a tailwagging reason to get out of the house — if only for walks.

“Being able to go to a store — and not just hate it and drop everything and walk out — is phenomenal,” explained the 29-year-old Fuller, a K9s for Warriors graduate, as the women he was helping to train did laps with their dogs beneath the park’s tall pines.

But even among psychiatric service dog providers, which range from well-established charities to small start-ups, there’s disagreement about what the animals should do.

The accrediting group Assistance Dogs International published its first standards for training and placing PTSD dogs with veterans in January, after two years of heated discussions about how much mental health experts should be involved, which commands the animals should be taught and other issues, said Sheila O’Brien of America’s VetDogs, who chaired the process.

The approved standards reject commands for a dog to search for an enemy or threat — something VA study dogs are trained to do — or to guard. Though ADI did not shun other “panic protection” commands, including “cover” and “block,” those are also controversial.

“Our philosophy is that the dog is a bridge between his environment or her environment,” said Cynthia Crosson, a psychiatric social worker and consultant for the dog provider group NEADS, where she helped develop the nation’s first service dog program for veterans with PTSD a decade ago. “We feel that blocking kind of enables the symptoms rather than helps them cope with the symptoms.”

Some veterans disagree. At K9s for Warriors, which works with a dozen veterans a month, it’s common to hear stories of those who were

PHOTOS BY KILE BREWER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

scared to leave their houses or were gripped by anxiety in public — until they had a dog at their side that had been trained to provide a sense of space or surveillance.

“Ladies, this is the command you’re going to love most,” announced Greg Wells, another Afghanistan war vet, as he and Fuller taught the four female veterans how to direct their dogs to cover.

It was mid-March and midway through the three-week training, with a visit to Home Depot also on this day’s schedule. One woman had come from Maine, another from Texas,

another from Indiana. And from Michigan flew Adrianna Ruark, a 26-year-old Air Force veteran, who explained that her PTSD followed sexual traumas — plural, she stressed — during her service that left her wary of males, even canine ones.

“Yea!” Ruark told Crockett, the black shepherd mix whom she’d been given, when he nailed the cover command a few times. Ten days in, she said, she was still working to connect with the pooch.

For every applicant it accepts, K9s for Warriors picks up all costs but transportation. On

8 SUNDAY, APRIL 1, 2018

15 SUNDAY, APRIL 1, 2018

COVER STORY

SALWAN GEORGES/THE WASHINGTON POST

KILE BREWER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

its eight-acre campus, the veterans spend every moment with their assigned animals. They stay in apartments on the grounds, and they’re even encouraged to share the queen-size beds with their dogs. Practicing commands is crucial, the organization teaches, but so is bonding.

Ruark and the others followed the park session with lunch at Chili’s, where the four dogs snoozed under the table. She said she’d turned to K9s for Warriors in part to again feel comfortable in places like restaurants. “I’m hoping to be able to function more,” she said.

That’s the kind of goal for which VA clinical

psychologist Louanne Davis sees the animals’ potential as a complement to conventional therapies. One symptom of PTSD is hyperarousal, which can include a constant feeling of being on guard. A dog might provide a sense of calm and safety that helps veterans reengage with the world, Davis said.

Yet, she cautioned, “we don’t know the extent to which this might be good in the short run but not so good in the long run.” Given the potential that a veteran might come to depend on the dog for a sense of security, “my goal would be to eventually wean them off.”

‘There are worse crutches’ The K9s for Warriors chief executive says about a third of its graduates “drop the leash” over time, using their dogs less and less for service. Another third expect to stop after their first dog dies. Only that last third express interest in having service dogs for life.

“Is that causing a harm?” Diamond asked.

“The worst thing that’s happened is: They have a well-trained dog. There are worse crutches, and VA is handing out a lot of them — like prescription drugs and opioids.”

Most of the organization’s canines come from shelters, along with a small number of purebreds donated by breeders. Those that pass temperament tests are schooled at the campus by professional civilian trainers and spend several months learning basic obedience and commands. The dogs that perform well — the organization estimates their value by that point at $27,000 — are then paired with veterans, who learn to handle their dogs from veterans who have completed the program.

The other dogs are adopted out.

Cross, a floppy-eared black Lab mix, was one of the shelter mutts — nothing like the fluffy golden retriever Tammie Gillums pictured when she headed from her Gainesville, Va., home to K9s for Warriors last summer.

Gillums had been an Army human resources officer, a job she did not expect would expose her to trauma during a tour in Kabul. She was wrong a few times over, with one event being a suicide blast that threw her off her chair during duty in a guard tower. Seared into her mind was the image of the bomber’s detached head.

Gillums, a 39-year-old mother of six in a blended family, came home in 2008 with crippling migraines. She couldn’t sleep or concentrate. She started lengthy therapy with a VA psychologist and psychiatrist and at one point was on a half-dozen prescriptions simultaneously. She stayed home whenever possible.

One thing made the difference, she said: Cross.

Gillums had never owned a dog, and she admits she was skeptical. But it has been months since she has needed any medication.

Cross jumps on the bed to wake her from restless dreams. After a decade of dropping out of classes because of panic attacks and anxiety, Gillums for the first time completed a semester of courses at the community college where she is studying American Sign Language for an associate degree in deaf studies.

Her relationship with Cross, she said, “is some type of magic.”

On a recent Friday, Cross rested at her feet during her African American history class. She accompanied Gillums on a shopping errand, then to a medical appointment.

While waiting in line at a Starbucks, Gillums quietly instructed Cross to “block,” putting space between the veteran and a middle-aged man next to her.

“Cross,” Gillums said, “is my anxiety medication now.” n © The Washington Post

KLMNO WEEKLY

‘Bring.’ ‘Get.’ ‘Block.’ What the dogs learn and why.

Nationwide, several private groups train and provide service dogs to help military veterans cope with post-traumatic stress disorder, and the tasks they teach the animals vary by organization. Here are some of the common commands: • Lights — The dog uses its nose to turn on a light switch, reducing the veteran’s anxiety about entering a dark room.

• Bring or Get — The dog retrieves a small object such as a medication bottle.

• Visit or Lap — The dog places its nose or front paws on the veteran’s lap, providing a calming presence.

• Brace — The dog stands still as the veteran uses its back for support while getting up.

• Block — The dog positions itself between the veteran and another person, serving as a buffer.

• Cover — The dog sits beside the veteran in a rearfacing, “watch my back” position.

• Sweep or Clear — The dog enters a room and barks or sits if it detects another person or “threat.”

— Karin Brulliard

9 SUNDAY, APRIL 1, 2018

16 SUNDAY, APRIL 1, 2018

KLMNO WEEKLY

CELEBRITY

Superstitions of the successful TEXT AND ILLUSTRATIONS BY

E LLEN W EINSTEIN

How do the most high­achieving performers get into the best mind­set for their work, their competitions, their experiments?

Can they make their own luck? I set out to answer that question and discovered that writers, inventors, artists, musicians, athletes, scientists and actors often look for a particular routine that, rightly or wrongly, they associate with their success.

No two people are alike, and neither were their “Recipes for Good Luck,” as I called my book on the subject.

BJORN BORG ANTHONY BOURDAIN

PUNK CLASSICS Chef, author and TV personality Anthony Bourdain developed a ritual during his days in the kitchen at Les Halles: The go-to soundtrack for his food prep routine featured a collection of mid-’70s New York punk classics. Music has been an essential ingredient in Bourdain’s life, and his taste for it began in his childhood, when his father worked for Columbia Records.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN COCO CHANEL

LUCKY NUMBER 5 French clothing designer Coco Chanel was deeply superstitious. She was reportedly informed by a fortuneteller that 5 was her lucky number, and she named her famed fragrance accordingly. Her apartment also contained a crystal chandelier whose arms were twisted into the number 5, and she liked to present her collections on the fifth day of May.

AIR BATHS Author, inventor, diplomat, scientist and Founding Father Benjamin Franklin swore by air baths. Before he started to work, Franklin would sit without any clothes on for 30 minutes or an hour in front of an open window. He wrote that the shock of cold water was too violent for him and that it was more agreeable to bathe in cold air.

Franklin would either read or write during his “bath.”

PLAYOFF BEARD Tennis great Bjorn Borg is the first known athlete to cultivate the superstitious “playoff beard.”

Borg would prepare for Wimbledon by growing a beard and wearing the same Fila shirt for every match. While repeating this ritual, he won five straight Wimbledon titles from 1976 to 1980.

Since then, athletes in professional football, hockey and baseball have all adopted this practice.

CHARLES DICKENS ISABEL ALLENDE

STARTING DATE Chilean American author Isabel Allende began writing her first novel on Jan. 8, 1981. What had started as a letter to her dying grandfather eventually became “The House of the Spirits.” Allende now begins all of her books on that same day — initially thanks to the commercial success of her first book, but now, she says, because she can work in productive solitude on a day people know not to disturb her.

SLEPT FACING NORTH Charles Dickens, the 19th-century social critic who wrote “Great Expectations,” “A Christmas Carol” and many other classics, carried a navigational compass with him at all times and always faced north while he slept — a practice that he believed improved his creativity and writing. n

10 SUNDAY, APRIL 1, 2018

17 SUNDAY, APRIL 1, 2018

HEALTH

KLMNO WEEKLY

Can meal timing improve health?

BY

D AVID K OHN

T

his is a story about the importance of good timing.

Two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese. This excess weight contributes to a variety of health problems. Despite enormous effort over decades, the problem has proved extremely difficult to solve. Biologist Satchin Panda thinks we’re missing a key variable: Instead of focusing so much on what we eat, he says, we should pay more attention to when we eat.

A researcher at the Salk Institute in San Diego, Panda argues that eating within a certain time window each day can help people lose weight and may help prevent illnesses including diabetes, heart disease and cancer. In animal studies, he and others have shown that limiting food intake to a period of eight to 12 hours can boost cognitive and physical performance, and may even lengthen life span. Known as time-restricted feeding, or TRF, the approach is simple: Eat more or less what you want, but don’t consume anything before or after the allotted time.

Panda argues that humans’ circadian rhythm is not designed for a world with 24-7 access to food.

It is not clear whether TRF works in humans the way it seems to work in lab mice. For one, mice and humans have very different circadian rhythms. “It may be that for a mouse, a 16-hour fast is the equivalent of a two- or three-day fast for a human,” says Courtney Peterson, a nutrition scientist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who is doing research on TRF in humans.

Panda first got interested in TRF 15 years ago, while studying the genetics of circadian rhythm.

His research on mice revealed that over the course of a day, hundreds of liver genes turn on and off cyclically. The liver plays a central role in metabolizing calories, and it turned out that most of these cyclic genes were involved in eating and digestion. This led him to ask whether mice — and humans, too — were programmed to eat ac-

ISTOCK

Focusing on when we eat rather than what we eat may boost cognitive and physical performance cording to a certain circadian schedule. In 2008, he began examining how mice responded to different feeding schedules; to his surprise, TRF had powerful health benefits.

The researchers compared two groups of mice, both of which consumed the same number of calories. One group was limited to an eight-hour window, while the other could eat at any time. After four months, the eight-hour mice weighed 28 percent less than the anytime eaters.

He had his students independently repeat the experiment three times; all of the results were similar. Using the same model — two groups eating an equal number of calories, but on different feeding schedules — he found that TRF mice had normal blood sugar levels, while the unlimited-schedule animals developed Type 2 diabetes. Since then, he has shown that TRF can reduce the risk of heart disease and cancer.

“TRF is an interesting and valuable idea, but it’s not proven that it works in humans,” says nutrition researcher David Allison, dean of

the University of Indiana School of Public Health. “There is some evidence to suggest that it might be useful for some things. But it’s extraordinarily complex to actually nail this down.”

Panda is now starting a study that will eventually include thousands of adults worldwide. Using a custom smartphone app that allows people to take photos of what they eat and immediately send them to researchers, he will be able to more accurately track which foods people eat. Using this data, he will examine whether TRF can improve weight, blood sugar, blood pressure, joint pain, sleep, anxiety and inflammation.

Panda and other circadian scientists say that many if not most animals have evolved to consume food according to the 24-hour solar cycle. For humans, this rhythm involves eating during the day and sleeping after sunset. With the advent of electric lights, refrigerators, microwaves and 7-Elevens, millions if not billions of us have jettisoned this pattern. But the circadian rhythm of our metabolism still expects us to stop eating

“Just by changing when we eat, we can have an effect on obesity and these related problems.”

Satchin Panda, Salk Institute researcher

at sundown. This mismatch between modern society and programmed biology can lead to myriad health problems, Panda and others say.

It is not clear exactly how TRF works, but it seems to trigger several molecular changes. It increases the activity of mitochondria, which provide energy to cells throughout the body; it boosts levels of ketone bodies, molecules produced by the liver during fasting, which are a powerful source of energy and are especially useful to muscle and brain cells; it also raises production of brown fat, the “good” fat that helps the body burn more energy. Together, these mechanisms allow the body to generate more energy and metabolize calories more efficiently than unscheduled eating.

Other researchers are examining calorie restriction, which requires reducing calorie intake below normal levels, for months, years or longer, in hopes of triggering a variety of beneficial physiological responses. Studies of animals and humans have found that these regimens can have benefits, including weight loss, lower rates of cancer, diabetes and heart disease, and, in some animal studies, significantly longer life span. All of these strategies have some similarities to TRF, Panda says, with one major difference: They are much more difficult to follow.

“Just by changing when we eat, we can have an effect on obesity and these related problems,” Panda says. “This can really move the needle.”

Panda himself has adopted TRF and says he’s seen benefits: lower blood sugar, weight loss, better sleep and more energy.

Peterson, the UAB scientist, is one of the early adopters. Five to seven days a week, she limits her consumption to a six- or sevenhour window. She says she has more energy, feels a bit calmer and doesn’t feel particularly hungry in the afternoon or evening.

“You have to adapt to it,” she says. “When I first started trying this, I found 10 hours was hard.

Now, six hours seems easy.” n ©The Washington Post

19 11

SUNDAY, APRIL APRIL 1, 2018 SUNDAY, 1, 2018

BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

A twisty tale of deceit, friendship

Explorers seek a mythical passage

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

“T

C HRIS B OHJALIAN

angerine,” Christine Mangan’s first novel, opens with three men pulling a corpse from the waters off Tangier, Morocco, wondering what kind of birds pecked out its eyes and whether dead bodies weigh more than living ones. But then we get to the hook that really propels the story forward. The unnamed narrator tells us: “Of course, only the first bit is true — the rest I have simply imagined.”

It won’t be until halfway through the novel that we learn whose body this is. It won’t be until the end that we know who is sitting alone in an asylum or nursing home across the Strait of Gibraltar and ruminating on the deceased. It’s clearly going to be one of Mangan’s two narrators: Alice Shipley or Lucy Mason. But which one? Between the prologue and the epilogue, the story is told in alternating chapters by each woman.

It’s 1956, a year after Lucy and Alice have left Bennington College in Vermont. They were roommates and close friends, despite their difference in backgrounds.

Alice is a wealthy Brit, Lucy a poor Vermonter on scholarship. They share the trauma of having lost their parents, Lucy as a young girl, Alice more recently.

But neither is a reliable narrator — that’s clear early on. Alice is emotionally fragile and was nearly institutionalized after her parents’ death in a house fire, a blaze that Alice may (or may not) have caused. Lucy is stronger than steel, but she’s also a lying sociopath.

Lucy and Alice’s friendship implodes their senior year at college and, for a variety of reasons, Alice hopes never to see her roommate again. She returns to London, and Lucy decamps to Manhattan. Back in Britain, Alice marries John McAllister, a fellow whose work brings him to Tangier. A year later, Lucy shows up unannounced at their front door in North Africa —

and we’re off.

Rather like a tennis match, Alice and Lucy volley back and forth, each telling her side of what occurred after Lucy’s unexpected arrival in Morocco. And, like a good tennis match, the salvos grow more intense. Lucy is a chameleon who makes Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley look talentless when it comes to reinvention. She’s a force to be reckoned with. Alice, it would seem on the surface, is going to be easy prey. But as emotionally frail as she is, she still rallies just enough to keep the match close and gives us hope for an upset.

Occasionally, the story’s momentum is slowed by Mangan’s enthusiastic attempts to turn the novel into a threesome, with Tangier as its third character. “Only Tangier knew,” she writes, “and I suspected she would keep her secrets.” And later: “He was with a woman he had loved, for better or for worse, and whatever that love had meant to him, he would be with her, Tangier, for the rest of time.”

Moreover, sometimes the two women sound so similar that they are difficult to distinguish. They both have trouble drinking hot mint tea from glass cups instead of porcelain with handles, and they both “wrench” their shoulders in acts of violence. They both ponder the nuances of the words they use (tourist vs. traveler), and sometimes take their interest in vocabulary to the edge of parody: “I mused briefly over the fact that ‘thank you’ and ‘no thank you’ were so closely related — the difference of a word added to the latter.”

Still, these are small distractions. The lying, the cunning, and the duplicity are so very mannered that it’s chilling. Rich in dread, the foreboding positively drips from every page of this one. n Chris Bohjalian just published his 20th novel, “The Flight Attendant.” This was written for The Washington Post.

I TANGERINE A Novel

By Christine Mangan Ecco. 308 pp. $26.99

DISAPPOINTMENT RIVER Finding and Losing the Northwest Passage

By Brian Castner Doubleday.

334 pp. $28.95

l

REVIEWED BY

D ENNIS D RABELLE

n a sense, this book grew out of a mistake. Back in 1778, the great English explorer James Cook discovered a body of water — Cook Inlet, as it came to be known — in what is now Alaska.

But he mistook the inlet for an outlet, as well as a portion of the Northwest Passage, a muchsought-after transportation corridor from Europe to Asia via the waterways of North America.

Eleven years later, Alexander Mackenzie, a Scot representing a Montreal-based fur company, tried to confirm Cook’s theory by tying together the segments of the putative interior passage, starting on the St. Lawrence River, crossing lakes, following rivers, portaging where necessary and emerging at Cook Inlet, from which it was a straight shot to the Pacific Ocean.

Mackenzie, too, had a body of water named after him: the 1,100mile-long river canoed by him and his crew during the latter part of their journey. By the time Mackenzie arrived at river’s end, however, he knew he’d failed. Or, rather, geography had failed him. The stream, known locally as the Deh Cho, had swung north and emptied into the Beaufort Sea, an arm of the Arctic Ocean, which, being iced over most of the time, was not a reliable thruway. (For the record, at their closest, the Mackenzie/ Deh Cho River and Cook Inlet are about 700 miles apart.)

If not for the mystique of the Northwest Passage, Mackenzie wouldn’t have made the trip, and the same probably goes for Brian Castner, a former U.S. Air Force officer who followed in Mackenzie’s wake. In “Disappointment River” Castner alternates an account of Mackenzie’s voyage with a chronicle of his own repeat in the summer of 2016.

In need of a second paddler, Castner lined up four friends, each of whom would take a turn, “like runners in a relay race, and pass me as the baton.” That’s a nice simile, but Castner is an uneven writer whose ultra-compressed

sentences can leave the reader scratching his head: e.g., “It was a worn massif, indicative of an exhausted range that would succumb to the riverine thoroughfare [Mackenzie] transited.”

At his best, however, Castner has the Conradian ability to make you see and feel, as when he conjures up a summerlong plague with a few strokes: “The interior of our tent was . . . polka-dotted, brown on yellow, every surface covered with mosquito body parts and our own blood.” Or, even pithier, as he drives to his put-in point through a cloud of flies, “My windshield was a murder wall.”

The book abounds in vivid details. The mystery of how certain trees could have lost their crowns, and nothing else, to ax blows was cleared up when Mackenzie took a winter walk and found himself standing on a snowbank so high that “these towering stumps were at his knees.”

Framing these interludes of astonishment, however, were days of drudgery, with nowhere to pull over and make camp. “Of all the plagues of the Deh Cho,” Castner sums up, “the worst is emptiness.”

In the last pages, Castner lets Mackenzie sum up his 1789 trip, whose outcome he faced with clear eyes. “Tho I was disappointed . . . [my expedition] proved without a doubt that there is not a North West passage below this latitude and I believe it will generally be allowed that no passage is practicable in a Higher Latitude, the Sea being eternally covered with ice.”

It will also “generally be allowed” that profligate burning of fossil fuels is changing the world’s climate. When Castner and his last paddling partner reached the Beaufort Sea, they found it icefree. We finally have a Northwest Passage, but at what a cost! n Drabelle, a former contributing editor of Washington Post Book World, writes about exploration. This was written for The Washington Post.

20 12

SUNDAY, APRIL SUNDAY, APRIL1, 1, 2018 2018

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Congress must rein in USOC executive spending SALLY JENKINS is a sports columnist for The Washington Post.

The “Olympic movement” is a misnomer: The only thing moving in it is the cash from one suit pocket to another.

While Congress is in the midst of investigating the United States Olympic Committee’s inaction on sexual abuse of hundreds of athletes, it should also demand a financial audit. The receipts would show the fraud and underlying root rot inside the USOC that has caused the current crisis: Officials are feeding on filet mignon while ignoring athletes who are abused and on food stamps. That’s no exaggeration.

The chronic sex abuse of our gold medalist athletes in multiple sports is the direct result of a structure with zero accountability. Make no mistake, the two are related: The USOC is a nest of self-dealing in which athletes are expected to pick up the tab for official excesses and stay silent for fear of losing funding.

“Athletes are starving and hungry, and this is their dream.

They’ll be willing to do anything to get there, including take any amount of abuse,” says Ben Barger, a former Olympic sailor who has tried to confront the USOC on its fiscal habits.

Congressional hearings on the sexual abuses are underway, but they need to expand to address the full range of this problem: The USOC is an unconstrained, runamok body created by Congress in the first place, and Congress has a responsibility to fix it.

Thanks to a lack of any oversight, the USOC turned itself into a glorified first-class travel agency for its execs while ducking its duty of care, and, worse, fostering an anti-whistle-blower culture in which anyone who complains or tries to reform is ostracized, or unfunded, or left off the team. “There is suppression,” Barger says.

That suppression has shown up in my email queue in the form of people who want to talk openly

but can’t. There is the former USOC employee who wants to tell me about the “obscene” expense account abuses they allegedly witnessed at USOC headquarters in Colorado Springs, who shows me copies of receipts for $300 dinners for two with $150 bottles of wine on them but won’t go public “because I have to raise kids in this town.” There is the winter sports athlete who wants to talk about their anger over training debts while watching officials collect $800,000 salaries but requests anonymity because “the retaliation could be careerending.”

For this atmosphere alone, the entire USOC management should be removed, the organization decapitated. This is supposed to be a nonprofit that relies wholly on private donations. The board of directors headed by Larry Probst had a responsibility to exercise ethical governance and transparent fiscal stewardship.

None of it exists. Instead, this alleged nonprofit has 129 staffers who make salaries of six figures or more. What decent board lets a nonprofit operate that way?

The USOC needs to explain to somebody, preferably Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) and the rest of the Senate Commerce Committee, exactly why the USOC needs 129 six-figure executives, when meanwhile we’ve only got 800 or so Olympic athletes. Self-starting

RYAN PIERSE/GETTY IMAGES

U.S. flag bearer Jessica Diggins walks in the Parade of Athletes during the Closing Ceremonies of the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea.

kids don’t ask for much. Many of them had to crowdfund to get there. They bartended, cleaned houses and begged their local police to hold bake sales to help them pay for training and plane tickets.

Let’s examine the USOC’s tax return. The only real public disclosure the USOC must make is on its yearly 990 form, and I asked tax expert Howard Gleckman of the UrbanBrookings Tax Policy Center to take a look at it. It showed revenue of $336 million for 2016 (made up of TV money, royalties and donations). Of that, as far as Gleckman could tell, only about $28 million, or 7 to 8 percent, made it to the athletes. Again, what nonprofit operates that way?

“My basic take is, this is a business,” Gleckman says. “This isn’t a charity.”

In 2016, Washington Post reporter Will Hobson asked thenUSOC CEO Scott Blackmun why there is such a gap between what the organization claims it gives in “support” to athletes and what athletes actually receive. It turns out the USOC categorizes the salaries of many employees as part of “athlete support.” You heard that right: USOC execs like to “support” athletes by paying themselves six figures.

You know how else the USOC execs like to “support” athletes?

By flying their husbands and wives first class. “As you look at where the money goes, it’s pretty

obvious a lot went to executive compensation and first-class air travel, not only for the board and the execs but for their spouses,” Gleckman says.

This spendiness has spread all through the USOC and its underling sports federations. U.S. Ski & Snowboard paid CEO Tiger Shaw $512,683 and former CEO Bill Marolt almost $741,696 in 2016. Certain employees are allowed to expense “travel for companions.” And a company owned by Marolt, who is now on the USOC board, was paid another $80,000 for “consulting.”

Meanwhile, U.S. Ski charges our young B and C team skiers money to race, billing them upward of $20,000 a year each to cover what the organization claims are travel budget shortfalls.

Asked to respond to criticism that its management overhead is too high, U.S. Ski & Snowboard sent this response by federation chairman Dexter Paine: “US Ski & Snowboard provides a competitive compensation program that is comparable to those offered by other for profit and not-for-profit organizations of similar size and structure.”

Congress created the USOC with the Amateur Sports Act, and Congress can whack it back down to size and mandate regular audits. It’s not hard.

“What it needs is some common business sense and experienced nonprofit leaders,” Barger says, “and oversight on a regular, standard interval.” n

21 13

SUNDAY, APRIL APRIL 1, 2018 SUNDAY, 1, 2018

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Tipping is easier hated than fixed CHARLES LANE is a Post editorial writer specializing in economic and fiscal policy.

What’s most powerful — culture, economics or law? We need to know, because restaurant tipping is a cutting-edge policy issue: Congress has just overridden a controversial proposed tipping regulation from the Trump administration; meanwhile, residents of Washington, D.C., will soon vote on a higher minimum wage for tipped workers.

And nothing illustrates the interaction of culture, economics and law more vividly than the peculiar American practice whereby diners help determine servers’ compensation.

Identifying the inefficiencies and inequities tipping breeds is relatively easy; designing an alternative that benefits everyone is not.

Even New Deal-era minimum wage laws exempted tipped workers until 1966. By then, tipping was so culturally embedded that Congress took it for granted that certain workers “customarily and regularly” received tips, while others did not. It created the “tip credit” system, whereby restaurants could pay customarily and regularly tipped personnel a much smaller minimum wage than others received, as long as tips offset the difference.

The unintended economic consequence: an imbalance between the pay of “back of the house” staff — dishwashers and the like — pegged to the regular

minimum wage, and the more variable pay of “customer-facing” servers.

There is some inevitable exploitation built into the latter reality. The New York Times recently published a lengthy article about the indignities, sexual and otherwise, tipped servers put up with.

However, the system enables servers who are not necessarily more skilled than dishwashers to get paid more nevertheless, and, often, to get paid more than it would have taken to recruit them in the first place.

After restaurateur Danny Meyer enumerated tipping’s drawbacks in a Feb. 25 Washington Post commentary, Simone Barron of the pro-tipping Restaurant Workers of America responded in a letter to the editor that “control over my earnings is

one of the greatest perks of working as a tipped employee.”

She preferred pay for service with a smile to what would be “dictated by your employer or the federal government.”

Tipping culture is becoming less stable in today’s world, where everyone eats out, restaurants employ nearly as many Americans (11.9 million, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis) as factories, and the fast-casual restaurant business is going through a shakeout.

There is money on the table, so to speak; employers would like to grab some and redirect it from servers to dishwashers, while workers’ rights groups insist it belongs to servers and that employers should find another way to top up dishwasher pay.

When culture, economics and law collide, politics results. There was an uproar when a Trump administration labor regulation rewrite threatened to let restaurants redirect tips not just to dishwashers but also to their own profits. The recently passed appropriations “omnibus” bill included a provision preventing that.

The June 19 ballot initiative in Washington, D.C., would gradually replace the “tip credit”[ with a system under which all

local restaurant employees get the statutory minimum wage — soon to be $15 per hour — and servers could still receive tips on top of that. Similar laws prevail in seven states, mostly on the West Coast.

However, servers wouldn’t necessarily get to keep all of the tips, because the law Congress just passed lets restaurants that pay servers the statutory minimum, and don’t use the “tip credit,” to redistribute tips to their “back-of-the-house” employees.

Lower-income diners would probably lose out in a no-tip world, because, as Michael Lynn, an expert on tipping at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration, points out, the current system lets them control the cost of eating out by tipping less; higher-income big tippers cross-subsidize them. If server pay had to be fully reflected in menu prices, that couldn’t happen.

Or we could forbid tipping.

This, too, is easier said than done, as Meyer discovered when he barred tipping at his establishments; some servers lost income and defected to competing “tipped houses.”

For all of tipping’s stubborn flaws, it’s possible to imagine worse alternatives. Trying to enforce a law against it might be one. n

22 14

SUNDAY, APRIL SUNDAY, APRIL1, 1, 2018 2018

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

BY OHMAN FOR THE SACRAMENTO BEE

Segregation belongs to all of U.S. DAVID VON DREHLE writes a twice-weekly column for The Post.

History means remembering, but it also involves forgetting. The hurly-burly of daily life is gradually shaped into a tidy tale of causes and effects, heroes and villains — much as a jagged stone is smoothed under rushing water.

I think about that whenever I see a book or film about the struggle to end racial discrimination in the United States. Though it is a story as old as the nation itself, we have a tendency to start it with Rosa Parks on a city bus in Montgomery, Ala. And though it is a story involving all of us, we have a tendency to tell it as if everything revolved around a brilliant young pastor, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. As a storyteller myself, I understand the importance of a strong protagonist and a vivid setting in building a compelling narrative. We want history to grab and hold the attention of current and future citizens.

But something important is lost in the erosive impulse to streamline this story. The fight for civil rights is too often framed in regional terms — as Southern history — rather than as the history of every American.

One of the forgotten figures at the center of the saga passed away Monday in Topeka, Kan. Linda Brown Thompson was 75 years old when she died, though some reports said she was 76. At the other end of her life, she was a bright, sweet-hearted child bewildered that she wasn’t

allowed to attend her neighborhood grade school with her white playmates.

Her father, the Rev. Oliver L. Brown, promised he would stand up for her. His lawsuit became the lead case in the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision striking down the doctrine of “separate but equal” — Brown v. Board of Education.

This is Kansas, remember, where a very different Brown is celebrated in a mural at the State Capitol. Fiery abolitionist John Brown spreads his arms, Bible in one hand, a rifle in the other and a terrible war for freedom trailing in his wake. That Brown helped make the Kansas Territory the first battlefield of the Civil War, before moving back East to lead his doomed slave uprising.

The fact that Kansas was

BY SHENEMAN

founded by abolitionists willing to die to halt the spread of slavery is deeply cherished in the Sunflower State. The University of Kansas athletic teams are called Jayhawks in honor of the antislavery “jayhawker” militia.

Sumner School in Topeka was named, I assume, in honor of Charles Sumner, the crusader for human dignity whose defense of Kansas abolitionists led to his near-fatal beating on the floor of the Senate in 1856. Sumner was the elementary school Linda Brown could not attend.

Americans will never fully comprehend our history as long as we smooth out jagged edges like that one: a child forbidden to attend a school named for a hero of equality, simply because she was black. The story of discrimination, white supremacy and oppression cannot be entirely symbolized by statues of Robert E. Lee and Nathan Bedford Forrest down below the Gnat Line. It is also a Kansas story. It’s a Boston story: The same city that led the antislavery movement was also the last to integrate its baseball team.

As a boy growing up in Colorado, I felt a sort of pride that my state was too new and pristine to have been part of this history.

But one morning, the newspaper displayed the burned hulks of

school buses firebombed to protest court-ordered desegregation. I later learned our airport was named for a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

Though President Abraham Lincoln waged a brutal war across the South and staked his life on emancipation and citizenship for the slaves, he understood that the entire nation bore the cost and the blame for race hatred.

“American slavery . . . belongs to our politics, to our industries, to our commerce and to our religion. Every portion of our territory in some form or other has contributed to the growth and to the increase of slavery,” he once said. “It is wrong, a great evil indeed, but the South is no more responsible for the wrong done to the African race than is the North.”

It may be painful to scrape against this unsmoothed history, but pain might be a prelude to healing. Healing for African Americans, who have always known the whole story and never needed reminding. Healing for American Southerners, who have long resented the unmerited smugness of Northern and Western hypocrites. And healing for the coming generations of Americans, whose lives can write new and better chapters in the nation’s history. n

23 15

SUNDAY, APRIL APRIL 1, 2018 SUNDAY, 1, 2018

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Passover BY

D ANYA R UTTENBERG

On Friday, Jews around the world sat down to a Passover Seder.

Given the importance and complexity of Passover, it’s not surprising that there are misunderstandings about its history and its practice.

MYTH NO. 1 The Seder tells the historical story of the Israelites leaving Egypt.

The historical accuracy of the Exodus is hotly debated among scholars. Archaeologists and Egyptologists have never found evidence that could be directly connected to Israelites’ enslavement or departure, or of a large group of people — 600,000 men, plus women and children — wandering the Sinai Peninsula for 40 years.

Some suggest that the Exodus may have been developed by scribes in the 8th through 6th centuries B.C. to give hope to a conquered, exiled people living under Assyrian and then Babylonian rule.

The story also resembles other famous Near Eastern tales, like that of the Mesopotamian Sargon the Great, said to have been set in a basket in a river as a baby, as Moses was in the Torah.

Others say there may have been an Israelite Exodus, but smaller in number than the Torah relates.

Regardless, some truths are deeper than history: The story of enslavement and liberation is a deep, indelible facet of Jewish theology. And a mature faith can hold an expansive understanding of God and holy texts that embraces the ways this story — no matter whether it happened historically — helps us see who we are and the nature of our obligations to those oppressed today.

MYTH NO. 2 The Seder is a purely Jewish tradition.

In fact, many scholars today argue that the Seder is based on

the Greco-Roman model of the symposium, which involved, among other things that may sound familiar to anyone celebrating Passover: a banquet framed by specific appetizers, eating in a reclining position, drinking a predetermined number of cups of wine, songs of praise, easily accessible questions, and deep discussion of philosophical matters that lasted sometimes all night.

Of course, the real power of the Seder is in how it sacralized and transformed the symposium model. Praise was sung not to the emperor but to God; questions were not about the nature of food or pleasure, but rather an invitation to discuss essential themes of bondage and freedom.

The cups of wine alluded to the four actions taken by God in redeeming the Israelites or to the four stages of liberation. Women and children were included. The Seder may have been adapted from the wider culture, but it was imbued with enduring meaning.

MYTH NO. 3 Jesus’ Last Supper was a Passover Seder.

The Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke assert that the Last Supper took place on the first night of Passover. However, it’s pretty unlikely that Jesus participated in a Seder. When the Second Temple in Jerusalem stood, the first night of Passover usually involved just eating the paschal sacrifice, a lamb that had been slaughtered at the temple and then roasted and served at home. There are no descriptions of the Seder or the Haggada — the text that guides the Seder ritual now — from major historical authors or works

RAFAEL BEN-ARI/CHAMELEONS EYE/ISTOCK

Passover Seder involves, among other things, retelling the story of the Israelite Exodus from Egypt, drinking wine and eating a big meal.

detailing Passover observance during the time of the Second Temple. Parts of the Seder might have begun to take root during Jesus’ lifetime, but there’s no evidence that they were widespread or developed enough that he would have participated in them.

MYTH NO. 4 The Seder centers on asking and answering four questions.

If you look carefully at the Haggada, there’s actually only one question: “Why is this night different from all other nights?”

Following this are four observations about the foods and practices that distinguish the evening from others. In the Haggada, only two of the observations — about eating matzah and bitter herbs — are addressed directly, and not until much later in the Seder. Rather, the frame of the questioning is intended to point us to the discursive nature of the Haggada: It’s not meant to be recited rote but rather engaged as part of a dynamic discussion, with the people at the table fleshing out what the text leaves unsaid and with multiple “right” answers to

every question out there.

MYTH NO. 5 There’s a standard list of foods Jews avoid during Passover.

Many people know that Jewish law prohibits eating chametz at Passover — food made from or including wheat, barley, rye, oats or spelt that has fermented or risen. Many Jews with ties to the traditions of Germany or Eastern Europe also abstain from eating kitniyot, a complicated Passoverspecific category of food that includes rice, beans, lentils, corn, peas and soy.

Most Jews with roots elsewhere in the world do eat kitniyot, but even then, it’s not necessarily straightforward.

During Passover, for example, many Moroccan Jews eat kitniyot except for rice and chickpeas, though some abstain from legumes that have been dried or processed. Many Persian Jews eat rice but not legumes. Ethiopian Jews avoid fermented dairy.

Some groups of Hungarian Hasidic Jews don’t eat carrots. n Ruttenberg is rabbi-in-residence at Avodah and the author of “Nurture the Wow.” This was written for The Washington Post.

BIKE, SWIM, PLAY, KAYAK, CLIMB, RAFT, HIKE, DINE, JET-SKI, SHOP, CAMP, RUN, SKATE, TOUR, SIP, RECHARGE,

RECREATE AND A WHOLE LOT MORE...

Free

Wenatchee Valley

Visitor Guide

Spring and Summer 2018

Featuring Wenatchee Valley ❖ Lake Chelan Leavenworth ❖ The Methow The Okanogan ❖ Columbia Basin

Presenting Sponsors

Supplement to

There’s a lot to do in North Central Washington, and we have your guide to experiencing it all. The Wenatchee Valley Visitor Guide, Spring & Summer edition, has just been published by The Wenatchee World.

We’ve packed two seasons of activities into 92 pages of fun-filled activities, whether you’re hiking in Leavenworth, wine-tasting in Lake

Chelan, climbing in the Okanogan region, shopping in the Wenatchee Valley, touring the Methow Valley, or enjoying the fruits of the Columbia Basin.

Pick up a copy of the Wenatchee Valley Visitor Guide at the Wenatchee World office,

visitor locations or view the digital edition at wenatcheeworld.com/vg/2018/

wenatcheeworld.com