The Washington Post National Weekly - April 8, 2018

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Politics Trump’s trade policy may hurt GOP 4

World Sissi tightens grip on power 8

5 Myths Tariffs 23

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POLITICS

Troops at the border isn’t new BY

A LEX H ORTON

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resident Trump on Thursday said he plans to send between 2,000 and 4,000 National Guard members to the U.S.-Mexico border.

“Until we can have a wall and proper security, we are going to be guarding our border with our military,” President Trump said earlier in the week when he floated the idea.

He added: “That’s a big step, we really haven’t done that before, or certainly not very much before.”

That’s not exactly true. Long-standing concerns about the security of the southern border led to National Guard troops being deployed by the thousands under Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush.

It also wasn’t immediately clear why soldiers would be needed: The number of people crossing illegally into the country has plummeted over the past decade and is at the lowest level since 1971.

Operation Jump Start, President Bush, 2006-2008 At the height of the war in Iraq and months before a troop surge there, Bush federalized 6,000 National Guard troops in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. Another battle, across the border in Mexico, was simmering as Mexican officials declared war on drug cartels in late 2006, sparking waves of killings and instability that threatened spillover.

Despite the presence of armed U.S. soldiers and airmen, their mission was mostly passive, Customs and Border Patrol said. The Posse Comitatus Act forbids using the military for domestic law enforcement outside military bases, leaving troops focused on conducting surveillance from ground stations and helicopters, installing fences and vehicle barriers and training.

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Troops were typically expected to avoid capturing suspected drug traffickers or undocumented migrants and instead report activity to federal agents, but orders that activate troops to the border affected what military personnel could do.

Under Title 10 for instance, Guard troops are under the command of the secretary of defense, using federal funds. Troops activated under Title 32 are federally funded but are under the command of the state governor, where they have more flexibility for law enforcement operations.

KHAMPHA BOUAPHANH/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Utah National Guard troops prepare to extend a wall along the U.S. border in San Luis, Ariz., in 2006 as part of Operation Jump Start.

Officials said at the time that it was a necessary augmentation that allowed agents to pivot from administrative and infrastructure tasks and focus on ground operations.

But the $1.2 billion price tag raised questions about the use of troops to fulfill a Department of Homeland Security mission, as National Guard troops were exhausted from rotations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There also were tensions on the border after a deadly 1997 incident involving the military. A U.S. Marine shot and killed an American high school student carrying a .22 rifle who was mistaken for a hostile person as he herded

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. 26

goats at the Texas border, leading to a temporary halt of military activity there.

DHS pointed to successes, including large drug seizures and an incident in which Guard troops dived into the Rio Grande to save a Central American migrant from drowning.

Operation Phalanx, President Obama, 2010-2016 The successor to Jump Start began with an Obama authorization to deploy 1,200 troops along the border, again amid fears that violence would spread on the U.S. side after highprofile killings north of the border, The Post’s Nick Miroff reported in 2011.

Another reason: Customs and Border Protection agents needed time to fill their ranks after staffing shortfalls.

National Guard troops deployed a fleet of UH-72 Lakota helicopters later in the mission with infrared camera arrays to detect movement from the sky at night and through some of the foliage migrants use as concealment.

A release from the Guard said the helicopters typically included a Border Patrol agent on board. The Lakotas used powerful radio equipment that helped agents communicate with one another and Guard units spread over vast areas.

The Guard touted the deployments as a way for troops to get hands-on experience in the mission, which cost $110 million in 2010, its first year. But the Government Accountability Office issued a report in 2011 detailing Pentagon concerns about the lack of strategy for troops plugged into an ongoing, permanent mission executed by DHS. The spectrum of how troops could operate depending on their orders left DHS struggling to figure out how to best utilize them, the report found. In late 2011, Obama scaled back the mission to focus on aerial surveillance. n

© The Washington Post

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

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ON THE COVER Rosa Sabido becomes emotional while reflecting on nearly nine months of chosen confinement in a Colorado church to avoid deportation. Photograph

by MELINA MARA, The Washington Post.

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POLITICS

Trump’s tariffs may help Democrats E RICA W ERNER Akron, Ohio BY

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resident Trump’s recent spate of tariffs are popular among his working-class supporters here. But his aggressive trade moves could help put a key Senate seat out of reach for his fellow Republicans, undermining the GOP’s fight to keep control of Congress in November.

Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown is running for reelection partly by touting his support for the president’s aggressive trade strategy and trumpeting his longtime opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement and other trade deals Trump rails against. That’s largely a boon in Ohio, where Trump won by 8 percentage points in 2016.

“I’m working with the president to make these tariffs work,” Brown said recently after addressing a gathering of Teamsters at a United Steelworkers hall in Akron.

For Brown’s likely Republican opponent, Rep. James B. Renacci, Trump’s trade moves are a growing political headache, forcing the candidate to explain his own past support for trade pacts and his concerns about the tariffs.

It’s a challenge that was compounded Wednesday when China threatened to retaliate with tariffs on U.S. soybeans, cars and airplanes — critical cogs in the Ohio economy. The threats sparked widespread anxiety among farmers and potentially created even greater complications for Renacci, who is trying to broadcast his support for Trump while also navigating around a policy that could hurt voters who usually vote Republican.

“I want to just continue to work with as many constituents in Ohio and make sure that we don’t have any window between what the president wants to get done and what Ohio businesses and the economy really need,” Renacci said in an interview in Columbus.

Other Republicans are likely to face the same challenges as Renacci as they defend their party’s

PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

In Ohio, a Republican grapples to explain his support for trade pacts two-seat Senate majority and try to keep Democrats from picking up the 23 seats they would need to retake the House. Brown is one of 10 Senate Democrats running for reelection in states Trump won, and analysts say the two-term lawmaker is in a strong position, in part because his populist approach on trade now aligns with Trump’s rhetoric.

Renacci, like GOP lawmakers elsewhere, is being forced to explain to blue-collar voters why he

supports free-trade policies that are now out of step with Trump’s Republican Party.

“In the context of politics there may be some people, including Trump people, who say ‘Whose side are you on?’ ” said Herb Asher, a professor emeritus of political science at Ohio State University. “And it’s easier for Sherrod to answer that question than Renacci.”

Similar upside-down trade politics could emerge in House races,

From left, Bryan C. Williams, chairman for the Summit County Republican Party, and Rep. James B. Renacci (ROhio) greet President Trump in Cleveland last month.

too, in districts from California to Washington state to Michigan. In the 7th District in southern Michigan, Democratic challenger Gretchen Driskell has embraced Trump’s trade moves, praising his steel and aluminum tariffs while criticizing her opponent, Republican incumbent Tim Walberg, who has a history of supporting trade deals.

In Indiana, Democratic Sen. Joe Donnelly has also spoken in favor of Trump’s tariffs, and he,

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POLITICS like Brown, could end up facing a Republican House member with a history of embracing free-trade deals.

Ohio, like other states in the Midwest, remains reliant on manufacturing industries despite having bled tens of thousands of jobs in steel and other industries over the years. Mills shuttered by the dozens during the 1970s and 1980s, putting well-paid steel and iron workers into unemployment and devastating once-prosperous communities like Johnstown and Warren.

While a variety of factors contributed to the manufacturing decline, many workers blame unfair foreign competition, including countries like China and South Korea “dumping” steel at belowmarket prices that domestic producers could not compete with.

Now, many see hope in Trump’s announcement of 25 percent tariffs on imported steel and 10 percent on imported aluminum.

Although few argue that Ohio’s steel production industry can be restored to its glory days, steelworkers here hold out optimism that some idled facilities could be restarted and some jobs brought back. After the tariff announcement, Republic Steel announced plans to restart an idled furnace in Lorain, Ohio, with the potential to bring back 1,000 jobs. In Granite City, Ill., U.S. Steel said it would restart one of two blast furnaces and bring back 500 workers.

“We’re hoping the steel tariffs could just put the industry back on a level playing field,” said Patrick Gallagher, a subdistrict director for United Steelworkers in Cleveland.

Union leaders in Ohio and elsewhere watched in frustration during the 2016 election as significant portions of their workforce ignored union endorsements of Democrat Hillary Clinton and voted for Trump instead. Jack Hefner, president of United Steelworkers Local 2 in Akron, estimated around a third of his membership voted for Trump despite the leadership’s support for Clinton.

“Labor’s been beating the drum that these trade deals are bad, so here comes Trump saying the same thing, which made it really hard for us,” Hefner said. “He stole our playbook.”

Brown’s alliance with Trump on the issue can only help him

J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

“I can quarrel with he punished Canada initially more than China . . . but fundamentally it was the right thing to do.”

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), talking about President Trump’s tariffs with such voters, Hefner said. He said he had spoken with several union members who cast their ballots for Trump in 2016 but intended to support Brown’s reelection.

“I don’t imagine he and Donald Trump are going to go out and have a beer anytime soon, but on trade and jobs, Donald Trump talks the talk. We’ll see if he walks the walk,” Hefner said. “If he does what he says he’s going to do on these trade issues, he’ll have an ally in Senator Brown.”

Until Trump came along, free trade was a core GOP tenet and remains so for many GOP donors and Chamber of Commerce Republicans who typically help Republicans win elections. But given the steel industry’s strong history in the state, along with the emotional appeal of Trump’s “Buy America” refrains, support for his tariffs appears to stretch well beyond union halls, despite the potential economic downsides.

When Trump visited the state recently to deliver a speech about infrastructure in Richfield, the

crowd waiting for him included two women in pink hard hats holding signs that said “Thank You for Supporting American Steel” and “Our Steel Industry Thanks U.” One of these women, Sherry Slocum, said she works at a local company called Belden-Hutter that helps manufacturers sell power-transmission products.

“I foresee good things” from the tariffs, said Slocum, a Republican who said she voted for Trump. But Slocum wasn’t ready to say who she would support in the Senate race, saying, “That one’s going to have to play itself out.”

Such voters may present an opportunity for Brown to peel away some Trump supporters based on their views on trade and his ability to present himself as the president’s ally on an issue so ingrained in the culture of the state. Brown has a long-established record on the issue and even wrote a book more than a decade ago called “Myths of Free Trade.”

Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, seen at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, is running for reelection. He has touted his support for President Trump’s strategy on trade — an issue that Republicans find themselves out of step with the White House on.

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He has partnered with Republicans on the issue, including work with Rob Portman, the state’s Republican senator, on legislation called the Leveling the Playing Field Act, which aimed to give businesses more recourse to challenge unfair foreign competition.

In an interview, Portman cited his joint work with Brown on the issue and said he wasn’t sure where Renacci stood.

“I don’t know what Renacci’s position’s going to be. I just don’t know. But as you know, Brown and I work together on this stuff,” Portman said, going on to advocate a “nuanced position” on tariffs.

“We need to have a level playing field and fair trade but that doesn’t mean that you want to slap on protectionist tariffs without, you know, a fair-trade reasoning behind it. It invites retaliation and causes big downstream costs to our consumers,” Portman said.

“So I think there’s a balance here.”

Brown refused to speculate on the political ramifications of his views or the fact that a Republican president now holds positions he has long advocated.

“Believe it or not, I don’t care. . . . I don’t mind supporting or opposing presidents in either party on trade,” Brown said in an interview at the steelworkers hall in Akron.

On Trump’s tariffs, Brown said, “I can quarrel with how he did it, how he rolled it out, I can quarrel with he punished Canada initially more than China . . . but fundamentally it was the right thing to do” and will “be a net positive for the national economy.”

Renacci, a four-term House member and former accountant who founded a company that owned and operated nursing homes, has his own track record on trade, but his includes voting for the deals with Colombia and the one with Korea that Trump is now renegotiating.

“I’m someone who is a big supporter of the president and his agenda and the direction he’s taking. I do think we have some unfair trading partners with China, so I’m glad to see we’re doing some of the things we’re doing with China,” Renacci said. “I’m close, but in the end, I want to also talk with the constituents who are going to be most affected.” n ©The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Swift battlefield wins vs. ‘infinite war’ BY

G REG J AFFE

P

resident Trump’s pronouncement that he would be pulling troops out of Syria “very soon” has laid bare a major source of tension between Trump and his generals.

The president has made winning on the battlefields of Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan a central tenet of his foreign policy and tough-guy identity. But Trump and the military hold frequently opposing ideas about exactly what winning means.

Those differences have played out in heated Situation Room debates, said senior administration officials. And they contributed to the dismissal last month of Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster who as national security adviser had pressed the president to support an open-ended commitment of U.S. forces to Afghanistan.

Trump’s words, both in public and private, describe a view that wars should be brutal and swift, waged with overwhelming firepower and, in some cases, with little regard for civilian casualties.

Victory over America’s enemies for the president is often a matter of bombing “the s--- out of them,” as he said on the campaign trail.

For America’s generals, more than 17 years of combat have served as a lesson in the limits of overwhelming force to end wars fueled by sectarian feuds, unreliable allies and persistent government corruption. “Victory is sort [of ] an elusive concept in that part of the world,” said Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland, who led troops over five tours of Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Anyone who goes in and tries to achieve a decisive victory is going to come away disappointed.”

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis echoed that in November when he outlined an expanded role for U.S. forces in preventing the return of the Islamic State or a group like it in Syria. “You need to do something about this mess now,” he said. “Not just, you know, fight the military part of it and then say, ‘Good luck on the rest of it.’ ” The Army recently rewrote its primary war-fighting doctrine to

SUSANNAH GEORGE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The president’s definition of military victory is far different than that of his more cautious generals account for the long stretch of fighting without victory since Sept. 11, 2001. “The win was too absolute,” said Lt. Gen. Michael Lundy of the old document. “We concluded winning is more of a continuum.”

The tension between the White House and the military over how and when to end America’s wars is not entirely new. To the frustration of his generals, President Barack Obama announced plans in 2014 to pull all combat forces out of Afghanistan by the end of his presidency. The decision drew heavy criticism from Republican lawmakers, and in 2016, with the Taliban expanding across Afghanistan, Obama decided to leave about 7,800 troops in place.

Trump came to office promising to give the Pentagon a free hand to unleash U.S. firepower. He has boosted airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, a key element in the military’s campaign to help its proxies rout the Islamic State.

But the attacks haven’t addressed the sectarian rivalries that created the Islamic State. In some

instances they have inadvertently allowed forces allied with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and Iranian-backed militias to extend their influence. For many in the military and Congress, the 100 percent defeat of the Islamic State hardly feels like a victory.

“Who is winning in Syria?” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) asked the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East last month when he appeared before lawmakers.

“Well, again, from — from the — from a civil war standpoint it would appear that the regime is ascendant,” Gen. Joseph Votel stammered in reply.

“Is our policy still that Assad must go?” Graham continued.

Votel indicated he wasn’t sure.

“Well, if you don’t know, I doubt if anybody knows, because this is your job,” Graham said.

The exchange offered a rare window into the military’s frustration. And it called to mind McMaster’s oft-repeated insistence before entering the White House that simply targeting enemies was not a war-winning strategy,.

U.S. troops look out toward the border with Turkey from a small outpost near the town of Manbij, northern Syria.

Trump has said he wants to pull American troops out of Syria.

A similar dilemma for Trump has played out in Afghanistan, where U.S. airstrikes have increased sevenfold.

The problem isn’t a lack of military firepower, but the weak Afghan government, the persistence of safe havens in Pakistan and a Taliban movement that is fighting on terrain it knows intimately.

“As we learned so painfully in Iraq, defeat has meaning only in the eyes of the defeated,” said Ryan Crocker, who served as ambassador in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Near the end of President George W. Bush’s presidency, Eliot Cohen recalled journeying to the basement of the Pentagon where a senior intelligence officer presented him binders full of data that he and his staff had compiled to track U.S. progress in Afghanistan.

“Are we winning?” Cohen, then a top aide to the secretary of state, recalled asking.

“I have no idea, sir,” he replied.

Today in Kabul, senior U.S. officials track more than 700 bench marks designed to capture the progress of the Afghan government and its security forces. U.S. officials said the Afghans have hit 97 percent of these goals this year.

They often debate whether they are even tracking the right things.

“Are these the metrics that put you on the trajectory to winning?” one senior military adviser in Kabul recalled asking over the course of 2016 and 2017. “How will you even know when you get there? ” “Because the Afghan war is so difficult to wrap your head around — so insoluble — there’s a profound urge to look at things you can measure,” Cohen said. “That one- or two-sentence summary that a distracted president with other priorities can understand.”

One answer, said veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, is simply to set aside the whole notion of winning in favor of something else.

“What does it even mean in the 21st century?” Crocker asked. “I don’t know.”

He paused and searched his mind for a suitable alternative. “I don’t think coping is one the military would be likely to embrace.” n © The Washington Post

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POLITICS ANALYSIS

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Why is Pruitt in so much trouble?

BY

D INO G RANDONI

Pruitt rented part of a Capitol Hill condo apartment for $50 nightly. The place is coowned by the wife of a lobbyist, J. Steven Hart, whose firm, Williams & Jensen, lobbies on energy and transportation issues. In addition to the rental’s surprisingly low price given its location, Pruitt only had to pay for the nights he stayed in Washington.

By comparison, Pruitt now lives in a building where rents begin at about $3,000 monthly. He and his wife still own a home in Tulsa, with an estimated $5,500-a-month payment for mortgage and taxes.

I

f you’ve seen the headlines lately about Scott Pruitt, who leads the Environmental Protection Agency, you know he is in some sort of trouble.

But is it over taking first-class flights? Or about living in a discount housing rental linked to a lobbyist? Or about giving raises to favored aides behind the White House’s back?

Actually, it’s all of the above. Let us explain the hot waters in which President Trump’s top environmental enforcer finds himself.

When did Pruitt become controversial?

Among environmentalists, conservationists and most elected Democrats in Washington, Pruitt was contentious from the moment President-elect Trump tapped him to lead the EPA. Pruitt was one of the biggest foes of the agency during the Obama administration, suing it 14 times when he was Oklahoma’s attorney general. Pruitt remains a loathed figure on the left for following through on his promise to dismantle much of President Barack Obama’s environmental legacy, including his successful push to have Trump commit to withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement last May. Just this past week, Pruitt announced that EPA would roll back Obama-era fuel-efficiency standards for future cars and light trucks.

When did the criticism become about more than Pruitt’s policies?

The scrutiny began when The Washington Post began reporting on Pruitt’s repeated firstclass flights and stays in high-end hotels while ostensibly on government business. The costs included at least $120,000 spent last June for Pruitt, his aides and his round-the-clock security detail to travel to Italy for a conference. By comparison, the agency spent about $56,000 to send Pruitt’s immediate predecessor, Gina McCarthy, and her team to Italy in 2015.

Why did the EPA insist on flying Pruitt premium-class?

Pruitt’s security detail pointed to threats some members of the public have made against him since he took office in February 2017 and said sitting near the front of a plane allowed for easier boarding and exit. But airline safety and security experts struggled to fully explain the EPA’s rationale as to why the premium seats are safer. While government policy allows for the purchase of premiumclass flights for long international trips (so high-level officials are fresh for meetings right after landing), Pruitt often flew firstclass domestically. After a wave of criticism

ANDREW HARNIK/ASSOCIATED PRESS

about the practice, he suggested recently that he would look for ways to return to coach seating while still following his security detail’s advice.

In what other ways has the EPA chief been accused of wasting taxpayers’ money?

Pruitt insisted in an interview with Fox News on Wednesday that he knew nothing about the big salary hikes awarded two staffers last month until the Atlantic reported it, and he blamed other staff members for awarding the raises by utilizing a littleknown provision in the Safe Drinking Water Act. The controversy even has some Republican lawmakers calling for him to step down or be fired.

In general, Pruitt has defended his actions in office, mostly in appearances on conservative media outlets.

But when pressed during the Fox News interview on who exactly awarded those raises, Pruitt said, “I don’t know.” One important fact: The 1977 provision the EPA used to grant the salary increases gives the special hiring authority directly to Pruitt himself.

That seems bad.

It gets even worse once you learn that White House officials urged Pruitt to think twice about doing any interviews Tuesday or Wednesday, according to several senior administration officials. Chief of Staff John F. Kelly got on the phone, too, with Kelly expressing dissatisfaction with Pruitt’s previous media sit-downs. But the EPA chief ignored the message.

What are the issues with his past living arrangement?

For the first few months of his tenure,

Here’s what you need to know about the EPA chief EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, seen Tuesday, has faced scrutiny over his first-class travel.

He is now facing questions about a discount condominium rental from the spouse of an energy lobbyist.

Anything else?

There are numerous mini-controversies revolving around Pruitt. He has faced scrutiny over the costs of hiring a 24/7 security detail and of installing a $43,000 soundproof phone booth in his office. He has also faced questions about his extensive interactions with industry representatives since taking office. His schedule for meetings or travel is never released in advance.

How have Republicans reacted to all this?

Some, including Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), have come to Pruitt’s defense this past week.

That parallels the GOP reception he typically has gotten every time he’s visited Congress for hearings, with lavish praise from lawmakers representing states rich in oil, natural gas and coal for his efforts to unwind EPA regulations on those fossil fuels. All but one GOP senator, Susan Collins of Maine, voted last year to confirm Pruitt.

But the man who matters most is Trump.

Earlier last week, the president expressed support for Pruitt after cryptically telling reporters, “I hope he’s going to be great.” That tepid endorsement seems to be eroding, however.

On Wednesday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump was “not” okay with Pruitt’s old living arrangement. “When we have had a chance to have a deeper dive on it, we’ll let you know the outcomes of that,” she said.

So is Pruitt on his way out?

It’s very hard to say because we are, after all, talking about Trump. Pruitt has been one of his most effective Cabinet-level officials so far. And while boarding Air Force One on Thursday, Trump was asked by reporters if he still had confidence in him. “I do,” Trump replied.

But as former secretary of state Rex Tillerson can tell Pruitt, Trump’s opinions on his deputies can turn on a dime. n

© The Washington Post

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NATION

Female vets fight to be part of history E MILY W AX- T HIBODEAUX Bethlehem, Pa. BY

W

hen Jenny Pacanowski took the floor, she stood tall, looked straight into the crowd and told her story just like this: When she — a former combat medic in Iraq — goes to veterans’ events, she gets “that crossover handshake.”

“You know the one, right?” she said. “When some guy reaches right over me to shake hands with a nearby guy. ‘Thank you for your service,’ they say to the man next to me!”

“Even though I’m the Iraq War veteran,” she said, her voice rising almost like a preacher’s. “I’m the one who drove a military ambulance through the Sunni Triangle.”

She grew so frustrated that she had “Combat Veteran” tattooed on her right forearm. “I should have got it tattooed on my forehead,” she told a group of female veterans gathered in a creaky farmhouse in this old steel mill town.

Pacanowski, a poet and writing coach, is part of a growing national movement to bring the unvarnished experiences of women who have served into mainstream popular culture. As a result, more female veterans are attending memoir-writing retreats, learning new storytelling skills at workshops for stand-up comedy, screenwriting and improv, and performing in poetry slams and plays.

Pacanowski’s workshop takes place about once a month, with several women huddled with notebooks and laptops near a crackling fire while her puppy naps atop blankets. Books filled with Vietnam War-era poetry are strewn across a table.

Wars are remembered with monuments and memorials, but also through the words of the people who fought them. Yet the most famous books, films and television shows about war are about men. Think “Platoon” and “Band of Brothers” and readinglist classics such as “The Red

MARK MAKELA FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Jenny Pacanowski carries her dog after leading a writing workshop with her organization, Female Veterans Empowered to Transition, in Bethlehem, Pa. She got her tattoo because she was frustrated people often don’t think of women as veterans.

Badge of Courage” and “The Things They Carried.”

Women have served in every American conflict dating back to the Revolution. In the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, female units first known as “Team Lioness” and later called Female Engagement Teams were able to search and gather intelligence from women in areas where it was largely taboo for unrelated members of the opposite sex to touch.

Under pressure to acknowledge that female service members were often already in combat, the Pentagon officially opened all jobs to women in 2015. Women are now the fastest-growing group in the military, and there are nearly 2 million female veterans in the country.

Yet when Americans think about war, they still typically think of men, said Peter Molin, a retired Army infantry officer who deployed to Afghanistan and now teaches writing at Rutgers University.

“It’s definitely an entrenched

male tradition in the country’s popular mind. And it’s just wrong because it hides their outstanding contributions,” Molin said.

Women who are writing about the military are upending the “conventional and outdated idea” that our society should “send our boys to war to make them a man,” he said.

“When we see women in the military serving so strongly, it becomes about, well, shouldn’t we be going to war to prove our competence and bravery and love of country — not just manhood?”

Molin said.

Female veterans have also written about what Molin called the “absurdity and often toxic male world of the American military.”

The military is like a “massive frat party. With weapons,” Kayla Williams, a former sergeant and Arabic linguist, writes in her critically acclaimed book “Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army.”

“Hey, Kayla! Show us your boobs!” she recounts in one passage. “I was on a mountain near

After combat, workshops help many women find their voices onstage and on the page

the Syrian border. At this time, I may well have been the most forward-deployed female soldier in Iraq.”

The male soldiers offered her money, and some “smart-ass threw in some M&M’s.”

Williams, who is now director of the Center for Women Veterans at Veterans Affairs, said more women should be “writing themselves back into history,” penning works that focus not only on trauma, but also on triumph — ways they fought bravely or saved fellow soldiers.

“How can anyone know we even existed when our history is hidden?” said Williams, whose second memoir, “Plenty of Time When We Get Home: Love and Recovery in the Aftermath of War,” is about her family’s transition to healing.

Army truck driver Lyn Watson has been attending Pacanowski’s writing workshops every month for more than two years.

“In this little space, we finally get to be heard,” she said, sipping tea at a wooden table. “And I think that it’s only going to spread outside these walls.”

Tammy Barlet, who served eight years as an operations specialist with the Coast Guard, said Pacanowski’s writing workshops have helped her get out of bed and “be with my tribe — my women veterans.”

Less than a year after she started attending the workshops, Barlet was invited to a program called “Veterans Voices.” From a stage in New York, she read aloud a piece she had written about how disorienting it was for her to return home after years patrolling the Persian Gulf.

Her family came to the reading, weeping in the audience as she spoke.

“My mom often expresses to me how she feels she has her ‘old Tammy’ back,” she read to the audience. “The woman who is ambitious, adventurous, strong and smart. I’ve reclaimed myself as a person, woman, sister, daughter, friend and a female veteran.” n ©The Washington Post

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In the Ozarks, teaching ‘Hispanics 101’ D ANIELLE P AQUETTE Branson, Mo. BY

I

n a ballroom with antlers on the wall and hoof prints on the carpet, diversity coach Miguel Joey Aviles asked whether anyone knew how to merengue.

“Lord have mercy,” he said, counting hands. “Only two?”

This is “Hispanics 101,” a class meant to teach employers in the Ozarks resort town of 11,400 how to lure workers from Puerto Rico and persuade them to stay.

The economy depends on it.

The remote getaway known for dinner theaters, country music concerts and a museum of dinosaur replicas has been filling 2,050 vacation season vacancies — with a lack of locals applying.

So, like other areas with tight labor markets, Branson finds itself getting creative to fill jobs — in this case by recruiting people from a part of the United States with much higher unemployment.

But the plan to bring 1,000 workers from the island to overwhelmingly white, conservative Branson over the next three years has sparked unease, with critics saying that the newcomers will steal work from residents or drag down wages or bump up crime.

Inside the mountain lodge with Aviles, however, managers who say they’re desperate for employees stood up and tried to move their hips. They came from hotels, hospitals, hardware stores and banks, paying $50 each for the workshop.

“It’s very, very difficult to find talented people in this labor market,” said Lynn Brown, regional human resources manager at Bluegreen Vacations. Few responded to the 20 vacancies he had posted online.

It’s another challenge to get workers to stay. Aviles advises bosses to check in often, ask about their mothers and request that grocery stores in the area sell plantains and Goya coconut water.

“It’s not enough to invite them to the party,” Aviles said, twisting his body to the beat. “Bring them to the dance floor.”

Branson boasts hiking, cave

DANIELLE PAQUETTE/THE WASHINGTON POST

Tourist town Branson, Mo., is trying to attract workers from Puerto Rico — and get them to stay tours and 47 music venues, including Dolly Parton’s horse show, which a Slate reviewer recently described as “the Lost Cause of the Confederacy meets Cirque du Soleil.” The town logged a record 9 million visits from tourists in 2017.

The local chamber of commerce expects an even bigger rush this year, thanks to rising wages nationwide.

Branson’s workforce development team is partnering with local businesses, including food suppliers, to accommodate the new hires. But officials acknowledge that some in the area, which is 92.4 percent white, are clinging to the past. Confederate flags adorn shop windows. A nearby billboard advertises “White Pride Radio.”

“We get nasty comments all the time,” said Heather Hardinger, programs director at the Taney County Partnership, which is working with the chamber on what it calls the “talent attraction” plan.

Companies across the country are competing for workers from Puerto Rico, which has the highest jobless rate in the United States.

(Last year’s average was 10.8 percent.)

Firms in Maine, Wisconsin and Indiana have sought employees there, with some offering housing as a sweetener. One medical device maker in tiny Warsaw, Ind., has provided its hires with cars.

Branson employers seek a variety of hires, from housekeepers to receptionists to senior managers in the tourism and hospitality industries, with pay ranging from $12 to $20 an hour, as well as hospital nurses whose salaries start at $54,000.

If Puerto Ricans face hostility in the town, Hardinger worries they will decamp for somewhere else — and the town will be stuck without the workers it needs to grow.

“The question we keep asking ourselves is: What can we do to set the community apart and make them feel at home here?” she said.

Branson has long sought temporary foreign workers to support its tourism industry and faced a crisis last summer when the Trump administration curbed the number of H-2B visas, cutting off a supply of seasonal employees from Belize.

The town’s workforce development team got to brainstorming, and it struck them: Puerto Rico is

Miguel Joey Aviles teaches “Hispanics 101,” a class that teaches employers in Branson, Mo., to increase and retain their Hispanic workforce. “The worst thing I’ve seen is halfhearted efforts,” Aviles told the room. “If we go halfway, it never works out.”

part of the United States — and the island’s jobless rate is typically much higher than Branson’s.

Perhaps they could make a deal: quality jobs and a warm welcome in exchange for hard workers who will consider staying.

Chamber officials visited Puerto Rico last April, August and again in February to recruit workers for positions in hotels and hospitals. The effort has brought 269 people from the island to Branson.

One of the first signs of resistance was a resident complaining he had read a story in the local newspaper last May about two men from Puerto Rico getting into a bar fight.

“Did you bring them here?” he asked, Hardinger said she recalled. “We don’t want this violence.”

“What if they had been from Minnesota?” she recalls responding. “Would you want Minnesotans to stop coming here?”

Across town, a pair of store owners questioned the need for the recruitment push on the island.

“You have to wonder if this will drive wages down,” said Beth Burgess, standing behind the wood counter at Cadwell’s Downtown Flea Market, which sells old books and raccoon pelts.

Two blocks up the street, at the Downtown Branson Visitor Center, Mike Peery, who has lived here more than a decade, lamented that locals can’t seem to fill the town’s openings. He doesn’t blame outsiders, though. “So many people around here don’t want to work,” Peery said. “They have drug problems, tattoo problems, show-upto-work problems.”

Karen Best, the mayor of Branson, has heard these complaints.

She has assured residents that the recruits are Americans just like them — and vital to their town’s future.

“I would love to give all of our jobs to folks in the mainland U.S.,” she said. “But we have more openings than we have folks to fill those jobs. And if those jobs aren’t filled, our tourism season doesn’t happen.” n ©The Washington Post

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With reelection, Sissi’s power grows S UDARSAN R AGHAVAN Cairo BY

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ith his landslide reelection victory, Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi has deepened his grip on the Arab world’s most populous country and a key U.S. ally, making him arguably the country’s most autocratic leader since it became a republic in 1953.

His consolidation of power, marked by wide-scale repression and targeting of opponents, is widely expected to grow in his second term. His supporters are already pushing to alter presidential term limits to allow Sissi to remain in office past his new term.

But his outsize economic and political ambitions are at the same time breeding resentment within large segments of the general population and, some analysts say, inside Egypt’s highly influential military.

“The past few months have indicated some tensions and divisions,” said Michael Wahid Hanna, a Middle East expert at the Century Foundation. “But there’s nothing to date that suggests that impacts the way in which Sissi at the end of the day can exercise power. He is in charge.”

On Monday, Egypt’s election commission officially confirmed what was already a foregone conclusion: In an election where Sissi arrested or pushed out all of his credible challengers, he won 97 percent of all valid votes.

Critics say Sissi has been emboldened by President Trump, feeling free to use coercion in securing a landslide victory. Since Trump signaled during a trip to Saudi Arabia in May that human rights in the Middle East would not be a priority for the White House, repression under Sissi has escalated.

On Monday, Trump called Sissi to congratulate him on his election victory. A White House statement said, “The two leaders affirmed the strategic partnership between the United States and Egypt, and noted that they look forward to advancing this part-

THIBAULT CAMUS/POOL/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

But the tight grip and bold ambitions of Egypt’s president also stir resentment, analysts say nership and addressing common challenges.”

Voter turnout, however, was only 41 percent — six points lower than in the 2014 presidential election. Voter participation dropped despite a campaign by Sissi loyalists, business executives and local authorities to get Egyptians to go to the polls with offers of cash, food, services — and even religious trips to Saudi Arabia.

The proportion of “spoiled votes” was more than 7 percent, higher than in any previous Egyptian election.

“There were more people too disillusioned to enter the polls, and probably a lot more people going to the polls who didn’t want to go to the polls than last time,” said Timothy Kaldas, a political analyst with the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy. “This time the urgency amongst the population to vote was a lot less than last time.”

Sissi’s supporters applaud his ambition. They point to his economic and infrastructure proj-

ects, including building new roads, expanding electricity capacity, and encouraging more investments in the country’s oil and gas sectors.

But Sissi has also embarked on expensive megaprojects, including a new branch of the Suez Canal and a $45 billion new administrative capital outside Cairo.

Many economists say these will provide little return for years, even decades.

The funds, critics say, could be better spent helping Egypt’s mostly impoverished population of about 100 million people. While the economy is showing signs of a rebound, even middle-class Egyptians are struggling to cope with rising prices, falling subsidies, and austerity measures imposed by the International Monetary Fund.

In his second term, Sissi will face growing expectations from ordinary Egyptians. Many who voted for him said in interviews that they hoped he would produce more jobs for youth, better ser-

Supporters of President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi are already pushing to alter presidential term limits to allow Sissi to remain in office past his new term.

vices, and lower prices so meat and other basic items could be more affordable.

“The things I most wish he takes care of in his coming term are education and health services,” said Mona Kamel, 52, a housewife who voted for Sissi.

“This is what will build the infrastructure for our country.”

Other supporters of the president credit him with restoring stability, especially after the violence that followed the 2011 Arab Spring revolt that toppled President Hosni Mubarak. Two years later, the military led by Sissi overthrew the elected Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi, and later jailed him along with tens of thousands of members of the nowbanned Muslim Brotherhood.

Those actions helped trigger a rise in Islamist militancy, including the emergence of an Islamic State affiliate in the northern Sinai Peninsula and new threats in the Western Desert.

Sissi’s supporters give him good marks on fighting extremism, but his critics say he’s using the specter of terrorism to target anyone deemed a threat to his regime.

Days after Trump’s speech in Saudi Arabia, Sissi blocked dozens of websites. Now more than 500 sites are blocked. Human rights groups say that extrajudicial killings are on the rise and that hundreds of activists have “forcibly disappeared” at the hands of Egypt’s security services.

The Egyptian government has also tried to tame the foreign media, especially when it is critical. Egypt’s prosecutor general has referred to the foreign media as “forces of evil” and vowed to take legal action against anyone who publishes “fake news” that harms the country.

Kaldas said Sissi has been effective in his recent takedowns of detractors and those he suspects are against him.

“His ability to do so suggests that whoever within the regime has objections to Sissi, they are neither powerful enough or organized enough to be consequential right now,” Kaldas said. n

©The Washington Post

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KLMNO WEEKLY

E.U. faces another major rebellion

BY G RIFF W ITTE AND M ICHAEL B IRNBAUM

Budapest

I

t was a continentwide party to mark the end of history.

On a spring night in 2004, a chorus sang in a Warsaw square. Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” — the anthem of the European Union — echoed across oncebloody frontiers. Midnight fireworks sparkled along the Mediterranean. The next morning, organizers set a white-tablecloth breakfast on Budapest’s Chain Bridge for revelers still celebrating the dawn of a new era for Europe.

“The divisions of the Cold War are gone — once and for all,” declared then-European Commission President Romano Prodi as he welcomed 10 new members to the E.U., eight from the former communist East.

And yet, 14 years later, new divisions are emerging — many of them following old lines. The triumph of liberal democracy is being attacked from within by E.U. members that openly deride the club’s values, principles and rules.

The bloc, meanwhile, has been incapable of fighting back, its weakness a side effect of the optimism with which it grew.

Ground zero for the rebellion is here in Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban is running for reelection Sunday with boasts of his illiberalism, swipes at the hostile E.U. “empire” and promises to further tighten his grip on a country dancing evercloser to the edge of autocracy.

Orban’s defiance presents the E.U. with a far different threat than the one it faced in 2016, when Britain voted to exit and speculation swirled over who might go next. It may be more serious than that — a challenge that endangers the character of the union.

“Orban doesn’t want to leave the E.U.,” a senior German official said. “He really wants to change the E.U.” By some measures, he’s succeeding. Far from being a pariah, Orban has found imitators in Poland and admirers in the Czech

AKOS STILLER/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Some Eastern European members are openly deriding the bloc’s values, principles and rules Republic, Austria and even at top political levels in Germany.

Orban’s European opponents, meanwhile, have proved unable to curb his behavior. Rather than punish Hungary for its intransigence, Brussels continues to supply the government with billions of euros in E.U. subsidies — money that Orban’s domestic critics say is vital to his survival because it boosts the economy and puts cash in the pockets of favored cronies.

“Orban is waging his freedom fight against the E.U. with huge amounts of E.U. money,” said Peter Kreko, executive director of the Budapest-based policy research firm Political Capital.

“Lenin said, ‘Capitalists will sell the rope to us with which we’ll hang them.’ Well, the E.U. is not selling. It’s giving it to Orban for free.”

The E.U. never gave itself adequate tools for dealing with a wayward leader such as Orban because it never imagined needing them, even as the alliance spread far beyond its original Western European core to coun-

tries with scant experience of democratic governance.

At the start of the millennium, the bloc had just 15 members — none of them east of the old Iron Curtain. But after the fall of communism, Eastern European countries that had been in the orbit of the Soviet Union looked to the E.U. and NATO as institutions that could bind them to the West and keep them out of Moscow’s grasp. Prosperous western neighbors spotted an opportunity to spread their influence across the continent.

Everyone assumed that, with time, differences would recede as the new members grew to adopt the values, rules and institutions of the old ones.

“We wanted to believe it. History would go on and we would be on the right side of it,” said the German official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for the record. “We never imagined that history could go the other way.”

For Hungarians, too, there were expectations that, in retro-

Honor guard soldiers stand outside the Hungarian parliament in Budapest last month. On Sunday, Prime Minister Viktor Orban is running for reelection. Orban has used the E.U. as a rhetorical foil and source of money.

spect, look naively optimistic.

“It was a fantastic constellation. We wanted it. The West wanted it. It was back wind in every respect,” said Peter Balazs, a former Hungarian diplomat who was deeply engaged in the E.U. accession process. “And the followup was in the fairy tales: They live happily ever after.”

Balazs, who would go on to become the country’s foreign minister, said Hungary spent a decade proving to the E.U. that it was worthy of membership, working assiduously to meet the club’s strict rules for entry.

But once Hungary had joined, the union’s best leverage to keep the country on a free and democratic path evaporated. Meanwhile, no one had seriously planned for what would happen after Hungary and others joined the bloc — a failure that Balazs attributed to parallel illusions.

“A Hungarian illusion that the E.U. would do it, that somebody else would solve our problems,” he said. “And for Europe, the illusion that they would be like us.”

The result was fertile ground for Orban. Since coming to power in 2010, he has simultaneously used the bloc as rhetorical foil and cash spigot — all without fear of meaningful consequences.

“I have, in fact, more respect for the decency of Euroskeptics who at least say, ‘Well, I don’t like the European Union, and I don’t like the values, and I’ll go out,’” Guy Verhofstadt, who was prime minister of Belgium when Hungary joined the E.U., told Orban last year when the Hungarian leader came to speak at the European Parliament. “You want to continue the money of European funds, the money of the European Union, but not the European values.”

Far from fearing the E.U.’s wrath, Orban’s allies see the historical pendulum swinging their way.

“More and more, political leaders in Europe are coming to the same conclusion,” ruling party spokesman Balazs Hidveghi said.

“Viktor Orban is right.” n © The Washington Post

COVER STORY

‘YES, I AM ROSA,’ SHE WOULD SAY TO HERSELF. ‘YES, I FEEL LONELY. YES, I’M IN SANCTUARY.’

BY STEPHANIE MCCRUMMEN in Mancos, Colo.

I

nside a tiny Colorado church, a woman who had been taking refuge for nearly nine months was sitting by a window, watching the snow drift down. She watched for an hour, then another, reminding herself for the 257th day in a row why she had chosen to be here, when there was a knock at the door.

“Rosa?” called a voice from the hallway, and then she remembered. Today was the day of the surprise.

“Don’t tell me what it is,” Rosa Sabido had said when someone started to elaborate on it the week before. She had been in United Methodist Church of Mancos since June 2, 2017, one of 40 known cases of undocumented immigrants living in churches across the country to avoid deportation, and wanted something to look forward to beyond what life had become. A blur of waiting. A blur of sleeping. A blur of people stopping by to see how she was doing, to say how sorry they were that it had come to this.

Out in America, beyond the property line of a church that in effect had become her country, the decades-old debate over immigration reform was as loud and emotional as ever.

President Trump was stepping up deportations and highlighting immigrants he described as rapists, murderers and gang members. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was giving an eight-hour speech calling young immigrants “courageous” and “patriotic” and speaking of their “divine spark.” Week after week brought more protests and accusations that both parties were using the issue for political gain while failing again to find a solution.

And all this time, Rosa was sealed off, watching the seasons change through the window — the end of spring, summer, fall, winter, and now almost spring again, a late snow falling as she got up to answer the door.

It was the pastor, his wife and a woman Rosa had never met before — a stranger arriving with a plate of cookies and pretzels. “There’s more!” the woman said, disappearing to her car, then calling out from the front door: “Okay!

Close your eyes!”

Rosa closed them.

“No cheating!” said the pastor’s wife, who moved toward Rosa, reached her hands up and pressed her fingers over Rosa’s closed eyelids. Rosa wobbled. She held out her arms for balance, waiting to see what it could be.

She was not a “dreamer,” one of the 800,000 immigrants living in the country illegally who were brought to the United States as children and are now waiting for the courts to decide whether they can be deported. She was not one of the violent criminals often singled out by Trump, or one of the life-or-death cases that sometimes appear in the news. Rosa Sabido was one of the rest — roughly 10 million immigrants without proper legal documents living ordinary lives in America.

She was 53, unmarried and without children and said she first came to the United States on a visitor visa in 1987 to see her mother and stepfather, both naturalized citizens who lived in Cortez, Colo. She said she traveled back and forth between Colorado and Mexico for a decade until immigration officials raised ques-

tions about her visa and told her to leave the country, at which point she crossed back into the United States illegally and settled into a quiet life in Cortez.

She lived in a small blue house next door to her parents at the edge of Mesa Verde National Park. She got a job as a secretary for the local Catholic parish. She made extra money selling homemade tamales out of her car, driving a route that took her to banks, pottery galleries, spas and offices around Cortez and the nearby town of Mancos, avoiding run-ins with immigration authorities until 2008, when she was arrested during a raid targeting relatives and released on the condition that she check in with the federal immigration office in Durango.

This was what she had been doing, checking in year after year, requesting stays of deportation and being granted them until last May, when she was notified that her latest request had been denied. Her next check-in happened to be scheduled for 10 days later.

Frantic, she called a lawyer, who told her she would probably be detained and deported if she went. She called her priest to see if he could do anything. She called a parishioner who did charity work, and that was when she first heard about a church that had recently voted to become what is known as a sanctuary.

“Standing with compassion” was how the church’s pastor, Craig Paschal, had described the idea when his small congregation began discussing it not long after Trump was elected. He explained to them that being a sanctuary would mean taking in a family or person facing deportation, which the congregation was in a unique position to do because it was a long-standing federal policy to avoid enforcement actions in churches.

The vote was unanimous, even though people thought it unlikely that anyone would need them in the mostly white town of 1,700 people. A few months later, though, word came that there was a person in need, and it was the woman who drove around town selling tamales.

“They want to take Rosa,” the pastor recalled telling his wife.

Rosa realized that she knew the church. It was the small stone one with the nice garden where she always turned right on her sales route.

In Mancos, volunteers began hauling in a mattress and clearing out a classroom inside the church’s fellowship hall, preparing for what they imagined might be a stay of a few weeks.

In Cortez, Rosa began packing, suddenly panicked that immigration officers might show up at her door at the last minute, and realizing

Rosa Sabido begins to wake up in her makeshift bedroom at United Methodist Church of Mancos in Colorado.

Photographs by MELINA MARA The Washington Post

she didn’t know if she’d be gone for a week, a month, or longer. She packed shirts for summer and sweaters for winter. She boxed up documents representing years of trying to legalize her status. She packed her pictures of the Pope and saints of impossible causes. She asked her stepfather to take care of her four dogs, one of which suddenly bolted out the door, Rosa running after her, crying when she found her and crying again as she said goodbye and drove east to Mancos.

At the church, the pastor and several volunteers were waiting, and Rosa walked up the four steps and went inside the fellowship hall.

She looked around. Here was a short hallway, the pastor’s office to the right, a kitchen to the left. Ahead was a large, wood-paneled main room, and in a corner, a smaller one with a door that said “classroom.” Inside was a single bed with new sheets, an empty bookcase and an empty table under a window with a view of a tree, a yard and a fence. She unpacked her bags.

As news spread, people began coming by the church with canned goods, and towels, and bath items, and in one case, a rocking chair whose owner noted that the wood grain on one of the arms resembled the face of Jesus. But the pastor realized that not everyone was supportive. One online commenter wrote that the church should

be burned down. A few people wrote letters to the editor. “The Mancos church may appear to be doing a kind deed in the community, however, they are in their own way supporting lawless behavior,” one woman wrote.

The pastor answered that America had a long history of unjust laws and that it was the duty of Christians to stand with “the outcast.”

He invited people to come meet this person that the government now considered an “ICE fugitive,” a designation that applies to more than a half-million undocumented immigrants failing to comply with final deportation orders. Come see the fugitive.

By summer, Rosa’s voice was hoarse from telling her story over and over to the steady stream of people stopping by, including the volunteers who slept on a mattress in the pastor’s office every night within reach of a folder scribbled with emergency instructions: “If ICE shows up, DO NOT OPEN THE DOOR UNLESS THEY HAVE A BENCH WARRANT SIGNED BY A JUDGE!” By fall, she found herself standing with a group of people holding candles to mark her first 100 days in sanctuary, noticing that many of them were wearing T-shirts with a drawing of her face and the slogan “Rosa Belongs Here.”

By winter, she was realizing that her best hope for a solution — a bill to legalize her status that would have to pass in Congress — was exceedingly remote, and soon, Rosa stopped reading political news altogether.

She began using her laptop to play a continuous stream of meditation music, unable to bear the Mexican ballads she used to love to play. She began learning about mantras. The year 2017 became the year 2018, and one day as spring was arriving, Rosa went outside, squinting in the bright sunshine, walking all the way to the edge of the church property, where she always willed herself to stop.

Only once in the entire nearly nine months had she crossed the line. She was talking on her cellphone, distracted. She moved a foot forward, and her toes touched the sidewalk in front of the church. “Rosa!” yelled a woman passing by, and she jerked her foot back onto the property.

Now a group of boys traipsed by.

“Hey, Rosa!” they called out.

A woman driving by slowed to a stop.

“Hey, Rosa!” she said. “I hear you’re making tamales this weekend?”

“Yes,” Rosa said. “Veggie.”

She waved goodbye and went back inside.

She was starting to notice herself changing. She had varicose veins on the back of her knees. She felt her mind becoming sluggish.

She worried that she was losing touch with who she had been before all of this, even as she knew she was becoming more and more important to people in the town of Mancos.

Almost every day brought some Rosarelated activity inside the fellowship hall.

“Rosa, do you agree that you can’t oversteam the tamales, you can only understeam?” a woman asked her now, another day underway with Rosa teaching a tamale-cooking class.

“That’s true,” Rosa said, mixing the corn dough in the kitchen as a group of women looked on. “Now this is a Mexican tradition.

Please, everyone taste the masa, otherwise the continues on next page

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from previous page

tamales will never cook.”

“Oooh,” one woman said, trying some.

“The cheese has to be the soul of the tamales,” Rosa continued, folding it in.

“The soul,” another woman repeated, nodding, and as Rosa went on explaining about lard-to-flour ratios, three more women arrived for an exercise class Rosa would be leading after the tamales. They unrolled their mats in the main room and started warming up.

“I’m telling you, Rosa Sabido has changed my life,” one of the women said, swinging a kettle bell. “It’s inspiring — it’s wonderful.”

Rosa exhaled a long breath as she walked across the room to get more corn husks. She had the meditation music going. The woman with the kettle bell told Rosa to remember her mantra. “Be flexible — mentally, physically, spiritually,” she said as Rosa exhaled again and went back into the kitchen, where someone was talking about a recent trip to a place far away involving wide-open views and long walks around a lake. Rosa put the tamales in the steamer and walked back into the main room to start the exercise class.

“Okay, so we’ll work from the head down — shoulder roll . . .” she began.

After a while, a woman arrived to set up supplies for an afternoon art class, and smiled seeing all the activity.

“She’s a little community maker, isn’t she?” she said.

“She’s a very spiritual person,” said another woman.

“Rosa has been the answer for me. She’s helped me find my purpose,” said the woman who slept over in the pastor’s office Monday nights, and as the group began painting, Rosa slipped off into the kitchen. A man from Durango was coming by to pick up an order of tamales she had stayed up late cooking, and she understood he was connected to a prominent Colorado family who might be helpful with her case.

She wanted to make a good impression.

“There are three dozen, all mild — everything is very, very mild,” she said when he arrived.

“Oh wow,” he said, looking at the two large boxes, and when Rosa said she could help carry them to his car, he looked concerned.

“Is it safe?” he said.

“If I just go to a certain point, it’s okay,” Rosa said.

They walked outside into the late afternoon, and when Rosa reached the edge of the grass, a woman driving by called out in a startled voice: “Rosa!”

Rosa assured her everything was fine. She wasn’t leaving. She handed over the tamales.

“It’s very courageous what you’re doing,” the man said, and she thanked him.

People kept telling her things like that. She was brave. She was spiritual. “Our Rosa Parks,” was how the pastor’s wife described her, referring to the civil rights leader. “She is the perfect one. I think she was destined to be the person in this place, at this time.”

Rosa went back inside, and soon everyone

was gone except Joanie Trussel, a Zen Buddhist chaplain who had become a confidante. They sat by the window and Rosa looked out. Tree, yard, fence.

“I’m exhausted,” she said.

“It’s okay for you to just relax,” Joanie said.

“Yeah, I know,” Rosa said.

Joanie asked Rosa how her stepfather, Roberto, was doing, and her mother, Blanca, who was sick with cancer.

“Any news?” Joanie said.

“No,” Rosa said. “They’re just sending her here and there. So.” “So,” Joanie said. “Wednesday. You’ve probably heard this already. You have an event.”

“There’s going to be an event here?” Rosa said.

“For you,” Joanie said. “It’s something nice.”

“If it’s a surprise, don’t tell me what it is,” Rosa said.

“Okay, that’s all I’m going to say,” Joanie said.

She got up to leave. “Are you going to take a nap now?”

“I probably will,” Rosa said.

She went into her room, shut the door and fell asleep surrounded by shelves now full of all the gifts people had brought her, so many

Top: Animal friends pay Sabido an affectionate visit.

Above: The tiny church recently voted to become a sanctuary.

crosses and candles and pictures of saints. An hour passed. The night person came and settled into the pastor’s office.

Another hour passed. The heater clicked on.

A dog barked. A neighbor’s truck pulled into the gravel alley behind the church, sounds that used to startle Rosa but no longer did. She kept sleeping, having a dream she would later recall as involving a big dog running down a street, which became hundreds of little black puppies, and her running after them scared and worried, and when she woke up, three hours had passed.

She got out of bed, walked across the dark room to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. She stared inside, then closed it, and went back to her room. She fell asleep again and woke up after midnight.

She felt most like herself when she was awake in the middle of the night. She could think in Spanish without translating. She could remember who she was. “Yes, I am Rosa,” she would say to herself. “Yes, I feel lonely. Yes, I’m in sanctuary.” She could think about whatever she wanted, about how at times she felt “like a pet, like the bear of the zoo everyone wants to come and see,” or “like the excuse” people needed to vent their anger about where the country was headed. She could wonder why one person had brought her a can of soup that was expired and why another had brought her a traditional Mexican blouse.

She could feel guilty for questioning all the good will. She could feel selfish for being a burden to Pastor Craig, to Roberto and to her sick mother.

She could remember all the things she loved.

Like reading a biography of Edgar Allan Poe. Like her dogs, or driving from Cortez to Mancos with music blaring. Most of all, she could remember how she loved living in her blue house with all the possibilities of America outside her doorstep. She had always loved that feeling, ever since she was a little girl in Mexico City who told her teacher that what she wanted to be was not a doctor or a lawyer but a person who lived in America. She kept reminding herself that was why she was here. She fell asleep.

She slept through the 9 a.m. church service and the 11 a.m., and when she woke up, her stepfather Roberto Obispo was there. They talked about Blanca, who had gone to Mexico to visit her family, and after a while Roberto got up to leave.

He had an air of formality and always tried not to cry when he was leaving, and he was trying not to now as he so easily left the church property, a naturalized citizen driving home along a highway past the orange mesas and sagebrush.

He blamed himself for so much of what had happened. If only he and Blanca had married the day before Rosa’s 18th birthday instead of on Rosa’s 18th birthday, she might have been eligible for legal status as their minor child. Or if he had included Rosa and her brother on the petition he had filed for Blanca’s American residency, maybe a path would have opened.

“Just fill in the names,” Roberto said. “Just that.”

It all felt so arbitrary, he said. The only reason he was here legally was that his boss happened to put his name on a form back in 1987, when legislation granting amnesty to

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COVER STORY

nearly 3 million undocumented immigrants was taking effect. So now Rosa was the Mexican who felt American, and he was the American who was turning on a CD of his favorite old Mexican ballads and still trying not to cry as he reached Cortez, turned down a narrow street into an industrial area, passed a hulking recycling yard where he worked sorting materials, and stopped in front of three one-story houses in a stand of leafless trees.

The tan one, he said, was where Blanca’s son lived until, facing deportation, he returned to Mexico. The pink one with the yard full of flower pots was where he and Blanca lived. The blue one with the broken-down trucks in front was Rosa’s. She had bought the trucks over the years to fix up — an RV to travel the country, an old food truck to expand her business.

Roberto tried to understand her. He was worried about her. He thought she should go back to Mexico. Be with the rest of the family. He and Blanca could visit. Everyone loved her in Mexico. “Rosie, you’d be happier,” he told her.

But he knew she didn’t want to leave. She kept telling him that. She so deeply did not want to leave that she was willing to remain in the only place left for her to be in this country, the place she was now inside with the door locked.

It was Sunday evening, and soon people would be arriving for a potluck dinner. She needed more time alone. She needed to remember why she was here. She needed to remember her blue house and how it felt being there. She was forgetting. It would be a year soon. She would turn 54 soon. She was realizing that this sanctuary life could go on forever. She wondered what she was becoming in here.

Pastor Craig was wondering the same thing, and so one afternoon when she was asleep in her room, he sat in his office planning what he called a town “visioning session.” He wanted people to imagine alternative ideas for what success might look like for Rosa, to think bigger.

His own vision included what he called “the Mandela option,” after Nelson Mandela, who remained a political prisoner in South Africa for 27 years until he finally emerged as a national hero who brought down apartheid.

Maybe Rosa would become a version of that. He had been reading about cloistered nuns, including one “who just lived in this room, and had all this wisdom and knowledge.”

“She became a saint and really changed the world,” he said. “Maybe this is like that.”

As birds perch on a hanging feeder, Sabido opens the church’s door a crack and peeks out.

KLMNO WEEKLY

He and Rosa had talked about it.

“The word I use is surrender,” the pastor had told her. “Not resignation. Patience.”

Rosa told him she was trying. And on her 257th day, as she stood in the middle of the fellowship hall with two hands pressed over her closed eyes, she was trying again. Patience.

“No peeking!” said the pastor’s wife.

She kept her eyes closed. She knew better than to hope it might be a letter from a congressman, or some solution that would allow her to leave this church and live as an American. She knew to expect nothing. She held out her arms to keep balance.

“Okay!” said the pastor’s wife. “One, two, three!”

Rosa opened her eyes.

She saw the wood-paneled room. She saw the window, the tree, the yard, the fence. She saw the pastor smiling in front of her, the pastor’s wife who thought Rosa was destined to be here, the Zen Buddhist chaplain who had become her friend, and a stranger now approaching her with an enormous wreath of flowers and saying, “Everyone loves you, even if they don’t know you.”

She saw her country. n ©The Washington Post

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KLMNO WEEKLY

ENTERTAINMENT

Putting on a good face (and nose) K AREN H ELLER Bloomington, Minn.

BY

still love us in nursing homes.”

T

“Clowns are a relic of America’s midcentury industrial era,” says University of Southern California professor Andrew McConnell Stott, an authority on coulrophobia (fear of clowns), author of the essay “Clowns on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” (spoiler alert: the verge dates to Charles Dickens) and a man unlikely to be invited to a clown convention anytime soon.

“The root of a lot of suspicion is the mask. Why do you need to disguise yourself? It’s stranger danger.”

The solution, clowns say, is staring them in the face: Lose the greasepaint.

“When I talk to my clients, I don’t want to give them an excuse not to hire me. Makeup might scare people,” says Lee “Lew-e” Andrews of Forsyth, Ga., who happens to be sitting behind a vendor table stacked with clown makeup and setting powder.

“Most of the time I perform with no makeup,” says Jeff “JB Milligan” McMullen, of Appleton, Wis., a former Ringling clown and regional Ronald McDonald, who averages 225 annual performances, including overseas.

“Markets are changing,” McMullen says. “Understanding a child’s world today is essential. It’s our obligation to work in their world.”

And they’ve been warned. A recent appearance at a library — modern libraries being noisier places and havens for clown gigs — promised, “Jeff does NOT wear traditional clown face paint!”

Yet the mask remains a liberating tool for some clowns.

“When you put on the makeup, you feel free. You can be silly and joyful,” says Manuel, who runs the Pricilla Mooseburger Originals costume shop and has operated a clown camp for adults for 23 years.

“You get rid of all your inhibitions.

It’s license to play. You have this great freedom to be your true self.

You get to be a rock star.”

his has been a terribly sad time for clowns, those purveyors of happiness whose recorded history dates to ancient Greece. Last year was possibly the pits.

Clowns witnessed the shuttering of venerable Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, the largest and latest of circuses to close. The layoffs of regional Ronald McDonalds. The movie “It”?

Don’t get them started.

It has been one packed clown car of woe.

And it comes on top of decades of portrayals of depressed, malevolent and downright crazed clowns in movies and on TV, not to mention in real life: Krusty on “The Simpsons,” Zach Galifianakis on “Baskets,” Twisty on “American Horror Story,” the Great Clown Scare of 2016, Insane Clown Posse, Heath Ledger’s Joker, Jack Nicholson’s Joker, John Wayne Gacy.

Recently, 240 entertainers assembled for the World Clown Association convention. It was in Minnesota — in March.

Which prompts the question: Haven’t clowns suffered enough?

Ah, but you can’t keep a good clown down. The craft requires putting on a good face, after all, and clowns remain a genial, outgoing, colorful lot, ready to laugh off their cares.

“There’s no secret that clowning is taking a hit. It’s not something new,” former Ringling clown and International Clown Hall of Fame founder Greg DeSanto said in his keynote address to the 36th annual convention, a tribute to Ringling Bros. “The kitsch thing to say is ‘I’m afraid of clowns.’ What do you think I’m going to do? Make you laugh?”

Clowns from across the United States and nearly a dozen countries gathered to consider tiny trikes, colossal footwear and the future of their craft.

The convention boasted as many women as men, mostly of a certain age, though there were seven junior “joeys,” industry nomenclature after celebrated Re-

MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

The fears of a clown: With circus closures and films like ‘It,’ it’s a tough time for the entertainers gency-era performer Joseph Grimaldi, who promoted the harlequin clown and whiteface image still familiar to this day.

There were caring clowns who visit hospitals, ministry clowns who combine faith and silliness, birthday clowns and parading clowns. There were clowns who work so frequently that they claim “entertainer” on their tax returns and those who, after retiring from foolish office jobs, perform on holidays and summer weekends, peak time for clowning.

A clown’s education never ends, even if the extremely selective Ringling Bros. Clown College did in 1997.

There were workshops on juggling, puppetry, mime, magic and “perfecting perfect pies.” (Psst, clown secret: not whipped cream but shaving soap and water, mixed in a bucket with a paint mixer attached to a power drill.)

Exhibit booths featured the latest in rubber chickens, oversized pants, magic tricks and latex noses.

Competitions included appearance, originality and paradability — that is, the ability to walk and jest simultaneously.

And yet behind everything loomed the shadow of the recent troubles.

When it came time for the top 20 paradability competitors to journey from the convention hotel to the nearby Mall of America, their fellow clowns were strenuously advised to abandon all whiteface and costumes in public. Stephen King, author of “It” and the murderous, sewer-dwelling Pennywise, was scorned repeatedly.

“I’ve been told that ‘you can’t come to the hospital. You’ll scare people.’ That was really heartbreaking,” says veteran Tricia “Pricilla Mooseburger” Manuel, 56, of Maple Lake, Minn. “It’s diminished my income. The damage is done in so many respects.

There’s a whole generation that, when they think of a clown, they think of something scary.”

Though, Manuel adds, “people

A group of World Clown Association convention attendees wave on their way to a veterans home. More than 200 clowns from across the United States and nearly a dozen countries gathered recently in Minneapolis for the annual event.

After almost a century and a half in operation, Ringling Bros.

closed in part because of animal rights advocacy. But audiences were already on the wane. Clowns

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NUTRITION were collateral damage.

Then McDonald’s terminated its regional Ronald McDonald program at the end of last year, though it’s vague about the reasons for the move.

“Ronald remains an important part of our brand, and he will continue to appear at local events,” said a McDonald’s spokeswoman.

“We are just moving to a centralized program.”

Recent Ronalds say they are barred from discussing the program and the decision, but the convention was rife with theories even as attendees mourned the loss of steady employment.

One former Ronald, who thinks their number was as high as 300 nationally, said he earned $64,000 in 2016, plus a $2,000 expense account, a car, and health and dental insurance, a fortune in clowning.

Now, that sort of income and security may be disappearing.

“Young people have not been excited by clowns,” says Richard “Junior” Snowberg, a World Clown Association founder and a retired professor. “They’re more excited by entertainment on screens.”

Which makes someone like Robin “Pinkie Bee” Bryan very sad.

Bryan, 49, of Jacksonville, Fla., parades around the convention in her orange ponytail “Yuki” wig — she owns seven, all the Day-Glo colors of the rainbow — a polkadot ensemble and Spear’s custom yellow saddle shoes, at $400 a pair the Guccis of clown footwear.

“I might have 15 pairs of clown shoes, five of them Spear’s,” Bryan confesses, appearing as embarrassed as a clown in full makeup can. “Pinkie gets everything, closets full. Robin has nothing.”

Bryan is a generously proportioned midlife clown. She used to work at convenience stores and in customer service. For the longest time, she never even saw a live clown act. Once she did, she knew it was the life for her.

Clowning has that effect. Many clowns claim to have been born, not made.

A veteran cautioned Bryan, “it’s not okay to be obese and a clown,” she recalled. “I cried hysterically.”

Actually, she’s crying now, smearing her makeup. Pinkie Bee is one verklempt clown.

So she went to the World Clown Convention in 2015 “to validate myself. I entered every contest. I just wanted to win anything, some

© The Washington Post

WEEKLY

On campus, harsh lessons in hunger

third-place something.”

Pinkie Bee won All-Around Clown, judged the best of the lot at her first convention. Without shedding a single pound.

The World Clown Association has 2,400 members, about half its peak membership in the 1990s. Clowns of America International — yes, there is another association — represents an equal number, though many performers belong to both. (There is yet a third group, the International Shrine Clown Association.)

“Clowning will never be what it was, but I know it will continue to go on and on,” Manuel says. “We’ll survive the closing of the circus.

We’ll survive scary movies. There’s something in the human spirit that wants to make people laugh and be happy. Once you do it, you have to do it — even though it might not be the popular thing.”

Taylor Moss of Lebanon, Ind., offers hope for the future. The 14-year-old is an actress, an aerialist, a dancer and a model.

But what Taylor really wants to do is to clown.

“I’ve loved clowning since the third grade,” she says, sitting with her mother in a hotel convention room, missing a week of school to take workshops and learn from the veterans.

“Are you sure you want to go down this road?” her mother, Brandy, recalls asking when Taylor first expressed interest. “I had a lot of doubt.” Especially given what clowns have been going through.

“Yes, there are people way out there trying to scare you, but everybody should give clowning a chance,” says Taylor, who performs as Hoops (her act involves gyrating 30 hula hoops at once). “You get to do things that people don’t get to do in their everyday life.”

Still, even this novice clown has had her moment on the clownsare-terrifying bandwagon. A couple of years ago, she landed a Los Angeles agent and scored an audition, going up against hundreds of other kids, for a movie that went on to gross $700 million.

Brandy, though not a clown herself, was aghast at her clown-adoring daughter’s desire to try out for this particular film. “You cannot do this part,” she admonished her.

Fortunately for her clowning career, Taylor did not get the role — in “It.” n

KLMNO

BY

C AITLIN D EWEY

C

aleb Torres lost seven pounds his freshman year — and not because he didn’t like the food in the dining hall. A first-generation college student, barely covering tuition, Torres ran out of grocery money halfway through the year and began skipping meals.

BILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST

Caleb Torres regularly skipped meals his freshman year because he didn’t have enough money for food.

Many college students are skipping meals, a new report finds

He’d stretch a can of SpaghettiOs over an entire day. Or he’d scout George Washington University campus for events with free snacks. Torres told no one, least of all his single mom.

“She had enough things to worry about,” he said.

Now a senior and living offcampus, in a housing situation that supplies most meals, Torres is finally talking about his experience with the hunger problem on college campuses: a quiet, insidious epidemic that researchers say threatens millions every year.

According to a survey by researchers at Temple University and the Wisconsin HOPE Lab, 36 percent of students on U.S. college campuses do not get enough to eat, and a similar number lack a secure place to live. The report, which is the first to include students from two-year, four-year, private and public universities, found that nearly 10 percent of community

college students and 6 percent of university students have gone a day without eating in the past month.

Researchers blame ballooning college costs, inadequate aid packages and growing enrollment among low-income students — as well as some colleges’ unwillingness to admit they have a hunger problem. College hunger is not a new issue, researchers caution.

But it appears to be growing worse, and not merely because college is getting more expensive.

“Prices have gone up over time,” said Sara Goldrick-Rab, professor of higher education policy at Temple and lead author of the report.

Goldrick-Rab’s report is based on data from 43,000 students at 66 schools and used the Department of Agriculture’s assessment for measuring hunger. That means the thousands of students it classifies as having “low food security” aren’t merely avoiding the dining hall or saving lunch money for beer: They’re skipping meals, or eating smaller meals, because they don’t have enough money for food.

On top of that, the report found, 46 percent of community college students and 36 percent in universities struggle to pay for housing and utilities. In the past year, 12 percent of community college students and 9 percent of university students have slept in shelters or in places not intended as housing.

Some colleges have altered dining plans to cover more meals or to offer more low-cost options, or have begun distributing free dining hall vouchers to students who need them. Others have partnered with nonprofits to redistribute unused meals to hungry students.

“This is top-of-mind right now on many campuses,” said Amelia Parnell, the vice president for research and policy at the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators. “When we think about reasons students drop out, financial issues — like the ability to pay for food and housing — are one of them.” n ©The Washington Post

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BOOKS

Revolution meets gentrification N ONFICTION

E A WALK THROUGH PARIS A Radical Exploration

By Eric Hazan.

Translated by David Fernbach Verso.

208 pp. $22.95

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REVIEWED BY

E UGENE B RENNAN

ric Hazan’s “A Walk Through Paris” is about, simply, a walk through Paris. But Paris being Paris, a walk through its streets is anything but simple — or ordinary.

Here Hazan, who has spent his entire life in the City of Light, offers a perspective — “a radical exploration” — that is both personal and historical, drawing on his experiences as a student, surgeon, social critic and publisher of leftist books.

Hazan sets out from Ivry, in the southeast of the city, to SaintDenis in the north. As he travels, memories rise “to the surface street by street, even very distant fragments of the past on the border of forgetfulness.” His journey sparks questions: For example, he wonders, why choose one route over another? At other moments, personal preferences lead him on more convoluted detours.

What emerges from this book is a profound affection for the city, often expressed in endearingly idiosyncratic terms. On the Rue Hautefeuille, where Charles Baudelaire was born, Hazan observes a hanging turret on the corner of a small cul-de-sac. Dating from the 16th century, this conical trunk is made of a knotwork series in decreasing diameter, “each ring bearing a different decoration — a masterpiece of masonry.” Hazan lists several other locations in the city where these turrets can be found, referring to the architectural structures as “friends of mine”; sometimes, he writes, he even makes a detour just for a chance to greet them.

The first part of the walk traverses the Left Bank, including the Latin Quarter, embedded in the international imagination of Paris as a center of intellectual life, full of art house cinemas, independent bookshops and, in May 1968, civil unrest. Hazan, whose previous books include “A People’s History of the French Revolution,” finds this neighbor-

CHRISTOPHE ARCHAMBAULT/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

The Sacre-Coeur Basilica atop Montmartre hill in Paris. In his book, Eric Hazan notes the contradictions between the city’s architectural grandeur and the everyday lives of its people.

hood sadly transformed. He writes of no longer feeling at home here, after high rents drove the working class away and boutique shops replaced many of the independent bookstores of the 6th Arrondissement.

Most Parisians agree, however, that the pulse and energy of the contemporary city lie north of the river on the Right Bank. It’s twice as populous and contains, as Hazan notes, “pockets of popular resistance that are slow and difficult to suppress.” Walking from Chatalet in the center to La Chapelle in the north, Hazan seems pleasantly surprised to find that many neighborhoods remain workingclass and multicultural. In this regard, Paris has fortunately seen nothing like the scale of gentrification and rent increases inflicted on cities like London and New York in recent decades. Here Hazan is interested in spaces of con-

tradiction in the city center, where an imposing architectural grandeur exists in tension with the everyday lives of the people — where, he explains, there is a contrast “between the nobility of the stone and the quite plebeian activities.”

Hazan’s perspective is refreshing: Though he is an uncompromising critic of the destructive effects of gentrification, he also rejects the illusory comforts of nostalgia. To those who romanticize and wish for the return of the Trente Glorieuses, a period of postwar economic boom in France, Hazan argues that in fact the Gaullist years were “actually ones of conformity and boredom on the one hand, and of war and police brutality on the other.”

A similar perspective guides his analysis of gentrification. Hazan reminds us of the ways Paris has always been a battleground of

class conflict; he offers wide-ranging historical examples of the gutting of formerly working-class neighborhoods and emphasizes popular insurrections throughout the city’s history.For Hazan, it is no coincidence that many of the areas of the city most resistant to gentrification are also areas with a strong revolutionary tradition.

Similarly, in the final pages, Hazan considers the historical continuities of other forms of oppression and resistance, elucidating the points of convergence between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. In tracing a continuity of resistance and its presence within the contradictions of the contemporary city, Hazan makes a compelling argument that “the people have not lost the battle of Paris.” n Brennan is a writer and academic based in Paris. This was written for The Washington Post.

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Luckily, this gift isn’t author’s last

3 Indian couples bound by customs

F ICTION l

N ONFICTION

I

REVIEWED BY

P ETER E ARNEST

lived and worked in Athens in the 1950s, and Philip Kerr’s colorful new novel, “Greeks Bearing Gifts,” brought those times vividly back to mind. His dead-on depictions of the city and its boisterous residents, and the deep animosity many still bear toward their wartime German oppressors, rang true.

Kerr, who died March 23, has left behind a terrifically complex tale.

“Greeks Bearing Gifts” is a propulsive spy novel that moves swiftly from Germany to Greece. This is his 13th novel starring the wisecracking detective Bernie Gunther, and word has it that a 14th is slated to be published next year.

“Greeks” opens in 1957, with Bernie avoiding Berlin, where too many Nazis are finding their way back into government, while others are distancing themselves from having had anything to do with the Third Reich and its attendant evils. Like a spy creating a new cover, Bernie grows a beard, takes a new name, Christof Ganz, and creates a legend of his past life: a German nobody who has no connection with the police — let alone the Third Reich.

Though never a Nazi party member, Bernie was a police detective under the Third Reich, and that’s enough in Germany to be targeted by the Nazi hunters or newly righteous Germans. So he’s shed his badge and gun and gone to ground in Munich, a city he and his wife, Kirsten, lived in before she died.

Jobs in Munich are scarce, so Bernie gladly accepts one as a mortuary assistant in one of the city hospitals. He likes being alone, he’s quite used to dead bodies, and it pays. On top of that, a local undertaker tips him for referrals and for filling in on occasion as a pallbearer.

A Munich detective spots Bernie at a funeral and remembers him from his days as a detective.

He threatens to put him on an Interpol watch list unless Bernie helps the corrupt detective carry out a heist. Suspecting a setup with himself as the sacrifice, Bernie agrees to the scheme but turns

the tables on the corrupt cop, but not before a couple of bodies lie dead, murdered, at Bernie’s feet with him as a principal suspect.

Bernie talks his way out of the situation with the local police but still needs a lawyer to deal with his involvement in the heist. He remembers one he knew in Berlin who now practices in Munich, a Max Merten.

Befriending Bernie, Merten tells him that he’s close to one of Germany’s largest insurance companies, Munich RE, an old firm that did business with the Nazis during the war. Knowing Bernie’s background as an investigator, Merten persuades Munich RE to employ Bernie as a claims adjuster.

Impressed with his handling of his first two jobs, his new employers give Bernie a raise, an expense account, a company car and dispatch him to Athens to investigate a seemingly routine claim for a German vessel sunk in Greek waters off the Peloponnese coast.

Bernie is met on arrival by Achilles Garlopis, a junior Munich RE employee who quickly assumes the role of Bernie’s assistant. He’s been manning the office and answering the phone in the absence of the full-time investigator. Bernie suspects that there is much more to the foundering of the Doris, a hunch that proves correct. The investigation leads to a murder scene — a gruesome killing but not the last one in this fast-paced tale.

The tempo quickens as Bernie and Achilles chase down other shadowy figures implicated in the voyage of the ill-fated Doris. In one gripping scene, a tough Israeli Nazi hunter holds Bernie’s life in her hands while she and Bernie sit chatting in plain sight on the top tier of the storied Olympic Stadium.

This is but one of many heartracing moments in a beautifully written novel by a gifted writer who has left us too soon. n Earnest is the founding executive director of the International Spy Museum and a 35-year veteran of the CIA. This was written for The Washington Post.

W

GREEKS BEARING GIFTS A Bernie Gunther Novel

By Philip Kerr Marian Wood/Putnam.

511 pp. $27

THE HEART IS A SHIFTING SEA Love and Marriage in Mumbai

By Elizabeth Flock Harper. 358 pp. $27.99

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REVIEWED BY

K APIL K OMIREDDI

riting in a Chicago magazine in 1917, Basanta Koomar Roy, an American journalist of Indian origin, demystified marriages in the old country for readers in his new homeland. If “a girl gets to be sixteen years of age,” he wrote, “her parents feel humiliated for having such an ‘old maid’ in the family.” In India in those days, matchmakers introduced potential spouses, and parents made the selection. “The boy and the girl themselves have little or nothing to say in the matter,” Roy explained. The entire business was governed by the laws and customs of Hinduism. For betrothed couples, the wise course was to be stoical and to reconcile themselves to their fate. Men and women, in matters of marriage and other life journeys, typically gave in to “Hindu fatalism.”

Elizabeth Flock landed nine years ago in an India unrecognizably different from the one Roy inhabited. A 22-year-old American, she came to Mumbai in search of a career. Her choice suggests that India had indeed undergone a dramatic transformation in recent decades from a stalwart of socialism into a land of progress and opportunity.

In “The Heart is a Shifting Sea,” Flock seeks to understand the evolution of Indian marriages.

She follows three couples — Veer and Maya, Marwari Hindus; Shahzad and Sabeena, Sunni Muslims; and Ashok and Parvati, Tamil Brahmins — in Mumbai, “India’s most frenetic city.” What unfolds is a book that truly is impossible to put down.

Veer and Maya, Hindus from the Marwari caste, eloped to marry for love. But they were illequipped to survive the backlash provoked by their transgression against tradition. Sabeena and Shahzad saw each other only once before being paired off in a marriage arranged by their Sunni Muslim families. No matter. Sabeena grows to care deeply for her

infertile husband. Parvati and Ashok are married after Parvati, unsure of her love for a Christian student at her university, ultimately yields to her Brahmin father and finds a fellow Brahmin on a matrimonial website.

On one level, there is nothing unique about these marriages: The couples cope with infidelity and infertility, and struggle to balance the demands of work and home life. What distinguishes them is their backdrop: the ferment of modern India.

And it is here that Flock falters.

A book that would have merited wide readership as a narrative of three marriages struggles to capture the nuances of a country in transition. Flock strives to meet the challenge by layering in historical detail. But facts sometimes get the better of her. She notes that the British “abruptly [withdrew] from India after three hundred years,” which adds a full century to British dominion over the subcontinent.

Flock discusses India’s political change largely in terms of Muslim-Hindu antagonism, neglecting the seemingly innocuous attitudes of the majority Hindus that have permeated the country’s nominally secular political space.

Superficially, India has changed. People have bigger apartments; they have cars, mobile phones and disposable incomes. Substantively, how different are these marriages from the ones Roy discussed a century ago?

None of the six characters has really outgrown his or her inherited identity; all of these men and women, meant to epitomize India’s energetic departure from the past, have married people like themselves, down to their caste and sect. Men and women continue to fall back on the fatalism of old India. n Komireddi, an Indian journalist, has written from South Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. This was written for The Washington Post.

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OPINIONS

Teacher strikes may be more powerful than ever JON SHELTON is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay. He is author of “Teacher Strike! Public Education and the Making of a New American Political Order.”

This was written for The Washington Post.

The media loves a good labor stoppage. The nonstop coverage of teacher demonstrations in West Virginia earlier this year and now in Oklahoma and Kentucky proves it.

But these walkouts are more than publicity stunts.

Public school teachers have enormous bargaining power, and some of the lowest paid have clearly realized it. Just as happened in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, the price of peace will come from treating teachers like the important professionals they are.

Labor strikes are high drama. Services shut down and employers are forced to take action that had been unthinkable before: Either bend to workers’ demands or try to find other ways to keep operations going (for instance, finding replacements willing to cross a picket line).

The fact that teachers — whom we rely on to instill morals in our children in addition to instructing them how to read, write and do arithmetic — walk off the job, doing so illegally, makes a teacher strike even more fascinating.

Striking teachers present a special problem. Kids can’t go to school when teachers are out, causing immediate inconvenience to parents.

Indeed, there’s no other time like a strike for us to realize what an important yet unnoticed childcare subsidy that schools represent. But employers have few options other than to bargain when teachers are united.

Oklahoma can’t replace 40,000 teachers any more than West Virginia can replace 20,000.

It is only in the past 30 years, however, that the teacher strikes we see today have become so exceptional. Strikes by teachers in the 1960s, ’70s, and early ’80s could be measured annually by the dozens, not by the handful.

Although statewide strikes were infrequent, there were numerous strikes in school districts across the United States during this era, sometimes affecting millions of students at a

time. In 1967, for example, there were more than 100 teacher strikes in the United States. And in the 1975-1976 school year, there were more than 200, with more than 100 in September alone, including in New York City, Boston and Chicago.

The causes of these strikes were similar in many cases to what we are witnessing today. In the 1960s and ’70s, teachers across the country fought hard for basic respect and for better conditions for their students through decent salaries, increased preparation time and lower class sizes.

Disinvestment in public education in many states since 2008 has led to conditions that look very much like the conditions under which teachers worked in the era before collective bargaining began in the 1960s. In those days, many teachers faced deplorable salaries, had limited due process

SUE OGROCKI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

TIMOTHY D. EASLEY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Teachers in Oklahoma (top) and Kentucky (above) protest this past week to voice dissatisfaction with issues like pay, pensions and the amount that state funding of schools has been cut.

rights and in some places could still be fired for getting pregnant.

Still, there is one crucial difference between the two eras of teacher strikes. Back in the 1960s and ’70s, more Americans could get decent jobs without a college degree and even without a high school degree. And back then, the percentage of workers in blue-collar jobs who were covered by union contracts was much higher. A much larger percentage of Americans without a college education could enjoy a living wage and look forward to retirement with dignity.

But globalization, deindustrialization and political pressure from the right against unionization has eroded these possibilities for many Americans.

If there is anything on which

Republicans and Democrats can find some agreement these days, it is the significance of education in ensuring American workers can develop the human capital to compete in a global marketplace.

Given the vital economic significance Americans have placed on education, teachers may be more powerful now than ever before. They cannot be outsourced, and neither freetrade deals geared toward corporate interests nor digital technology can render them obsolete. It’s quite possible that striking teachers across the country represent the beginning of a trend in which the ordinary people who keep our education system — and our economy — running realize just how much power they have. n

SUNDAY, APRIL 8, 2018

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Leave no child on a mountainside TIM J. MCGUIRE is professor emeritus at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and was editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune from 1991 to 2002. He is the author of “Some People Even Take Them Home — A Disabled Dad, a Down Syndrome Son and Our Journey to Acceptance.”

This was written for The Washington Post.

Back when I was a Catholic school student in the early ’60s, the Dominican sisters seemed intent on telling us about some culture’s ancient custom of leaving deformed children on the mountainside.

Most of my classmates were surprised and offended but then quickly moved on to studying “Lord of the Flies” and algebra. For me, however, the lesson stuck.

I was born with arthrogryposis multiplex congenita — Greek for “curved joints.” My father and mother wept when they first saw me.

Friends urged them to immediately commit me to the state mental institution — the 1949 version of the mountainside.

Thirty years later, my middle son, Jason, was diagnosed with Down syndrome. The bumbling, insensitive doctor suggested that we commit Jason, adding that “some people even take them home.” The mountainside had not changed since I was born.

Today, the mountainside looks a bit different, thanks to the technological tools of the 21st century. New tests and an abject fear of difference have made abortion of Down syndrome babies commonplace.

In countries such as Iceland, Denmark and France, most pregnancies with a Down syndrome diagnosis are terminated.

Washington Post columnists Marc Thiessen, Ruth Marcus

and George Will have been discussing the wisdom of terminating these pregnancies from radically different perspectives. Will put the big word, genocide, on the table, arguing that an entire class of citizens is being eliminated.

Marcus called the state legislative attempts to outlaw abortion because of an in vitro Down syndrome diagnosis “unconstitutional, unenforceable — and wrong.”

Rachel Adams, whose son has Down syndrome, wrote in The Post to plead that kids such as hers be left out of the politically fracturing abortion debate.

Bravo to her.

But I think it’s time we talked frankly about leaving countless deformed and genetically

challenged babies on the mountainside. And that’s exactly what we’re doing by aborting 67 percent of our diagnosed children. How is this abortion based on medical diagnosis any different from leaving deformed children to the wolves?

It should stop, yet I categorically oppose any bills that force people to keep Down syndrome babies. I find it reprehensible and morally dangerous that our governments would pretend to know best what choice parents should make. I oppose abortion, but I believe the state must stay out of that choice.

My life has been worth living.

The mountainside would have been a bad place for me. Jason’s life has been worth living. He makes every person he encounters better. He spreads joy and kindness everywhere he goes. His ready laugh, his obvious kindness and his precious insight enrich our family. When his mother died a few years ago, as I sobbed, he pointed at his head and his heart and said, “Daddy, she’s here and here.”

Everyone who is different deserves respect and celebration. Rather than wasting so much time screaming at each other about

abortion, we must build a basic respect for all lives.

We might take a lesson from John Duns Scotus, one of the most important Franciscan theologians, who stressed the concept of “thisness,” or “haecceity.”

Mary Beth Ingham, a professor at the Franciscan School of Theology, recently discussed the concept: “What is haecceity? It’s you. It’s the unique identity inherent in each being. Each one of us has been given our gift, and that’s our little ‘haec.’ It’s what makes me, me, and not somebody else.

Haec cannot be cloned. It’s the part of me that is not to be replicated.”

Everybody is different in some way and everybody has a special contribution to make to the world. We enter dangerous ground when we decide some gifts are worth exalting and others are worth destroying.

Physical and mental deformities do not render people without haec. It may be a smile, it may be an insightful comment, but something about every human being gives life meaning — ours and others.

Every child makes the world more complete. And no child deserves to be left on the mountainside. n

SUNDAY, APRIL 8, 2018

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

BY MIKE SMITH FOR THE LAS VEGAS SUN

Why YouTube attack was a rarity TOREY VAN OOT is a contributor to The Lilly, an online site published by The Washington Post.

On Tuesday afternoon, a tragically familiar headline dominated news sites, cable shows and Twitter feeds across the country. Yet another community had been shattered by an act of gun violence.

But the latest incident to capture the public’s attention — a shooting at a YouTube office outside San Francisco that left the attacker dead and several wounded — was not like the majority of violent rampages in one key way: The person behind the attack was a woman.

The shooter, identified by authorities as 39-year-old Nasim Najafi Aghdam, opened fire at an outside patio of the video streaming company’s headquarters just before 1 p.m.

Tuesday, injuring three before turning the gun on herself. The motive is under investigation, though family members told reporters she had a grudge against the company over its policies.

What we know so far has put the spotlight on the fact that it is exceedingly rare for acts of mass or public violence, including shootings, to be committed by women.

Jaclyn Schildkraut, a professor and national expert on gun violence, analyzed hundreds of mass shootings between 1966 and 2016 and found that 14 of 352 perpetrators — just 4 percent — were women.

Analyses published by the New York Police Department, Mother Jones and USA Today have produced similar findings.

While incidents involving female attackers are so rare that some researchers say it’s difficult to identify the reasons why, Schildkraut says the data she’s reviewed on the issue does point to some trends.

“Women are more likely to commit intimate homicide, killing their spouses or killing their children and less likely to kill strangers than men to begin with,” Schildkraut says. “Then you factor in weapon selection: Men are more likely to use guns, women are more likely to use poison and suffocation, much more personal types of methodologies.”

Those women that do commit mass shootings are more likely to do so at a school or a

BY SACK FOR THE STAR TRIBUNE

workplace, Schildkraut found.

“It has to do with access to victims and knowing their routines,” she explained.

Schildkraut has also tracked differences in how female shooters are viewed by the public and the media. Women who commit such crimes are often portrayed as “crazy or depressed,” when in reality, Schildkraut says, data show they are typically not “drastically different in motivation than the other workplace shooters.”

Prominent cases involving women in recent years — including a 2015 shooting at a Southern California center for the developmentally disabled that left 14 dead and a 2014 attack at a tribal office that killed four — featured vastly different circumstances.

The Southern California rampage involved a husbandwife pair who were believed to be inspired by Islamic terrorists.

The 2014 attack was committed by a former tribal chair who family said “snapped” and killed several relatives over a move to evict her from her home.

It’s not just mass shootings being overwhelmingly committed by men.

Three times as many women as men die as a result of intimate

partner violence, the majority of which involve guns. Men also commit — and die of — homicide and suicide by gun at higher rates than their female counterparts.

Some experts point to these findings to argue that the gun violence epidemic in this country is, at its core, an issue of toxic masculinity deeply woven into society. Further exacerbating the issue, some experts say, is that men are less likely than women to seek help for mental health and substance abuse issues that can in some cases lead to violence.

Regardless of the gender – or the motive – of the suspect, Tuesday’s shooting was a grim reminder of the reality of gun violence in this country. More than 38,000 people died of gunrelated deaths in 2016.

Shootings that leave four or more wounded are near-daily occurrences.

Given those statistics, advocates for stricter gun laws say this latest attack is yet another sobering example of the need for reform.

“We don’t have to live this way,” Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts tweeted Tuesday. “We sure as hell don’t have to die this way.” n

© The Washington Post

SUNDAY, APRIL 8, 2018

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Tariffs BY

E SWAR P RASAD

After President Trump decided to impose tariffs of 25 percent on steel imports and 10 percent on aluminum imports, China and the United States spent this past week announcing escalating tariffs on one another’s goods. As with many economic policies, tariffs can cre­ ate winners, losers and lots of misconceptions.

MYTH NO. 1 Tariffs will help reduce the U.S. trade deficit.

Retaliatory trade barriers put up by other countries would hurt U.S. exports and offset reduced imports, meaning the trade deficit wouldn’t vanish. What’s more, lower exports would mean less employment — a possible unintended consequence of Trump’s policy.

Trade deficits are ultimately a result of macroeconomic policies that influence how much a country produces and consumes.

When a nation consumes and invests more than its annual output, it has to run a trade deficit. A temporary deficit is not a bad thing if it reflects good investment opportunities or strong income growth that leads people to spend more money. But a trade deficit fueled by large government budget deficits can be harmful.

Reducing government borrowing and helping U.S. firms boost their productivity (meaning they could better compete abroad) would do a lot more to shrink the trade deficit than anything else. Getting other countries to drop their trade barriers would certainly help, but doing this through bilateral and multilateral agreements is likely to be more successful than simply raising tariffs.

MYTH NO. 2 The United States would win a trade war.

A trade war is an escalation of tit-for-tat trade restrictions imposed by countries on one another’s exports.

Shutting down trade with any

country would lead to collateral damage. A trade war wounds all combatants: It rattles business and consumer confidence, restrains exports and hurts growth. Many U.S. businesses rely on low trade barriers to create international supply chains that reduce costs and increase efficiency. These could come apart amid the new tariffs.

The last time the United States imposed sweeping tariffs, in the 1930s, the effect was to prolong and worsen the Great Depression. Winning a trade war by destroying both imports and exports would be a Pyrrhic victory.

MYTH NO. 3 Tariffs are powerful negotiating tools.

This is a dangerous game, since even the threat of such action opens the door for other countries to consider unilaterally protecting their own industries through similar measures.

Former U.S. trade representative Michael Froman notes that other capitals could block imports of U.S. agricultural products on the grounds of food security, thereby improving their negotiating positions. The European Union has threatened tariffs on American bourbon, peanut butter, cranberries and orange juice. The mere uncertainty fomented by Trump hurts U.S. businesses that rely on intricate international supply chains.

All countries, even longstanding trading partners and allies, now have reason to reevaluate their economic relationships with the United States, which looks like an

MAURICIO PALOS/BLOOMBERG NEWS

A worker at a steel processing facility in San Luis Potosi, Mexico.

President Trump has imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum imports.

untrustworthy partner. After Trump pulled out of the TransPacific Partnership, the other 11 countries in that arrangement moved on without Washington; they’ll benefit from easier access to one another’s markets for their exports at a moment when we’re the ones saying we need to export more.

MYTH NO. 4 Tariffs are an unfair, illegal strike against trading partners.

The World Trade Organization permits tariffs under certain conditions, including when a country faces unfair competition from trading partners; other nations have tariffs on many products, often at higher levels than ours. China has skirted WTO rules and not met its commitments to open up its domestic markets, so the WTO has okayed previous tariffs against it. The body even allows trade sanctions based on national security considerations in exceptional circumstances, such as war or some “other emergency in international relations.”

The problem is that Trump’s tweets suggest that his tariffs are really focused on economic objectives, not national security.

This pretext opens the door for other countries to use similar

grounds to impose retaliatory sanctions, undermining the rules of the global trading system.

MYTH NO. 5 The tariffs will not help the steel and aluminum sectors.

In fact, they will help. By limiting imports, which accounted for about one-third of steel demand and nearly 90 percent of primary aluminum demand in the United States last year, the tariffs will lead to higher prices in the United States for both metals. This will be great for steel and aluminum company profits. Indeed, stock prices of companies in these industries jumped when the tariffs were announced as investors anticipated higher profits in the coming years. Unfortunately, this won’t do much for employment in these industries, which are becoming highly automated.

Moreover, higher prices will be passed on to consumers who buy metal things, such as cars, machinery and construction materials. This will hurt employment in those sectors and could reduce the demand for steel and aluminum. n Prasad is a professor of trade policy at Cornell University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, APRIL 8, 2018

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Join us for these exciting events leading up to WEN-CON! Wednesday, April 18: WEN-CON Trivia Night at Riverside Pub

Drop by Riverside Pub from 6pm to 8pm for pop-culture trivia, drink specials and fun!

538 Riverside Avenue in Wenatchee

Thursday, April 19: WEN-CON Short Film Festival

All short film submissions will be shown at this first annual event. Local filmmakers have 2 minutes or less to impress judges Charley Voorhis, Jeff Ostenson and Jamie Howell. Winning films will be shown at WEN-CON. Grove Recital Hall at Wenatchee Valley College, 7pm Free admission.

(It’s not too late to enter your film, the deadline is April 17th. Anyone can enter, you can even use your phone to film your movie. Great prizes and even better bragging rights!

Go to wen-con.com for details.)

Friday, April 20: Batmobile Appearances

Get a sneak peek of the fully-restored 1966 Batmobile autographed by Adam West, Burt Ward and Evel Knievel. Numerica Credit Union is the sponsor of this one of a kind vehicle. Batmobile appearances will be at 11am at the East Wenatchee branch at 477 Grant Road; and 2pm in Wenatchee at 615 N. Emerson Ave.

Friday, April 20: The Official WEN-CON Kick-off Party!

Suburban Vermin concert at Wenatchee Valley Museum

This family friendly concert from Seattle’s indie punk rock band starts at 7pm. There will be trivia and dance contests, awards for costumes and a chance to create LEGO jewelry.

Suburban Vermin photo and logo attached

Friday, April 20: RadarStation’s “Tales From the Spacepod”

This live podcast includes wacky paranormal stories, weird news and other highly inappropriate shenanigans. Bigfoot, UFOs, ghosts and conspiracies tango with pop culture and comedy.

21+ 115 S. Wenatchee Ave. 8pm Tickets are $15 at the door.

Saturday, April 21: WEN-CON

Doors open at 10am! Skip the lines and get your tickets online today at wen-con.com.

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