The Washington Post National Weekly - April 9, 2017

SUNDAY, APRIL 9, 2017

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Disabled or just desperate?

As jobs become scarce, rural Americans are increasingly applying for benefits PAGE 12

Politics Battle in the White House 4

World Chile basks in solar energy 10

5 Myths The circus 23

SUNDAY, APRIL 9, 2017

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THE FIX

An unexpected show of force BY

A ARON B LAKE

T

he U.S. military launched unprecedented missile strikes against the government of Syrian President Bashar alAssad on Thursday night.

And with the strikes, Americans were confronted with a reality they were led to believe they’d never see: President Trump using elective military action for humanitarian purposes, and doing so without congressional approval.

During the campaign and even before it, Trump forcefully derided U.S. military involvement in the Middle East, repeatedly saying the war in Iraq was a disastrous mistake and that he would focus on “America first.” And he wasn’t afraid to appear cold in the face of the refugee crisis and suffering in Syria; it was a problem for the Middle East to solve, and no refugees would be admitted into the United States for fear of admitting terrorists. He even suggested military action could lead to another world war.

“Now wants to start a shooting war in Syria in conflict with a nuclear armed Russia that could very well lead to World War III,” Trump said just days before the 2016 election.

Trump also in 2013 derided the specific idea of retaliating against the Syrian government for using chemical weapons, repeatedly urging President Barack Obama not to involve the United States in the civil war, despite Obama’s “red line” policy. Trump also said that, if Obama did decide to strike, he should seek Congress’s approval.

“President Obama, do not attack Syria.

There is no upside and tremendous downside.

Save your ‘powder’ for another (and more

KLMNO WEEKLY

intervention for years.

It may seem trivial to focus on Trump’s past words in the light of the suffering in Syria and the realities of actually being president. But the fact is that the United States elected a man who promised to use force in a very circumspect manner and spoke unequivocally about it.

And it’s likely that the noninterventionist promises Trump made during the campaign helped him by allaying some of the greatest fears about making him president and commander in chief. Arguably his biggest liability was that people — even many supporters — believed he lacked the proper temperament to be president. The prospect of the hotheaded, itchy-Twitter-fingered reality TV star having access to the ALEX BRANDON/ASSOCIATED PRESS nuclear codes was an attack ad that practically wrote itself. And there were plenty who argued that his important) day!” he tweeted on Sept. 7, 2013. noninterventionist talk was just that — talk — In August of that year, Trump tweeted and that he couldn’t be trusted to deal with similar sentiments: international conflicts.

“The President must get Congressional But Trump’s promises to stay out of the approval before attacking Syria-big mistake if Middle East and focus on the homeland he does not!” mitigated that line of attack. Voters were led “Let the Arab League take care of Syria. to believe his foreign policy wouldn’t be on Why are these rich Arab countries not paying the same hair trigger that everything else us for the tremendous cost of such an attack?” about him seemed to be, and it gave them The events of Thursday night run license to instead focus on what a completely counter to all of that. Trump is businessman president could do for the reported to have been personally affected by economy. the scenes of suffering and the information he Yet here we are. Less than three months has learned now that he's president — “Even into his presidency, Trump has now beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in responded to a not-unprecedented set of this very barbaric attack,” he said late circumstances in Syria with an Thursday night in brief remarks, adding: “No unprecedented degree of force and child of God should ever suffer such horror” provocation. n — but the barbarism and horror were there in 2013. Yet Trump took a firm line against ©The Washington Post

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. © 2017 The Washington Post / Year 3, No. 26

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

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ON THE COVER Desmond Spencer was injured when he fell from a roofing job. He loves living in the country, but there are few job opportunities in his area and he struggled with whether to apply for disability. (Photo by BONNIE JO MOUNT/The Washington Post)

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POLITICS

Bannon’s circle loses ground in feud with Kushner faction

PHOTOS BY JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

In the White House, the ‘Goldman’ and ‘Breitbart’ groups vie for influence with Trump

BY A SHLEY P ARKER, AND A BBY P HILLIP

S

R OBERT C OSTA

tephen K. Bannon — the combative architect of the nationalistic strategy that delivered President Trump to the White House — now finds himself losing ground in an internecine battle within the West Wing that pits the “Bannonites” against a growing and powerful faction of centrist financiers led by the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Less than 100 days into Trump’s chaotic presidency, the White House is splintering over policy issues ranging from taxes to trade.

The daily tumult has created an atmosphere of

tension and panic around the president, leaving aides fearing for their jobs and cleaving former allies into rivals sniping at one another in the media.

The infighting spilled into full view this past week after Trump removed Bannon from the National Security Council’s “principals committee,” a reshuffling that left the president’s chief strategist less fully involved in the administration’s daily national security policy while further empowering Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, Trump’s new national security adviser.

Bannon, an iconoclast, has generally chafed at the transition from firebomb campaigning to more modulated governing and for weeks has vented about the possibility of quitting,

Jared Kushner, right, and a group of business-minded advisers to President Trump have clashed with Stephen K. Bannon, left, and his allies.

one person close to him said.

This account of the latest West Wing turmoil comes from interviews with more than 20 White House officials and people close to those in the administration, many of whom requested anonymity to offer candid assessments.

Despite the demotion, Bannon attended Wednesday’s National Security Council meeting, and his friends and allies say the position on the Cabinet-level security committee was always supposed to be temporary — a way for Bannon to keep watch over retired Gen. Michael Flynn, the controversial former national security adviser who was fired in February after he misled Vice President Pence about his contacts with Russian officials.

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But the benign explanation for Bannon’s removal belies the growing strife between Bannon, Kushner and Gary Cohn, the National Economic Council director. A registered Democrat who previously was president of Goldman Sachs, Cohn is close to Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, the president’s oldest daughter and adviser.

Fairly or unfairly, Bannon has borne the blame for several specific policy and political failures, including the scattershot drafting and implementation of Trump’s first travel ban and the strategy and approach to dealing with the conservative House Freedom Caucus, which helped tank the Republican health-care bill by failing to support it.

The clash over control of a pro-Trump outside group also pitted Bannon, Republican super-donor Rebekah Mercer and her father, Robert, against Kushner.

And Bannon has felt the brunt of general frustrations surrounding the security council.

In the early days of the administration, he elevated himself, without Trump’s knowledge, to the principals committee, a move that infuriated the president. Bannon insisted, along with Kushner, on keeping certain staffers over the objection of McMaster.

But the ultimate argument against him, said one person with knowledge of the situation, is that “Bannon isn’t making ‘Dad’ look good.”

As Kushner has expanded his portfolio and consolidated his already vast power — the 36-year-old adviser has been called “the Trump whisperer,” with a direct line to the president — he has surrounded himself with a small group of outsiders who largely hail from the ranks of business and Wall Street. The group includes Dina Powell, an Egyptian-born former Goldman Sachs official who served in George W. Bush’s administration. Both she and Cohn are part of Kushner’s newly announced Office of American Innovation, an internal team devoted to streamlining government.

Bannon and his populist allies view Kushner’s circle with growing suspicion, worrying aloud that the group — whom they dismiss as “the Democrats,” “the New Yorkers” or, simply, “Goldman” — are pushing Trump in a “Democrat Lite” direction. Kushner’s allies, meanwhile, label Bannon’s crowd as “the Bannonites,” “the Nationalists” or “Breitbart,” the name of the incendiary conservative website he previously ran.

Bannon, grousing to friends, has cast the tensions as a confrontation between the nationalists and the liberal Democrats, whom he worries are eager to undercut the populist movement that helped lift Trump to victory. Looming over him daily on his office walls are the promises that Trump made during the campaign, which he methodically checks off.

Cohn has met with Democrats on several occasions and appears much more comfortable offering lawmakers olive branches than does Bannon, who during the health-care fight argued in favor of forcing a vote on the doomed bill to establish a public list of Republican traitors.

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ANDREW HARNIK/ASSOCIATED PRESS

From left, Jared Kushner, economic adviser Gary Cohn, Ivanka Trump and Senior Counselor for Economic Initiatives Dina Powell leave the White House on Wednesday.

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich cast the disagreements as important and weighty policy debates.

“It’s not about petty soap-opera stuff,” Gingrich said. “Bannon represents a very fundamental change in how we think about economic policy, taking us back to the era from Alexander Hamilton up through the 1920s when we were a much more national economy.

Gary represents the New York international worldview and is a very competent and smart guy. There’s a natural tension.

“I think it’s very helpful to have the tension and the arguments,” he added. “I think presidents are much better served if they have different sources of information.”

The president, asked by reporters Thursday on Air Force One if a staff shake-up is looming, said he thought the administration had “already shaken things up.”

“I think we’ve had one of the most successful 13 weeks in the history of the presidency,” Trump said, wrongly referring to the 11 weeks he has been in office.

Some friends of both Bannon and Kushner, who talk daily and still have a cordial rapport, say the tensions are mostly driven by policy.

In February, for instance, a group of former Republican Cabinet secretaries met with Cohn to pitch him on the idea of a carbon tax, arguing it would help reduce fossil fuel emissions while also addressing budget issues. Some left the meeting believing Cohn was open to the idea.

Bannon was furious when he caught wind of the proposal, saying the White House was veering too far from Trump’s core nationalist principles as it molded its economic policy.

A meeting recently at the White House at the behest of Kushner and Cohn to discuss health care with Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and one of the architects of President Barack Obama’s health-care bill, was another fault line. The mere existence of the staff-level discussion with Emanuel — who had previously met with Trump three

But the ultimate argument against him, said one person with knowledge of the situation, is that “Bannon isn’t making ‘Dad’ look good.”

times — raised concerns among conservatives that the president was serious about his threat to work with Democrats after his initial healthcare proposal failed.

Bannon, allies said, still has the president’s ear, especially on key issues such as immigration, where he and Trump are in a complete “mind meld.” But the chief strategist has struggled to adjust to the more regimented mores of the White House. One friend said he hates attending meetings, bemoans the need to frequently wear suits and finds the government bureaucracy stifling.

Some of those who resent Kushner’s rising power have compared him to Icarus, the youth in Greek mythology who flew too close to the sun and melted his wings. But because Kushner holds so much clout, many of his rivals fear bad-mouthing him and train their ire on his deputies instead.

“When you complain about Gary or Dina, you’re really complaining about Jared and what he’s doing, because you’re not able to complain about Jared around here,” said one senior White House official.

But one administration official warned that Bannon was playing “a dangerous game” because it is “not a smart strategy to go up against the president and his family. That’s a game Steve will never win.”

Patrick J. Caddell, a veteran pollster who advises Breitbart and is friends with Bannon, said that “an outsider administration is vulnerable to these kinds of cracks.”

“Steve is taking the slings and arrows, but I hope Trump understands that the attacks on Bannon are an attempt to undermine Trump,” Caddell said. “That’s the crucial point. Steve is essential to him, the only person who has a clue why the president was elected and why he’s there.”

Regardless, the ongoing drama has taken a toll on West Wing operations, where aides continue to jockey for power and worry about their job security. One senior official pointed to Trump’s interview Wednesday with the New York Times, during which at least five senior White House staffers, as well as Pence, crowded into the Oval Office.

“Why were they there?” asked the official, saying they should have been working on other tasks. “Now the expectation is you have to be in every picture and every meeting.”

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a White House spokeswoman, dismissed reports of palace intrigue. “There are many serious issues at hand, which the president has been totally focused on, and the only conflicts his advisers are concerned with are those that are impacting the lives and safety of Americans, as well as the citizens of the world,” she said.

Trump, for his part, enjoys a somewhat chaotic management style and so far hasn’t aligned entirely with either camp. Aides say one moment the president will praise Bannon and sound out nationalist themes. The next, he’ll see a headline about “President Bannon” and grimace. n ©The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Gorsuch’s impact to be felt quickly BY

R OBERT B ARNES

T

he new justice at the Supreme Court, Neil M. Gorsuch, is likely to have an immediate impact, weighing in as early as this week on whether to expand the breadth of the Second Amendment, considering how voting rights should be protected and perhaps casting the deciding vote in a major separation of church and state case.

The Senate voted 55-45 Friday to confirm Gorsuch, ending more than a year of bitter partisan conflict over the ideological balance of the nation’s highest court.

Gorsuch will be sworn in Monday, allowing him to join the court for the final weeks of its term, which ends in June.

President Trump’s pick of Gorsuch to be the nation’s 113th justice will restore a conservativeleaning, Republican-nominated majority to a court that has either deadlocked or drifted to the left since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016.

Gorsuch’s arrival will have no immediate effect on the majority that has edged the court in a more liberal direction of late, upholding affirmative action, striking down laws restricting access to abortion, and declaring same-sex marriage to be protected by the Constitution.

And it is unknowable exactly how the lifetime appointment of the 49-year-old Coloradan will affect the court in the decades to come. Gorsuch has a welldeserved reputation as a conservative on the Denver-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, even if he has not ruled on many of the high-profile issues that form the public’s image of the Supreme Court.

But there is no reason to believe he will not fit comfortably in the court’s right flank, and hopes of conservative activists who championed Gorsuch will be put quickly to the test.

Within the week, Gorsuch will join his new colleagues in considering whether to hear two lower court defeats being appealed by

gun rights organizations. A case about whether business owners may refuse to offer their wedding services to same-sex couples awaits resolution. North Carolina wants the justices to take up and overturn a decision that tossed out its restrictions on voting as unconstitutional.

And heading toward the court is Trump’s revamped travel ban on refugees and certain immigrants, a case that Senate Democrats said will test Gorsuch’s independence from the man who chose him for the high court.

“One notable difference between this nomination and those past is that Trump had clear, stated litmus tests for his nominee,” said Elizabeth Wydra, president of the liberal Constitutional Accountability Center, which opposed Gorsuch’s confirmation.

“Gorsuch will have the opportunity almost immediately to demonstrate just how closely he fits within two of President Trump’s stated litmus tests for his high court nominee — guns and religion.”

It seems likely that Gorsuch holds the key to a long-delayed case that is the court’s most important of the term regarding separation of church and state. A church-affiliated school in Missouri is challenging that state’s refusal to let it participate in a grant program that provides playground safety materials.

Trinity Lutheran Church says religious institutions are unfairly excluded from such state programs. The state points to a clause in its constitution that says “no money shall ever be taken from the public treasury, directly or indirectly, in aid of any church, sect, or denomination of religion.”

The court accepted the case nearly 15 months ago, when Scalia was still alive. But it delayed scheduling the case for oral argument until now. That might be an indication that the court has been divided on the issue from the beginning and needs a ninth vote to break the tie.

Gorsuch was an outspoken supporter of religious objectors in two cases involving the Afford-

RICKY CARIOTI/THE WASHINGTON POST

He may play a decisive role on guns, voting and religion able Care Act. In Hobby Lobby v.

Sebelius and Little Sisters of the Poor v. Burwell, Gorsuch wrote that a requirement that employers provide contraceptive coverage for their employees could make the religious complicit in what they consider a sin.

The court is also considering a petition from a Denver baker who was found to have unlawfully discriminated against a gay couple by refusing to sell them a wedding cake.

Lower courts ruled that Jack Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, violated Colorado’s public accommodations law, which prohibits refusing service to customers based on factors such as race, sex, marital status or sexual orientation.

The Supreme Court has listed

Neil M. Gorsuch, seen during his confirmation hearing in March, was confirmed by the Senate 55-45 Friday and will be sworn in Monday.

the case as “under consideration” for weeks, without announcing whether it was accepting the case or turning it down.

“It seems likely, in light of his past votes in cases like the Little Sisters and Hobby Lobby that Gorsuch would be a vote to grant in that case,” said John Elwood, a Washington lawyer who closely watches the court’s deliberations on accepting cases.

Two controversial gun issues await at Gorsuch’s first private conference with his new colleagues Thursday, when the court meets to decide whether to accept a long list of cases for the term that begins next fall.

The most important is a petition from gun rights activists asking the court to find for the first time that the Second Amendment right to keep a gun for self-defense extends to carrying firearms outside the home.

In cases from California, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that it did not.

A second case involves whether those convicted of certain crimes can indefinitely be barred from possessing firearms.

On a different subject, the court must soon decide what to do about North Carolina’s request that the court review a decision striking down its voting law. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit said the law was unconstitutional because it was drawn to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”

Until there is another change on the court, Gorsuch will probably reestablish the basic arithmetic of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.: four consistent liberal justices, four fairly consistent conservatives and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy providing the deciding vote when there is a deadlock.

But Wydra said the addition of Gorsuch does more than simply replace Scalia with a like-minded justice.

“Substituting Gorsuch for Scalia extends the conservative life of that seat for another few decades,” she said. n ©The Washington Post

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POLITICS

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Some police pledge to stick to reform

BY T OM J ACKMAN AND M ARK B ERMAN

T

he Trump administration’s suggestion that it may ease federal oversight of police departments was greeted with praise from police unions but pushback from local law enforcement leaders, who pledged to continue pressing for reforms amid intense scrutiny of fatal shootings by police.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in a memo made public this past week, promised that his Justice Department will simultaneously back police officers and support civil rights, ordering his top deputies to review overhaul agreements to make sure they abide by those goals. Echoing his prior criticism of these pacts, Sessions said the federal government should not “manage non-federal law enforcement agencies” and that “the misdeeds of individual bad actors should not impugn or undermine” all law enforcement.

Local leaders in Baltimore and Chicago, two cities where Justice Department inquiries have decried police practices, quickly moved to say they will continue reform efforts no matter what the federal government does.

In Baltimore, where Justice Department lawyers sought to postpone a Thursday public hearing on one such proposed agreement, known as a consent decree, Police Commissioner Kevin Davis called the requested delay a “punch in the gut.” A federal judge denied the request, saying the hearing would go on.

Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson and Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) said in a joint statement that “reform is in our self-interest and that is why Chicago has been, is, and always will be committed to reform.” They did not directly address what the Justice Department’s review could mean for a potential consent decree there.

At the same time, unions in both cities said they welcomed Sessions’s move.

Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, said

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Unions laud government’s review of changes, but some leaders say they’ll stay the course members of the major union had met with President Trump and Sessions days before the memo was signed and conveyed their view that “oversight isn’t being used correctly in the context of the consent decree.”

Pasco said federal civil rights investigations “looked at good policing and saw overly aggressive policing. They looked at stops being overwhelmingly in minority neighborhoods as unfair, but that’s where the crime is.”

In recent years, increased scrutiny has been placed on policing across the country after the controversial deaths of black men in encounters with officers, including the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.; the chokehold death of Eric Garner in New York; and the death of Freddie Gray after suffering a severe neck injury in a Baltimore police van.

Demonstrations that followed led to changes in many departments, with prominent policing leaders pushing for training in how to de-escalate tense situations and to help officers recognize potential bias. President Barack

Obama created a panel to recommend good policing practices, and his Justice Department aggressively conducted civil rights investigations of potentially troubled departments.

The Trump administration has said it would make fighting violent crime a priority and decried what it sees as a lack of support for police officers. Sessions wrote in his memo that one of the Justice Department’s goals under the new administration is to “help promote officer safety, officer morale, and public respect for their work.”

Sessions has been a longtime critic of court-enforced consent agreements, calling them “dangerous.” His memo called for reviews of “existing or contemplated consent decrees” — which would extend to the decree in Baltimore, which was signed by federal and local officials but not by a judge, as well as any decree that could emerge in Chicago.

Dean C. Angelo Sr., president of the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, who had criticized the federal review pillorying that city’s police practices and supports giv-

Police officers patrol in Baltimore in 2016 after one of six Baltimore city police officers charged in connection to the death of Freddie Gray was acquitted.

Local leaders in Baltimore say they will continue reform efforts even without the backing of the Justice Department.

ing it a fresh look, said he stopped worrying about a consent decree after Trump’s election.

“I wasn’t all that concerned that a consent decree was going to occur, and I believe this helps reinforce that,” Angelo said. “Taking care of your own agency and your own needs is something I believe the attorney general has not only stated in the past but restates here.”

Police leaders and experts said no matter what happens with particular consent decrees, they believe a broader effort to improve policing practices will continue.

They said departments have recognized they need to mend fractured relationships with their communities.

“In the post-Ferguson environment, there is so much more attention to those issues, I don’t think it’s going to simply slide into the night,” said Ronal W. Serpas, a former police superintendent in New Orleans and police chief in Nashville.

While in New Orleans, Serpas oversaw the department as it was being investigated by the Justice Department’s civil rights division, and he signed the 2013 consent decree still in effect between that city and the federal government.

Consent decrees give departments “time and breathing space” to enact reforms and change their cultures, Serpas said. He said this was true of New Orleans, where he took over the police force in 2010 and retired in 2014.

“The police department had essentially come off the tracks,” he said of the New Orleans police force after Hurricane Katrina. “I have been a supporter of the consent decree in New Orleans since it happened and still am.”

Terry Cunningham, the former president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, noted that many departments that proactively launched changes have found them to be positive.

From that group’s view, he said, “a lot of the policy reforms we’ve seen in the last 10 years were necessary and appropriate to the profession.” n ©The Washington Post

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NATION

The trouble with funding health care BY

C AROLYN Y . J OHNSON

H

ere’s a simple reason crafting health policy is so devilishly hard: Most Americans are pretty healthy and a few are really sick.

The top 1 percent of health-care spenders use more resources, collectively, than the bottom 75 percent, according to a new study based on national surveys.

Slice the data a different way, and the bottom half of spenders all together rack up only about 3 percent of overall health-care spending — a pattern that hasn’t budged for decades.

This creates a fundamental inequality in the country’s health spending that is the crux of the challenge policymakers face: They need a system that works for people who are ill, but is attractive to those who are healthy and spend little on health care.

The political debate over health care often focuses on how a new system will meet the needs of the sick: Will cancer patients or people with diabetes access and afford care when they need it? But the Health Affairs study, “Most Americans have good health, little unmet need and few health care expenses,” shows just how important the healthy people who spend very little on health care are. The message you draw from that, however, may depend on your politics.

“The key takeaway message really is most people are in good health; they don’t spend a lot of money, and yet it’s important to have them be part of our insurance system. If they’re left out of the system, we’re not going to have the funds to take care of people who are very sick,” said Marc Berk, a health policy researcher and contributing editor of Health Affairs who led the analysis.

But Tom Miller, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, disagreed. He said that the study is based on quick and incomplete snapshots of health and argued that it is yet another way to divert from the health-care discussion we should be having:

THE WASHINGTON POST

Half of Americans are responsible for only 3 percent of overall health-care spending about how to rein in spending.

Using this data to argue about where to get premium dollars from — from the pockets of the well or the sick — simply allows the system to grow ever bigger and prop up an even-moreexpensive medical system.

“We all get diverted by hoping we can hide the bill under someone else’s pillow,” Miller said. “I think that’s the political argument you hear — these low spenders, we’re scared to death they might catch on to the fact they’re getting taken to the cleaners” by being forced to buy expensive

KEVIN HAGEN/ GETTY IMAGES

health insurance they don’t need.

According to House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), the inequality in spending and sickness is the “fatal conceit of Obamacare.” Ryan used a graph that showed that chronically ill people are a narrow slice of the population, but a big driver of spending.

“The whole idea of Obamacare is the people . . . who are healthy pay for the people who are sick; it’s not working and that’s why it’s in a death spiral,” Ryan said last month.

As critics have pointed out, this was part of how the Affordable Care Act was designed, and it is how insurance traditionally works. The auto insurance of people who don’t get into car crashes helps foot the bill for those who do. The premiums from homeowners who never file a claim help underwrite the insurance payouts for those whose houses burn down. It’s the same for health, and a major challenge in the exchanges, where people buy individual plans with government subsidies, has been getting enough healthy people to sign up to keep the premiums reasonable for everyone.

A conservative vision of health care would have people take more responsibility for their own health-care costs, but the graph above presents policy challenges as well, because it suggests that solution wouldn’t just be a matter of making people at all levels smarter shoppers. It would saddle those with the bad luck of being sick with costs that could quickly become untenable.

To different people, the pattern suggests very different policy implications: Berk said he thinks the data are a powerful argument that everyone needs to pay in to the system; to Miller, it suggests the opposite.

“We should probably leave a lot more people alone,” Miller said. “There’s unexpected catastrophic coverage, but don’t micromanage every detail of coverage for people who are just going to be fine.” n ©The Washington Post

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NATION

KLMNO WEEKLY

Troubles at the mall coming to a boil BY

S ARAH H ALZACK

A

fresh round of distress signals sounded in the retail industry this past week, as another bigname chain announced hundreds of new store closings and still others moved aggressively to recalibrate their businesses for the online shopping stampede.

Payless ShoeSource filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and outlined plans to immediately close nearly 400 of its 4,400 stores globally. Ralph Lauren is shuttering its flagship Polo store, a foot-traffic magnet located on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, the latest step in a massive costcutting effort. Big-box office supplies stalwart Staples is reportedly considering putting itself up for sale.

The shake-out among retailers has been building for years, and it is now arriving in full force.

The retrenchment comes as shoppers move online and begin to embrace smaller, niche merchants. As a result, many major chains now find themselves victims of a problem of their own making, having elbowed their way into so many locations that the nation now has more retail square footage per capita than any other. To use the industry vernacular, they are simply “overstored.”

Many have begun cutting back, sending ripples through the economy. The wave of store closures by Macy’s and Sears alone will empty 28 million square feet of retail real estate, according to an analysis by research firm CoStar. Often those vacancies are slow to fill, leaving shopping centers less hospitable to the chains that remain, feeding even more departures and job losses.

The malaise has spread even as the economy overall grows stronger and the stock market marches higher. Just this past week, Urban Outfitters reported that in the current quarter todate, its comparable sales are “mid single-digit negative.” The women’s clothing chain Bebe said in a regulatory filing

CARLO ALLEGRI/REUTERS

Malls closing. Historic brands filing for bankruptcy.

Are we in the middle of a retail apocalypse?

Wednesday it is closing 21 locations. Recently, yoga clothier Lululemon chief executive Laurent Potdevin acknowledged the chain had seen “a slow start to 2017.”

Few traditional retailers are immune: The Limited filed for bankruptcy and shuttered all 250 of its stores. Hudson’s Bay, the parent company of Saks Fifth Avenue and Lord & Taylor, announced a $75 million annual cost-cutting effort. Banana Republic and Abercrombie & Fitch each named a new chief executive, leadership changes that were precipitated by struggles to connect with customers.

In a report published in late February, Standard & Poor’s said it had already lowered ratings 20 times on various retailers in 2017.

S&P analysts wrote that they expect to see “increased levels of stress for the sector in 2017.”

As big retail closes stores, it has cost many Americans their jobs. So far in 2017, retailers have

announced plans to slash more than 38,000 positions, according to data from job placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

And yet some of those losses have been offset by new jobs at startup retailers and e-commerce operations. Amazon.com, for example, said this year that it expects to create 100,000 full-time roles over 18 months.

Retailers are deploying different kinds of firepower to try to regain some momentum. J. Crew announced last week it is parting ways with its longtime creative director, Jenna Lyons, a change that effectively concedes that it needs to fix its fashion if it wants to boost its sales. Still other companies are exploring branching into different kinds of retailing formats: Ralph Lauren, for example, said it is exploring new opportunities for its Ralph’s Coffee concept. Macy’s is selling off some of its lucrative real estate portfolio, hoping to strengthen its balance sheet.

Payless ShoeSource filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this past week and outlined plans to immediately close nearly 400 of its 4,400 stores.

Another chain, J.C. Penney, looks to be trying to position itself to take advantage of fallout from the turmoil: The retailer has started to carry large appliances again, a potentially shrewd move that could fill a void in the marketplace as Sears and HHGregg close stores.

It doesn’t help any of these legacy brick-and-mortar companies that customers are increasingly seeking out under-theradar labels with a more specialized, boutique feel. The likes of Bonobos, Warby Parker, Shinola and Marine Layer are picking off shoppers that might once have filled their closets with goods from more ubiquitous chains.

As worries mount for brickand-mortar players, Amazon’s stock hit an all-time high on Wednesday. While others pare back, the Seattle company announced a deal to stream NFL games, a milestone that underscores the e-commerce giant’s growing muscle. (Jeffrey P. Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon, owns The Washington Post.)

According to research from Slice Intelligence, Amazon captured 38 percent of all dollars spent online during the holiday season. The next-closest retailer, Best Buy, had a mere 3.9 percent.

And now the old guard has to worry about Amazon encroaching in new ways: It is branching into physical retailing, including opening several bookstores. In Seattle, it is preparing to open a concept store called Amazon Go, a technology-powered grocery that would not require shoppers to go through a checkout line.

All of this change is not just pushing traditional retailers to reduce their overall numbers of stores — it is also forcing them to re-think what their stores should look like. Office Depot, for example, is converting some stores to a smaller footprint of just 15,000 square feet. And Target is testing a new store prototype in which there will be a separate entrance and dedicated parking for shoppers looking to retrieve a “buy online, pick up in store” order. ©The Washington Post n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

WORLD

Embracing the solar age TAMARA MERINO FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

The unique Atacama Desert is making Chile a leader in harvesting the sun’s power BY

N ICK M IROFF

O

n the solar farms of the Atacama Desert, the workers dress like astronauts. They wear bodysuits and wraparound sunglasses, with thick canvas headscarves to shield them from the radiation.

The sun is so intense and the air so dry that seemingly nothing survives.

Across vast, rocky wastes blanched of color, there are no cactuses or other visible signs of life. It is Mars, with better cellphone reception.

It is also the world’s best place to produce solar energy, with the most potent sun power on the planet.

So powerful, in fact, that something extraordinary happened last year when the Chilean government invited utility companies to bid on public contracts. Solar producers dominated the auction, offering to supply electricity at about half the cost of coal-fired plants.

It wasn’t because of a government subsidy for alternative energy. In Chile and a growing list of nations, the price of solar energy has fallen so much that it is increasingly beating out conventional sources of power.

Industry experts and government regulators hail this moment as a turning point in the history of human electricity-making.

“This is the beginning of a trend that will only accelerate,” said Chilean Energy Minister Andrés Rebolledo. “We’re talking about an infinite fuel source.”

President Trump ordered U.S. regulators last month to reverse Obamaera policies aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions, and he has promised to “bring back” the U.S. coal industry. But construction of coal-

fired power plants dropped 62 percent tions. China produces more than twoover the past year worldwide, accordthirds of the world’s PV panels, and ing to a survey by the Sierra Club and their price has fallen more than 80 other activist groups. In China last percent since 2008. year, the number of new permits for If the trend does indeed symbolize coal-fired plants fell by 85 percent. a turning point, that doesn’t mean More worldwide generating capacevery country is on board with the ity is being added from clean sources global green-energy conversion. than coal and natural gas combined, The United States last year pledged according to a December report by with other members of the Group of 7 Bloomberg New Energy Finance, nations to phase out subsidies for oil, which closely tracks investment in regas and coal by 2025. But meeting newable energy. such goals remains politicalAn investor in Chile wantly contentious in the United The tower at ing to build a hydroelectric States, with a network of the Cerro dam or coal-fired plant poconventional power plants Dominador tentially faces years of costly and jobs that depend on solar thermal political battles and fierce rethem. Nations such as Chile plant is sistance from nearby comcan take a different path. ringed by munities. In contrast, a solar Chile is adding solar plants reflectors company can lay out acres of because they fulfill the counthat will focus automated sun-tracking try’s goal of 60 percent clean the sun’s rays panels across an isolated energy by the year 2035. But on the top of stretch of desert and have mostly it is adding them bethe tower, them firing quiet, clean eleccause no other energy source generating tricity in less than a year, with can compete with the aweheat to run a no worries about fluctuating some sun power of the Atacasteam fuel prices or droughts. The ma Desert. turbine. sunlight is free and shows up Unlike many of South for work on time, every morning.

America’s other major countries, Long dependent on energy imports, Chile has virtually no oil or gas deposChilean officials now envision their its. With a heavy dependence on imcountry turning into a “solar Saudi Araported fuel, Chileans have been paybia.” Chile’s solar energy production ing some of the highest electricity has increased sixfold since 2014, and rates in the region, but prices are last year it was the top-scoring clfalling as renewable sources come ean-energy producer in the Americas, online. and second in the world to China, acThe Atacama is well-suited to solar cording to the Bloomberg rankings. energy production for the same rea(China is the world’s largest producer of sons astronomers put high-powered greenhouse gases but also the leading telescopes in northern Chile for the investor in renewable energy.) clearest possible Earth-based views Driving the global shift to cheap of the cosmos. sun power is a dramatic decline in the In nations such as Japan and Gercost of the photovoltaic (PV) panels many, which are some of the world that can be used to create giant desert leaders in solar-energy production, solar farms or rooftop home installathe sun’s rays are partly diffused by

water molecules floating in the air, even on days when it isn’t cloudy.

But in the super-dry Atacama, where it virtually never rains, the photons beam straight down. Put a solar panel beneath them and it’s like plugging into the sun.

At the Finis Terrae solar plant near the tiny town of Maria Elena, more than 500,000 PV panels blanket the desert. The 160-megawatt plant was the largest solar installation in Latin America when it went online last summer, capable of powering nearly 200,000 homes. Since then, another Chilean plant has surpassed it.

“Compared with the Arabian, Sahara and Australian deserts, the Atacama Desert has the highest levels of direct normal irradiation, the key component of the sun’s rays for energy production,” said Salvatore Bernabei, the head of renewable energies for Latin America at Enel, an Italian multinational that owns the plant.

The radiation is so intense that no one is really sure how long standardissue PV panels — which are designed to last 25 years — will be able to withstand it. One solar plant here had to replace most of its exposed cables after six months because the radiation fried their insulation.

Chilean energy officials say that and other challenges are relatively minor. The country derives about 6 percent of its energy from solar, but the potential of the Atacama is so great that Chile could generate all of its electricity with about 4 percent of the desert’s surface area, if there were a way to efficiently store and distribute that energy.

“We’ve been thinking for so long that we’re poor in energy resources, but we’re really rich,” said Rodrigo

SUNDAY, APRIL 9, 2017

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WORLD Mancilla, who leads a commission on solar power at Chile’s Ministry of Energy.

So many companies have raced to set up solar plants that they’ve essentially outpaced the electrical grid’s ability to absorb their electricity output. At times of peak radiation in recent months, they’ve had to give away sun power virtually free.

Chilean officials say the problem will be overcome this year when the country’s northern power grid will finally be linked to the larger central grid, which serves most of the country’s residential consumers. In theory, that will allow the system to draw more heavily on sun power during the day and save sources such as hydropower and coal for the evenings, when the solar plants are useless.

Still, this remains the biggest knock on renewable energy sources: They cannot produce reliable, round-the-clock power.

Conventional plants using coal or other fuels can’t be turned on and off like a light switch. So they have to keep running during the day, when they’re far less competitive, and try to make up the difference at night.

A company looking to bridge this gap in Chile is building Latin America’s first solar thermal plant. You can see its solitary tower rising from the desert for miles around. Instead of PV panels, the solar thermal plant will have 10,000 giant, rotating mirrors set in concentric circles around the tower. They will concentrate the sun’s rays on a huge boiler at the top of the tower, filled with molten salts, that reaches more than 1,000 degrees and glows like the Eye of Sauron in “The Lord of the Rings.”

The superheated salts ooze downward to steam turbines, retaining enough energy to generate electricity all night.

The plant’s owner, Cerro Dominador, a subsidiary of U.S.-based EIG Global Energy Partners, says it will be completed in 2019.

Iván Araneda, the company’s top executive, said such solar thermal facilities can transform the industry.

“The attack on renewables is that they’re too expensive, but this is efficient, proven technology,” Araneda said. “On an even playing field, renewables can compete with anything.” n ©The Washington Post

KLMNO WEEKLY

Germany turns to the law in its fight against fake news

BY A NTHONY F AIOLA AND S TEPHANIE K IRCHNER

Berlin

G

ermany officially unveiled a landmark social media bill this past week that could quickly turn this nation into a test case in the effort to combat the spread of fake news and hate speech in the West.

The highly anticipated draft bill is also highly contentious, with critics denouncing it as a curb on free speech. If passed, as now appears likely, the measure would compel large outlets such as Facebook and Twitter to rapidly remove fake news that incites hate, as well as other “criminal” content, or face fines as high as 50 million euros ($53 million).

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet agreed on the draft bill Wednesday, giving it a high chance of approval in the German Parliament before national elections in September. In effect, the move is Germany’s response to a barrage of fake news during last year’s elections in the United States, as officials seek to prevent a similar onslaught here.

Already, a few fake news reports have emerged in Germany.

One falsely alleged that a German girl of Russian descent was raped last year by asylum seekers. Repeated by high-level Russian officials, the reports seemed aimed at Merkel’s open-door policy for refugees.

Merkel is now involved in a strenuous campaign for a fourth term in office.

“The providers of social networks are responsible when their platforms are misused to spread hate crime or illegal false news,” German Justice Minister Heiko Maas said in a statement.

The proposed law would apply only within German borders. But Maas said he would press for similar measures across the European Union.

A number of European countries have also sought to counter

ADAM BERRY/GETTY IMAGES

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet agreed on the bill, but some call it censorship.

the fake news scourge. The Czech Republic recently inaugurated a special unit charged with denouncing false reports. Should the German measure become law, however, experts say it would amount to the boldest step yet by a major Western nation to control social media content. Depending on how obviously false or illegal a post is, companies would have as little as 24 hours to remove it.

In addition to fake news and hate speech, the draft bill would target posts seen as inciting terrorism or spreading child pornography. Officials have cited a surge of hate speech across the Internet as a major factor behind the rise of far-right violence in Germany, including arson attacks at refugee centers and assaults on police officers.

“Germany considers itself a pioneer,” said Markus Beckedahl, a prominent German Internet activist and blogger. “It’s a solo effort . . . but the European Commission will certainly watch closely what Germany is doing.”

Yet the broad nature of the bill prompted critics to call it an overreach that risks becoming de facto censorship. Stephan Scherzer, chairman of the Association of German Magazine Publishers, said the measure could turn big

social media companies into “private opinion police.”

Green Party politician Renate Künast told public broadcaster ARD that the bill could lead to “a sharp limitation of freedom of speech, because there will only be deleting, deleting, deleting.”

One of the companies most affected by the bill is Facebook, which has sought to sidestep such laws by taking voluntary measures to curb the spread of fake news. The company echoed concerns that the bill would wrongly foist upon corporations a level of decision-making on the legality of content that should instead reside with German courts.

“We work very hard to remove illegal content from our platform and are determined to work with others to solve this problem,” the company said in a statement. “As experts have pointed out, this legislation would force private companies rather than the courts to become the judges of what is illegal in Germany.”

But German officials argue that social media companies are simply not acting fast enough to deal with damaging posts. Maas cited statistics showing that Facebook has rapidly deleted just 39 percent of the criminal content it was notified about, while Twitter acted fast to delete only 1 percent of posts cited in user complaints.

Rather than setting a new standard, officials also say they are simply forcing social media outlets to comply with existing laws governing hate speech and incitement in Germany. Incitement and defamation laws here are far broader than in the United States; for instance, laws on the books forbid defaming German leaders and make denial of the Holocaust a crime.

“There must be just as little room for illegal hate speech on social networks as there is on the street,” Maas said. “We owe it to the victims of hate crimes to enforce this better.” n ©The Washington Post

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COVER STORY

Discouraged. Defeated.

Disabled America.

Desmond Spencer, like many working-age adults in rural communities, is turning to benefits as jobs become scarce BY

T ERRENCE M C C OY // PHOTOS BY B ONNIE J O M OUNT

T

beaverton, ala.

he lobby at the pain-management clinic had become crowded with patients, so relatives had gone outside to their trucks to wait, and here, too, sat Desmond Spencer, smoking a 9 a.m. cigarette and watching the door. He tried stretching out his right leg, knowing these waits can take hours, and winced. He couldn’t sit easily for long, not anymore, and so he took a sip of soda and again thought about what he should do.

He hadn’t had a full-time job in a year. He was skipping meals to save money. He wore jeans torn open in the front and back. His body didn’t work like it once had. He limped in the days, and in the nights, his hands would swell and go numb, a reminder of years spent hammering nails. His right shoulder felt like it was starting to go, too.

But did all of this pain mean he was disabled? Or was he just desperate?

He wouldn’t even turn 40 for a few more months.

An hour passed, and his cellphone rang. He picked it up, said hello and hung up — another debt collector. He rubbed his right knee. Maybe it would get better. Maybe he would still find a job.

His mother had written a number the night before and told him to call it, and he had told her he’d think about it. She wanted him to apply for disability, like she had, like his girlfriend had, and like his stepfather, whom he now saw shuffling out of the pain clinic, hunched over his walker, reaching for a hand-rolled cigarette.

Spencer got out of the truck. He lit his own.

“Remember we were talking about it last night?” he asked Gene Ruby. “Remember we were talking about signing up?”

“Yeah,” said Ruby, 64.

“Remember Mama said there was a number

Desmond Spencer was injured as a roofer and has not been able to find full-time work for more than a year. His mother, Karen Ruby, has medical problems and is on disability and has urged Spencer to do so as well.

you got to call?”

“She’s got the number,” Ruby said. “The Social Security number.”

Spencer kept asking questions. What would Social Security want to know? How often are people denied? But he didn’t mention the one that had been bothering him the most lately: Was he a failure?

“There’s a stigma about it,” Spencer said, thinking aloud. “Disabled. Disability. Drawing a check. But if you’re putting food on the table, does it matter?”

Then: “I could probably still work.”

He put his stepfather’s walker in the truck bed, got behind the wheel, started another cigarette and, pulling out of the pain clinic’s parking lot, headed for home.

T

he decision that burdened Desmond Spencer was one that millions of Americans have faced over the past two decades as the number of people on disability has surged. Between 1996

and 2015, the number of working-age adults receiving disability climbed from 7.7 million to 13 million. The federal government this year will spend an estimated $192 billion on disability payments, more than the combined total for food stamps, welfare, housing subsidies and unemployment assistance.

The rise in disability has emerged as yet another indicator of a widening political, cultural and economic chasm between urban and rural America.

Across large swaths of the country, disability has become a force that has reshaped scores of mostly white, almost exclusively rural communities, whereas many as one-third of workingage adults live on monthly disability checks, according to a Washington Post analysis of Social Security Administration statistics.

Rural America experienced the most rapid increase in disability rates over the past decade, the analysis found, amid broad growth in disability that was partly driven by demographic changes that are now slowing as disabled babyboomers age into retirement.

The increases have been worse in workingclass areas, worse still in communities where residents are older, and worst of all in places with shrinking populations and few immigrants.

All but three of the 136 counties with the highest rates — where more than one in six working-age adults receive disability — were rural, the analysis found, although the vast majority of people on disability live in cities and suburbs.

The counties — spread out from northern Michigan, through the boot heel of Missouri and Appalachia, and into the Deep South — are largely racially homogeneous. Eighteen of the counties were majority black, but the remaining counties were, on average, 87 percent white.

In the 2016 presidential election, the majoritywhite counties voted overwhelmingly for Don-

SUNDAY, APRIL 9, 2017

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Spencer, 39, and his girlfriend Tasha Harris, 34, hang out at the house they share with Spencer’s mother and stepfather in Beaverton, Ala. Four years ago, Spencer lost his job at a roofing company. He took a series of odd jobs, but he hasn’t been able to find anything stable.

ald Trump, whose rhetoric of a rotting nation with vast joblessness often reflects lived experiences in these communities.

Most people aren’t employed when they apply for disability — one reason applicant rates skyrocketed during the recession. Fulltime employment would, in fact, disqualify most applicants. And once on it, few ever get off, their ranks uncounted in the national unemployment rate, which doesn’t include people on disability.

The decision to apply, in many cases, is a decision to effectively abandon working altogether. For the severely disabled, this choice is, in essence, made for them. But for others, it’s murkier. Aches accumulate. Years pile up. Job prospects diminish.

“What drives people to [apply for] disability is, in many cases, the repeated loss of work and inability to find new employment,” said David Autor, an economist with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied rising

disability rates. “Many people who are applying would say, ‘Look, I would like to work, but no one would employ me.’ ” In that position now, Spencer, a slight man with luminous blue eyes, drove deeper into western Alabama. He steered through Walker County, where nearly one in five working-age adults are on disability, and into Lamar County, where the disability rate has more than doubled over the past 20 years, arriving in the town of Beaverton, population 273, where even the 55year-old mayor is drawing a disability check.

He pulled up to a small house alongside a quiet country road, got out and looked around.

There was only forest and hills and sun. “Man, I love it out here,” he said.

“Ain’t going nowhere,” Ruby agreed.

Spencer, who wears mud-caked boots and camouflage and brags of burning trash “like a proper redneck,” has grown so enamored of rural life that he’s sometimes surprised when he remembers that he spent most of his life elsewhere. He grew up just outside of Peoria, Ill., dropped out of school at 14, secured his GED, served two stints in prison for felony burglary before he turned 20 and started working roofing jobs, following other family members into manual labor, like his grandfather who built bridges, and his mother, who worked at a stove factory.

His work as a roofer had been a constant thread through his life, from one state to the next, one job to another. And so it had been continues on next page

Trump’s rhetoric of a rotting nation with vast joblessness often reflects lived experiences in these communities.

SUNDAY, APRIL 9, 2017

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COVER STORY need an act of Congress to get hired. Up ahead downstairs to see him off. was a horse-trailer shop. Three consecutive “I’m sorry,” Spencer quietly told her, then went again in 2005 when he followed family memmonths he had gone through the door, and each outside to his truck and pulled onto the road. bers to Lamar County, which is 86 percent time they’d said, “Next month, try us.” MeanThis is how Spencer spends most of his days, white and 11 percent black, and was then while, he tried to sign up for a welding class at a ferrying to the dollar store and back, collecting navigating a long decline in population and community college, but failed the enrollment soda, cigarettes and whatever else his family manufacturing jobs — one plant moved to math exam. may want, and consoling them when he’s Mexico, another to the Dominican Republic.

He pulled up to the Piggly-Wiggly. He collectaround. Most days he doesn’t mind. He likes He nonetheless found a roofing job quickly, ed cake mix and three 12-packs of Mountain feeling like the strong one when it seems as settling into a life that, for a time, felt as safe as Dew for Harris, who he knows can go through though almost everyone he knows is either it was comfortable. But then came the reces24 cans in a day, and was driving home, passing applying for or already on disability. Just the sion, and the uneven recovery, and jobs started everywhere he couldn’t get a job, when he night before, during a family dinner, it had drying up, and four years ago, as the county thought of another opportunity. There was still struck him again. poverty rate climbed to 24 percent, the roofing that place that might need help with welding, a “She walks, and it breaks her bones,” his company let him go. skill he’d picked up after he lost his roofing job. cousin, who applied for disability after a nerHe figured he’d find more work right away.

He had told himself he’d go first thing on vous breakdown, had said of another relative But weeks became months, and he started Monday morning. Arrive by 8:30 a.m. Show the receiving disability. doing what he calls “odds and ends” — work as a enthusiasm and dedication of someone worth “She falls a lot,” added his aunt, who collects welder, a ranch hand, even a full-time garbage hiring. $733 monthly in disability checks because of collector — but nothing restored the stability Walking back into his that had gone missing. house, he placed the cake mix He opened the front door to on the counter. his house. He walked past a Disability rate in Alabama in 2015 He began placing empty small sign in a living room soda cans into a plastic bin cabinet that said, “BELIEVE The percentage of working-age people on disability in Lamar County, Ala., and clearing the kitchen table in the beauty of your dreams,” increased 64.1 percent since 2004, to 18.7. In Alabama overall, the average of the dishes from the night and into a bathroom that he disability rate is 11.9 percent. before, then heard Harris at had recently remodeled and 0 10 20 30% the bottom of the steps. where another sign said, “Baby?” she said. “My head “DON’T QUIT: Stick to the is still killing me.” fight when you’re hardest hit; Most “I got you something for it’s when things seem worst rural Lamar County, Ala. your headache,” he said, that you must not quit.” handing her some medicine He was blessed, he always and a 12-pack of Mountain tried to remind himself.

Dew, and went back to the Small metro kitchen. ut increasingly there were “Desmond,” Harris softly days when Spencer knew called after him. he was faking a belief, once so “Yeah?” he said, returning. strong, that everything would “Do you have a cigarette?” work out. There were days like Most urban He gave her one, finished today, when he sat in a pew in a with the kitchen, then limped small church in Lamar County, Sources: Social Security Adminstration SSDI Annual Report, 2004 and to the living room. He lowlistening to members of the THE WASHINGTON POST 2015; Social Security Adminstration SSI Annual Report, 2004 and 2015 ered himself onto the couch, congregation ask for prayers his knee hurting worse than for health issues. earlier, and flipped on the television. back pain.

An hour later, Spencer was home again. His Something had to change.

Spencer, listening to the conversation, had knee was hurting once more, as it had on and off looked around. At the table was another cousin, ever since he fell from a roof during a construcwho has bipolar disorder and receives $701 per tion job two years ago. He’d never had it checked veryone in his life has been telling him month. Beside her was her boyfriend, whose out because he’d never had insurance, and he what that something is. mom had applied for disability, too. Spencer didn’t mention it now because everyone at the You’re hurting more and more, his mother glanced at the ceiling and sighed. house seemed worse off than he was. His mother, said. And not getting any younger.

“The whole world is on disability,” he said.

Karen Ruby, 60, who has cirrhosis of the liver, There aren’t jobs for you here, a friend said.

“It’s a tough world,” someone else said. was sitting at the kitchen table with her head in Think that’ll change anytime soon?

And now that world was spread out before her hands, saying, “I don’t know when I’m going We all need help now and again, his girlhim as he drove through downtown Beaverton, to be able to get back into church.” His stepfather friend said. Don’t be ashamed of being on past a value store, a post office that closes at was stooped beside her, next to a wheelchair, disability. noon, a bank that shuttered during the recessmoking a cigarette. His girlfriend, Tasha Harris, You’re a grown man, his stepfather said. sion, a gas station that hasn’t been open for as 34, a thin, ashen woman whose back was often Bring in some money. long as Spencer has been here. thrown out, was upstairs in the dark after leaving That was what Spencer was thinking about He saw a large roadside banner that said, church early because she hadn’t felt well.

— money, and not having any — when one day “APPLY NOW IMMEDIATE OPENINGS,” and “I need angel food cake,” his mother told him Harris found him sitting alone on the back cursed to himself. He didn’t know how many before he headed out to the store. “Write it porch in the quiet, going through another times he’d gone in that upholstery factory and down.” cigarette. “Checks are in,” she said of his parasked about a job, any job, and was turned “Angel food cake? All right, I’ll be back,” he ents’ monthly disability payments, which are away. He saw another factory, this one an said, walking toward the door. cumulatively worth $3,616 and support everyequipment supplier, where he thought he’d “I feel like crap,” said Harris, who had come one in a house that, at that moment, was low on from previous page

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SUNDAY, APRIL 9, 2017

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Top left, Spencer sits on one of several wheelchairs around the family’s house used by his stepfather, Gene Ruby, 64, bottom right. He trims filters with pliers to make cigarettes stronger and spends time building and repairing things, such as jumper cables.

just about everything.

“We’re going to the store,” Harris said.

“How you getting there?” he asked.

“The truck.”

“It ain’t got no gas, though.”

“I got to take your mom to the bank.”

“Maybe she’ll loan you 10 for gas.”

Harris disappeared back into the house, and Spencer went back to his cigarettes and thoughts. It didn’t seem right to him, living off his parents’ disability checks and borrowing money from them. But he felt trapped. He couldn’t leave Lamar County with his mother so sick. And the only money he had coming in was the monthly $425 an elderly friend paid him to tend his horses and keep him company

on lonely afternoons, and it was never enough to cover everything. This month it was socks.

Harris needed socks. And what kind of man can’t afford socks? His grandfather used to tell him that a man isn’t a man unless he owns land, and now here he was, years later, not feeling like one at all.

He found Harris in the kitchen. “Ask him for $40,” she told him. “And I’ll get 10 more from him to buy socks.”

Gene Ruby was at the computer when Spencer approached him. The question came quickly and quietly. “Could I borrow 40? And give it back to you right here soon?” he asked. “I promise.”

A few hours after pocketing the money, Spen-

We all need help now and again, his girlfriend said.

Don’t be ashamed of being on disability.

cer climbed back into the truck Gene made the payments on and started it with the gas Karen had paid for. Harris got in beside him. They had been together for seven years and rarely disagreed, except for that day two years before when Harris said she was thinking of applying for disability on account of back pain. He told her not to do it. People would look down on them. They would find jobs. Don’t lose hope.

A light blinked on the dashboard.

“Transmission’s hot,” Harris said. “I told you it did that to me the other day.”

He pressed down on the accelerator.

“No, don’t do that,” she said. “Just put it in neutral and coast. Try not to mash the gas at all.”

“We’re running it into the ground, is what we’re doing,” he said, lighting another cigarette.

Harris looked at him. She could tell he was getting frustrated. Just about everything these continues on next page

SUNDAY, APRIL 9, 2017

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COVER STORY from previous page

days made him that way. He had begun complaining more, not just about the truck or the pain in his knees and hands, but about all of Lamar County. He told her there would never be jobs here for them. Maybe she had been right about applying for disability. His injuries weren’t getting better, and he wasn’t getting hired, and how much longer could he ask for help with groceries? Help with gas? Help with transportation? Help with everything?

He moved the truck out of neutral and back into drive. The store was 20 miles up the road in Hamilton, the largest town in the area, with a population of 6,814. Harris’s brother and his wife lived on its outskirts, and in the falling light, they went to visit, pulling up to a tidy mobile home set beside a large field. Harris’s sister-in-law, Chastity, who was working full time at a calling center, came outside. Then followed Harris’s brother, Josh, 28, broadshouldered and shirtless. They handed a plate of barbecue pork to Spencer and Harris, both of whom had skipped lunch that day. The plate went back and forth between them.

“I just went and got a job at Wrangler,” Josh said of a distribution center in nearby Hackleburg.

Spencer stopped eating. He looked up.

“Is that right, man?” Spencer asked, and Josh nodded. “That’s great. I’m proud of you. Man, I’m happy about that. I’m happy you got that.”

“Me, too,” Josh said. “It pays good.”

“Monday, I’m going to go back to that shop where . . . I heard they need help,” Spencer said.

“Hopefully, I can weasel my way in there.”

“You can,” Josh said. “Put it in your mind, and you can do it.”

“I had an inspiration book,” Spencer said.

“You wake up and put it in your head: ‘God’s got my back. I got this job.’ ” There was a moment of quiet.

“I’m glad you got that, man,” Spencer said again. “I’m proud of you.”

“Sometimes, it’s just the right place at the right time.”

Spencer and Harris finished the barbecue, hugged their relatives goodbye and got back into the truck. He drove to a strip mall that had a Shoppers Value Foods, a Check Into Cash and a title loan shop. He glanced at a sign outside a Sonic fast-food restaurant: “Now Hiring All Shifts.” He sometimes considered applying for a fast-food job. But how, after making $20 an hour at some jobs, could he take one paying $7.25?

He parked and went inside the grocery store.

S

pencer was looking at a piece of paper on the coffee table. It was the number to the Social Security office his mother had given him.

He and Harris sat on the couch in the living

Spencer burns trash in the back yard. He doesn’t let things go to waste. Behind him is a scrap yard filled with recyclables and other materials that he hopes might be worth something.

room, and she handed him a telephone.

“You got to call,” she said.

“I’m nervous,” he said.

“Don’t be nervous,” she said. “They’re not going to reach through the phone and get you.”

He didn’t say anything for a moment, just held the phone.

“What do I do and say?” he asked.

“Call that number and do whatever they tell you to do.”

He took in a breath and exhaled slowly.

“I guess I’ll call,” he said, punching in the number, and then came a voice on the other end, with that question again, the one he rarely had the courage to ask himself: “Are you disabled?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

“How long have you been disabled?”

“Two years.”

“How are you supporting yourself?”

“Living off my mom.”

“Is this a permanent disability?”

“Uhh,” he began. “I don’t think . . . ” He looked at the floor and leaned forward.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “Yeah, I don’t think it’s getting no better.”

He scheduled an appointment for an interview at the local Social Security office the following month. He hung up, stood and, appearing dazed, told Harris, “I didn’t like it at all.” She gave him a sympathetic look and left him alone on the couch.

He was there again four days later on a

He sometimes considered applying for a fast-food job. But how, after making $20 an hour, could he take one paying $7.25?

Monday morning.

The entire house was dark. Spencer was in his pajamas, watching television. Harris was soon beside him, also in pajamas. “I think I’m getting sick,” she said, and he didn’t answer. She went to another room and came back with Ruby’s laptop, which she uses every Monday morning to look at job listings.

“I ain’t checked it in a week,” she said.

She pulled up her email and clicked on one that listed service positions within 25 miles.

“Okay,” she said. “Here we go.” She saw three postings: “Customer Service/Telecommute,” “Telecommute Consultant” and “Product Tester.” She didn’t investigate any of them, instead going back to her inbox. She found another email with more listings.

“Erber?” she asked. “We don’t even have an Erber place around here.”

“Uber,” Spencer said.

“Uber, Erber, whatever,” she said, closing the computer.

An hour passed, then another, and Spencer stayed on the couch. He would not apply for the welding job today. He wanted to focus on securing disability.

“I got to go get dressed,” he said, looking down at his clothing. “What a loser.”

He returned in torn jeans and, with nothing better to do, went outside. He limped to the truck and fiddled with jumper cables. He set a fire inside an iron bin and burned some trash. He inspected a sheet of aluminum he had found, wondering how much he could sell it for. He walked into the woods and walked out. He looked at the road. A car hadn’t passed in a long while. It was 1 in the afternoon. The day already felt over. n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, APRIL 9, 2017

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TRENDS K AREN H ELLER Los Angeles BY

A

pungent fog blankets Goda Yoga in Culver City.

It’s Friday night and the studio is packed, with overflow mats extending down the back hall to the bathroom.

Votive candles and sitar music set the mood. But this class offers a whiff — actually plenty — of something extra: the unmistakable scent of marijuana.

Participants vape, then stretch.

It’s yoga with deep breathing.

And, after several inhalations, a lot of coughing.

Co-instructor Emily Meyers asks the 20 participants: “What are you most passionate about?”

“Staying in touch with nature and making out with my dog,” is one reply.

“I’m not quite sure. That’s why I moved to California.”

“Uh, I forgot the question.”

Such moments are common in Higher Self yoga, a monthly “ganja yoga” class that Goda owner Nathania Stambouli introduced in the fall: “We’re bringing together two great spiritual practices. Marijuana is a way of enhancing the experience.”

Ah, yes, enhancing the experience. Of late, there’s been a fair amount of yoga-enhancing going on. It’s yoga with something extra on the side.

Would you like beer with your yoga? There’s a class for that.

Yoga in the buff? Manhattan’s Bold and Naked Yoga is precisely what it says it is.

For yogis who prefer to bundle in down, there’s snowga — yoga with snowshoes.

Some classes eschew the calm and quiet many practitioners seek. Y7, with locations in New York and Los Angeles, bills itself as “the original hip-hop yoga studio.”

Wish to vocalize at multiple decibels above a soothing om?

There’s yoga with karaoke and — YES! REALLY! — tantrum yoga, which encourages poses and primal screams.

Trampoline yoga also exists, which must make balancing in Tree pose a challenge.

And, because it had to happen, there’s a yoga class with goats.

Yoga now welcomes a menagerie of critters, in fact: yoga with horses, yoga with dogs (doga — yoga lends itself to a sun salutation series of puns), yoga with bunnies,

Are gimmicks a buzzkill for the yoga scene?

WASHINGTON POST STAFF ILLUSTRATION: GETTY IMAGES; ISTOCKPHOTO

even yoga with cats, which seems like an exercise doomed to failure.

Already rife with rival and sometimes competing schools, the ancient practice has become a tabula rasa, open to endless permutations and personal spins. It’s such a fixture in the popular culture that it has inevitably become ripe for parody, in fare such as “Yoga Hosers,” a Johnny Depp spoof in which a pair of teenage Californians use their yoga prowess to defeat villains.

So we have to ask: Has yoga jumped the shark? (Or goat?)

Depends on whom you ask.

“Yoga has become the answer to everything,” laments John Philp in his documentary, “Yoga, Inc.,” which traces — and bemoans — yoga’s evolution from a spiritual practice to a global commercialized endeavor.

But Andrea R. Jain, associate professor of religious studies at Indiana University and the author of “Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture,” points out that although yoga dates back thousands of years, “it has always been open to malleability.”

The vast and unusual array of classes reflects a marketplace bursting with jewel-toned rubber mats. From 2012 to 2016, the number of Americans practicing yoga — three-fourths of them women —

almost doubled to nearly 37 million, according to a major study, creating a $17 billion industry. The growth is partly attributable to the promotion of yoga and wellness and the pervasive practice of mindfulness.

Or maybe it’s just that yoga’s super trendy.

It would seem a challenge to make yoga expensive. It’s not exactly yachting. You don’t need specific togs, shoes, nor even a mat.

But it has come to be viewed as a privileged practice, done in $98 Lululemon pants in Bali or Tulum, some exotic beach retreat far, far from home.

“We’ve packaged yoga to make it look like it’s done only by young, thin white women,” says Lori Hunter, a University of Colorado sociology professor who teaches a course titled Yoga, Culture & Society. “If that’s not you, you feel that space is not for you.”

Enter the goats and bunnies, the tantrums and marijuana, brought in to make yoga appear fun, less exclusive and sanctimonious, and to attract different people.

Like men.

“If adding cats and bunnies to yoga introduces more people to a positive physical and mental experience that leads them to pursue deeper study of yoga, then it’s all

Popular classes incorporate marijuana, nudity and even goats to draw clients

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for the good,” says Andrew Tanner, chief ambassador for the nonprofit Yoga Alliance, which represents 76,000 registered yoga teachers and 5,000 yoga schools.

The breakfast-cereal aisle of offerings, a little hip-hop with your plank pose, has not pleased everyone. In 2014, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a dedicated yogi, launched a campaign to reclaim yoga as Indian and to strengthen its moorings to Hinduism, and he even appointed a yoga minister.

And that was before the yoga and goats business. So how’s that working out?

Unsurprisingly, Higher Self regularly attracts lots of male students, some taking yoga for the first time. Almost half of tonight’s class is male, which is also diverse in age and race.

“Maybe they’ve been toying with the idea of yoga in a safe space,” Stambouli says of the male contingent. “Socially, yoga’s a girl thing to do.”

Or, she notes, “Maybe they’re fans of marijuana.” Maybe?

The 90-minute class incorporates meditation, deep breathing and gentle beginner poses, rather than an aerobic regimen of sun salutations. It is supremely mellow.

A good thing, because some poses are decidedly raggedy in their execution. Triangle poses melt into trapezoids. Bridge poses crumble.

One student becomes too baked to attempt anything more rigorous than Savasana, the aptly named corpse pose. For much of the class, he lies on the mat doing the most rigorous yoga he can muster, which is almost nothing at all.

In 2018, recreational marijuana will be legal in California, creating the nation’s largest market for its products — and activities incorporating those products.

“The demand for yoga and weed is going to explode,” Stambouli says. For the time being, she says, “We’re going to let the buzz build.”

The man who kept plummeting downward doing downwardfacing dog drifts out of a yoga class in a yoga studio, content and mellow, and asks, perfectly serious — well, in a stoned sort of way — “Do you offer other yoga classes here?”

Seems that herbal additive is having the desired effect. n

©The Washington Post

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BOOKS

‘Great Gatsby’ reboot is actually much more F ICTION

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REVIEWED BY

R ON C HARLES

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NO ONE IS COMING TO SAVE US

By Stephanie Powell Watts Ecco. 371 pp. $26.99.

t a crucial moment in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel “The Great Gatsby,” when Nick says, “You can’t repeat the past,” Gatsby instantly disagrees: “ ‘Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously.

‘Why of course you can!’ ” Whether you should is less clear.

Various people — starting with Fitzgerald — have been borne back ceaselessly into the past, particularly by trying to repeat “The Great Gatsby.” Since it was published in 1925, the story has been adapted for radio and television, acted out on Broadway, jazzed up as a musical, spun into a ballet, sung as an opera, digitized into a computer game, reimagined in new novels, and, of course, dramatized in film, most recently in a garish blur by Baz Luhrmann.

These efforts fail — dully or hilariously — because once Fitzgerald’s poetic language has been stripped away, “The Great Gatsby” is just a silly story about a misfit obsessed with a gangster who’s stalking his cousin. But seduced by the book’s enduring fame, writers and producers keep reanimating Frankenstein-monster-esque imitations of the Jazz Age masterpiece.

Crossing through that valley of ashes once again, we approach Stephanie Powell Watts’s debut novel with a mixture of wariness and dread. “No One Is Coming to Save Us” is billed as an African American version of “The Great Gatsby.” It doesn’t help that Christopher Scott Cherot’s movie “G” already attempted that color switch back in 2002.

Surprise: Watts’s novel is unfairly freighted with this allusion to its distant, white ancestor. If you know Fitzgerald’s story intimately, it might be interesting, in some minor, academic way, to trace the lines of influence on her work, but in general that’s a distraction. Watts has written a sonorous, complex novel that’s entirely her own.

This modern-day story takes place in a North Carolina town

ALLA DREYVITSER/THE WASHINGTON POST: IMAGES/ISTOCK

ground down by factory closings.

“So much has changed since we were just starting out,” Watts writes. “Without the factories there is little work to do. What a difference a few years can make.

The jobs that everybody knew as the last resort or the safety net are the jobs nobody can get anymore.”

That plural narrator, knowing and wry, is just one of the novel’s rich pleasures. Without yoking herself to some cumbersome Greek chorus, Watts has invented a communal voice that’s infinitely flexible, capable of surveying the whole depressed town or lingering tenderly in a grieving mother’s mind.

The central characters are members of an African American family who have remained in town, sustained on a thick diet of disappointment. Sylvia, the matriarch, has “spent her whole life tense and waiting for the worst thing to happen,” but it already has. Still married to a philandering man whom she despises, she’s convinced that she failed as a mother and a wife. The only hopeful moments of Sylvia’s life come during periodic phone calls from an incarcerated young man who first made contact by randomly dialing her house.

While Sylvia’s plight provides the novel’s disconsolate bass line, its mournful melody is sung by her daughter, Ava. With a good job at a local bank, Ava enjoys a rare degree of economic stability in this town, but years of trying to conceive a child have frayed her personality, and her own husband is no more faithful to her than her father is to Sylvia.

Into this sad family comes — or, rather, returns — JJ Ferguson. He was once a quiet misfit, dumped into the care of his grandmother after his own mother was murdered. As teenagers, he and Ava bonded over their shared vulnerability steeped in misery. Now, 15 years later, he’s a handsome, successful man — “I go by Jay now.”

He’s building a beautiful house that sits above the town. “That JJ had loved Ava was obvious,” Watts writes. “That Sylvia loved JJ too, like a son, like Devon, her own son, was just as clear.” Soon enough, JJ drops by and confirms everyone’s suspicions about his intentions.

And why not? Why shouldn’t he make Ava happy, rescue her from a dead marriage? Even give her a child?

Little happens in this novel in any traditional sense, but it

seems constantly in motion because Watts is so captivating a writer. She’s unusually deft with dialogue: the self-pitying asides, intentional misunderstandings and veering tones of real conversation. And she’s no less effective when considering these characters alone, flowing seamlessly from one to another, plumbing their various levels of despair.

She seems to know exactly how years of economic depression would ingrain habits of hopelessness. Sexual infidelities that once promised a surge of excitement have long since dribbled into puddles of shame. All of these men are weary; all of these women are exhausted. While they can look back at a past of extreme poverty and vicious racism, now they live in a static country, permanently broken, devoid even of the promise of progress.

We may want to see JJ as the Gatsbyesque hero who can sweep Ava away from this malaise, but the novel resists — even mocks — such meretricious romanticism.

The characters in Watts’s novel are rooted to the exigencies of real lives; they’re not chiffon figures in Fitzgerald’s fantasy.

All of this is conveyed in a prose style that renders the common language of casual speech into natural poetry, blending intimate conversation with the rhythms of gossip, town legend, even song lyrics.

What Watts has done here is more captivating than another retread about the persistence of a crook’s dream. She’s created an indelible story about the substance of a woman’s life. Her characters aren’t allowed to smash up things and let other people clean up the mess they have made — or get shot down and ascend into national mythology. They needn’t reach out their arms any farther.

They’re already running as fast as they can. n Charles is the editor of The Washington Post’s Book World.

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BOOKS

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Baldwin wields pen against his own soul

Novel start to cure Rust Belt rhetoric

N ONFICTION

F ICTION

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REVIEWED BY

D AN Z AK

he portrait on the cover of Alec Baldwin’s new memoir does not show a celebrity basking in the glow of a long and lustrous career. It shows a man who is haunted.

Instead of seducing the reader with his cool blue eyes and trademark smirk, Baldwin is looking away and askance, brow knit, as if he’s troubled by the mere existence of his book. The portrait is a fitting introduction and an appropriate warning. If Baldwin’s “Nevertheless” had a subtitle, it would be “A Portrait of the Artist as a Defeated Egotist.”

After nearly four decades in the spotlight, Alexander Baldwin III is something of an American treasure: an entertainer beloved by the public, in multiple media and genres, a step below Al Pacino and Jack Nicholson in esteem, but rich, famous and talented nonetheless. A committed Democratic activist, he was urged over the years to run for Congress, mayor or governor of New York and has been merciless in his impersonation of President Trump on “Saturday Night Live,” which he has hosted more times than anyone else. Baldwin has surmounted scandal and heartbreak to find domestic bliss, with his second wife, and a professional rhythm that has put him on-screen with Cate Blanchett, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep.

And yet Alec Baldwin daydreams about living a different life. He wants to be the proprietor of a stationery store so he can sell “exquisite pens.” He wants to be a lawyer, a club owner, a clockmaker, the warden of a prison and a gallerist in Chelsea. Depends on the day, he writes in his preface.

What’s consistent is Baldwin’s dissatisfaction with himself and his life. “Nevertheless” is a blunt object wielded by a man of sharp intellect against his own soul.

“I’m not actually writing this book to discuss my work, my opinions, or my life,” Baldwin says, three pages in, winding up for

self-flagellation. “I’m writing it because I was paid to write it.”

He was probably dissatisfied by the pay, too. This rude honesty actually works in the book’s favor.

It’s refreshing to read a celebrity memoir that is not painted in pastels and glossed with self-actualization, that does not ride off into the sunset after rewarding projects and hurdled obstacles. “Nevertheless,” because of Baldwin’s aimlessness, is many things: the confession of an Irish Catholic hothead, an appreciation of film and theater by a sincere aesthete, and a 265-page therapy session — wherein the reader becomes an armchair psychoanalyst unable to treat his patient.

The book starts on a promising note, with an evocative first chapter that reads almost like literature. Baldwin seems ready to emulate Patti Smith, whose “Just Kids” dispensed with simplistic autobiography and aimed for something fragmented, ethereal and truer.

Baldwin’s gripping description of a cocaine overdose during his “Knots Landing” days is a high point (pun intended), and the book provides extensive evidence that fame is less a dream and more a chronic condition. That Baldwin is both enraptured and besieged by his own celebrity is what makes him fascinating and combustible; the book itself is only occasionally so. Instead, it is elegant and petty, sometimes on the same page.

By its last third, “Nevertheless” is checking boxes instead of leaping from and around them — which is a shame, because Baldwin is a fierce wit and proven raconteur. The author humbly accepts responsibility for his personal and professional failures but uses far too much ink to taunt and settle scores.

Baldwin’s memoir is readable but not memorable, a satisfactory attempt by a man who is capable of more and better. He would probably be the first to tell you that. n Zak is a writer for The Washington Post.

D NEVERTHELESS A Memoir

By Alec Baldwin Harper. 272 pp. $28.99.

A WELCOME MURDER

By Robin Yocum Seventh Street.

280 pp.

Paperback, $15.95.

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REVIEWED BY

M ARK A THITAKIS

oes anybody know of a cure for Rust Belt punditry fatigue? Asking for a nation of readers.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s election, these are good times for stories about semirural bad times.

Op-ed pages and political magazines overflow with personal commentaries about the region’s decline. Explanations abound for why good-hearted, salt-of-theearth laborers decided to throw their political lot with billionaires eager to take scissors to the social safety net.

At the center of this newly minted chattering class is J.D. Vance, whose inescapable 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” delivers a likable story about Vance’s triumph over his hardscrabble upbringing with the help of gumption and familial loving kindness.

Alas, Vance also staples some questionable policy prescriptions for improving the former industrial Midwest — basically, gumption and familial loving kindness.

But regardless of Vance’s personal experiences and politics, the success of his book established a uniform — and lamentable — tone for how the region is written about: dry, somber, earnest, wonkish.

Robin Yocum’s fourth novel, the crime story “A Welcome Murder,” isn’t a cure-all for the problems with today’s Rust Belt rhetoric. It has its imperfections; his plotting can be as wobbly as Vance’s politics. But it also has a wit and quirkiness that serve as reminders that the region isn’t so sacred that you can’t bring a little humor to it.

“A Welcome Murder” is set in Yocum’s home town of Steubenville, a southeastern Ohio burg that’s gone adrift. Early on, Yocum writes of the place: “Its old homes, built into the steep hillsides at a time when the town boomed and steel and coal were twin kings, now sag against their own weight, stripped by the acrid smoke and bleached by years of neglect.”

But Yocum constructs a mad-

cap yarn around this epicenter of economic depression, shifting narrators across a handful of quirky, hard-bitten residents.

Johnny Earl is a former major league baseball prospect with “the morals of an alligator” who hit the skids and did a prison stint after lapsing into the region’s remaining thriving business: drugdealing. Sheriff Francis Roberson is a Minnesota transplant who spends his days “dealing with idiots with beer on their breath and vomit on their shoes” but has serious ambitions to be president.

(Ohio has produced seven of them, after all.) His wife, Allison, resents being transplanted into “the lyrics of a bad country song.”

The local milquetoast can’t shake off his distasteful nickname, “Smoochie.” His wife devotes what free time she’s not spending on cuckolding her husband into nursing outsize irrational rages.

The plot turns on the murder of an arrogant reprobate who’s done enough to offend so many people in town that just about everybody who remains is a suspect. Yocum can be precious and a little goofball in assembling the requisite twists and color around that story.

But even amid the silliness, Yocum, a former investigative reporter in the region, has a keen eye for detail about how a place like Steubenville is flailing — and, not unimportantly, doesn’t exactly deserve its role as a symbol of American goodness brought to heel.

There’s no one right way to write about a place. Just look at southern Ohio alone, which has provided the setting for fiction that’s violent, operatic, experimental and lyrical. For now, the institutional voice of the region may belong to Vance. But it’s a place that has plenty of room for Yocum’s brand of serio-gonzo storytelling as well. n Athitakis is a critic and author of “The New Midwest,” a critical study of the region’s fiction. He wrote this for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, APRIL 9, 2017

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Trump enforces ‘red line’ DAVID IGNATIUS, writes a twice-a-week foreign affairs column for The Washington Post.

Even for a president who advertised his coldblooded pragmatism, the moral dimensions of leadership find a way of penetrating the Oval Office. In the case of President Trump, the emotional distance seems to have been shattered by simple, indelible images of suffering children in Idlib, Syria.

“When you kill innocent children, innocent babies — babies! — little babies . . . that crosses many, many lines.

Beyond a red line, many, many lines,” Trump said Wednesday, his voice high and stretched, after pictures surfaced of lifeless infants choked to death by poison gas.

AMMAR ABDULLAH/REUTERS

The recognition: The Syria slaughter “is now my responsibility.” And the admission: “I do change.”

With that conviction, Trump took military action Thursday night, ordering retaliatory missile attacks on a Syrian air base.

American interventionism is our best and worst national trait. Historically, until 1941, the United States was a reluctant warrior, fearful of foreign entanglement. Thursday marked the 100th anniversary of America’s entry into World War I, a conflict that still drips with senseless, dutiful killing.

The young men of Europe had been slaughtering each other since 1914, but on the other side of the Atlantic it was “America First” until Congress backed Woodrow Wilson and declared war on April 6, 1917.

Trump’s wariness on Syria had been like President Barack Obama’s: He said repeatedly, over the past six years and during the campaign, that he opposed more headlong U.S. military actions in quests that might be morally urgent but strategically fuzzy. Republican hawks such as Sens. John McCain (Ariz.) and Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) had blasted Obama’s reluctance to intervene, but not Trump. Back in 2013, he’d argued against

calls to bomb Syria in retaliation for President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons.

Given that Trump’s view of Syria was so similar to Obama’s, his attempt to blame the latest chemical attack there on his predecessor’s alleged weakness was especially dubious. It displayed his embattled, defensive self-image: He is a victim of someone else’s bad decisions. A similarly immature blame-shifting troubled many military leaders after Navy SEAL William “Ryan” Owens died in a Special Operations forces raid in Yemen. “This was something . . . they wanted to do — the generals, who are very respected. . . . And they lost Ryan,” Trump said.

Why did Assad use nerve gas in Idlib? It’s impossible to know.

Maybe it was a signal to an increasingly aggressive Israel that he still had chemical weapons, or maybe it was a warning to Russia that he wasn’t a pawn to be traded in a grand bargain with Trump. But most likely, it was a reaction to the free hand he was seemingly given when Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said a few days earlier during a visit to Turkey that Assad’s future “will be decided by the Syrian people” — meaning that the United States no longer demanded his departure.

A man carries a dead child Tuesday, after an apparent chemical attack in the town of Khan Sheikhoun in rebel-held Idlib, Syria.

Trump has now taken a decisive step that Obama resisted, but he still faces a dilemma of how to bring political change to a Syria shattered by six years of civil war.

The irony is that Trump faces the same bad military options for pressing the attack in western Syria beyond this initial strike that Obama did. U.S. military commanders have focused on the battle against the Islamic State in eastern Syria.

The Pentagon has a plan for a relatively rapid conquest of Raqqa, the de facto capital of the caliphate of the Islamic State, with a force led by Syrian Kurdish fighters. U.S. troops will augment this assault with heavy artillery, Apache helicopter gunships and forward-deployed advisers. It’s a pragmatic plan for ending the Islamic State terrorist threat quickly, even at the risk of offending Turkey and leaving Assad and the political muddle in Damascus. This plan had all the pieces except a final White House stamp of approval.

Then came those pictures of the Syrian children. With Thursday night’s action, Trump reached one of those unforeseen tipping points on which decisions of war and peace so

often rest: the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, the “Zimmermann telegram” of 1917, Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Gulf of Tonkin attack in 1964, the Iraqi WMD delusion in 2003. What all these triggers for war have in common is that people didn’t see them coming.

The World War I centennial is especially haunting as we think about the choices Trump still faces in Syria. A century later, that conflict is still unfathomable, more like a mystery than a settled narrative.

Historians who gathered at the National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Mo., debated Thursday why it began and why the treaty that ended the conflict proved so unstable.

Trump might study the example of Harry S. Truman, another president who came to office radically unprepared for the global responsibilities he faced. World War I had made Truman. He commanded an artillery battery in the Argonne Forest. Like so many people caught up in war, he didn’t know what he could do until he was tested. Trump now better appreciates the truth of Truman’s famous line: “The buck stops here.” n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Why the Senate went ‘nuclear’ BOB DOLE and TRENT LOTT Dole is an attorney and retired United States senator from Kansas. Lott is a former United States senator from Mississippi.

They wrote this for The Washington Post.

For weeks now, we have heard the erroneous claim that Supreme Court nominees require 60 votes for Senate confirmation, rather than a simple majority. In reality, the Constitution and longstanding precedent require nothing of the kind.

Now Senate Republicans have finally ended the farce.

Some have described abolishing filibusters for Supreme Court nominees as the “nuclear option,” a phrase first employed when Democrats were blocking President George W. Bush’s judicial nominees and the Republican leadership was ready to change the Senate’s rules to stop the obstruction.

A more apt term might be the “Reid option,” as suggested by law professor Glenn Reynolds. It was then-Majority Leader Harry M. Reid, after all, who used this approach in 2013 to end filibusters for all executive-branch and judicial nominees below the Supreme Court. Or we could call it the “constitutional option,” since the Constitution provides that each house of Congress shall determine the rules of its proceedings, which the first Senate did by majority vote.

Whatever the label, when

Democrats insisted on denying Judge Neil Gorsuch the same up-or-down vote that Republicans gave to Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, it was time Senate Republicans dismissed the judicial filibuster for what it is today — a power play dressed up as inviolable tradition.

We have had the privilege of leading Republicans in the Senate, as majority and minority leaders. We love the United States Senate and the traditions, written and unwritten, of the world’s greatest deliberative body. But we have watched as Senate traditions have been steadily eroded, including the filibuster of Bush’s judicial nominees and the changing of the Senate rules to push through President Barack Obama’s lower-court nominees. Sadly, these shortterm power plays culminated in the current effort to deny an

up-or-down vote to an utterly qualified nominee, who became a federal judge in the first place with the unanimous consent of the Senate.

The public believed Gorsuch deserved an up-or-down vote.

Some senators took to saying that, sure, we’ll give him an upor-down vote — just as soon as he gets the 60-vote supermajority to end a filibuster. In other words, we’ll hold him to a fair standard as soon we’re done applying an unfair one.

In fact, treating a 60-vote threshold as “standard” is not only unfair, it is also without historical precedent.

As The Washington Post’s fact-checker who examined this “slippery” claim documented, there have been only four cloture votes for Supreme Court nominees. In a 2005 Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy article on the filibuster, two students of Senate history, Martin Gold and Dimple Gupta, pointed out that when the Senate changed its cloture rules to apply to all “debatable propositions” in 1949, nominations were swept into the new rule “by happenstance.

The Senate debates include not a single mention of filibusters of nominations, likely because

the concept was so alien to the Senate of 1949.”

Second, the Senate has never killed a Supreme Court nomination by filibuster.

Key Democratic senators noted that they could have denied Clarence Thomas confirmation but did not believe it right not to give him an up-ordown vote. He was confirmed 52 to 48. (In 1968, Justice Abe Fortas withdrew his nomination for chief justice after one failed cloture vote because of bipartisan concerns over ethical lapses that raised serious issues about his character; it had nothing to do with the nominee’s ideology or politics.)

Third, Reid and other Senate Democrats showed no regard for this “standard” or the Senate’s filibuster tradition, real or imagined, in 2013.

So, for whatever our opinion is worth, drawn from a combined 18 years as floor leaders: We support Thursday’s action eliminating the pretense of a 60-vote “requirement.” In the hands of today’s Democrats, 60 votes ensures defeat of future Republican presidential nominees. As their opposition to Gorsuch shows, no similar nominee could ever be confirmed if that “requirement” remains. n

SUNDAY, APRIL 9, 2017

22

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

BY MATT DAVIES FOR NEWSDAY

Let’s get the IRS to do our taxes JOHN KLOTSCHE a partner and former chairman of the executive committee of the law firm Baker McKenzie, wrote this for The Washington Post. He was a senior adviser to the IRS Commissioner from 2003 to 2008.

French philosopher Blaise Pascal’s satirical line on verbosity, “The letter I have written today is longer than usual because I lacked the time to make it shorter,” is a timely reminder that the dreaded tax season is upon us. Millions of individuals and families are making their annual pilgrimage through Form 1040 and its 13 schedules, accompanied by the 106-page instruction booklet loaded with gobbledygook.

Meanwhile, House Republicans have laid down a marker for tax simplification, proposing to lower tax rates, increase the standard deduction and end a host of special-interest provisions. They estimate that these changes would reduce the share of taxpayers who itemize their deductions from about one-third under current law to 5 percent.

Their ultimate goal: “The revised tax filings for most Americans will be simple enough to fit on a postcard.”

Yet this falls one crucial step short of achieving the ultimate goal of tax simplification: shifting the burden of preparing returns from taxpayers to the government.

After all, the Internal Revenue Service has all the information it needs to do what many taxpayers toil over annually, except it can complete the task more efficiently and accurately. Employers and financial institutions feed variable inputs such as wages and salaries (the W-2) and interest and dividend income (the 1099) directly into the IRS database.

The IRS uses this information to

check the accuracy of filed returns.

Why require taxpayers to spend time gathering documents and information and struggle to decode the forms and instructions? Why push 56 percent of taxpayers to pay professional preparers and 34 percent to purchase taxpreparation software?

The tax code contains 2.4 million words, plus 7.7 million in “interpretative” regulations. The Tax Foundation reports staggering tax compliance numbers: Individual taxpayers toil 2.6 billion hours each year gathering information and preparing the 1040 alone.

This idea for the tax agency to do the heavy-lifting computations

BY MARGULIES

is not new. California launched just such a program, ReadyReturn, in 2004 and recently took its best features and folded them into CalFile, the state’s easy-to-use service offering free e-filing.

Congress even thought such a system meritorious when it mandated in 1998 that the Treasury Department develop “procedures for the implementation of a return-free tax system” for 2008 and beyond.

The launch-year deadline has, of course, come and gone.

How would it work? The IRS would determine eligibility for something that could be called “EZReturn,” based on a taxpayer’s prior return, and prepare a “draft” 1040. It would notify taxpayers of their eligibility and establish a secure online mechanism for reviewing drafts or mailing addresses for the returns to be sent. A given taxpayer would then review the return and (a) agree to the content and file it electronically or by mail, (b) make appropriate changes and file it, or (c) toss it in the trash and start from scratch. EZReturn would be entirely voluntary.

What’s the downside? The most obvious is Armageddon for the powerful tax-preparation industry, a $9 billion business employing 300,000 bean

counters. Case in point: Intuit (maker of TurboTax) spent $3 million lobbying (unsuccessfully) to torpedo California’s ReadyReturn program. And the industry maneuvered the Treasury Department into sidestepping its 1998 congressional mandate by allowing the IRS to contractually agree not to develop a return-free filing system. This came about in 2002 with the launch of the IRS Free File program for low-income participants, which an industry alliance agreed to fund and manage and for which it extracted the IRS non-competition agreement. For the 2015 filing season, only 2.8 million taxpayers used the program.

“Drain the swamp” is a popular mantra of the president and his surrogates, and it seems that the interests of taxpayers annually dragged into the 1040 swamp should trump those of the taxpreparation industry.

Albert Einstein famously said, “The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.”

Let’s have Congress instruct (again) and fund the IRS to develop and implement a comprehensive program to assume the role of the nation’s tax-return preparer and make things as simple as possible for millions of taxpayers. n

SUNDAY, APRIL 9, 2017

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

The circus BY

J ANET M . D AVIS

After nearly 150 years, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Cir­ cus is staging its final shows. The “Greatest Show on Earth” will shut­ ter forever in May. If you want to understand its history, and the fu­ ture of the American circus, be wary of these common refrains.

MYTH NO. 1 The circus is dying.

Since Ringling Bros. announced its closure in January and the Big Apple Circus filed for bankruptcy last year, cultural observers have issued grim prognostications about the American circus.

But its impending death has been greatly exaggerated.

Although the biggest productions have had trouble attracting the large audiences they need to support themselves, smaller circuses are flourishing. Cirque du Soleil, the highly profitable Montreal-based one-ring show, is expanding in the United States.

Other one-ring shows, such as Circus Flora and the Culpepper & Merriweather Circus, are still going strong. As a bellwether of the future, youth circuses are booming. According to the American Youth Circus Organization, there are 250 circus education programs nationwide, with growth projected at 10 new programs per year.

MYTH NO. 2 The circus is a good metaphor for chaos.

The circus itself has always been tightly organized. The movement of people, animals and supplies across the country by railroad necessitates incredible discipline and punctuality. On multiple occasions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Army followed circuses to learn “up to date methods of moving men, animals and baggage.”

On July 6, 1944, circus discipline saved thousands of lives. The Ringling Bros. tent caught fire, and, because it had been waterproofed with a volatile mix of paraffin and gasoline,

within minutes it was engulfed in flames. Tragically, 167 people died.

But more than 7,000 people lived, owing to a carefully orchestrated disaster response.

MYTH NO. 3 Animal rights only recently caught up with the circus.

Kenneth Feld, whose family owns the Ringling Bros. circus, cited confrontations with animal rights activists as a major reason for shutting down. In the past five years, dozens of U.S. cities have banned wild animal exhibitions, as well as the bullhook, which is used to train and guide performing elephants. In 2014, the Feld family prevailed in a 14year legal fight with animal rights groups over the treatment of its elephants; still, Ringling Bros. bowed to continued pressure and the next year announced the retirement of its pachyderms.

One might conclude that these clashes are a product of 21stcentury sensibilities. Yet 19thcentury animal advocates readily confronted suspected cases of animal cruelty at the circus. In 1873, officers with the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals questioned Barnum’s circus about the use of the bullhook, but were reassured after finding “no marks” on the elephant.

In the early 20th century, some animal advocates began to reject captivity and circus animal performances wholesale. In 1918, the Jack London Club, named in honor of the late author, condemned trained-animal acts and staged walkouts from circus performances. In 1925, circus owner John Ringling seized on what appeared to be a cultural shift and temporarily banned big-

HEO WARGO/GETTY IMAGES

The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus is staging its final shows across the country before shutting down next month.

cat cage acts, which he had long disliked because they were difficult to transport. But no other circus joined him, and Ringling soon brought the big cats back.

Bridgeport in 1875. Generous with his fortune, Barnum was a founding trustee of Tufts University and endowed a museum of natural history.

MYTH NO. 4 Barnum was a con man.

A museum owner and circus impresario, Phineas Taylor Barnum profited mightily from his public hoaxes, such as “the Feejee Mermaid,” a dried monkey head and torso attached to a fish.

To this day, people assume that Barnum concluded, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

Yet Barnum never uttered the phrase that has been so famously attributed to him. Biographer Arthur Saxon observes that although Barnum loved pranks, he always considered his audience to be in on the joke.

Barnum saw himself as a respectable community leader and a cultural broker of “the show business”: “As a general thing I have not ‘duped the world’ nor attempted to do so. . . . I have generally given people the worth of their money twice told.” He also proved to be an honest and effective politician. Barnum served in the Connecticut state legislature from 1865 to 1867, and he was elected mayor of

MYTH NO. 5 The circus is a form of escapism.

The circus, rather than a mere diversion, has celebrated the realities of the world. The circus was at times the first place that Americans encountered new technology. In 1879, Bailey became the first impresario to illuminate his big top with an electric generator. In 1905, Barnum & Bailey made automobiles fly as part of an act.

Circuses staged spectacular reenactments of events, including battle scenes from the SpanishAmerican War. Writer Hamlin Garland recalled the cultural power of the circus during his childhood in rural Wisconsin in the 1870s: “In one day — in a part of one day — we gained a thousand new conceptions of the world and human nature.” n Davis is a professor of history and American studies at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of “The Circus Age.” She wrote this for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, APRIL 9, 2017

24

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