The Washington Post National Weekly - April 17, 2016

Politics McCrory’s difficult dance 4

World Smoothing over rifts in Israel 11

Trends Mindful or mindless mantra? 17

5 Myths About trade 23

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, APRIL 17, 2016

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Death in rural America As white women between 25 and 55 die at accelerated rates, a close look at one tragedy. PAGE 12

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RECOGNIZING THE BEST & BRIGHTEST Do you know someone who shows dedication and innovation on the job, displays leadership skills or has taken on a leadership role and/or demonstrates remarkable people skills? If they are younger than 35 years old on July 31st, be sure to nominate that person to be a “rising star” of North Central Washington.

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THE FIX CAMPAIGN ... .. . 2016

Debate winners and losers BY

C HRIS C ILLIZZA

H

illary Clinton and Bernie Sanders debated in Brooklyn in New Yorkon Thursday night, the first time the two had stood on the same stage in 36 days. I jotted down some of the best and worst from the night. Enjoy!

WINNERS

Hillary Clinton: Clinton didn’t knock Sanders out. But she definitely won on points. She was ready when Sanders came at her on her judgment for voting for the war in Iraq, noting that the voters of New York as well as President Obama trusted her judgment. She noted, powerfully, that women’s rights had not come up nearly enough in these debates and that Sanders had sought to minimize them as an issue when Donald Trump made his comments about abortion. (Side note: That was Clinton’s best moment of the night, reminding people watching that her campaign to be the first female presidential nominee for a major party was both historic and unique.)

Most importantly, Clinton drove home — again and again — the idea that Sanders talked a good game but couldn’t back it up. “It’s easy to diagnose the problem,” she said at one point. “It’s harder to do something about the problem.”

That’s her broader argument in this race — what Sanders says sounds nice but can’t be done — and she did yeoman’s work in making sure anyone watching understood that.

No, she wasn’t perfect in the Brooklyn debate. Clinton continues to be evasive and unconvincing when it comes to her refusal to release the transcripts of her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs. The idea that the Republicans running for president need to release any paid speeches they gave before Clinton will do the same is a cop out. Period.

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But, Clinton came into the debate ahead in New York and the race more broadly. Nothing that happened on Thursday night will change that.

WaPo’s Fact Checker: I already knew how good the Fact Checker blog — run by Glenn Kessler with an assist from the terrific Michelle Lee — was. But the two candidates are clearly paying a lot of attention to how many Pinocchios this dynamic duo is giving out. From fossil fuels to Clinton’s claim about guns in Vermont to Sanders not releasing his tax returns, the candidates just kept citing the Fact Checker. In the words of Charlie Sheen: “Winning.”

JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES

Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders debate Thursday night in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

John Dingell: If you don’t already follow the former and longtime Michigan Democratic congressman on Twitter, you’re doing it wrong.

Dingell’s tweet “Old Guy Who Yells A Lot Sick of Listening To Old Guy Who Yells A Lot” was the single best one I saw all night. And I saw A LOT of tweets.

LOSERS

Bernie Sanders: Let’s start with what Sanders did well in the Brooklyn debate: He effectively portrayed himself as the candidate of big

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2016 The Washington Post / Year 2, No. 27

ideas and Clinton as a seeker of half-measures, full of caution. And, if you came into this debate liking Sanders, you left it loving him.

Now to what he did wrong: The sarcasm. He was dismissive to the point of danger, politically speaking, on a number of occasions.

Why? I doubt it was any sort of strategy on the part of Sanders but rather a reflection that he has been running against Clinton for a long time now and is sick of listening to her talking points. Regardless of the reason, Sanders isn’t going to win over many converts with that sort of approach to Clinton. And, make no mistake, that is what he needs to do going forward. If the race continues as it has to date, Clinton will be the nominee. It might not be as smooth a path as she and her team imagined, but she will win unless Sanders can start changing hearts and minds. Sarcasm isn’t the way to do that.

The audience: I have been on the record in favor of live audiences at political debates. And I’ve even written favorably about audiences getting a little rowdy — or at least somewhat actively involved in the back and forth between the candidates. I am now officially flipflopping. The Brooklyn audience was so over the top, so bent on cheering for their preferred candidate no matter what he or she said that it made it hard to watch and listen to the debate at times.

Yelling: I suppose, technically, yelling should be in the “winners” category since there was so much of it. But, it’s my list so I am putting it as a loser. It felt as though the entire first hour of the debate was Clinton and Sanders shouting at each other. Not great.

Nuance: Debates are where nuance goes to die. On fracking. On the Middle East. On just about every issue, the gray areas present in all of these issues were lost amid opposition research dumps and each side looking for an opening to pry at in a future 30-second TV ad.

The Lincoln-Douglas debates these are not. n

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

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ON THE COVER Maryann Payne saved the death announcement for her mother, Anna Jones, who died at age 54 of cirrhosis of the liver.

Her death is part of a larger trend.

Photograph by BONNIE JO MOUNT, The Washington Post

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POLITICS

In the crossfire of a GOP civil war

JERRY WOLFORD/BLOOMBERG NEWS

N.C. governor struggles with party schism over law that rolls back local LGBT protections J AMES H OHMANN Raleigh, N.C. BY

G

ov. Pat McCrory is living the Republican Party’s identity crisis.

This past week began when McCrory, looking pale from a virus, emerged from the executive mansion to tell reporters that he would not discuss the raging national controversy over the state’s new law rolling back local government protections for gay and transgender people — which

he has been defending since he signed it last month.

McCrory referred to the matter only as the issue in which “I know there are people out on the streets.” After a few minutes listing his state budget priorities, he cut himself off and concluded: “I’m going to crawl back and continue to get rest.”

Then, Tuesday, McCrory backpedaled, issuing a surprising call for changes to the law — known as House Bill 2 — and signing an executive order to give state em-

ployees more nondiscrimination protections.

“After listening to people’s feedback,” he declared in a video posted on YouTube, “I am taking action to affirm and improve the state’s commitment to privacy and equality.”

McCrory’s delicate dance shows how a Republican governor, elected four years ago by mobilizing a coalition of suburban centrists and rural conservatives, is struggling to navigate the wildly shifting contours of the modern-day GOP as he readies for a tough reelection cam-

North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) quickly signed the “bathroom law,” which has been popular with some conservatives but created a backlash from the business community.

paign this fall.

The national intra-party battle over what it means to be a conservative — with billionaire Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas offeringnear-oppositeversions—is affecting state and local party officials such as McCrory, who are finding it difficult to gauge the mood of their supporters.

HB2 drew national attention for forcing people to use only the bathroom that matches the gender on their birth certificate. It also drew fire for provisions that

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POLITICS restrict an individual’s power to sue for discrimination in state court and block local gay rights protections.

Many Republicans here felt that HB2 would energize evangelical voters who have been skeptical of McCrory, especially after he vetoed a religious-exemption bill a year ago that allowed court magistrates to opt out of administering gay marriages. The overwhelmingly Republican legislature overrode him.

But, in recent days, McCrory was caught off-guard by the backlash over HB2 from another pillar of the GOP — corporate America. PayPal the other week scrapped plans to open an office that would have employed 400 people, citing the unfriendly business climate. On Tuesday, Deutsche Bank said it will no longer create 250 jobs in Cary. Several groups have canceled conventions, and the state may lose next year’s NBA All-Star Game.

Tuesday’s executive order served as an acknowledgment that McCrory is still trying to find the right political balance.

The governor does not want evangelicals to think he caved to pressure from big business, but he also wants to convince his friends in the country-club wing of the party that he understands the law overreached.

“In a presidential year, you have to run a base campaign and run a campaign based on appealing to the middle,” said Chris LaCivita, McCrory’s chief political strategist. “To fold up the tent and ignore a portion of the electorate — moderates in the suburbs — is ceding defeat.”

Both sides agree that, considering this year’s unpredictable dynamic, North Carolina is effectively a 50-50 state.

Barack Obama won here in 2008. He lost the state to Mitt Romney in 2012. But surveys show Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton either tied with or narrowly ahead of Trump and Cruz.

Polls show that McCrory is embroiled in a neck-and-neck race against his challenger, Democratic Attorney General Roy Cooper.

Criticism has grown inside the state as well. University of North Carolina system President Margaret Spellings, the education secretary under President George W. Bush whose past criticism of same-sex relationships became a

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JILL KNIGHT/(CHARLOTTE) NEWS & OBSERVER

controversy when her UNC appointment was announced, warned that the law could endanger her system’s federal funding, hurt alumni donations and make recruiting the best talent harder.

Bruce Springsteen canceled a Greensboro show last week.

Prior to Tuesday’s announcement, McCrory allies had become increasingly alarmed that the legislation would make it harder to tout adecliningunemploymentrateand other good economic news.

“The governor can [now] say he took action to fix it,” LaCivita said.

“But he’s not budging on the core issue — bathrooms.”

McCrory, 59, was mayor of Charlotte for 14 years before getting elected governor. Perceived as a centrist, he got 48,000 more votes out of Mecklenburg County, the most populous in the state and home to Charlotte, than Romney.

Democrats say the HB2 fight ensures McCrory will not be able to count on those numbers again.

Cooper has seized on the law, using it to activate his liberal base, to woo moderates and to raise money from the LGBT community.

Cooper has refused to defend the measure in court, where it faces challenges from the American Civil Liberties Union and other liberal groups.

“It was an easy choice for me,” Cooper said.

Cooper, 58, has taken on banks, utilities and pharmaceutical companies during his 15 years as attorney general. In the wake of HB2, he’s positioning himself as more friendly to business than McCrory, who was once an executive at Duke Energy.

“I believe that North Carolina should help businesses when they need help and stay out of the way when they don’t,” Cooper said.

It is ironic that McCrory has become the face of HB2. In many respects, he was dragged to the center of the controversy by the state’s conservative, GOP-led legislature, which was swept into power in 2010 and has engineered a major shift to the right in a state with a long tradition of centrist politics.

McCrory was reluctant to hold a special session to invalidate the Charlotte ordinance. After he declined to call for one, legislative

Front from left, Jess Jude, Loan Tran and Noah Rubin-Blose sit chained together in late March to protest North Carolina House Bill 2, a law rolling back local protections for gay and transgender people.

“I personally think the politics will work in our favor.”

Dallas Woodhouse, executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party

leaders used a parliamentary tactic to call themselves back into session.

Then, the legislature went further than his staff anticipated. Intended to be a “bathroom bill,” it wound up — among other things — preventing cities from setting a minimum wage higher than $7.25 an hour.

Instead of trying to negotiate to water down the bill, McCrory signed it hours after it passed. He knew the legislature would probably override his veto anyway — as it did with the religious-exemption bill last year. Another veto would have angered the grassroots activists whom he needs ginned up for the fall, while also making him look weak.

Dallas Woodhouse, executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party, argued that the bathroom bill — if properly framed — will help McCrory with suburban women, not just rural voters.

“I personally think the politics will work in our favor,” he said. “. . .

Moms want to be able to send their 11-year-old daughters into the bathroom and not worry about grown men being in there.” n

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POLITICS

Obama ponders Hiroshima visit D AVID N AKAMURA Hiroshima, Japan BY

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or nearly 71 years, the consequences of the world’s first atomic bombing have remained close to the surface here.

Construction workers digging under the Peace Memorial Museum recently discovered the charred and mangled remains of a bicycle, a rice paddle, a toothbrush and a fountain pen, tangible artifacts of a civilization that was buried in ash on Aug. 6, 1945.

The memory of that moment has defined this Japanese city of 1.1 million for more than seven decades, but the ghosts of that horrifying past also have prevented a final reconciliation with the nation that dropped the bomb.

No sitting U.S. president has ever visited Hiroshima, out of concern that such a trip might be interpreted as an apology. The bombing killed 140,000 people but has been viewed by many Americans as a necessary evil to end World War II and save the lives of U.S. troops.

Today, however, there is growing sentiment inside the White House that President Obama, who in his first year envisioned a world without nuclear weapons, should cap his final year with a grand symbolic gesture in service of a goal that remains well out of reach.

No final decision has been made, but aides have begun exploring the possibility of Obama spending several hours in Hiroshima in May, after attending the Group of Seven Summit in IseShima. One senior administration official suggested the president could potentially deliver a speech there that evokes the nonproliferation themes of his address in Prague in 2009.

“I think the president would like to do it,” said John Roos, who served as U.S. ambassador to Japan from 2009 to 2013 and in 2010 became the first American diplomat to participate in the annual Aug. 6 observance in Hiroshima.

The White House is well aware of the potential for domestic criticism around a Hiroshima trip, es-

MANDEL NGAN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

No sitting U.S. president has ever set foot in the city where America dropped its first atomic bomb pecially in an election year. Republicans have consistently portrayed Obama’s foreign policy as feckless and weak, and the president was ridiculed in 2009 when he bowed to the Japanese emperor in Tokyo.

Secretary of State John F. Kerry was in Japan this past week and local officials said the public has long been enamored of a potential visit from Obama. Yet even here, the geopolitics are complicated, in light of China’s rise and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s pursuit of a stronger self- defense strategy.

Abe has ramped up defense spending and won new powers for Japan’s pacifist self-defense forces to play a stronger international role in the face of China’s growing military capabilities and a nucleararmed North Korea. Last year, on the 70th anniversary of the war’s end, Abe made a concentrated effort to resolve lingering World War II-era disputes with Seoul and Beijing that had complicated relations

between the Asian powers.

“On the security side, particularly in East Asia, the rise of China poses a challenge to Japan’s security, and the military buildup of Chinaremindsusoftheimportance of balance,” said Nobumasa Akiyama, nuclear security policy professor at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo. “Here in East Asia, there is a divide between the nuclear abolitionists and the security people.”

Some Abe aides fear that an Obama appearance in Hiroshima would renew debate in the United States over Japan’s imperial past and complicate the prime minister’s security agenda in Asia by forcing him to respond to U.S. campaign trail criticism and justify his policies. One Abe adviser, in an interview, suggested that Obama delay a visit until after he leaves office; former president Jimmy Carter toured the memorial park in 1984, several years after he left the White House. And Abe

President Obama was ridiculed by his political opponents for bowing when greeting Japanese Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo in 2009. The White House is well aware of the potential for domestic criticism around a Hiroshima trip.

visited Hiroshima last August for the 70th anniversary memorial ceremonies.

Japanese foreign policy analysts said Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida, who was born in Hiroshima and is more moderate than the conservative Abe, is more committed to the disarmament message and to Japan’s pacifist post-war policies.

White House aides say they are confident that Obama can pay respects to the victims of the war — on both sides of the Pacific — without provoking a major political backlash in the United States.

The feeling within the White House is that a Hiroshima visit, while not crucial to the future of the U.S.-Japan alliance, would offer the president another opportunity to recognize history without being, in his words, “imprisoned” by it.

In his second term, Obama has made historic trips to Burma and Cuba and negotiated a landmark nuclear deal with Iran.

“It’s not lost on us that this would bring the Prague speech and the conception of a world without nuclear weapons full circle and offer a very poignant platform for a message that is so central to the Obama presidency,” said one senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because plans are not finalized. “This is not a triple bank shot. The risks are manageable.”

Local officials in Hiroshima said that most Japanese would be satisfied if the president were to express empathy and renew his call for disarmament. A former mayor once termed his constituents the “Obamajority” to signal their enthusiasm for the president’s nonproliferation agenda.

“If he comes to Hiroshima, I think the majority will welcome him because we see that he’s trying to move things forward,” Hidehiko Yuzaki, the governor of Hiroshima prefecture, said in a recent interview. “The difference between President Obama and the heads of other nuclear weapon countries is that, of course, the U.S. dropped the bomb. But we’re not expecting President Obama to apologize.” n

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POLITICS

KLMNO WEEKLY

A pivotal week in the Empire State D AN B ALZ New York BY

T

he Democratic presidential nominating contest has become a discussion about momentum, not mathematics, and that’s become a major problem for front-runner Hillary Clinton in her battle against Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Clinton has won more states, more popular votes and more pledged delegates, but Sanders has had the momentum. He has won seven of the past eight contests, including this month’s Wisconsin primary and Wyoming caucuses.

But after stumbles by the Vermont senator over the past two weeks, New York’s Tuesday primary and the series of contests that follow on April 26 provide Clinton the opportunity to change the conversation.

For both practical and psychological reasons, she badly needs to do so.

The U.S. senator from Vermont has been running a remarkable campaign politically, having generated support and enthusiasm far beyond what anyone anticipated. Even more astonishing is the fact that he continues to raise money faster and more easily than Clinton. The Sanders grass-roots, online money machine guarantees that he will have the resources — and the passion behind his candidacy — to contest every primary and caucus between now and June 7.

In recent weeks, thanks to huge victories in caucuses, he has chopped Clinton’s lead in pledged delegates substantially. That has given rise to his talk of potentially moving ahead of Clinton in pledged delegates, of a related battle to convert Democratic superdelegates — elected officials and party leaders who have automatic seats at the convention and are free to support whomever they choose — to his column, even to suggestions of an open convention in Philadelphia.

The cold realities of the nominating process have been stated many times. Democratic rules make it difficult for anyone to gain a significant lead in pledged delegates because delegates are awarded proportionally. But once someone has a lead, a rival candidate faces an even more daunting task trying to catch up. That’s the situation Sanders has faced for some time, but his big victories in recent caucuses and the Wisconsin vote have kept the focus on his successes more than on his challenges.

Clinton’s team had hoped that the hard realities of delegate math would have set in earlier this spring. Instead, the opposite has occurred.

The more Sanders has won, the more the focus has been on what’s wrong with Clinton. She has had to keep virtually her entire focus on the primary campaign. At some point, however, as the likely nominee, she will need to turn

YANA PASKOVA FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

her attention — and some of the resources of her campaign — to assembling the building blocks for a likely general election campaign.

That clock is now ticking louder.

The Clinton team thinks that by the end of this month, the numbers will be incontrovertible, that she will be seen as the presumptive nominee. Senior advisers who have run the numbers argue that by month’s end, Clinton will have accumulated roughly 90 percent of the delegates needed to clinch the nomination.

“There won’t be a path for Bernie to succeed,” said one adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal information.

That won’t end the competition with Sanders. The calendar looks better for him in May than in late April. He is most likely to win contests that month, giving rise to more questions about Clinton. This is not uncommon in nomination battles. President Obama, in his 2008 campaign against Clinton, lost more contests than he won between early March and the end of the primary season. But his delegate lead barely wavered. By the time we get to California in June, Clinton could be in a position to claim the nomination while still losing the state to Sanders by a wide margin.

The Clinton campaign’s projections of her trajectory are based on a combination of pledged and superdelegates. After Wyoming, the Associated Press count gave her 1,280 pledged delegates and 469 superdelegates for

Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton attends a Conversation on Gun Violence Prevention event on Long Island in New York. Beating Bernie Sanders in the state’s primary on Tuesday is vital for her campaign.

a total of 1,749. AP said Sanders has 1,061, including 38 superdelegates.

The Sanders camp pegs his total slightly higher. Beyond that, his advisers say that neither candidate can achieve the 2,383 delegates needed for the nomination on the basis of pledged delegates alone, and they say that would leave the issue of who becomes the nominee in the hands of the superdelegates.

Still, Clinton is likely to have a majority of those pledged delegates, on the basis of current projections.

Clinton’s strength among superdelegates appears to be understated by public counts. Campaign officials have told their allies in the party that their actual superdelegate count is at least 100 more than the AP count and closing in on 600 overall. Nor are those tasked with keeping an eye on those superdelegates seeing any defections, according to several party officials.

The campaign’s internal numbers are higher than the public numbers in large part because there are many who have made private commitments to the Clinton campaign but don’t want to say so publicly for the time being, with some likely to wait until the primaries are concluded.

Clinton knows Sanders will run to the end of the primaries; she did the same against Obama in 2008 when she was the underdog and trying to close the gap. But general election planning also looms. Working backward from Election Day, the time is fast approaching when any smart campaign must start to set up organizations in the battleground states and prepare in other ways as well.

That is unglamorous but necessary work — picking state directors who in turn will build out their paid staffs and link up to a bigger network of volunteers. In some states, early voting will begin a month out from the election, which means that by early September, a campaign focused on winning in the fall must have its teams up and running at full speed — to identify its voters and get them to the polls.

That work needs to start within the next month, if history is any guide. It can be done in a shorter time, but there are risks. The fractured Republican nominating contest could give Clinton some cushion, but, in practice, the prospect of a contested GOP convention gives Democrats an opportunity to take aim at the Republicans before they are truly ready to fight back.

That is why this Tuesday in New York is so important to Clinton. It’s not just winning, it’s changing the conversation. A loss in the state she represented in the Senate for eight years would be a huge setback, far bigger than what happened in Wisconsin. Victory could start her on a path that could make the Democratic race look far different in a matter of weeks. n

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NATION

In Sin City, an old vice gets snuffed out A Las Vegas sportsbetting venue clears the air and goes smokefree, but will the big casinos follow?

J OHN M . G LIONNA Las Vegas BY

Smoking rates of U.S. adults

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t was Final Four weekend, and James Riviello was in a mood to make some serious money.

The professional gambler sat in a puffy tan leather chair inside the mammoth Westgate Casino sports book, a realm the size of a Costco warehouse, with eight super screens showing his favorite sport in colorful high-definition.

Here in the place known as Sin City, where vice normally calls the shots, there was something refreshing about the scene. You could almost call it healthy.

Nobody was smoking.

Just weeks before, the Westgate had banned cigarettes and their acrid aroma inside one of the city’s largest sports books. Gone were the characters straight out of “Mad Men” — chain-smokers who flicked their lighters every few minutes, cigarettes dangling from their lips.

For Riviello, the resulting thrill was like raking in his winnings at the cash window. “It’s just so aggravating when someone sits there and blows smoke in your face,” said the 29-year-old Pennsylvania native. “Now when I see them light up, I just point to the no-smoking sign and shoot them a look that says ‘Put that out.’ A few might complain, but most of them do it.”

In a city that all but encourages bad behavior, casino bosses here flaunt their gambling floors as the last bastion of the guiltless cigarette. But Westgate’s move suggests the continuing cultural shift toward smoke-free public spaces may finally clear the air of some of the most celebrated smoke-filled rooms: Vegas casinos.

Jay Kornegay, Westgate’s Las Vegas vice president of race and sports operations, said he thinks the day is coming. “We’ve already gotten calls from some other operations in town,” he said. “People are surprised we haven’t gotten more pushback.”

In recent years, other Las Vegas sports books have banned smoking. Casinos offer nonsmoking gambling areas with special venti-

By region

SOURCE: CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION THE WASHINGTON POST

lation units, and most poker rooms are now smoke-free. But a stubborn resistance remains among casino bosses here against going totally smokeless, despite a growing public outcry.

In 1999, Nevada was the smokiest state in the nation, with nearly one-third, or 31.5 percent, of residents claiming cigarette habits. By 2014, that number had dropped nearly in half, to 16.9 percent. That followed a 2006 voter initiative in Nevada that banned public smoking, including lighting up while playing slot machines in restaurants, stores and gas stations.

But, as usual, casinos got a pass.

“They are very influential,” said Maria Azzarelli, tobacco control program coordinator for the Southern Nevada Health District.

“It’s very hard to fight against all that power.”

A 2014 report by Deutsche Bank suggested that a smoking ban in Nevada could mean a 7.5 percent decline in gambling during its first year. Delaware’s gambling market fell 11.3 percent after a smoking

ban in 2002. Illinois casinos reeled from a 20.9 percent revenue plunge after smoking was banned in 2007, according to the report.

“Nevada’s gaming industry has witnessed the results in other states,” said Andrew Zarnett, a Deutsche Bank gambling analyst.

“Operators and other stakeholders there, including the people who collect the taxes, have decided they’re not willing to take that decline in revenue.”

Casino bosses might also think that the experience of smoking somehow fuels more gambling.

An internal 2003 report for the Australian gambling company Tattersalls (leaked to the Age newspaper in Melbourne) claimed that “smoking is a powerful reinforcement for the trance-inducing rituals associated with gambling.”

Furthermore, “daily smokers gambled on more days and spent more money gambling; they also ‘craved’ gambling more and had lower perceived control over their gambling,” according to a 2002 study in the scientific journal Ad-

diction.

Zarnett said a smoking ban would initially disrupt customer wagering patterns, forcing many smokers to take a cigarette break from the gambling tables. Those breaks could sever any “trance” and force gamblers to think harder about their losses.

Stephanie Steinberg became so disgusted by the smoky atmosphere inside Las Vegas casinos that she formed a nonprofit group, Smoke-Free Gaming of America, to ban the practice from gambling floors nationwide. The professional blackjack player said the secondhand smoke is dangerous not only to fellow gamblers but also to employees who must inhale carcinogens during an entire shift.

“I just could not stand the smoke in Las Vegas,” she said. “I would talk to dealers and ask them ‘How do you handle this?’ And they would say, ‘We can’t stand it.’

Many would tell me about a litany of heath concerns, from heart disease and asthma to having part of a lung removed.”

Recently, Markus Battle sat at a slot machine inside the Westgate, his pack of Newports on the table next to him. Entranced by his play, he let his cigarette burn down to the filter. If the day comes where he can no longer smoke, he says he would quit his Vegas habit.

“This is the only place I know where I can come and do what I want,” said the 30-year-old Californian in an Angels baseball cap.

“Don’t take that away from me.”

Inside the sports book, David Stanley said he’s a fan of the new no-smoking rule.

A year ago, the Greeley, Colo., resident and 35-year-smoker contracted cancer and had a lung removed. Before last month’s ban, whenever he gambled at the Westgate’s sports book, the smell of smoke would stir the impulse to reach for a cigarette.

“It was always an adrenaline rush,” he said. “That first drag clears your mind, makes you think you have all the right answers.”

So has a cigarette-free life meant a gambling losing streak?

Stanley smiled.

“Heck, no.” n

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NATION

KLMNO WEEKLY

Basing student aid on future salaries

BY D ANIELLE D OUGLAS- G ABRIEL

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tudents at Purdue University soon will be able to apply for education funding in exchange for a percentage of their future earnings, a program that could revolutionize college financial aid at a time when costs are high.

Through its research foundation, the public college in West Lafayette, Ind., is rolling out the “Back a Boiler” program next month, using a concept known as an income-share agreement, or ISA, that would be available to rising juniors and seniors.

Awards Funding will start at $5,000 and will take into account a student’s cumulative debt. Students would repay the debt during the years immediately following college based on a fixed rate linked to their expected income, a gamble that could save them thousands of dollars compared with traditional loans but also could cost them far more if they land high-paying jobs.

Purdue is the first American university to experiment with ISAs in more than 40 years, and if successful, could standardize mainstream a novel alternative to private student loans.

The exact terms of the agreements will vary by student, but school officials say the length and percentage will be competitive with private student loans. The standard repayment period will be nine years or less, shorter than most education loans. Depending on a student’s professional earnings after graduation, the money repaid on the agreement could be higher or lower than the amount provided.

All the money students pay back will be used to replenish the fund for future investments. Purdue tapped Vemo Education, a Virginia financial services firm, as well as nonprofit organizations 13th Avenue Funding and the Jain Family Institute, to flesh out the terms of the agreements.

“Back a Boiler is designed for students who have economic need beyond what they can get from grants [and] subsidized federal

SCOTT BOEHM/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Purdue program replaces private loans with pact to give college a percent of graduates’ paychecks loans,” said Brian Edelman, chief operating officer at the foundation. “At Purdue, we have thousands of students who fit that profile. But this is not for everyone.”

Income shares do not function like traditional debt in that there is no explicit principal balance or interest. Purdue created an online comparison tool that lets students plug in their major, credit hours and expected graduation date to analyze repayment terms based on projected earnings.

A history major, for instance, with a $10,000 ISA would be expected to pay 3.72 percent of their salary for nine years, according to the comparison tool. The income share would be fixed, even though the calculation assumes a starting salary of $34,000 that would grow an average $1,590 a year the first 12 years out of school.

At the end of nine years, that history major would have paid back $14,265 on the ISA. If that student were to get a $10,000 bank loan at 9 percent interest without

a co-signer, it would cost $16,684 to repay the debt in a standard 10-year term, according to the tool. The ISA in that case would give the student a savings of more than $2,400.

Most private lenders require students to have a co-signer, so it is probable that a borrower could get a lower interest rate that would make the loan cheaper than the income share. But if that history student earns less than expected in those nine years, they would be responsible for a smaller payout on the ISA. Banks would expect full repayment of the loan regardless of the borrower’s earnings.

By the same calculation, an ISA could become an expensive gamble: A student who agrees to pay 5 percent of their income for five years on a $10,000 agreement could pay more than on a standard loan if, after graduation, they land a higher-paying job than expected.

At Purdue, students in highearning fields — economics or engineering, for example — would

Purdue University’s “Back a Boiler” program allows students to repay student-loan debt at a fixed rate linked to anticipated income.

pay a lower percentage of their income for a shorter period than those with lower earning potential. Purdue also has put a cap in place that prevents students from paying more than 2.5 times the amount of money they received, Edelman said.

“That’s still a fairly high cap,” said Robert Kelchen, a professor of higher education at Seton Hall University.

The biggest drawback to the program, he said, is for students who may earn a lot of money coming out of school.

Mike Young, one month away from an engineering degree from Purdue, no longer has to worry about paying for classes. But he and his friends have been talking about the experiment.

“The thing that makes this attractive is it would be a little bit easier than the traditional structure of taking a loan from a bank,” Young said. “Witha bank, you owe a certain amount of money no matter what happens. Whereas with this agreement, if your degree doesn’t end up getting you the job that you want, you’ve got options.

You’re not stuck with debt that’s going to be impossible to pay off.”

The agreements are not exactly loans, so it is unclear whether they would be subject to laws such as the Fair Credit Reporting Act. It would be up to policymakers and regulators such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to determine which consumer laws would be applicable.

CFPB officials would not discuss Purdue’s program, but said the agency is closely monitoring income-share agreements.

“It is important that consumers know upfront the costs and risks of financial products,” said Seth Frotman, student-loan ombudsman at the CFPB. Edelman said the foundation put other protections in place to account for hardship, including no required payments for graduates who earn less than $20,000 a year. If someone is making above that amount but does not make payments, the foundation will pursue that person through debt collection, he said. n

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Denmark’s hostile turn on refugees G RIFF W ITTE Copenhagen BY

L

ise Ramslog was out for a barefoot amble on the warm day last September that Europe’s refugee crisis came to her remote village in southern Denmark.

The 70-year-old grandmother had planned a simple stroll. What she found in her quiet, coastal community were hundreds of exhausted asylum seekers who had arrived on the ferry from Germany only to be stranded without access to public transportation.

Some had begun to walk along the highway in desperation.

Ramslog decided on the spot that she would help: She ended up giving two young couples, a small child and a newborn baby a 120mile ride in her cramped sedan to their destination in Sweden.

“When we crossed the border, they rejoiced and cried,” she recalled.

In another context, Ramslog might be known as a good Samaritan. But the Danish government has a different term for her: convicted human smuggler.

The decision by authorities to prosecute Ramslog — and to charge hundreds of other Danish citizens with a similar crime — is to many here just the latest evidence of a society that, when faced with an unparalleled influx of migrants and refugees, has taken a nasty turn.

In that respect, Denmark has company: Across Europe, a oncetender embrace of those fleeing conflicts on the continent’s doorstep has evolved into an uncompromising rejection.

The other week, authorities in Greece began sending new arrivals back across the sea to Turkey, as part of a policy intended to permanently close the path via which more than 1 million people sought sanctuary last year.

But as Europe walls itself off, the continent is left to reckon with what’s become of its longcherished humanitarian beliefs.

And to many in Denmark, the chasm between reputation and reality looks particularly gaping.

“We’re losing respect for the

GRIFF WITTE/THE WASHINGTON POST

Prosecution of those who helped asylum seekers prompts values debate amid humanitarian crisis values upon which we built our country and our European Union,” said Andreas Kamm, secretary general of the Danish Refugee Council. “It’s becoming very hard to defend human rights.”

This Scandinavian nation of compulsively friendly people is celebrated by U.S. presidential candidate Bernie Sanders as a social-welfare utopia, one that was recently judged the world’s happiest place. Ranking high in the country’s pantheon of heroes are those who protected Jews during the Holocaust or who helped the oppressed escape from behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. But when it has come to those fleeing 21st-century conflicts on Europe’s doorstep, Denmark has gone into overdrive to broadcast its hostility. While Germany continues to welcome asylum seekers, and other European countries

such as Sweden held their doors open for as long as they could, Denmark has taken a hard line almost from the beginning.

The government slashed refugees’ benefits, then advertised the cuts in Lebanese newspapers. It has enabled police to confiscate refugees’ valuables, including cash and jewelry. And authorities have made it far more difficult for those already here to reunite with their families, upping the wait time to three years from one.

Now ordinary Danes are getting caught up in the crackdown, punished for what many saw as a quintessentially good deed.

“I’m proud of what I did and will never regret having done it,” said Ramslog, her clear blue eyes welling with tears. “But I don’t want to be known as a criminal.”

‘Huge pressure’ Yet that’s exactly what she is,

Two women who helped stranded asylum seekers by giving them rides, Lise Ramslog, left, and Lisbeth Zornig, have been convicted of human smuggling for doing what they thought was a humanitarian good deed.

after a March conviction. And according to the far-right party that holds the balance of power in the Danish Parliament, it’s what she deserves, even though the police ordered the state-run railway to begin transporting asylum seekers only days after Ramslog opened her car door and invited them in.

“These people broke the law,” said Peter Kofod Poulsen, a recently elected member of Parliament from the anti-immigration Danish People’s Party. “Human smuggling is not all right — not if it’s done by the train company and not if it’s done by private individuals.”

Poulsen, who at 26 is Parliament’s third-youngest member, has helped push the country’s weak center-right government to take a less-forgiving line on asylum seekers since the once-fringe DPP surged to second place in elections in June.

The number of refugees taken in by Denmark, he said, should be “as close to zero as possible.”

The alternative, in Poulsen’s view, is the end of everything Danes hold dear — including low crime rates and high-quality government services. Welcoming Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans and others fleeing war, he said, is just too burdensome.

“This country is falling apart,” said Poulsen, who is slim, blond and self-assured. “We used to have a safe, monocultural society. Now our welfare state is under huge pressure.”

The notion that Denmark can’t adequately look out for its own if it is also giving sanctuary to asylum seekers has found wide appeal here. Anti-refugee positions once considered extreme are now embraced by a broad cross section of the country’s politicians.

The hardening of public attitudes has been underway for at least a decade. But a key turning point in popular opinion may have been that day last September when asylum seekers took to the highways to walk.

Many had been blocked a week earlier from leaving Hungary, leading to a bulge in numbers on the migrant trail.

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WORLD When they arrived in Denmark, on Sept. 7, they were initially barred from using public transportation unless they agreed to be registered — something few were willing to do because they wanted to travel onward to more hospitable destinations, especially Sweden.

When Danes turned on their televisions that day, they saw highways clogged with people in need.

“That was an eye-opener for many Danes,” said Kasper Moller Hansen, a University of Copenhagen political scientist. “They thought, ‘Wow, that’s a lot of people. We can’t help all of them.’ ” Instinctual response Other Danes took a different lesson, jumping in their cars and driving to the small ferry terminal in Rodby to offer asylum seekers a lift.

Lisbeth Zornig, a well-known child-rights activist and author, was in the area and decided she couldn’t imagine driving back to Copenhagen with an empty car.

“I’d never seen people in need that way in Denmark before,” she said. “They were hungry. They were thirsty. They didn’t have anything but the clothes they were wearing.”

She opened her minivan’s doors to a small group of Syrians, and four adults and twin 5-year-old girls hopped in. “Two minutes later, they were sleeping in the back seat,” she said.

In Copenhagen, her husband, former journalist Mikael Lindholm, served them coffee and cookies, and offered to let them spend the night. But they were eager to get to Sweden, where anxious relatives awaited. He drove them to the train station.

Both Zornig and Lindholm were convicted last month of human smuggling — a crime usually associated with greedy profiteers, not humanitarian do-gooders.

Each was ordered to pay a fine amounting to about $3,350.

Ramslog had her fine cut in half because she’s retired and lives on a small pension. It’s still far more than she can afford. Until now, her most serious run-in with the law was a speeding ticket.

She said she responded that September day from instinct, not from any plan. At most, she thought she would drive the refugees, who desperately wanted passage to Sweden, a few miles up the road. “But then I kept thinking, ‘Oh, I’ll just go a little further,’ ” she recalled. n

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Israel’s president is a voice of reason, but a lonely one R UTH E GLASH Nazareth, Israel BY

W

hen a Jewish lawmaker tweeted that his wife did not want to share a hospital room with an Arab woman after giving birth, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin responded: “When we come to the hospital to give birth, we don’t come as a Jew or an Arab, we come as a human being.”

When fierce public protests broke out after army prosecutors said they wanted to try an Israeli soldier recorded shooting dead a disarmed Palestinian assailant, Rivlin urged people: “Trust in the military’s ability to investigate, and attentively and swiftly draw operational and individual lessons wherever needed.”

But Rivlin’s calm voice of reason seems to be a lonely one these days.

Nearly two years into his seven-year term as president, Rivlin often finds himself smoothing over rifts that erupt between conflicting sectors of Israel’s fractious society. Often, the divisions are further inflamed by politically incorrect or downright racist comments by lawmakers or religious leaders from one group or another.

“Those who say they do not want to live together need to understand that we are destined to be together,” Rivlin said recently at an event in Nazareth, a mainly Arab city, showcasing Collective Impact, a rare Jewish-Arab employment initiative.

“I know these are far from easy days in which to bring about change,” he told the program’s directors, chief executives of some of the largest Jewish and Arab-run firms in Israel. “This year, there is a sense that relations between Jews and Arabs have reached a new low, the depth of which constantly surprises us.”

Despite this, Rivlin urged perseverance: “We must not give up.

The spirit of our cooperation will prevail.”

These might seem like hollow

words amid a decades-old bloody conflict and especially after more than six months of attacks by Palestinians against Israelis and harsh Israeli countermeasures.

About 29 Israelis have been killed in the violence and more than 180 Palestinians, more than half carrying out attacks, since Oct. 1.

Sometimes responses by Israeli-Arab lawmakers only serve to distance Arab citizens of Israel — who make up roughly 20 percent of Israel’s population of

IVAN SEKRETAREV/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Israeli President Reuven Rivlin often must smooth over rifts.

8.5 million — from the Jewish public.

And comments like those of Israel’s chief Sephardi rabbi, Yitzhak Yosef, that non-Jews should be forbidden from living in Israel or that it is commanded for Jews to kill “terrorists” who come at them with knives, alienate the Arab community.

“The Arabs are my enemies and that’s why I don’t enjoy being next to them,” Knesset member Bezalel Smotrich tweeted in response to a report on Jewish-Arab segregation in Israeli hospitals. “It’s natural that my wife would not want to lie down in a bed next to a woman who just gave birth to a baby who might want to murder her baby twenty years from now.”

A recent poll by the Pew Research Center on Israel’s Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Druze and other communities found that there was little social interaction among the groups.

Another study by the Israel Democracy Institute found that most Jews, 66 percent, agree with the chief rabbi’s statements about killing terrorists carrying knives.

In a defining speech in the summer, the president talked of a “new Israeli order.” He noted that demographics were changing and that no one group — not even the Jews — was now a clear majority.

“Israeli society is comprised of four principal tribes growing closer in size,” he said.

It’s a reality that Israel must deal with, the president said.

“Rivlin has been trying to offer a counterweight to extremist views,” said Amotz Asa-El, a commentator on Israeli society. “He is a supporter of the settlements and in some ways even more right-wing than [Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu, but in terms of liberal values, he is a disciple of Jabotinsky.”

Asa-El was referring to revisionist Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky and an often-overlooked part of his doctrine: equal rights for all.

Most right-wing leaders, including Netanyahu, point to Jabotinsky’s views that Jewish claims to the land of Israel supersede those of the Arabs and that the state can be secured only through power and not by persuasion.

“Rivlin has made himself very popular in all sectors by lending an ear to anyone who feels they are the minority and that they are being discriminated against or mistreated,” Asa-El said. “He does this efficiently, and in addition he is affable and outgoing.”

And although, as president, he does not wield great amounts of political power, he can affect society in a moral way.

“The burden is on the Jewish majority in Israel to prove that the definition of their country as Jewish and democratic is not a contradiction,” Rivlin said in an interview with The Washington Post.

Jews must make the Arabs feel part of society, he said. “The relationship between the Jews and Arabs is necessary to help build a bridge between Israelis and Palestinians.” n

‘We don’t know why it came to this’ White, poorer women in isolated areas are dying earlier — often from overdoses or suicide. But the root causes for the spike in deaths are elusive.

BY ELI SASLOW in Tecumseh, Okla.

T

hey had been expecting a full processional with a limousine and a police escort, but the limousine never came and the police officer was called away to a suspected drug overdose at the last minute. That left 40 friends and relatives of Anna Marrie Jones stranded outside the funeral home, waiting for instruction from the mortician about what to do next. An uncle of Anna’s went to his truck and changed from khakis into overalls. A niece ducked behind the hearse to light her cigarette in the stiff Oklahoma wind.

“Just one more thing for Mom that didn’t go as planned,” said Tiffany Edwards, the youngest surviving daughter. She climbed into her truck, put on the emergency flashers and motioned for everyone else to follow behind in their own cars. They formed a makeshift processional of dented pickups and diesel exhaust, driving out of town, onto dirt roads and up to a tiny cemetery bordered by cattle grazing fields.

In the back there was a fresh plot marked by a plastic sign.

“Anna Marrie Jones: Born 1961 — Died 2016.”

Fifty-four years old. Raised on three rural acres. High school educated. A mother of three.

Loyal employee of Kmart, Walls Bargain Center and Dollar Store. These were the facts of her life as printed in the funeral program, and now they had also become clues in an American crisis with implications far beyond the burnt grass and red dirt of central Oklahoma.

White women between 25 and 55 have been dying at accelerating rates over the past decade, a spike in mortality not seen since the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s. According to recent studies of death certificates, the trend is worse for women in the center of the United States, worse still in rural areas, and worst of all for those in the lower middle class. Drug and alcohol overdose rates for working-age white women have quadrupled. Suicides are up by as much as 50 percent.

What killed Jones was cirrhosis of the liver brought on by heavy drinking. The exact culprit was vodka, whatever brand was on sale, poured into a pint glass eight ounces at a time.

But, as Anna’s family gathered at the gravesite for a final memorial, they wondered instead about the root causes, which were harder to diagnose and more difficult to solve.

“Life didn’t always break her way. She dealt with that sadness,” said Candy Payne, the funeral officiant. “She tried her best. She loved her family. But she dabbled in the drinking, and when things got tough the drinking made it harder.”

There were plots nearby marked for Jones’s friends and relatives who had died in the past decade at ages 46, 52 and 37. Jones had buried her fiance at 55. She had eulogized her best friend, dead at 50 from alcohol-induced cirrhosis.

Other parts of the adjacent land were intended for her children: Davey, 38, her oldest son and most loyal caretaker, who was making it through the day with some of his mother’s vodka; Maryann, 33, the middle daughter, who had hitched a ride to the service because she couldn’t afford a working car; and Tiffany, 31, who had two daughters of her own, a job at the discount grocery and enough accumulated

stress to make her feel, “at least a decade or two older,” she said.

Candy, who in addition to being the officiant was also a close family friend, motioned for Tiffany and Maryann to bring over the container holding their mother’s cremated remains.

They opened the lid and the ashes blew back into their dresses and out into the pasture.

“No more hurt. No more loneliness,” Candy said.

“No more suffering,” Tiffany said.

They shook out the last ashes and circled the grave as Candy bowed her head to pray.

“We don’t know why it came to this,” she said.

“We trust You know the reasons. We trust You have the answers.”

A

ll anyone else had so far was a question, one that had become the focal point of congressional hearings, health summits and presidential debates: Why? Why, after 50 years of unabated progress in life expectancy for every conceivable group of Americans — men, women, young, old, rich, poor, high-school dropouts, college graduates, rural, urban, white, black, Hispanic or Asian — had one demographic group in the last decade experienced a significant percent increase in premature deaths? Why were so many white women reporting precipitous drops in health, mental health, comfort and mobility during their working-age prime? Why, over the last eight years alone, had more than 300,000 of those women essentially chosen to poison themselves?

“It’s a loss of hope, a loss of expectations of progress from one generation to the next,” said Angus Deaton, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who had studied the data.

“What we’re seeing is the strain of inequality on the middle class,” President Obama said.

“Erosion of the safety net,” Hillary Clinton said. “Depression caused by the state of our country,” Donald Trump said. “Isolated rural communities,” Bernie Sanders said. “Addictive continues on next page

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from previous page

pain pills and narcotics,” Marco Rubio said.

There were so many paths in the America of 2016 to what coroners termed “a premature and unnatural death,” and one version was what had happened to Jones: Another night of drinking that ended in the emergency room, her seventh trip in the last four years. A diagnosis of end-stage liver failure. A week in a nursing home. A quiet death followed by burial four days later.

And now her family had caravanned from the graveyard to a memorial potluck, hosted at a senior center in a part of the country where fewer people were becoming seniors. The early death rate had risen twice as fast in rural Oklahoma as in the rest of the United States, and the walls of the center were adorned with posters about prescription overdose and the phone number for a suicide hotline. Candy set up a buffet table and brought in her homemade biscuits. Other relatives came with macaroni salad, coleslaw and baked chicken. They lined the food on a foldout table near a collection of photos from Anna’s life. Here she was riding a horse on her 10th birthday. Here she was behind the register at the hamburger counter, 13 years old and straight-shouldered in her uniform.

“So proud. So confident,” said Kaitlyn Strayhorn, a friend, looking at the photo.

“She had to lie and say she was 16 to get that hamburger job,” said Junior Sides, her brother.

“She was a hard worker. Had it going good there for a while.”

She had been born on the way to the hospital in the back seat of her father’s car, the ninth of 10 children, and the family joke was that Anna had never stopped hurtling her way into the world. At a time when life on the far edges of the middle class came with dependable opportunities, her older siblings left home for the quarry, the machine shop and the military, and Jones moved out along with them even though she was only 17. She rushed off to get married in Reno, Nev. She got a job at a Kmart snack bar in California and worked her way up to manager.

She was good at making people feel comfortable, at listening without judgment and aligning herself with the customer. She clipped coupons for regulars and gave free drinks to people who couldn’t afford them. By the time she reached her mid-20s, Kmart was training her to become a regional manager. She had her own trailer in Ferndale, Calif., two children, two cars and a retirement savings account.

But the promotion never materialized and the marriage took work, and after a while her eagerness turned to restlessness. She drank more. She tried drugs. She left Kmart. She was arrested for drinking and for failing to pay her taxes. Her marriage unraveled and she moved home to Oklahoma with the kids. She helped push Maryann and Tiffany to finish high school, and then once all of her children left home she lived for a while with her mother, then her daughter, then her fiance and finally her son for the last years of her life.

Her brother Junior hadn’t seen her for the

PHOTOS BY BONNIE JO MOUNT/THE WASHINGTON POST

Clockwise from top: Maryann Payne lights a cigarette at home; an old family photo of Anna Marrie Jones and David Parish with children Maryann and Davey; Anna Jones celebrates with son-in-law Shawn Payne in a family photo.

last several months, and in the most recent photos her skin had turned pale and the fatigue lines beneath her eyes had hardened into deep red marks. “Sick and tired of being sick and tired,” Junior said, and then he filled his plate and sat down at a table with her children and her friends.

“I think in some ways she was ready,” he said.

“You can see how much it took out of her.”

“Sometimes the hard things in life eventually break you,” said Kaitlyn, Anna’s friend.

“It’s a test of how much you can take,” Junior said.

“But there’s a choice in how you handle it,” Candy said. “That’s what I always told her: You’re choosing this. I’m sorry, but you are.”

“Alcohol is a powerful drug,” Davey said.

“Everybody needs a little something,” Maryann said.

They finished eating and cleared their plates. Davey went outside to smoke a cigarette. Maryann found her way to an empty car and took a nap. After a while it was just Tiffany and a few others left in the senior center to clean up the dishes. “You have all this under control?” the last remaining relative asked Tiffany, already heading out the door, because with Tiffany it never seemed like a question.

She always had it under control. She was the strongest sibling, the most responsible, the one who had gone to a year of college, the head of pricing at a grocery store, the dieter, the rare

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woman in rural Oklahoma whose well-being nobody seemed to worry about. And now she was alone at the sink, gripping hard onto the handle, closing her eyes.

“When does it get easier?” she said.

S

he finished the dishes and drove home to a trailer where everyone was waiting for her, and where all of them needed something. Her 4-year-old daughter wanted dinner. Her disabled 1-year-old daughter had another doctor’s appointment in Oklahoma City. Her husband, Chad, needed their car to run errands. Her boss missed her at work. Her brother needed money for rent or a place to live.

And then there was their trailer itself, which

they had purchased for $2,000 from a cousin because they wanted to tear it down and put a new trailer on their beautiful country lot. But now it was two years later and they were still in the old trailer, with faulty electricity, a broken shower and no door for the bathroom.

“A work in progress,” Tiffany called it, and sometimes she thought that was true of so many lives in this part of Oklahoma. Goals receded into the distance while reality stretched on for day after day after exhausting day, until it was only natural to desire a little something beyond yourself. Maybe it was just some mindless TV or time on Facebook. Maybe a sleeping pill to ease you through the night.

Maybe a prescription narcotic to numb the

At top, Candy Payne walks through the mud and drives her mail route in Pottawatomie County, Okla. She presided over the funeral of her friend Anna Jones. Above, Tiffany Edwards downs a shot of vodka while socializing with her brother, Davey Parish, at her home in Tecumseh, Okla.

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physical and psychological pain, or a trip to the Indian casino that you couldn’t really afford, or some marijuana, or meth, or the drug that had run strongest on both sides of her family for three generations and counting.

“Shot and a beer for Mom?” she said now, raising a shot glass to her husband. He shook his head. She drank the shot and sat down next to him in the living room.

They had gotten drunk with her mother dozens of times, and it was almost always fun.

She was a happy drinker who made for good company around a fire, with fun stories and a throaty laugh.

After she was diagnosed with cirrhosis in 2009, doctors had said her prognosis was good if she stopped drinking. Her liver had a few years left. She would be eligible for a transplant. And for a few months at a time she had managed to quit, but reality often left her depressed. Her fiance died. A few nephews were arrested for using drugs. She filed for bankruptcy. Her mother died. She drank until she was too sick to work.

“I could be mean to her sometimes,” Tiffany said now, in the living room. “I kept saying to her, ‘You’re killing yourself.’ ” “You were watching her die,” Chad said. “You were the one taking her to all those doctor appointments.”

“It made me so angry,” Tiffany said.

“You were just trying to pull her out of the spiral,” Chad said.

They each had gone through spirals of their own. Chad had been arrested for driving under the influence three times in the years after his mother’s death before straightening himself out to take care of the children. Tiffany had sometimes been going to work hung over until she became pregnant, and then she went nine months without a beer or cigarette. “I’m not going to make my problems my kid’s problem,” she had told her mother then, because there was still hope that her children would have it easier.

Maybe the world would open up to them.

“Don’t you want to see what your grandchildren become?” Tiffany would ask her mother.

“Don’t you want to be there for them?”

But even though Anna loved her granddaughters — babysat them, admired the way Tiffany and Chad cared for them, bought them whatever she could — she could never give them that. She quit drinking and then started again, quit and then started. She fell down at her house and broke a leg. She had to use a wheelchair. She lost her car and then her driver’s license. She stayed in her living room and watched TV for hours at a time unless Tiffany came to pick her up.

Tiffany stood up from the couch. She walked to the kitchen and reached into the cooler.

“Babe,” Chad said, looking at her.

“What?” she said, but she closed the cooler and came back to him empty-handed. She wrapped her hand around his and leaned against his shoulder.

“She had family. She had friends,” she said. “I don’t understand why it wasn’t enough.” continues on next page

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here were days when the vast emptiness of rural Oklahoma could make someone feel alone — when the only sound was wind, and the prairie looked small beneath the sky, and the one car bouncing along the rutted gravel roads was Candy Payne’s mail truck, circling its way from one house to the next.

It had been four days since she presided over her friend’s funeral, and now she was back on her usual U.S. Postal route: 404 mailboxes in 126 square miles of Pottawatomie County. The roads were in fact dirt trails, the houses were mostly farmsteads equipped with well water, and what she called the “traffic considerations” were turkey, deer and coyotes that darted across her route. In one of the most isolated parts of the United States, she was the only thread that connected one house to the next, and her customers were often standing at their mailboxes and watching for her. There were pill poppers waiting for packages of medication and people on disability waiting for their government check. There were lonely retirees who waited only for a wave, a smile or a few minutes of conversation with their only visitor of the day.

“Anything for me today?” said one woman, as she watched Candy drive by the long dirt driveway to her house.

“Not today,” she said. “Better luck tomorrow.”

The route took six hours, and she drove with a cigarette in one hand and an inhaler on the dashboard. She followed unsigned roads to addresses she knew by heart, stopping at houses in disrepair with cars rusting away in the weeds. Most of her route had been settled by land run in the late 1800s, all property free to whomever came first, and for generations it had been populated by farmers, dreamers and opportunists. But now the farming had gone away to big companies and the poverty rate had climbed above 20 percent. “A whole lot of places just going to pot,” she said, grabbing another phone book out of the mail sack in her passenger seat, stuffing it into a box.

She was 62 with bad knees and a nagging cough, but she had no intent on retiring. Many of her friends had died in their 40s and 50s. Her husband was dead of cirrhosis and the Vietnam War veteran she lived with now was managing his way through liver disease with narcotic pain patches. She believed she had made it into her 60s as a woman in rural Oklahoma not just by avoiding alcohol and pills but also by forcing herself out into the world. “You see people. You talk a little bit,” she said. “Otherwise you just sit at home and the end closes in. ” A pickup came moving toward her from the opposite direction, and she pulled over to let it pass.

“Howdy, Candy,” the driver said, slowing down to wave. “Sure is a windy one.”

“I’m eating dust,” she said, smiling back, continuing down the road.

She had watched the end close in on Anna, even as she tried to draw Anna out. They had talked over the phone every few days, and then

a week before Anna’s death Candy had gone over to visit her house, a two-bedroom rental near the funeral home in Tecumseh. Anna’s clothes were piled up in a corner and there were no sheets on her bed. There was a hole in the living room wall, and the air smelled of sweat and smoke. Candy went into the kitchen to try to clean up a week’s worth of unwashed dishes — “Relax. Breathe through your mouth. You can do this,” she had told herself — but the plastic plates were covered in mold and eventually she had decided to throw them out.

When Anna lost consciousness for the final time in the nursing home, Candy had gone to sit with her and hold her hand. All of Anna’s children were also there — Davey, Maryann and Tiffany — and they looked exhausted from sitting by her bed through the night. Candy sent them home to rest, and after a while she went home, too. She had seen so many people die of cirrhosis, and the disease usually took its time in the final stages. Sometimes weeks. Sometimes months. But then the next morning she got a call telling her Anna had died in the night.

“Sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

“That’s one thing I keep thinking about,” Candy said now, stuffing a phone book into another mailbox, nearing the end of her route.

“I wish she wasn’t alone at the end.”

She drove up to the last address, hers, and turned off the engine. “The route’s complete,” she said, notifying a supervisor. The road behind her was quiet. There was only wind and a few hundred homes scattered across the plains.

A family photo of Anna Jones at about 1 year old.

Jones recently died at age 54 of cirrhosis of the liver. Her family was left with many questions about what led Jones to such a demise.

O

ne of those homes had been Anna and Davey’s, and now it was just Davey inside with the doors locked and bed sheets blocking the windows. His mother’s medications were still stacked on the counter. Those were her clothes strewn across the living room, her microwaved jambalaya leftovers in the sink and her $8.75 liter of Heaven Hill Vodka pushed against the couch.

Davey reached for the bottle and took a gulp.

He chased it with water and then drank again.

Junior Sides, talking about his sister, Anna Jones, who died at age 54

“Last day,” he said. “Tomorrow it’s detox, getting a job, all that.”

The day before had also been the last day, and so had the weekend before that, and now it was two weeks until $350 in rent came due on the house. He had no money of his own and nowhere else to go. For the last five years he had been living with his mother and surviving on her disability payments and $197 in food stamps. She had supported him and he had been her caretaker, lifting her out of bed in the mornings and pushing her wheelchair up the hill to a tornado shelter whenever a storm hit.

He had monitored her medications, washed her jaundiced skin and dealt with the diapers.

He had even tried to keep her from drinking, just as the doctors insisted. But he was buying vodka with her money and drinking it in front of her, and she would yell and beg and then threaten to withhold Davey’s cash so he couldn’t drink either. Eventually he had decided to compromise by rationing out her liquor, filling half of a pint glass with vodka that she could nurse through the night. But sometimes he would pass out on the couch or go to the bathroom, and whenever he came back the bottle looked emptier than before.

“Do you blame me?” he had asked Tiffany once, a day after the funeral.

“You did the best you could,” Tiffany had told him. “There’s no sense obsessing over it.”

Now the house was empty and there was nothing to do except reach back for the vodka and watch the same shows they’d always watched together: “Family Feud,” “Sleepy Hollow,” “Modern Family” and whatever else came through on the rabbit ear antenna. Day turned into night. Night turned back into day. He needed to shave, cut his hair and start putting in applications. “Last day,” he said again, rolling his own cigarette, reaching down for the bottle.

They had lived together for five years, and yet there were so many questions he had never asked her. Did she know she was dying? Was she scared? Was she ready? “I keep having these conversations in my head,” he said, and sometimes, as the days stretched on with no visitors, he would pick up his phone and call another relative to talk. “What happened? Was it my fault?” he would ask each time.

It was a choice, Tiffany said.

It was stress, Maryann said.

It was everything wearing her down, Junior said.

It was just the way it went, Candy said.

Davey sipped from the bottle. He gulped from the water. He lay back on the couch, where lately he had been having a recurring dream.

He was sitting in the living room with his mother, a woman not yet 55 who had some color back in her cheeks and her hair pulled into a braid. He wanted to be honest with her, to tell her she was dying, and finally he blurted it out: You’re dying, he said, but she didn’t look back at him. You’re dying, he said again. You’re dying! But the TV was blaring, the bottle was in her hands, her eyes were glazed over, and she was too far gone to hear him. n

SUNDAY, APRIL 17, 2016

17

TRENDS

The ‘Umm . . .’ factor of mindfulness BY

VICTORIA ADAMS FOGG/THE WASHINGTON POST

J

M has gone through the roof,” says Kabat-Zinn, who has a doctorate in molecular biology. “We’re multitasking continually, juggling a thousand things. Mindfulness is a way to maintain sanity.”

Haven’t humans always been stressed? The Depression, the plague, the Inquisition, revolutions, beheadings — all stressful.

Perhaps the difference is that we’re aware of the stress, and we’re mindful of the time and sleep lost worrying about the stress.

Perhaps our mindful moment can be blamed, like so many of society’s ills, on the smartphone, which makes people — and stress — available at any time. Hence the need to be more present and calm and the proliferation of all things mindful.

And, yes, there’s an app for that.

Actually, there are plenty.

T

ara Healey is program director for mindfulness-based learning at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, which has counseled 150 businesses and more than 10,000 workers on becoming more mindful.

“I am kind of happy and excited that this word is out there in the culture in a way that it never has been,” she says, “though I so worry about it getting watered down and losing the integrity of the word.”

When a word becomes omnipresent, “like any currency, the more you print of it, the less value it has. The word loses meaning,” says Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist

WEEKLY

at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Information.

“Mindful is no different from disruption,” he says. “When everything’s disruptive,” he cautions, “nothing’s disruptive.”

Pat Croce is energetic, fit, voluble. He made his fortune in sports medicine, served as president of the Philadelphia 76ers, and opened a pirate museum and chain of pirate-themed bars and restaurants. You know, typical résumé.

Now, Croce spends five hours a day on mindfulness. It’s almost his full-time job: meditating, journaling, intentionally breathing, reading, drawing Chinese characters, getting Chinese-character tattoos.

“For 60 years, I trained my body,” he says. “I never did a frickin’ thing for my mind.”

In February, Croce and his wife, Diane, donated $250,000 to his alma mater, West Chester University, for the study of mindfulness.

“It sounds a little ‘woo-woo,’ ” Croce said when he announced the gift, “but truly, we’re all here.

We’re all mindful.”

He hopes that the gift will “expand the 18-credit minor. I would like to see mindfulness become one of the core subjects in the college curriculum. Like math.”

K AREN H ELLER

on Kabat-Zinn is Mr. Mindful. He’s been mindful since the Johnson administration, for five decades, long before mindfulness was a movement, a mantra,a mayonnaise.

Also: a tea, the motto of a chain of Chicago burger joints, a diet.

Kabat-Zinn, 71, founder and former executive director of the University of Massachusetts Medical School’s Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care and Society, is widely considered the father of the modern mindfulness movement, a practice derived from Buddhist meditation.

He speaks across the globe about mindfulness, which he defines as “theawarenessthatarisesbypaying attention on purpose in the present moment non-judgmentally.”

So Kabat-Zinn seems the man to ask how “mindful” became the buzzword of the moment, applied to clothing, tea and adult coloring books — mind you, a whole series of coloring books. The Epic Burger chain produces “a more mindful burger,” because lettuce, tomato and Epic sauce weren’t enough.

To which Kabat-Zinn responds with a shrug: “It’s a mystery to me.”

Surely, we were veering in this direction. In 2012, Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) wrote a book advising us to become “A Mindful Nation.” Last year, Parliament recommended that Britain become one, too.

An increasing number of academic studies, nearly 700 in 2015, have examined mindfulness’s positive effect on stress, brain connectivity and chronic medical conditions, according to the American Mindfulness Research Association, which pleases Kabat-Zinn.

The ubiquity of the adjective, however, is another matter.

“I don’t feel particularly good about it,” he says. “When something becomes hot in our society, everyone is an expert and wants to commodify it and make money from it.”

Why have we become so mindful now? “Stress in the last 35 years

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It’s the buzzword of the moment.

But is anyone more mindful?

indfulness means so many things to different people.

It takes Barry Boyce nearly a quarter-hour to define mindfulness — and he’s the editor of Mindful, a website and bimonthly magazine dedicated to the subject.

“The range of interpretations is huge. We’re pretty open about letting people discover for themselves what mindfulness means.”

But he is not a “mindful” minder.

“I don’t care. I don’t own the English language,” he says. “My job is that we keep giving a meaning for people that is meaningful in a particular context in their lives.”

He notes that “there are some people who think it’s woo-woo” — there’s that technical term again — “but it doesn’t have to be woo-woo.”

Kabat-Zinn, Mr. Mindful, is “resigned” to mindful burgers and tea. “In a year or two, the fad element will blow over and people will be on to the next new thing.”

Meanwhile, you can find Mindful magazine at Whole Foods, along with the Earth Balance Mindful Mayo — original, organic and olive oil. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

A Cosmo girl who beat the patriarchy N ON-FICTION

W

ENTER HELEN The Invention of Helen Gurley Brown and the Rise of the Single Woman

By Brooke Hauser Harper.

462 pp. $28.99

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REVIEWED BY

C AITLIN F LANAGAN

hen I was a teenager, I would always perk up when a talk-show host announced that he was about to introduce a woman who knew a lot about sex. This was back when information on the subject was still hard to come by, so the prospect of some ravishing, free-spirited, braless creature of the now, coming on TV to explain it all, was exciting.

But all too often, out would totter Helen Gurley Brown: Aged, skeletal, wrapped in Pucci and wearing several coats of PanCake, she looked like someone’s foxy grandma on her way to the champagne brunch at Leisure World. She was always old, always out of date with the youth culture she helped create; she was dragged, kicking and screaming, from the helm of Cosmopolitan magazine at the age of 74. Crass, clever, miserly, fantastical and forever nursing herself through a thousand social snubs, Brown deserves the biography that Brooke Hauser has written, “Enter Helen.” It is entertaining, thoughtfully researched and — the ultimate encomium where HGB was concerned — fun.

It was Brown’s contention — vouched first in her 1962 bestseller “Sex and the Single Girl” and then in the pages of Cosmo, which she reinvented — that the ideal single woman was part courtesan, part grifter. Sexual encounters should be opportunities to fulfill a man’s secret desires and also to get a little something from him — if not actual cash, then at the very least a hot tip on where to buy an electric blanket or a record album at wholesale prices. She located (and helped create) a vast market: single women who had been too busy waitressing or answering telephones or running adding machines to have gotten hip to the Summer of Love.

While contemporary feminism might have been alienating to them, the various credos of Cosmo

HEARST CORPORATION VIA REUTERS

Helen Gurley Brown on her first day as editor in chief of Cosmopolitan magazine in 1965.

were not. It was explicitly feminine, fashion-focused, written in the “baby simple” prose Brown demanded, and ever hopeful — not of revolution, but of resolution to every woman’s marriage plot. Because while the immediate game plan was sex, the longrange goal was always to groom one of these sexual partners into a husband. How to do it? By taking lessons not from Mother or the minister’s wife but from, among others, a Park Avenue prostitute, one of whom explained in the pages of the magazine, “That’s the whole enchilada, darling — the will to please.”

Needless to say, leaders of the burgeoning women’s movement — and in particular, Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan — were vexed to no end by Brown and her “will to please.” Feminists were talking to women interested in overthrowing the patriarchal system; Brown was teaching women how to work within that system and come out a winner. In

Hauser’s apt formulation, Brown was “the powerful leader of the most insecure army in the world.”

It was an army desperately trying to turn one-night stands into romances and then into proposals, and its members were eager to learn how to maintain their looks during the “crucial man-keeping years.”

The feminist leaders of the day considered femininity to be part of the great trap. What the movement didn’t understand, however, is something that third-wave feminists have come to champion: that an enduring female attraction to fashion, cosmetics and beauty does not preclude an even fiercer interest in liberation.

The movement also gave Brown scant credit for something that would have been highly regarded by today’s feminists: her business acumen and her creation of a hugely successful international brand. It’s true that she gathered power to herself in a stealthy and feline way, not by confronting

male assumptions directly but by carving a path around them.

In the end, the values of the women’s movement and Cosmo became one. The materialism, fashion obsession and man-craziness of Brown fused with feminism’s demand for women to be treated as equals in the workplace.

Brown’s values were callow, but they have endured. Steinem maintained that “women’s obsession with romance is a displacement of their longing for success,” but she was wrong.

Many women want both, and they have shaped — at great effort — a world that allows them to have what they want. When you see a fearsomely educated young lawyer clipping down the corridors of her law firm in high heels and a miniskirt, showing off her cushion-cut diamond to her friends — well that, darling, is the whole enchilada. n Flanagan is a contributing editor at the Atlantic and the author of “Girl Land.”

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19

BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

It’ll make you hate insurance firms

Insightful tales of writerly death

F ICTION

N ON-FICTION

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REVIEWED BY

“A

W ENDY S MITH

lice & Oliver” conveys the experience of cancer treatment with such grim immediacy that some readers may wonder whether they want to subject themselves to it. Charles Bock plunges right into an out-of-theblue health crisis that sends new mother Alice Culvert to the hospital, where a test reveals that she has “zero white blood cells” and half of her remaining blood cells are cancerous. One page later, she’s getting chemotherapy, and her hair is falling out. We get our first glimpse of husband Oliver’s approach to her illness when he shows up at the hospital with his own head shaved bald. “I wanted you to see it’s just hair,” he says.

Neither Alice nor Oliver will consent to be a passive victim, nor will they behave unfailingly well over the six months between her diagnosis of acute myeloid leukemia and the stem cell transplant that her doctor states bluntly “is the only option here.”Alice is a difficult patient; she has little faith in Western medicine and probably would not subject herself to the agonizing treatments required if she weren’t determined to survive to raise their infant daughter. Oliver, who is just the kind of control freak you’d expect the head of a start-up software company in the early 1990s to be, isn’t terribly good at hiding his skepticism about the holistic healing techniques with which Alice supplements conventional therapies or his frustration when she argues about the health risks of consuming processed sugar even though doctors are desperate for her to gain weight.

Oliver’s hard-driving nature comes in handy, however, when dealing with the byzantine healthcare system. If you don’t hate insurance companies already, you will after Bock delineates Oliver’s struggles with their policy’s limits.

The profiles of other cancer patients scattered throughout the novel provide more ammunition: the new hire who finds a lump on

her breast but doesn’t say anything until her insurance kicks in after three months on the job; the elderly woman in the final stages of terminal cancer whose insurance company refuses to pay for a home health aide and determines that she “no longer needed care from an elite hospital”; and so on, until we realize that Alice is, heaven help us, one of the lucky ones. At least she doesn’t die from chemotherapy while she waits for the transplant — squeamish readers be warned: there are lots of gory details — and she has a husband capable of negotiating the insurance bureaucracy.

After Oliver manages to switch policies to one without a ceiling on in-network costs, he runs into the hospital employee who enraged him by putting a hold on Alice’s account because of their original policy’s limits. “I was really glad to see you all got that insurance problem handled,” she says. “Tell Alice my prayers are with her.” The seemingly cold corporate clone has a heart, and Bock treats a variety of health-care workers with similar nuance.

Alice and Oliver are also skillfully portrayed, but we are held at emotional arm’s length from them and discouraged from wallowing in voyeuristic grief. Bock, whose first wife died of leukemia in 2011, clearly wishes to avoid pandering to those who enjoy a good cry, and his restraint is commendable, even if, at times, it gives the novel a slightly abstract air.

“Alice & Oliver” has flaws considerably less important than its tough-minded commitment to truth-telling and to honoring the complexities, contradictions and even the cruelties of people under extreme duress. Lasting damage and lasting loyalties are equally part of the human condition, Bock reminds us in an elegantly rueful epilogue set in 2010: Death happens, and life goes on. n Smith is a frequent contributor to Washington Post book reviews.

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ALICE & OLIVER

By Charles Bock Random House. 399 pp. $28

THE VIOLET HOUR Great Writers at the End

By Katie Roiphe Dial.

306 pp. $28

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REVIEWED BY

L ISA Z EIDNER

.B. Yeats famously declared that “only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mind: sex and the dead.” Journalist Katie Roiphe has already said plenty about sex.

In books like “The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism,” she has helped shape the discussion about current sexual mores and politics.

In her meditative new book, “The Violet Hour,” she turns her attention to death — in particular, to the deaths of six famous writers.

As a child, Roiphe was obsessed with death. In fact, she argues that all writers share a mix of fear and fascination about the mystery of mortality. “The Violet Hour” asks whether writers’ fluency with language and their acuity of perception buy them more conscious, meaningful ends. With varying degrees of success, the writers chronicled here tried hard to shape their deaths in ways that accorded with their personal narratives.

Roiphe begins with Susan Sontag, who, having lived through cancer once, was sure she could beat it again. Sontag seems to have been stuck in the denial stage of bargaining throughout her grueling and ultimately failed treatments.

Roiphe documents how those around Sontag propped up her conviction about her specialness.

Demanding, imperious, mercurial, Sontag is not particularly appealing in this portrait, although Roiphe clearly admires her ferocity about writing as long as she could.

Poet Dylan Thomas’s attitude toward death was the opposite of Sontag’s. She hoped to conquer it; he seemed to have chased it, embracing the picture of himself as a tortured poet racked by consumption. “He harbored many romantic mythologies about the frailty of his constitution,” Roiphe reports. “He certainly liked the theater of sickness, the staginess, the attention it brought him, and later the excuses it provided.”

The other writers whom Roiphe discusses — Sigmund Freud, John

Updike, Maurice Sendak and James Salter — occupy different points on the spectrum from denial of death to courtship of it, from control to abandon.

Some of the most riveting anecdotes here are about how these writers managed to inspire such dedication from their helpmates.

Despite his wanton overspending and his many infidelities, Thomas’s wife would feed him in bed when he was hung over — cubes of bread soaked in milk, just like his mother used to do.

Roiphe provides no interviews with psychiatrists or hospice workers about methods of facing death. “The Violet Hour” doesn’t really make an argument about ways to die (although most of us would probably choose to be Salter, with his clean, efficient heart attack shortly after his 90th birthday). Instead, the book is a series of impressions and observations, sometimes gossipy, sometimes gently ruminative. She doesn’t even proceed chronologically from diagnosis to last breath. Indeed her stories dart all over the place, from the writers’ childhoods to the present. Except for some puzzling tense shifts, the episodic structure makes sense; if there is an overarching theme in “The Violet Hour,” it’s that death never comes in a straight line, no matter how hard the writers try to exit with a “graceful bravura.”

Roiphe is moving and insightful about these artists’ late works.

Sendak feverishly drew right until the end. When Updike ruefully told his wife that he thought he was done writing, she pushed him, “Just one more book.” And he did complete his rapturously elegiac collection of poetry, “Endpoint.” If Freud is right that “every one of us is convinced of his own immortality,” Roiphe proves to us that writers chase immortality the hardest of all. n Zeidner’s most recent novel is “Love Bomb.” She teaches in the MFA Program at Rutgers University.

SUNDAY, APRIL 17, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

I was a closeted Christian working at the Pentagon MATTHEW SPENCE served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Middle East policy from 2012 to 2015 and is a senior follow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs.

The distance from my church to my office at the Pentagon was just over five miles. But for most of my time in government, it might as well have been 5,000.

On Sunday mornings, I prayed for peace. “Jesus was a homeless refugee from the Middle East,” my minister reminded us once before announcing our Advent offering. I contributed to the collection basket and asked God to help the Syrians fleeing from their homes in the land of the Bible.

And when services were done, I went back to planning for war. As deputy assistant secretary of defense for Middle East policy, my responsibilities included evaluating troop deployments and missile strikes in the very places where biblical scripture is set.

Before passing through two locked doors to get to my Pentagon office, I had to check all electronics that could be used as recording devices, including my iPhone and BlackBerry.

I checked my religion, too.

It felt inappropriate to broadcast my Christianity when considering hard-nosed questions of national security. I’d landed my job because I understood the foreign-policymaking process, had a doctorate in international relations and enjoyed a fair amount of luck.

There was no religious test, nor should there be. Power politics and personal faith have little in common.

But perhaps even more than that, I feared how coming out as a practicing Christian would define me. I worried that my bosses, peers and subordinates might associate me with American officials who have spoken of U.S. military engagements in the Middle East as “crusades ” or with the Islamic State’s declaration of holy war. I feared that talking about my faith would detract from the logic of my arguments. And, as a relatively young person in a senior position, I needed every scrap of credibility I

could claim. So while I might pray for guidance, or forgiveness, on a particularly challenging day, I rarely spoke of my faith in the office.

It wasn’t until early 2014, after five years in the Obama administration, that I began to question the boundaries I’d drawn.

I was intrigued to read that former White House press secretary Mike McCurry recently had gone to seminary and become a theology professor. So I invited him and a half-dozen friends over to talk about what it means to be a Christian working in Washington.

My guests included Obama appointees, Hill staffers and journalists. As we ate, we reflected on how our faith inspired and constrained us.

Faith, we all agreed, had led us to public service.

Yet all of us had been quiet about our church attendance and our religious convictions. “I was taught that Jesus called us to care about human suffering, wherever it occurred,” one friend said. “But when you say you’re a Christian, people assume you’re judging them, not that you’re called to work for something larger than yourself.”

After that dinner, I determined that I was needlessly living a double life. I started thinking of myself as a Christian in the Pentagon. I didn’t wear my faith on my sleeve, but I looked to my religious values to hold myself

WASHINGTON POST ILLUSTRATION

more accountable, make myself more thoughtful and help shine a light on suffering I might otherwise overlook.

I thought back to my minister’s sermon on Syrian refugees. There are national security reasons that the United States should care about them. Millions of refugees could have a destabilizing effect on Jordan, Turkey, Egypt and Iraq. With few opportunities for employment, they may be vulnerable to recruitment by the Islamic State and other terrorist groups. But U.S. foreign policy should also reflect broader American values. We should care about Syrian refugees because they are part of one of the greatest humanitarian crises of our time.

I realized I could do far more for those refugees, and others like them, from my position at the Pentagon than I could with my modest contributions to the offering basket at church. So I convened colleagues from the State Department’s human rights bureau, the U.S. Agency for International Development and outside human rights groups, along with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to talk about how the Pentagon could better support their work. I visited refugees at a camp in Jordan and along the Syrian border and then discussed their needs — education for their children, jobs for men in the

camps with little to do — with my counterparts in Israel, Jordan and Turkey. We talked about using military cargo planes to deliver food and other assistance.

My religion didn’t overwhelm other considerations, dictating which policies I should support.

Nor did thinking about the obligations of my faith reveal clear answers to questions such as how to fight a two-front war against the barbarism of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the Islamic State.

But recognizing that there’s a role for faith in a time of war made me a better policymaker. It forced me to confront tough moral questions. It encouraged me to take action in situations where it was tempting to throw my hands up and conclude that there were no good options. It kept me going when Washington bureaucracy and political infighting otherwise would have worn me down.

Of course, finding the strength to speak up and take risks, and making time to reflect and think strategically, are universal principles. They can be practiced as much by Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and nonbelievers. But for me, my Christian faith gave me the discipline, courage and inspiration to question and do more. n

SUNDAY, APRIL 17, 2016

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Senate waiving its right to advise GREGORY L. DISKANT is a senior partner at the law firm of Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler and a member of the national governing board of Common Cause.

On Nov. 12, 1975, while I was serving as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, Justice William O. Douglas resigned. On Nov. 28, President Gerald R. Ford nominated John Paul Stevens for the vacant seat. Nineteen days after receiving the nomination, the Senate voted 98 to 0 to confirm the president’s choice. Two days later, I had the pleasure of seeing Ford present Stevens to the court for his swearingin. The business of the court continued unabated. There were no 4-to-4 decisions that term.

Today, the system seems to be broken. Both parties are at fault, seemingly locked in a death spiral to outdo the other in outrageous behavior. Now, the Senate has simply refused to consider President Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, dozens of nominations to federal judgeships and executive offices are pending before the Senate, many for more than a year. Our system prides itself on its checks and balances, but there seems to be no balance to the Senate’s refusal to perform its constitutional duty.

The Constitution glories in its ambiguities, however, and it is possible to read its language to deny the Senate the right to pocket veto the president’s nominations. Start with the

appointments clause of the Constitution. It provides that the president “shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint . . .

Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States.” Note that the president has two powers: the power to “nominate” and the separate power to “appoint.” In between the nomination and the appointment, the president must seek the “Advice and Consent of the Senate.” What does that mean, and what happens when the Senate does nothing?

In most respects, the meaning of the “Advice and Consent” clause is obvious. The Senate can always grant or withhold consent by voting on the nominee. The narrower question, starkly presented by the Garland nomination, is what to make of

things when the Senate simply fails to perform its constitutional duty.

It is altogether proper to view a decision by the Senate not to act as a waiver of its right to provide advice and consent. A waiver is an intentional relinquishment or abandonment of a known right or privilege. As the Supreme Court has said, “ ‘No procedural principle is more familiar to this Court than that a constitutional right,’ or a right of any other sort, ‘may be forfeited in criminal as well as civil cases by the failure to make timely assertion of the right before a tribunal having jurisdiction to determine it.’ ” It is in full accord with traditional notions of waiver to say that the Senate, having been given a reasonable opportunity to provide advice and consent to the president with respect to the nomination of Garland, and having failed to do so, can fairly be deemed to have waived its right.

Here’s how that would work.

The president has nominated Garland and submitted his nomination to the Senate. The president should advise the Senate that he will deem its failure to act by a specified reasonable date in the future to constitute a deliberate waiver of its right to give advice and consent. What date? The

historical average between nomination and confirmation is 25 days; the longest wait has been 125 days. That suggests that 90 days is a perfectly reasonable amount of time for the Senate to consider Garland’s nomination.

If the Senate fails to act by the assigned date, Obama could conclude that it has waived its right to participate in the process, and he could exercise his appointment power by naming Garland to the Supreme Court.

Presumably the Senate would then bring suit challenging the appointment. This should not be viewed as a constitutional crisis but rather as a healthy dispute between the president and the Senate about the meaning of the Constitution.

It would break the logjam in our system to have this dispute decided by the Supreme Court (presumably with Garland recusing himself ). We could restore a sensible system of government if it were accepted that the Senate has an obligation to act on nominations in a reasonable period of time. The threat that the president could proceed with an appointment if the Senate failed to do so would force the Senate to do its job — providing its advice and consent on a timely basis so that our government can function. n

SUNDAY, APRIL 17, 2016

22

OPINIONS

BY STANTIS FOR THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE

Let’s see candidates’ full tax returns RUTH MARCUS is a columnist for The Post, specializing in American politics and domestic policy.

Politicians like to bet that reporters and their pesky questions will go away. Too often, they’re right. Thus, the drumbeat of demands for Donald Trump’s tax returns faded after he waved it all away with claims that a pending audit prevented the transparency he would otherwise be delighted to provide.

With Trump’s demurral, so, too, subsided requests for a fuller accounting from the other remaining presidential candidates. Aside from Hillary Clinton, they have been unprecedentedly parsimonious with tax information.

A confluence of events presents an opportunity to refocus attention on the missing returns. First, Tax Day is upon us, the traditional time for the incumbent president and vice president to release their tax returns — a voluntary act but one that has been practiced by every president since Harry Truman, with the exception of Gerald Ford.

Second, the leak of the Panama Papers, the deluge of documents detailing the offshore accounts of various foreign leaders and their relatives, underscored the value of disclosing financial information, and the wisdom of a norm in which elected officials release their tax filings as a prudent matter of course — not in the midst of a political firestorm.

Third, The Post reported that,

notwithstanding Trump’s claims to have given more than $102 million to charity over the past five years, the list of gifts from his foundation suggests far less in the way of personal philanthropy — none, actually.

Trump’s tax returns would fill in the blanks about his actual charitable giving.

Trump is, by far, the greatest offender here and, in this area at least, Clinton the avatar of full disclosure. Ted Cruz, John Kasich and Bernie Sanders have claimed transparency but released only the initial, summary pages of their tax returns.

This dodge, as my Post colleague Catherine Rampell has noted, obscures all sorts of potentially significant information, from amounts and details about charitable giving to

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY WASSERMAN FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE

precise sources of income to their use of various tax shelters. Voters should not be misled by this phony forthcomingness. Would they accept a president who provided a similarly flimsy summary?

But Trump’s obscurantism remains the most blatant and most troubling. He released a letter last month from his tax lawyers, who described Trump’s returns, since he operates his real estate and other businesses through sole proprietorships, as “inordinately large and complex for an individual.”

Trump’s returns, his lawyers report, “have been under continuous examination by the Internal Revenue Service since 2002, consistent with the IRS’s practice for large and complex businesses.” The audits from 2002 through 2008 “have been closed administratively by agreement with the IRS without assessment or payment, on a net basis, of any deficiency,” while “examinations for returns for the 2009 year and forward are ongoing.”

To Trump, this argues against disclosure. “I can’t do it until the audit is finished, obviously,” he said at a debate in February.

Not obvious, actually. Nothing in IRS rules would prevent Trump from releasing returns during an audit. Nothing would prevent him from releasing earlier returns,

despite his lawyers’ argument that “the pending examinations are continuations of prior, closed examinations.” Nothing would prevent him from at least providing a summary of tax information that would indicate his total income, effective tax rate and charitable contributions.

“You don’t learn very much from tax returns,” Trump told CBS News’s John Dickerson, when pressed on summaries. But this is untrue, it’s inconsistent with historical practice and it conflicts with Trump’s assertion that he’d be happy to provide the information once the audit is completed.

Indeed, although an audit for a taxpayer of Trump’s magnitude and complexity is not evidence of tax mischief, if anything, it argues for more transparency, not less.

Trump says there was no “net” deficiency. Were there dodges that the IRS disallowed? Aren’t voters entitled to know about those? Richard Nixon, of all people, released his tax returns — in the midst of an IRS audit, while he was president. (He owed nearly a half-million dollars in taxes and interest.)

Next Tax Day will see a new president in the White House.

Will it be the first in decades in which the president won’t be straight with fellow taxpayers? n

SUNDAY, APRIL 17, 2016

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Trade BY

J IM T ANKERSLEY

Expanded trade with China over the past 15 years has cost the Unit­ ed States at least 2 million jobs. Cracking down on trade with China, by taxing the cheap consumer goods it ships to our store shelves, could cost millions of additional jobs. That both of these things can be true is the conundrum of trade, the breakout issue of the 2016 election. On both sides, the issue has become a leading scapegoat for lost jobs and stagnating working­class wages, and rejiggering “bad” deals has become a common promise to restore middle­class pros­ perity. Many of the campaign promises, though, rest on myths.

1

America is “losing” in bad trade deals, particularly with China.

The United States does not have a trade agreement with China, neither a bilateral or a multilateral deal — much less a good one or a bad one. The two countries trade on baseline terms set by the World Trade Organization; Trump has long criticized America’s decision under President Bill Clinton to agree to China’s entry to the WTO. If the next president wants to change those terms, he or she would need to enact change at the WTO (nearly impossible, in the short term), negotiate an agreement directly with the Chinese (not remotely on the table) or pressure China through other means, such as officially declaring it a currency manipulator (theoretically possible and relatively simple procedurally). But when Trump says he would “immediately start renegotiating” America’s trade deal with China, he’s talking about something that doesn’t exist.

2

America is “losing” in auto trade with Japan.

While it’s true that Japan exports cars to the United States, it doesn’t do that nearly as much as it used to, even though Toyotas, Hondas and Nissans dot the list of best-selling automobiles. Today, many Japanese brands build vehicles in the United States — more than twice as many autos as those shipped from Japan into

U.S. ports. In the mid-’80s, America imported 3.5 million cars from Japanese factories every year. By 2013, those imports were down by 50 percent.

3

MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

Getting tougher on trade would supercharge the U.S. economy.

Trump’s economic plan boils down to cutting taxes and renegotiating trade deals, including the nonexistent China agreement. As leverage to cut better deals, Trump has threatened tariffs on China and Mexico. Sanders has also raised the threat of tariffs.

Economic models don’t generally predict that such ideas would rev up the U.S. economy, though — quite the opposite. A model by Moody’s Analytics, prepared at the request of The Post, predicts that Trump-style tariffs would push our economy into recession and throw millions of Americans out of work. A more optimistic model, from economist J.W. Mason of the Roosevelt Institute, estimates that tariffs would probably reduce America’s gross domestic product by about 1 percent — not a huge effect but also not the growth boom that opponents of free trade predict.

4

Better deals would bring back lost factory jobs.

That argument rests on two dicey assumptions: that companies would move production back to the United

Trade with China has cost U.S. jobs, especially in manufacturing. But there is no formal U.S. trade deal with China.

States in the event of a trade war and that the “re-shored” production would create as many new jobs as were lost to begin with. Many economists doubt that companies would move much factory work back from China. They wouldn’t be certain how long tariffs might last, for example, and wouldn’t want to be stuck with higher U.S. production costs if trade flows picked up again under a future president. They’re more likely, Moody’s economist Mark Zandi says, to move factories to Vietnam, Cambodia or other developing nations, unless the United States is set to restrict trade with all those countries, too. And in any country, the trend in manufacturing is toward automation of production.

5

There’s no way this debate ends well for the American worker.

An emerging consensus among trade-focused economists is that the United States needs to do a lot more to compensate the workers displaced by increased trade, through much more aggressive

retraining or direct government subsidies to affected workers.

What those workers really need are new, good-paying jobs. Oddly enough, expanded trade of a different sort could help foster the creation of those jobs. As the liberal economist Dean Baker frequently argues, large swaths of U.S. workers remain mostly shielded from foreign competition, thanks to various licensing requirements to work in their fields here. Those include many high-paid professionals, such as doctors and pharmaceutical executives.

Allowing more foreign-born professionals to compete with native-born Americans in those fields, Baker contends, would push salaries down for some of our highest-paid workers, and prices would fall for consumers.

Income inequality would shrink, the average worker would have more money to spend and the economy might run more efficiently. And perhaps more middle-class jobs really would rush into the economy. n Tankersley covers economic policy for The Post.

SUNDAY, APRIL 17, 2016

24

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