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POLITICS
Trump touts ‘historic meeting’ BY
J OHN W AGNER
P
resident Trump on Friday hailed the “historic meeting” between the leaders of North and South Korea and said “good things are happening” — but sounded a cautionary note about the thaw in relations between the two nations. “After a furious year of missile launches and Nuclear testing, a historic meeting between North and South Korea is now taking place,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Good things are happening, but only time will tell!” Minutes later, Trump offered a rosier assessment — writing in all capital letters, “KOREAN WAR TO END!” — and seemingly taking some credit for the possible pact announced by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in. “The United States, and all of its GREAT people, should be very proud of what is now taking place in Korea!” the president wrote. A three-page declaration by Kim and Moon stated goals including “complete denuclearization” on the Korean Peninsula and work toward a peace treaty that would formally end the Korean War. The fighting was halted in 1953 with an armistice agreement, which technically did not close out the state of war. The phrase “complete denuclearization” could be far more problematic. The United States regularly sends nuclear-capable aircraft and ships to the South during military exercises, and it was unclear whether the North could insist on fundamental changes in the U.S.-South Korea military structure. Trump’s tweets came as Kim and Moon wrapped up a landmark summit that could set the groundwork for possible talks between Trump and the North’s leader. Trump has announced plans to meet Kim possibly as early as
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KOREA SUMMIT PRESS POOL/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK
For the first time since 1953, a North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, left, entered South Korea. Kim met with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, right, in the demilitarized zone Friday.
next month, although no date or location has been set. Last week, Trump voiced optimism about the potential face-to-face talks with Kim, but he vowed to cancel the meeting or walk out if there are signs it “is not going to be fruitful.” He added that he intends to remain “flexible” as a negotiator, a strategy he credited for laying the groundwork for a possible U.S.-North Korea summit, which would mark the first time a sitting U.S. president has met with a North Korean leader. Such a meeting would be particularly striking given the exchange of rhetoric between Trump and Kim over the past year. The two leaders traded belligerent statements, with Trump mocking Kim as “Little
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 email weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2018 The Washington Post / Year 4, No. 29
Rocket Man” and pledging to “totally destroy” North Korea. Kim, in turn, called the American president a “dotard” and a “lunatic.” In a later tweet Friday morning, Trump credited Chinese President Xi Jinping for helping the United States pressure North Korea into a more peaceful posture. China is North Korea’s main economic lifeline, and Beijing has backed tighter U.N. sanctions aimed at squeezing Kim’s regime. “Please do not forget the great help that my good friend, President Xi of China, has given to the United States, particularly at the Border of North Korea,” Trump tweeted. “Without him it would have been a much longer, tougher, process!” n
©The Washington Post
CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION COVER STORY SPORTS BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS PLACEHOLDER
4 8 10 16 18 20 23 X
ON THE COVER The ramifications of too many men are only starting to come into sight. Illustration by JASU HU for The Washington Post.
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POLITICS
Cabinet chaos engulfs Trump BY P HILIP R UCKER, J OSH D AWSEY AND A SHLEY P ARKER
T
he final week of April was designed to be a triumphant one for President Trump. He hosted his closest foreign counterpart, French President Emmanuel Macron, for a state visit, complete with a 21-gun salute. He may be on the cusp of a diplomatic breakthrough with North Korea for the rogue state to abandon its nuclear weapons program. And he is set to put an exclamation point on it all where he feels most at home: onstage Saturday night in Michigan, riffing and ripping the elites at a rally of his fervent supporters. But instead, it became yet another week in which the Trump administration was convulsed by chaos and contradiction. A darkening cloud hung over Trump’s Cabinet on Thursday, as he had to abruptly withdraw his nominee to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs, Ronny L. Jackson, amid explosive allegations of poor conduct and negligence as the president’s personal physician. Jackson said the allegations were false, but he still took his name out of consideration for the VA job. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt also struggled Thursday before a Senate committee to answer for his ethical lapses and profligate spending. Two days earlier, Mick Mulvaney, who heads the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as well as directing the Office of Management and Budget, told banking executives that as a South Carolina congressman he prioritized meetings with lobbyists who gave him campaign contributions. The Cabinet struggles do not end there. Gina Haspel’s nomination to become CIA director is imperiled because senators are protesting her work overseeing enhanced interrogation on CIA prisoners, including techniques critics liken to torture. To get confirmed, a
JAHI CHIKWENDIU/THE WASHINGTON POST
Nominees struggle to move forward; others face ethics questions senior administration official said, she will have to have “a near perfect performance.” Haspel is in line to succeed Mike Pompeo, whose nomination to become secretary of state was so uncertain that on Monday Trump had to personally lobby Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) to table his objections and vote to approve Pompeo. “There are enough nominees to deal with, just with the president’s executive calendar on the courts, and then on Cabinet and ambassadorships, without churning through Cabinet members like this,” said Sen. Jeff Flake
(R-Ariz.). “It’s not helpful.” Said one Trump adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer a candid assessment: “It’s a joke. The whole thing is a joke.” There is some concern among Republican strategists that the converging controversies could weigh down GOP candidates in November’s midterm elections. “We’re living in a season of corruption the likes of which we haven’t seen but in a banana republic,” said Steve Schmidt, a veteran Republican Party operative and Trump critic. “. . . Everywhere you look you see incompetence,
Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, struggled to answer for his ethical lapses and profligate spending during a Senate committee hearing last week.
malfeasance, self-dealing and corruption.” But others said the sagas gripping Washington are unlikely to affect voters in the rest of the country. In North Dakota, home to one of the biggest Senate battles, Gov. Doug Burgum (R) said the farmers and energy workers he meets with hear about controversy and are inclined to believe the media and political establishments are out to get Trump. “There’s a sense that if ‘the swamp’ is not busy trying to block the Trump agenda and block Trump appointees, they’re trying to drive down those people on the
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POLITICS Cabinet pushing the agenda,” Burgum said. As former Virginia congressman Tom Davis (R) put it, “Voters don’t care about the emoluments clause and all the background noise. . . . People just push the mute button.” Inside the White House, the responses to this week’s convulsions were being personally directed by Trump, who has been acting as his own strategist and making decisions unilaterally — sometimes to the surprise of his senior staffers. “It’s starting to feel like the early days again, with everyone running around red-faced, trying to keep up with this president,” said a Republican strategist close to the White House, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer a candid assessment. Personnel matters are ordinarily the purview of the chief of staff, but John F. Kelly is a diminished figure these days. His influence a mere shell of what it was in his heyday of near-complete control — a downfall one West Wing staffer characterized as moving from the enforcer to an afterthought. So it was that Trump’s, and thus the administration’s, support for Jackson zigzagged over a chaotic 36-hour period this week. White House officials said they were unaware Monday that accusations about Jackson would be coming, but allegations first surfaced later in the day that Jackson had improperly dispensed drugs and became intoxicated on duty. Trump on Tuesday initially guided his nominee toward the exit. “I said to Dr. Jackson, ‘What do you need it for?’ ” the president told reporters, bemoaning the Senate confirmation process as “too ugly” and “too disgusting.” “If I was him,” he added, “I wouldn’t do it.” But a couple hours later, after huddling with Jackson, Trump decided to stand by the man he affectionately calls “the Doc” or “Doc Ronny.” He told advisers that although he was fine with Jackson dropping out, one of them said, “the doctor really wants to fight.” In addition, another adviser said, the president was reluctant to dump Jackson because he was afraid it would be interpreted as him giving in to criticism that he had hired a physician with no significant management experience to run one of the govern-
MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES
“Everywhere you look you see incompetence, malfeasance, selfdealing and corruption.” Steve Schmidt, a veteran Republican Party operative and Trump critic ment’s most sprawling bureaucracies. “The president is clearly of two minds about it,” said a third Trump adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly. “His typical instinct is deny, deny, deny, defend, defend, defend, fight, fight, fight. But what he said out loud at length [on Tuesday] was giving Ronny the opportunity to bow out and in some ways encouraging him to.” Trump ordered the White House staff to rally to Jackson’s defense, and a full-throated, proactive campaign was launched. Communications aides scrambled late into the evening to craft talking points for the media. Surrogates were deployed on cable news to praise Jackson and knock down the allegations. Military aides, Secret Service agents and others who had worked with Jackson were asked to help push back on damaging stories. And legislative affairs director Marc Short
worked senators as what one outside adviser described as “a oneman band trying to keep Ronny L. Jackson afloat.” Staffers said they readily rushed to Jackson’s defense in part because they were told to by the president and in part because they found the allegations inconsistent with the doctor they had come to know through many days traveling together. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters Wednesday that Jackson’s record as presidential physician was “impeccable.” She said that he underwent four separate background investigations, including one by the FBI, that found no indication of wrongdoing. “In a normal administration, you might be told you have to cut bait, you’re out,” said Sean Spicer, Trump’s first White House press secretary. “You get latitude you might not in normal worlds. Trump shares that feeling of peo-
Ronny L. Jackson, right, meets with Sen. Jon Tester (DMont.) earlier this month. Jackson took his name out of consideration to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs amid allegations of poor conduct and negligence as the president’s personal physician.
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ple fighting back when they get personally attacked. When you’re right, you fight.” The fight did not last long, however. On Wednesday afternoon, a two-page summary of allegations, written by Democrats on the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, included accusations from unnamed colleagues that Jackson had crashed a government vehicle while intoxicated following a Secret Service party, among numerous other offenses. Support for Jackson’s nomination evaporated almost immediately, with White House officials saying Wednesday night he was considering abandoning his bid to be VA secretary. And just before 8 a.m. Thursday, the White House made it official: Jackson was out. Whereas the Jackson scandal came and went in the span of three days, the Pruitt saga has been unfolding steadily for more than a month, in a cascade of damaging headlines about the administrator’s ethical blunders, security regimen and reliance on taxpayer money and government perks to support his lifestyle. Another president might have fired Pruitt by now, but not Trump, who has become convinced that the EPA chief is a singular warrior for his deregulation agenda. While other Cabinet officials caught in ethical peccadilloes have apologized and promised to do better, Pruitt has been defiant and has told the president he did nothing wrong, officials said. Though Pruitt has maintained the president’s affection, officials said, he has become estranged from most of the senior White House staff. Stories about tension between Pruitt and the West Wing were described by one White House official as “brutal,” and senior aides have grown exasperated by Pruitt and fearful that even more damaging information may come out about his profligate behavior. Trump and many of his aides said beforehand that they planned to closely monitor Pruitt’s Senate testimony on Thursday, with some White House staffers hopeful the administrator might embarrass himself. “If he screws up the testimony,” one senior White House aide said, “we have a chance at getting him out of here.” n © The Washington Post
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POLITICS
Macron: U.S. will help Syrian conflict France’s president is confident Trump will commit to new strategy despite his desire to withdraw
BY K AREN D E Y OUNG, J OHN H UDSON AND J OSH D AWSEY
F
rench President Emmanuel Macron left Washington late Wednesday confident he had at least one deal with President Trump in hand, if not yet firmly in his pocket. The U.S. president, he said, had agreed “in principle” to a new Syria strategy that would keep the United States committed to a conflict Trump has vowed to exit. “We have a feeling the U.S. is willing to work along these lines,” Macron told French journalists at a news conference before taking off for Paris. His proposal, he said, would work whether Trump stayed in or left the Iran nuclear agreement, although Macron still hoped the Americans would stay. It would address chemical weapons and humanitarian aid and, most important, it would jumpstart a political process to end the Syrian civil war and keep the Islamic State from reemerging. Many, even within Macron’s own government, are doubtful his plan — requiring nuanced choreography by the United States, Russia, Europe, regional partners and even Iran, as well as warring Syrian groups — can succeed where many have failed over the years. But a comprehensive strategy for Syria is precisely what the Trump administration has been lacking, in the view of numerous U.S. officials, lawmakers, regional experts and allies. And there is broad agreement that the plan to stop the Syrian carnage requires what one European official called “real U.S. engagement.” “If not,” the official said, “it’s a recipe for disaster.” Several U.S. and European officials discussed the sensitive issue on the condition of anonymity. Macron and Trump displayed warm chemistry during the French leader’s three-day visit, kissing cheeks, rubbing shoulders and holding hands for the cameras, although they did not hide their policy differences. During a closed-door meeting in the Oval
ANDREW HARNIK/ASSOCIATED PRESS
President Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron embrace at the conclusion of a news conference in Washington last week.
Office on Tuesday, Macron “basically told [Trump] he was wrong on most everything. But the president loved him being there,” said a person who was present during the exchanges. “It is really something special.” On the environment, Macron encouraged Trump to consider rejoining the multilateral Paris climate accord, discussing a wide array of issues from global warming to ocean life to biodiversity. The president, notorious for a short attention span, stayed engaged and refrained from airing previous claims that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese — a sign the French viewed positively, the officials said. Macron later said, with no public input from Trump, that he believed there was a chance the U.S. president would rejoin the climate accord. The French leader faced stiff resistance when their talks turned to trade, however, where Trump’s long-held views about “unfair” partners have proved difficult to shake. “Macron could make no headway,” said the person who
was in the room. “I’m not sure anyone can.” The disagreement over economic policy — Macron and the other members of the European Union want Trump to exempt them from steel tariffs — was the most difficult of the issues that divide them. Trump continues to complain that E.U. and Chinese trade barriers put U.S. businesses and workers at a disadvantage. Trump “gave no ground,” the person inside the room said. “It was the worst part of the meeting.” The issue is due to come to a head on May 1, when tariffs of 25 percent on steel imports and 10 percent on aluminum are scheduled to take effect. The tariffs are expected to dominate discussions between Trump and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who will make a brief visit to the White House on Friday. Her relationship with Trump is icy, and “he is not looking forward to Merkel coming,” said the person who was in the room, adding that Trump “said that to several of us” Tuesday. Nile Gardiner, a Europe scholar at the conservative Heritage
Foundation, said there is a wide gulf between Trump’s views of the two European leaders. “Trump and Merkel just haven’t really clicked on the world stage, where Trump and Macron have,” Gardiner said. “That’s a reflection that Macron is a real risk-taker and forthright, while Merkel is extremely cautious and nervous about being seen as too close to the U.S. president.” On the Middle East, Macron described an interlocking web of issues — Iran and its nuclear program, the Islamic State and other terrorist groups, the Syrian civil war and the millions of migrants it has sent fleeing to regional countries and Europe, and the millions more displaced and starving inside Syria. None of those problems, he told Trump, could be solved without addressing the others. Trump did not vow to “rip up” the Iran nuclear agreement, as he has in the past, one knowledgeable official said. But before his departure, Macron told reporters he expected the United States to withdraw from the deal. “If you listened to” Trump in the Oval Office, he said at his news conference, “you would reach the same conclusion.” What’s important, Macron said, is that “we don’t fall into a vacuum if the U.S. was to decide to walk away.” France and the United States, he said, “agreed to work on a comprehensive deal.” First is dealing with Iran, ideally through the nuclear agreement and side statements the United States, France, Britain and Germany are working on to address Trump’s concerns about its sunset clauses — in which many of the restrictions on Iran’s uranium enrichment expire in 2025 — flaws in the verification rules, and its failure to address Iran’s ballistic missile development. The Europeans have said they will stay in the agreement no matter what the Americans decide. The key, if Trump walks away from the deal, is that the United States does not reimpose financial sanctions that prevent European companies from doing business in
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POLITICS Iran. Iran, of course, has a vote in whether the agreement continues. While European officials in contact with their Iranian counterparts cautioned to watch what Tehran does rather than what it says, statements from the Iranian capital have been harsh. If Iran’s nuclear program can continue to be restrained, and concerns about its ballistic missile program are addressed, solutions to Syrian chemical weapons, humanitarian aid and a political process to end the civil war can be developed. The mechanism would be a relatively small “contact” group of stakeholders who are willing to compromise on an endgame that might, at least in the short term, leave Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in power. All of the international players on Syria’s complex battlefield are weary of the war and fearful it may expand into a wider conflict among regional actors, including Israel, Iran and Turkey. The greater problem may be persuading the Syrian participants in the civil war to back the strategy. Rebel fighters are distrustful. Assad has reclaimed much of the country’s territory from rebel groups that had occupied it early in the seven-year war. Russia, Assad’s main backer, believes it has proved that it is a powerful player in the region and increasingly believes Assad should capitalize on his victories and wind down the fighting. So far, Assad has dug in his heels, saying he wants to “take back” the entire country, including areas east of the Euphrates River once held by the Islamic State and currently occupied by the United States and its local proxy fighters. Trump has said he wants out of Syria, with U.S. forces and financing replaced by “rich” countries in the region. A physical U.S. departure, the Europeans believe, would send precisely the wrong signal to Russia, as well as to Assad and to Iran, his other backer, and undercut hopes of a comprehensive peace. It was a reality Trump appeared to allude to in his news conference with Macron after their talks Tuesday. “We want to come home,” he said. “But we want to leave a strong and lasting footprint, and that was a very big part of our discussion. Okay?” n © The Washington Post
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Suit amplifies human rights as North Korea summit nears BY
D AVID N AKAMURA
T
he family of Otto Warmbier filed an extraordinary lawsuit against North Korea in federal court this week alleging that the 22-year-old college student was “brutally tortured and murdered” by Kim Jong Un’s “criminal” regime during 17 months in captivity. The 22-page complaint filed Thursday details in blunt language how the University of Virginia student, a former homecoming king and soccer standout from Cincinnati, was “brutally” abused after being detained on a tour in Pyongyang. He arrived home in a coma after being released last June, dying days later. The action aims to hold Kim’s regime legally accountable for their son’s death, but the timing also raises significant geopolitical implications, coming weeks before an expected meeting between President Trump and the North Korean leader and on the eve of a high-stakes inter-Korean summit between Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in, which was widely viewed as a crucial prelude to the potential denuclearization talks between Trump and Kim. Trump has raised Warmbier’s death repeatedly in public statements and made his case a cornerstone of his administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign on Pyongyang, which the president has credited for bringing Kim to the negotiating table. Trump has pledged to raise human rights in his talks with Kim, but some South Korean officials fear that doing so publicly could complicate the sensitive diplomatic efforts underway. In a statement, Fred Warmbier said his son was “taken hostage, kept as a prisoner for political purposes, used as a pawn and singled out for exceptionally harsh and brutal treatment by Kim Jong Un. Kim and his regime have portrayed themselves as innocent, while they intentionally destroyed our son’s life. This lawsuit is an-
other step in holding North Korea accountable for its barbaric treatment of Otto and our family.” The Warmbier family is represented by McGuireWoods, and a lead attorney in the case, Richard Cullen, also represents Vice President Pence, who has spoken out against the North’s treatment of Warmbier and its record of human rights abuses. Trump has eviscerated the North for its treatment of Warmbi-
KIM KWANG HYON/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Otto Warmbier was detained in North Korea in 2016 and died in the United States last June.
er, raising his death last fall during speeches at the United Nations in New York and to South Korea’s National Assembly in Seoul. But more recently, Trump, who last year belittled Kim as “Little Rocket Man,” has tamped down his bellicose rhetoric in a bid to ease tensions ahead of the summit. “He really has been very open and, I think, very honorable from everything we’re seeing,” Trump told reporters of Kim last week. Critics have warned that Trump, who is eager for a deal on one of his top foreign policy priorities, risks giving up too much to Kim, who announced recently that he was freezing nuclear weapons testing and closing down one nuclear site. White House aides said they remain skeptical of Kim’s motives, suggesting he is taking easily reversible steps for public relations value, but Trump has been more enthusiastic about the “progress”
that is taking place. The Trump administration placed the North on the statesponsors-of-terrorism list in November, opening the door for the Warmbiers’ lawsuit. In their lawsuit, Fred and Cynthia Warmbier said their son traveled to the North in December 2015 as part of a program run by Young Pioneer Tours. When the group attempted to depart after five days, Otto was detained at the Pyongyang airport “without explanation.” The legal filing states that North Korean officials forced Warmbier to make a false statement in which he confessed to invented accusations that he was operating as a spy connected to the CIA. He was released 17 1/2 months later in a deep coma, blind, deaf, with a wound on his foot and damage to his teeth, the lawsuit states. When his parents met him at the Cincinnati airport, Warmbier “was completely unresponsive to any of their efforts to comfort him.” North Korean officials disavowed responsibility, asserting that Warmbier had contracted botulism. The lawsuit asks for a monetary award to be determined by the court for punitive damages related to Warmbier’s mistreatment and death, and the emotional suffering of his family. The money could come from a fund, created by Congress in 2015 and administered by the Justice Department, to compensate victims of state-sponsored terrorism. Victor Cha, who served as a high-ranking Asia policy official in the George W. Bush administration, said last week that the Trump administration should not shy away from raising human rights issues during its negotiations with North Korea. “We can never have a normal relationship with North Korea unless the human rights issues are addressed,” said Cha, now a Korea expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “We can’t sweep this under the rug.” n © The Washington Post
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NATION
Bolster Florida gun control, get fined BY
K ATIE Z EZIMA
A
fter a shooting at a Parkland, Fla., high school left 17 people dead, the mayor of nearby Weston wanted to prohibit people from carrying guns in public buildings and parks — a move that could lead to him being kicked out of office and on the hook for thousands of dollars in fines and attorneys’ fees. Florida law prohibits local municipalities from passing ordinances that regulate firearms or ammunition, and if one is passed that violates the state statute, it will be declared void. Elected or appointed officials involved in the drafting or passage of such local rules face fines of up to $5,000, will be unable to use a city attorney and could be held responsible for footing up to $100,000 of the legal bills for anyone who challenges the local rule in court. The governor is also given the power to suspend them from office. Florida is among 43 states that in some way restrict municipalities from enacting gun laws stricter than those in place at the state level. After a spate of mass shootings during the past few months, some localities are challenging the laws in court or narrowly crafting rules that circumvent the state. Weston Mayor Daniel J. Stermer joined nine other municipalities in a lawsuit earlier this month that says the penalties under Florida’s law are “onerous, unconstitutional and unprecedented” as well as “vindictive and expressly intended to be punitive in nature.” Plaintiffs say the state laws have a chilling effect and force local officials out of taking action when it comes to guns in their communities — creating fears that local authorities could be held personally responsible for the changes. “I’m putting my office where my mouth is,” said Stermer, who initiated the lawsuit and drafted the local gun control ordinance. “I’m prepared to put my office on the line for this. Until we all stand up and say something, nothing’s going to change. Parkland is in our back yard. It’s 20 minutes away.”
LACY ATKINS/THE TENNESSEAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Local officials could be liable for court costs or suspended for crafting rules to circumvent state Florida’s law is part of a class of ordinances called preemption laws, which are aimed at curtailing local power. The National Rifle Association was the driving force on the gun laws, most of which were put in place in the 1980s and 1990s. Florida’s preemption law was passed in the 1980s, and the fines were added in 2011. The NRA took a page from the playbook of tobacco companies — which realized that it is nearly impossible to control policy on the local level — turning their focus to statehouses, said Michael Siegel, a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health. “By implementing preemption, they could concentrate all of their focus at the state level and not worry about going from town to town and fighting these laws,” he said. The NRA Institute for Legislative Action says preemption en-
sures that “Second Amendment rights are not diluted or distorted through controversial local policies.” The laws also allow for a uniform statewide application of laws rather than scattershot local regulations, according to NRA literature. Chris Cox, executive director of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action, has said that preemption laws protect gun owners “from harassment by an unreasonable and confusing patchwork of municipal gun laws.” Eric Friday, general counsel for the gun rights group Florida Carry, which sued Tallahassee, said the city only won the right to keep a law that cannot be enforced on the books. Friday said the preemption laws apply to an array of rules, including those regarding traffic and pedestrians, and that gun owners should not have to wonder what the laws are when they cross different jurisdictions. He thinks
After a spate of mass shootings during the past few months, some localities are challenging the laws in court or narrowly crafting rules that circumvent the state. Above, members of a Billy Graham “response team” pray with Susan Cox, center, and Valerie Aaron, right, at a memorial for the four people who were killed Sunday at a Waffle House in Antioch, Tenn.
local officials who flout state statute should be held responsible, just as they would for breaking any other law. “I think it’s absolutely proper,” Friday said of the law, arguing lawmakers needed to enact it because cities and counties were “violating state law.” But Mike Alfano, a spokesman for Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum (D), said the mechanism that allows local officials to be held personally responsible is “a form of bullying and intimidating, and it really undermines local democracy.” The mechanism that allows local officials to be held personally responsible is “a form of bullying and intimidating, and it really undermines local democracy,” said Mike Alfano, a spokesman for Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum (D). McKinley Lewis, a spokesman for Gov. Rick Scott (R), who signed the 2011 law, said the governor’s office is reviewing the lawsuit. “Governor Scott’s top priority has always been protecting the safety of our students and communities,” Lewis said. “That’s why the governor proposed and then signed major legislation that strengthens school security and keeps firearms out of the hands of those with mental illness and individuals who wish to harm themselves or others.” A spokeswoman for Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi declined to comment, as did spokesmen for other state officials named in the lawsuit. The Miami City Commission unanimously approved a resolution calling for the city attorney to review the 2011 law. Commissioner Ken Russell said the law does not take into account that officials in Miami might want to regulate guns in a different way than leaders in rural parts of the state. Russell said officials are now ready to fight back against onerous penalties. “This sort of sanction is what’s inspiring a lot of elected officials to stand up and challenge it,” Russell said. n © The Washington Post
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NATION
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Many still drive with deadly air bags BY
A SHLEY H ALSEY III
A
lexander Brangman finds comfort in remembering how long his daughter lived — 26 years, 11 months, 9 hours and 15 minutes — rather than the horrible and needless way she died. Jewel Brangman, an academic all-American in high school, about to pursue a PhD at Stanford, had no need to know much about the rental car she drove north toward Los Angeles on a sunny September Sunday almost four years ago. Then came a relatively minor crash — she rear-ended a minivan — and her air bag exploded with a spray of razor-sharp metal shards that severed her carotid artery. Ten years after the biggest safety recall in U.S. history began, Honda says there are more than 60,000 vehicles on the nation’s roads equipped with what experts have called a “ticking time bomb” — defective air bags like the one that killed Brangman. The air bags, which sit about a foot from a driver’s chest, have a 50-50 chance of exploding in a fender bender. They are the most deadly air bags remaining in the recall involving more than 37 million vehicles built by 19 automakers. At least 22 people worldwide have been killed and hundreds more permanently disfigured when the air bags that deployed to protect them instead exploded and sprayed shrapnel. The worst among the bad bags are known as Alphas, driver-side air bags installed in Hondas that have up to a 50 percent chance they will explode on impact. The 62,307 people still driving with them, many in older-model cars that may have changed hands several times, either have ignored the recall warnings or never received them, Honda said. With the number of deaths and disfigurements continuing to climb — the last fatality was in January — automakers and federal regulators have rewritten the rule book in their outreach efforts, including deploying teams to knock on doors of Honda owners who have not responded to recall
FAMILY PHOTO
After 10 years and despite recalls, thousands of the Takata products remain on the road notices. “We’re good at repairing vehicles,” said Rick Schostek, executive vice president of Honda North America, “but finding and convincing customers of older model vehicles to complete recalls, now that has proved a difficult challenge.” The massive recall of air bag inflaters made by Takata — which allegedly suppressed tests revealing the flaw and where three key executives are under federal indictment — is well known to Congress and millions of Americans who have been touched by it. But tens of thousands of drivers most at risk remain oblivious to the efforts of automakers and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. “Our last hearing on the ongoing Takata fiasco is just further evidence that NHTSA is just rudderless,” said Sen. Bill Nelson (Fla.), ranking Democrat on the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. NHTSA has been without an
administrator in the 15 months since Donald Trump entered the White House. The president recently proposed elevating acting director Heidi King to lead the agency. King, whose nomination will require Senate confirmation, told the Commerce Committee last month that car companies have “made progress” on the Takata recall. “But the progress is uneven,” she said. “Overall completion rates are not where we want them to be.” That a car may change hands three or four times during a 10year period has made the recall more difficult, with notices from the car dealer or automaker discarded by people who sold the vehicle years earlier. And while most Takata inflaters go bad over time when exposed to temperature changes and humidity, the Alpha inflaters experienced high humidity at a Takata factory in Monclova, Mexico, before they were installed. The Alpha bags were installed in more than 1 mil-
Alexander Brangman’s daughter, Jewel Brangman, died in a crash that triggered a defective air bag in the rental car she was driving.
lion Honda and Acura cars between 2001 and 2003. They caused 11 of the 15 U.S. fatalities when their Takata inflaters ruptured. Although there had been inklings that Takata air bags could be deadly — with fatal explosions in 2003 and 2004 — the first U.S. recall was initiated by Honda in 2008. The 10 years that followed have been replete with allegations that Takata cut corners in a rush to fill orders and that the company sought to cover up tests that revealed the severity of the problem. After a 2002 Honda Accord air bag exploded in Alabama in 2004, Takata assured Honda that the incident was an anomaly. But at the same time Takata began testing 50 air-bag inflaters it had collected from junkyards. Even though two of them malfunctioned, Takata shut down the testing and told technicians to wipe the data from their computers, the New York Times reported. The company denied to Congress that it had ever done the testing. Years later, NHTSA said Takata was not “being forthcoming with information” or cooperating with the “investigation of a potentially serious safety defect.” The Justice Department fined Takata $1 billion for that failure. Under a consent order signed by Takata and NHTSA, John D. Buretta, a former Justice Department prosecutor, was named to prod the recall process. “There has been, I’m glad to say, marked improvement,” he told the Senate Commerce Committee last month. “There is still much room for improvement . . . and much work to be done.” Alexander Brangman flew to Washington last month for the committee hearing. “Jewel was the eighth victim at the time; now worldwide there’s 22,” Brangman said afterward. “Not prohibiting ammonium nitrate being used in these bags is sinful. Unethical behavior is the underlying theme. For a life to be taken when something is preventable is unconscionable to me. They should find a way to stop using these vehicles, period.” n ©The Washington Post
COVER STORY
when men outnumber women STORY BY SIMON DENYER AND ANNIE GOWEN ILLUSTRATIONS BY JASU HU
N othing like this has happened in human history. A combination of cultural preferences, government decree and modern medical technology in the world’s two largest countries has created a gender imbalance on a continental scale. Men outnumber women by 70 million in China and India.
The consequences of having too many men, now coming of age, are far-reaching: Beyond an epidemic of loneliness, the imbalance distorts labor markets, drives up savings rates in China and drives down consumption, artificially inflates certain property values, and parallels increases in violent crime, trafficking or prostitution in a growing number of locations. Those consequences are not confined to China and India, but reach deep into their Asian neighbors and distort the economies of Europe and the Americas, as well. Barely recognized, the ramifications of too many men are only starting to come into sight. “In the future, there will be millions of men who can’t marry, and that could pose a very big risk to society,” warns Li Shuzhuo, a leading demographer at Xi’an Jiaotong University. Out of China’s population of 1.4 billion, there are nearly 34 million more males than females — the equivalent of almost the entire population of California, or Poland, who will never find wives and only rarely have sex. China’s official one-child policy, in effect from 1979 to 2015, was a huge factor in creating this imbalance, as millions of couples were determined that their child should be a son. India, a country that has a deeply held preference for sons and male heirs, has an excess of 37 million males, according to its
most recent census. The number of newborn female babies compared with males has continued to plummet, even as the country grows more developed and prosperous. The imbalance creates a surplus of bachelors and exacerbates human trafficking, both for brides and, possibly, prostitution. Officials attribute this to the advent of sex-selective technology in the past 30 years, which is now banned but still in widespread practice. In the two countries, 50 million excess males are under age 20. Both nations are belatedly trying to come to grips with the policies that created this maleheavy generation. And demographers say it will take decades for the ramifications of the bulge to fade away. In the four sections below are personal tales that show how the imbalance has affected: Village life and mental health. Among men, loneliness and depression are widespread. Villages are emptying out. Men are learning to cook and perform other chores long relegated to women. Housing prices and savings rates. Bachelors are furiously building houses in China to attract wives, and prices are soaring. But otherwise they are not spending, and that in turn fuels China’s huge trade surplus. In India, there is the opposite effect: Because brides are
scarce, families are under less pressure to save for expensive dowries. Human trafficking. Trafficking of brides is on the rise. Foreign women are being recruited and lured to China, effectively creating similar imbalances in China’s neighbors. Public safety. With the increase in men has come a surge in sexual crime in India and concerns about a rise in other crimes in both countries. Harassment of schoolgirls in India has in some towns sparked an effort to push back — but at a cost of restricting them to more protected lives. CHAPTER ONE
‘Life is boring and lonely’
L
i Weibin has never had a girlfriend. Boys outnumbered girls in the isolated mountain village where he grew up, in the factories where he worked as a teenager, and on the construction sites where he now earns a modest wage. Today, 30 years old, he lives in a bare, stuffy dormitory room with five other men in the southern city of Dongguan, bunk beds lining the walls, cigarette butts carpeting the floor. “I want to find a girlfriend, but I don’t have the money or the opportunity to meet them,” he
50
million In China and India, there are 50 million excess males under age 20. The biggest gap between men and women of marriageable age will come in the next few decades. Men outnumber women in the two nations by 70 million overall.
said. “Girls have very high standards; they want houses and cars. They don’t want to talk to me.” Li’s problem is not only that he is poor and struggling to save enough money to buy an apartment of his own; it is that in China there are simply too many men. This is a country where marriage confers social status, and where parental pressure to produce grandchildren is intense. Bachelors like Li are dismissively branded as “bare branches” for failing to expand the family tree. But as any forester knows, bare branches pose a danger, and not just to themselves. In Dongguan, where the gender ratio is 118 men to 100 women, Li says he has virtually given up hope of finding a girlfriend. He spends his spare time playing games on his phone or accompanying his co-workers to karaoke or for a foot massage. “It is just me,” he said. “Life is boring and lonely.”
W
‘May you be the mother of a hundred sons’
hen Om Pati, a farmer’s wife in the Indian village of Bass, in the state of Haryana, was having children, she actually prayed a sweet-eyed girl bundle continues on next page
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In both China and India, baby boys have outnumbered girls by millions for decades: Number of babies ages 0-4: 65M
The shaded gap shows the difference between the number of boys and girls.
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YS BO LS GIR
would arrive. But instead she had a son. Then another, and another — seven in all. Her neighbors in the village were overjoyed for her each time a new baby arrived. They rang steel plates so everyone in the neighborhood would know a boy had been born. After all, this is a culture where male children are desired above all else — to light the Hindu funeral pyre, inherit property, care for aging parents. As the Sanskrit blessing says, “May you be the mother of a hundred sons.” Sometimes it felt to Om Pati like she was the mother of 100 sons. She worked from sunrise until night. She consoled herself with the thought that she would one day have daughters-in-law to trade stories and share cooking duties with. Grandchildren, too. But by the time her eldest, Sanjay — now 38 and a cook — reached marriageable age, the practice of families in her area sneaking off to larger cities for an illegal sonogram and then an abortion had taken its toll. When she and her husband began seeking matches for arranged marriage, still the norm, there were no suitable brides. The few young women had all married — that is, those who hadn’t left for better opportunities elsewhere. These days, Om Pati, now 60, spends her days cooking and cleaning for her husband and adult sons, who range from age 22 to 38. They gobble up so many rotis — the flat-round bread loaves that are a household staple, each one shaped in her calloused hands — that she goes through several pounds of flour a day. “There is no other option,” she said. “It’s not in our hands.”
There are now an estimated 6.2 million more baby boys than girls in India...
INDIA
55M
45M
YS BO S RL GI
...and an estimated 5.9 million more baby boys than girls in China.
CHINA
35M
PROJECTED→
25M 1970
1990
2010
2030
2050
2070
2100
Among toddlers and babies, the gender imbalance has slightly narrowed ... 2018
Number of boys for every 100 girls: 115
CHINA
110
INDIA
105 100
1970
2100
PROJECTED→
... but among marriage-age men and women, the biggest gap is yet to come. Number of men ages 15-29 for every 100 women ages 15-29: 115
CHAPTER TWO
‘If you want to find a wife, you have to build a house’
2018
110
CHINA INDIA
105
‘No one knows how sad I feel’
S
uresh Kumar once dreamed of getting married, with a procession through the lanes of Bass, a bride adorned in gold and the kind of ceremony that was once a near-universal rite of passage for Indian men. But after one potential engagement fell apart, no other suitable brides could be found. He even went back to earn his high school degree in hopes of being a more attractive suitor. Still no one. Now Kumar is in his mid-30s, long past what is considered marriageable age in India, and is beginning to face a hard truth — that a wife and a family won’t happen for him. “People say, ‘You don’t have a wife and children at home to care for — why are you working so hard?’ ” Kumar said. “I laugh on the outside, but the pain that I have in my heart only I know.” The men themselves are isolated, left out of major family decisions and subject to ridicule, with little in the way of support or mentalhealth services. Worse, in the traditional culture of villages, those who missed out on marriage have no hope of female companionship — dating or having a girlfriend is out of the question.
their cows from the pond, smoke wafts from evening meals, schoolchildren still in their plaid uniforms play in the uneven lanes. Kumar shuts himself in his room. “I watch TV, romantic movies sometimes,” Kumar says. “What can I do? It’s up to me then. What I feel inside stays inside.” It wasn’t supposed to end up this way. When he was in high school, he had a brief romance with a classmate, a beautiful 17-year-old, tall and slim, with two braids that reached down her back. Even now he cannot speak of her without singing a few bars of an Urdu love song. “I looked for her on Facebook just yesterday,” he says. But the tryst was discovered, the parents put a stop to it, and his classmate eventually married someone else. And the family wasn’t able to find any other suitable prospective brides for him. “We feel it, but this is a problem in every house,” said his mother, Bhima, sitting with her son after the party in the dimly lit courtyard of the modest house where they live. Sometimes, Kumar says, the suffocation he feels is palpable: “You know how when there’s no wind and a plant is sitting there and the leaves are not moving? That’s how the man feels: You’re just stationary.”
100
1970
Source: United Nations World Population Prospects
2100 LESLIE SHAPIRO AND CHRIS ALCANTARA/THE WASHINGTON POST
One recent evening, a family threw a rooftop party to celebrate the birth of a boy. Parties to welcome girl babies are still so rare they are covered by the local newspaper. Before the guests arrived, Kumar huddled in a stairwell nearby, sweating over a cast-iron pot, cracking jokes with friends as he fried sweet pancakes for the guests. He likes to cook, he says, but the role occasionally unbalances him. During a harvest festival last year, his mother was delayed in another town. So Kumar was left to prepare the pancakes on his own. As he flipped the cakes in the bubbling oil, he grew teary-eyed, thinking of how there were no wife and kids to eat the treats he was making. With a wife, he says, “there would be somebody to make tea for me, to tell me when to take a bath. We don’t have much value as unmarried men in this society. Everybody thinks, ‘What problem does this man have? What is lacking in his family? What is lacking in him?’ ” Evenings are the loneliest times, when the village folds into itself, minders return with
34
million Out of China’s population of 1.4 billion, there are nearly 34 million more men than women — the equivalent of almost the entire population of California.
T
oday, young people are fleeing the villages in a desperate search for fortune, and marriage. The best way to find a bachelor in rural China these days: Look for someone building a house. Li Defu is typical. Now 21, he left home seven years ago to find work in the provincial capital Guiyang, but he has pooled the family savings to build a 10-room house overlooking the green hills and valleys of his birthplace, Paifeng. The reason is simple: It is the only chance he has of finding a wife. “At the moment, there aren’t any girls my age around,” he said, on a recent trip home to supervise the construction. “But I am building this new house in preparation, in case I find someone.” Li was brought up by his grandmother, a tiny, wizened woman who sat beside him as he chatted. His parents still work in far-off factories; the savings they have collected could be crucial. Around $10,000, Li reckons, will have to be paid to his future bride’s family, just to gain their approval for the engagement. A centuries-old tradition, the “bride price” in China is similar to a dowry elsewhere in the world, but paid from the groom’s family to the bride’s parents — rather than the other way around. A decade or two back, the typical bride price was just a few hundred dollars. Today, in some
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COVER STORY parts of China, the average is nearly $30,000, according to a survey by the People’s Daily newspaper. That translates into huge pressure for young men like Li and their families. Indeed, helping to build Li’s house was another young man who was already feeling that pressure. “There are very few girls here, and many girls from outside won’t want to marry into this village because it’s poor,” said 25-year-old Zhou Haijiang, as he laid the tiles in one of the house’s many bathrooms. Only a show of prosperity can attract, and hold, a bride. “In our village, if you want to find a wife, you have to build a house.” Zhou said he would like to stay in Paifeng all his life, but the pay isn’t good, and he will soon reluctantly join the tide of migrant workers heading for China’s booming megacities, in search of riches — and brides. Many unmarried Chinese men have made their way to cities like Dongguan in southern China’s Pearl River Delta, a vast urban agglomeration nicknamed the “factory of the world.” Their work ethic, their determination to succeed, is remarkable. In a noodle shop close to a series of shoe factories, a 24-year-old who gave only his family name, Wang, was enjoying dinner with some friends. In between mouthfuls, he said he left his home in rural western China a decade ago and now works 11 or 12 hours a day, with just two days off a month. He has already saved enough to build a house back in his home village, but is still struggling to find a wife. “If you are picky, it’s hard,” he said. “There are also more boys here, and it is not necessarily easy to meet girls.” GIULIA MARCHI (TOP) AND PORAS CHAUDHARY (BOTTOM) FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
CHAPTER THREE
‘My wife didn’t run away. . . . Everyone says how nice she is’
L
iu Hua couldn’t find a wife in China. So he decided to buy a foreign one. His sister and mother helped him choose from a selection of Cambodian women who had come to China looking for husbands, eventually picking out a slim girl with a nice smile. Their main concern — she was a bit taller than he. That, and worrying about what the neighbors would think. “People in the village said she’d run away; they thought a foreign wife wasn’t as good as a Chinese wife,” said Liu, who lives in Leping in southeastern China’s Jiangxi province. “But now they don’t think so any more. My wife didn’t run away; she is friendly with the neighbors and treats them politely. Everyone says how nice she is.” His wife, Lili, is among tens of thousands of foreign women who are flocking here for marriage, pushed by poverty at home and sucked in by China’s dramatic shortage of women. Leping has become a center for the trade in
37 million
India, a country that has a deeply held preference for sons and male heirs, has an excess of 37 million men, according to its most recent census. Officials attribute this to the advent of sex-selective technology in the last 30 years, which is now banned but still in widespread practice. The number of newborn female babies compared with males has continued to plummet, even as the country grows more developed and prosperous.
Cambodian women: in village after village, they are easy to spot, looking after young children and picking them up from school, or just hanging out watching their husbands play mah-jongg. In Huangling, a village two hours’ drive to the north of Leping, Liu and Lili’s was the first of several transnational marriages. “Our village has 50 or 60 bachelors and only one or two single women,” said Liu. “For men who are 40 or even older, Cambodian women are like a second chance.” But for the women involved, it is a huge gamble, being catapulted into families where daughters-in-law often occupy the lowest status of all, especially foreign ones who have just
TOP: Chinese construction worker Li Weibin, 30, has given up on finding a girlfriend. ABOVE: Om Pati, 60, of Bass, India, is the mother of seven sons including, from left, Sandeep, Sanjay and Suresh. None of her sons have married.
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been “bought.” Not surprising, then, that Lili’s mother didn’t want her to come. You don’t speak the language, you don’t know anyone, it’s dangerous, she warned. But in Cambodia, daughters are expected to help support the family financially. Lili’s father had died, and there were three young brothers to bring up and get through school. Her village, in central Cambodia’s Kampong Cham province, offered no real employment opportunities. Lili, who was born Sreynich Yorn in Cambodia, was paid the equivalent of $450, plus travel expenses, and promised a relatively well-paid job in a Chinese factory when she arrived, provided she agreed to get married. “I wanted the money, for my mother,” she said. Liu said he paid deposits ranging from $5,000 to $40,000 to three local families, just for the right to date their daughters, and got only some of the money back when the matches didn’t work out. Fed up with demanding Chinese families, he eventually decided to pay a broker nearly $15,000 for Lili, who took a Chinese name after moving there. The two profess to be content, living in a house filled with photos of their wedding and their two young children, a 4-year-old boy, Siyiuan, and his 1-year-old sister, Sisi. In one, they sit on a park bench, he in his best gray suit and red tie, she in a white wedding dress carrying a bunch of red and white roses, together making the shape of a heart with their arms. Both insist theirs is a genuine marriage, not a transaction. Happily, Liu’s mother approves. But Lili still feels cheated, especially after she found out how much her husband had paid. The job she was promised never materialized, and she is furious with the marriage broker for pocketing almost all the fee. “She lied to me for money,” she said. Lili spends her days looking after her two young children. Her husband, a painter and decorator, is often away for work, but her mother-in-law seems sympathetic, even proud of the young woman who brought her two grandchildren. Her own mother even visited here last year, and went home with a wad of money, around $1,500, that will help the rest of the family. She is one of the lucky ones. “My husband is a good man, and he treats me well,” she said. “I don’t want to go back. I have children now.” One 32-year-old woman, interviewed in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, said she had been enticed to come to China with the promise of a factory job. But when she landed, she was forced to marry a man she didn’t like. “My husband said to me: ‘You are my slave; I bought you. If I want, I can do anything to you.’” Her new family locked her in the house to continues on next page
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prevent her from fleeing, she said. Her husband demanded sex four times a day. If she refused, she was beaten. Finally, she had a baby girl. Seven days after birth, her husband demanded sex again and, when she refused, beat her, she said. Two years later, she recalled, she had a miscarriage, was denied medical treatment by her husband’s family and almost died. For three years, the woman had not called her family back home in Cambodia “because I didn’t want my mother to worry,” and because she felt ashamed she hadn’t been able to send any money home. Eventually, though, she called her brother. Together they persuaded the Chinese family to let her visit her sick mother in Cambodia — but they let her go only on the condition she leave her daughter behind. Now she lives in a cruel limbo. Scared of being stigmatized in her village, she rarely goes home, working instead for low pay in a garment factory on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. She has been separated from her 3-yearold daughter for more than a year. Thinking of her, a fleeting smile passes over her face. “I cry every day,” she said. With men outnumbering women in China by 34 million, the demand for foreign wives risks simply shifting the problem onto China’s smaller neighbors. Russian women, some of whom used to look to the West for husbands, are increasingly seeking marriage in China, says Elena Barabantseva at Britain’s University of Manchester, who has been leading an international project on marriage migration into China. In China, they are the most sought-after brides, prized for their fair skin and European features. They are seen as educated but accessible, less emancipated than Western women. These women are more likely to end up in bigger cities, with richer men. Commercial marriage tours to Russia as well as Ukraine offer Chinese men the chance to meet 10 or 20 women over the space of a few days for around $5,000, rising to $8,000 if they find a bride. But a much larger number of women come from Vietnam. Marriage migration across the porous border in southern China began two decades ago and is flourishing, said Caroline Grillot, who has been researching the phenomenon for a decade, most recently with Barabantseva in Manchester. Vietnamese women are seen as less “demanding” than some Chinese women and more focused on traditional family values. They are also sought after for their fair skin, their big eyes and slim waists, Grillot says. They in turn often prefer Chinese husbands to their own compatriots, not just for their wallets, but because they are seen as hardworking and family-focused. Today websites like ZhongYueLove.com (China-Viet-Love) offer a selection of Vietnamese women. Some services offer a money-
CHAPTER FOUR
‘There’s too many men’
F
PHOTOS BY YAN CONG FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
$30,000
A centuries-old tradition, the “bride price” in China is similar to a dowry elsewhere in the world. However, it is paid from the groom’s family to the bride’s parents — not the other way around. A decade or two ago, the typical bride price was just a few hundred dollars. Today, in some parts of China, the average is nearly $30,000, according to a survey by the People’s Daily newspaper.
back guarantee that the brides will be virgins, and a free replacement for any who run away within a year. Others arrive from Burma and Laos, crossing into China’s relatively poor southwestern Yunnan province. In effect, they are replacing local women who have themselves migrated, to find husbands in more prosperous parts of “inner China,” said Shen Hanmei, a professor at Yunnan University in Kunming. Significant numbers have poured in from North Korea, too, especially after faminestruck there in the mid-1990s. Many have suffered horrendous treatment from abusive husbands or were trafficked into prostitution in China, and ended up in labor camps if they tried to return to their home country.
TOP: Liu Lili, with her daughter and husband, Liu Hua, in June 2017, is a success story among foreignbrokered brides. Lili, a native of Cambodia, considers herself lucky: “My husband is a good man, and he treats me well,” she said. BELOW: The couple with their son at a wedding ceremony in 2015.
irst the girls refused to go to class. Then they launched a sit-in in the center of town. Then they stopped eating. A group of 11th-graders in the Indian village of Gothra Tappa Dahina sparked a public revolt because they were tired of being harassed by men as they walked to school in a neighboring town. Nearly every day on the road, they said, they would be circled by young men buzzing them on motorbikes, grabbing their scarves, their bodies, and calling them sexually provocative names. Street harassment — called “eve teasing” here — has long been a problem in Indian society, which remains deeply patriarchal despite years of economic growth and superficial signs of change. Now, the widening imbalance between numbers of men and women in the country is exacerbating the problem, public safety officials believe. This conservative part of northern India has 7,000 villages with as many as 150 to 200 surplus single men each, one study said. In a country all too familiar with crimes against women, packs of men, fueled by cheap local liquor, often take to the street to chase and pressure young women. Ultimately the girls decided to take matters into their own hands. “There’s too many men,” said Nikita Chauhan, 14, the willowy daughter of the village seamstress who became a protest leader. “They keep us locked in their fist.” Last May, amid blackened, burned-over farmers’ fields and in the scorching heat, the girls gathered under a printed cotton tent in the center of the village and began their strike. The temperatures soared to 107 degrees. Some fainted and had to be taken to the hospital. Some passed out and lay as they were, fanned by fellow students, who spooned water laced with electrolyte powder into their mouths, like baby birds. They were joined by the mayor, their mothers, then women from other villages. A month earlier, the girls had graduated from the village school to high school and began experiencing what their older sisters had long warned them about — that the 1.5-mile stretch of road between their village and the high school was not safe, because of the young men on motorcycles — with helmets obscuring their faces — who harassed them as they walked. “I decided whatever I had experienced during those days wasn’t worth tolerating,” said Sujata Chauhan, 14, sitting near the protest site. (The girls are not related — Chauhan is a common last name among the local caste.) Gothra Tappa Dahina village is a small community of nearly 3,000, mostly farming families who grow corn, wheat and millet. It is part of a district that has one of the worst boy-girl ratios in Haryana, an economically
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127%
HOTOS BY PORAS CHAUDHARY FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
TOP, FROM LEFT: Sheetal Chauhan, Jyoti Chauhan and Nikita Chauhan, all 14, live in Gothra Tappa Dahina, a small farming community in northern India. They protested in the blazing heat last year to continue their education in the village school to avoid come-ons from men on their walk to a more distant school. After eight days, school officials relented: Their grades would open in the village school. (The girls are not related — Chauhan is a common last name among the local caste.) BOTTOM: Suresh Chauhan, the sarpanch, or mayor, of Gothra Tappa Dahina, says education is helping advance women’s causes.
strong but socially backward state that itself has the worst gender ratio of newborns to age 6 in the country, according to census data. Crimes against women have risen in the state by 127 percent in the last decade. The imbalance of men to women in the village tells the story — there are 133 men to every 100 women, according to community
health statistics. During hot, sleepy days, the men in the village play rummy on the front porch of the community center, their backs to the painted “Girl Boy Board” where community health workers have tallied the sex of newborns, monitoring done as part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Save Girl Child, Educate
In Haryana state in northern India, crimes against women have risen 127 percent in the past decade. Young men in Haryana say that they have no good job opportunities and little entertainment — save for a nightly game of cricket, soccer or kabaddi, the Indian contact sport. Out of boredom and frustration, many take to harassing young women.
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Girl Child” program, which carries out public awareness campaigns on the importance of caring for and educating girls. Modi launched the program after India’s ratio of boys to girls (newborns to age 6) widened significantly between the census of 2001 and that of 2011. Those who admit to “eve-teasing” say that it is harmless. Sometimes the girls flirt back or encourage it, they say. College student Shakti Singh, 20, said he would like a girlfriend but has no clue how to get one. With little help from their conservative parents but with easy access to the Internet, he and his friends model their behavior on the swains in Bollywood romance movies. The genre — often with a hero who breaks down a woman’s reluctance — has been criticized for glorifying stalking and rape. “There is a lot of effect from movies,” Singh said. “Even though the girl says no, he continues chasing her, and she still says no. But in the end, he gets the girl.” Now multiply that impression by the several million unattached young men watching these movies nationwide. The state recently launched a program to curtail these misguided “Romeos,” with special police squads to patrol shopping malls, college campuses and bus stands where chronic harassers gather. “I won’t tease in the village. I will get beaten up. But outside I do,” boasted Lal Singh, a field worker, 31. In Gothra village, the girls’ sit-in finally notched a small victory. After eight days, school officials — worn down by seeing the wilting girls on cable news as the protest garnered attention — announced that the girls’ demands would be met. They would open 11th and 12th grades in the existing village school so the girls would not have to walk. It was a victory that did little to discipline the harassing young men, and one that will liberate the girls by keeping them closer to home — but a victory, nonetheless. Suresh Chauhan — the local sarpanch, or mayor, who sat in the heat with the girls throughout the protest — says that education is the key to undoing what decades of patriarchy in India have wrought. “The change is in the younger generation. People look at each other and change themselves,” he said. There is some shift because of wider worlds glimpsed on television and smartphones, he said, but “education is the highest reason for change.” A few days later, the 11th-graders, flush with victory, lined up to await the start of classes at their school — a horseshoe-shaped ring of spare concrete rooms, some without desks. “Until we were at the hunger strike, we did not realize how progressive our village had become. How supportive they were. How they think now! Now, we are not restricted at all,” Sujata Chauhan said. “People have come to realize that we have equal rights, and they are willing to give them to us.” n ©The Washington Post
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SPORTS
Coach, teacher, cheerleader, lobbyist L IZ C LARKE New Orleans BY
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n the first day back from spring break, three Tulane football players are seated around a U-shaped table in a small meeting room. With marker in hand, sports agent Martin Fischman stands before them at a whiteboard and poses a question: “Ribbon sells for 19 cents a yard. How much will you save by buying 30 yards for $5?” There was no such scene in “Jerry Maguire,” the 1996 movie that shaped many sports fans’ perceptions of NFL agents. But here, on the second floor of Tulane’s student union, the 34-year-old Fischman, a real-life Jerry Maguire, doubles as teacher, coach and cheerleader in leading a test-prep session for the Wonderlic exam, which three of his clients will take the next morning as part of Tulane’s pro day for prospective NFL employers. Working from a stack of sample tests, Fischman gives examples of the types of math, vocabulary and reasoning questions that defensive tackle Sean Wilson and running backs Dontrell Hilliard and Sherman Badie will face. The goal isn’t to get them to memorize answers but to equip them with strategies for doing well on the test that has stunningly little to do with mastering an NFL playbook. Then Fischman reviews the strength-and-conditioning tests and drills they will do the next day. None among them was invited to February’s NFL Scouting Combine, so pro day would represent their best chance to impress teams before the draft, which was held this past weekend. Eat a good dinner and get a good night’s sleep, the agent reminds them. Arrive hydrated but not waterlogged. On the 40-yard dash, try for personal bests in both attempts because the times are averaged, but decelerate gradually to avoid pulling a muscle. And after it’s over, thank each scout with a firm handshake and good eye contact. “Y’all are fully prepared for
EDMUND D. FOUNTAIN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
In the ‘business of football,’ sports agents strive to sign players and be whatever they need what’s in store,” says Fischman. “We weren’t invited to the combine; we’re the underdogs. Let’s shock the world!” Building the client base There are about 830 agents certified by the NFL Players Association — more than one for every three players in or around the league — which makes it a brutally competitive business. Roughly 75 percent of NFL players are represented by just 17 percent of all certified agents, according to NFLPA statistics. The majority of the richest contracts are handled by a half-dozen “super agents” such as Tom Condon, Joel Segal, Jimmy Sexton and Drew Rosenhaus. Condon, who represents Drew Brees, Eli Manning, Matthew Stafford and J.J. Watt, among others, accounts for $1.4 billion in contracts alone, according to Forbes magazine. At the other end of the spectrum are nearly 700 agents vying to sign the rest. When NFL rosters are culled
to 53 each September, as many as 300 agents typically have no active clients at all. Between the extremes are Fischman and his partner, Stanley Wiltz, a former pro baseball player turned agent, who have steadily grown their client base each year since merging efforts to form New Orleans-based Fischman & Wiltz Sports in 2014. Heading into this weekend’s draft, they had 13 prospects, their most yet. Fischman wanted to become an NFL agent after suffering a lifethreatening episode of heat stroke as a high school football player in New Orleans. After graduating from Indiana with a history degree, he returned home to attend law school at Tulane with a vision of advocating for athletes while helping his home town rebuild after Hurricane Katrina. “Health is a premium part of why I got into this business,” said Fischman, whose wife is a child neurologist. “I think that if you truly care about people and you
Martin Fischman, center, talks with Parry Nickerson during his pro day. At left is Fischman’s business partner, Stanley Wiltz.
also have a passion for what they do and you know there is an inherent risk involved, you can hopefully protect them as much as possible while also being a solid adviser and a trusted negotiator.” Wiltz, 46, a former Louisiana Monroe first baseman who was drafted by the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1992, was drawn to the business because of his own experience as an athlete. After meeting Fischman while recruiting the same player, the Louisiana natives decided to join forces and are equal partners in the firm, sharing clients and contacts. “With two guys, we’re able to network twice as much,” said Wiltz, who towers over Fischman and shares his outgoing manner. “And we’re available to our players 24 hours a day, as well as their family members.” That’s what appealed to Tulane cornerback Parry Nickerson. “Martin and Stan — they’re from the same city as me, so they relate to my situation and know what I been through,” said the 6-foot, 180-pounder, who was 10 when Katrina took his grandmother’s home and that of his cousins. “I feel like I have a strong connection with those guys. I trust them. They are very loyal. And I feel like with those guys, we could accomplish a lot of things.” Dollars and business sense There’s no requirement that NFL players use agents. In recent months, two high-profile athletes opted against it. Veteran cornerback Richard Sherman handled his own free agent negotiations with the San Francisco 49ers this offseason. And Louisville quarterback Lamar Jackson, the 2016 Heisman Trophy winner and a projected first-round pick this year, tapped his mother as manager in lieu of an NFLPA-certified agent, although he will retain a lawyer to vet his contract. “I know, coming in as a rookie, agents don’t negotiate anything, really,” Jackson explained at the combine, alluding to the NFL rookie wage scale that largely dictates a player’s salary based on his draft position. “You know you’re
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TRENDS going to get the salary you’re going to get, and I decided I don’t need [an agent].” For many NFL agents, the riches of the game are elusive. Much like players, their profession demands significant front-end investment, persistence and a bit of luck to be successful. The typical first step is getting certified by the NFLPA, which involves passing an exam to prove fluency in the collective bargaining agreement, the salary cap, the substance abuse policy and other issues; securing liability insurance; and paying an annual fee of $1,500 to $2,000. Agents are expected to pay for their clients’ training expenses in the run-up to the draft, which can range from $25,000 to $40,000. That’s typically not repaid, so agents must decide: How much should I invest per prospect, based on the expected return? And the return is usually modest. Agents’ commission on NFL contracts ranges from 1.5 percent (under the standard NFLPA contract) to 3 percent. Similarly, the typical NFL rookie won’t be set for life after signing his first contract. The NFLPA tries to drive this point home before the draft via its “Pipeline to the Pros” seminars, held by request at college campuses. “We introduce them to the business of football, to get away from the glitz and the glamour,” said Mark Levin, the NFLPA’s director of salary cap and agent administration. Not every aspiring NFL player attends a seminar. Fewer still want to hear its message. It often falls to the agent, then, to paint a realistic picture — even if some are silvertongued in recruiting clients, promising Pro Bowl careers and million-dollar signing bonuses. Equally important is building trust and credibility among NFL scouts and personnel executives. In Fischman’s view, that doesn’t mean bombarding scouts with heavy-handed sales pitches. “I do believe a player needs a very powerful lobbyist,” Fischman said. “Agents don’t have the PhD in football, but the NFL scouts do, and the personnel directors and general managers do. This is what they do! They want to trust their eyes, their watches, their notes, their film review. So my job is finding the best way to lobby for my clients — to find maybe something that the team doesn’t know
about them despite all the research. . . . There still might be something that slipped through the cracks.” Time to go to work At Tulane’s pro day, held this month at the New Orleans Saints’ indoor practice facility in suburban Metairie, La., Fischman and Wiltz split up the workload. At one end of the field were the eight athletes (four of them Fischman & Wiltz clients) and representatives from 30 NFL teams, who conducted the drills and recorded results. At the opposite end of the field, looking on from behind a rope, were the agents, the media, a handful of Tulane players who turned out to support their teammates and the players’ family and friends. Fischman arrived with a large duffel bag stuffed with power bars, Gatorade chews and protein-dense snacks, in case any of his clients needed a boost. He and Wiltz circulated among the moms to let them know how their sons were doing. “This means the world,” said Shandrica Pugh, Badie’s mother. “This has been going on since he was 5 years old. It has been nonstop. This has always been part of what he has wanted to do.” By nightfall, some statistics appeared on social media — and it was good news, with Badie and Hilliard posting 40 times in the low 4.4-second range. And Nickerson, who had 16 interceptions at Tulane, had drawn plenty of attention. The next day, the agents were on the road by 5:30 a.m., headed to Baton Rouge for LSU’s pro day, the last of their clients’ pre-draft workouts. But their lobbying and information gathering continued until the final seventh-round draft selection was made Saturday. Then it erupts into a manic feeding frenzy over the best players who didn’t get drafted. The flurry of calls extends late into the night as teams make offers for players who caught their eye while agents press for the best deals, haggling over signing bonuses or settling for a rookie minicamp tryout with no contract at all — anything to give their clients a chance. “It’s pandemonium, the way the process is structured,” Fischman said. “But I continue to fight for my guys.” n ©The Washington Post
KLMNO WEEKLY
Is the craft beer craze going flat? BY
R ACHEL S IEGEL
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as craft beer peaked? In one sign that the industry has grown less frothy, more craft breweries closed in 2017 than in any other year in the past decade. And while the makers of craft beer saw more growth in production than the overall market last year, their pace is slowing. A report by the Brewers Association — a trade association representing small and independent American craft brewers — showed that craft brewers saw a 5 percent rise in production volume in 2017.
ROBERT F. BUKATY/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Craft beers are served at the Maine Beer Co. in Freeport, Maine, in 2015. The artisanal industry appears to be losing its growth energy.
Yet with that growth came an increasingly crowded playing field, leading to more closures of small craft breweries. In 2017, nearly 1,000 breweries opened nationwide, and 165 closed — a closure rate of 2.6 percent. That’s a 42 percent jump from 2016, when 116 craft breweries closed. Experts say that saturation is some time away and that pullback is inevitable as any booming industry begins to mature. “We have seen a little bit of deceleration,” said Bart Watson, chief economist of the Brewers Association. “When you’re talking about an industry that sells tens of billions of dollars [of product] a year, it’s hard to grow at doubledigit rates.”
Growth in the craft brewing industry began in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Watson said, and the industry experienced a resurgence in the past decade. The industry gained its foothold among adults willing to pay more for beer that tasted better than the mass-produced products that had long dominated the market. Small craft breweries compete among themselves for taps at restaurants and shelf space at retailers. Yet they are also up against massive industrial brewers that wield heavy influence over the national distribution of beer and often buy up smaller companies. In 2011, for example, AnheuserBusch InBev bought the craft brewer Goose Island for almost $39 million, the first in a slew of similar acquisitions. Matt Simpson, owner of the craft beer consultancy the Beer Sommelier, said the slowdown is natural after “an initial explosion.” Some of that culling, he said, sweeps up craft brewers who do not know how to successfully run a business or market products. At the same time, the industry has revived enthusiasm among craft beer aficionados who set out to establish a company and sometimes make bad-tasting beer. With more than 6,300 breweries operating in the United States in 2017, small and independent brewers represented nearly 13 percent of the market by volume. Craft brewers produced 25.4 million barrels in 2017, with a retail value estimated at $26 billion. Over much of the past decade the industry’s growth rate held at double digits, peaking at 18 percent growth in 2013 and 2014. The total beer market went down 1 percent by volume in 2017, a decrease in about 2.4 million barrels from the previous year. Still, Watson and Simpson agreed that it will take some time for the industry to reach full saturation. And albeit at a slower pace, craft breweries are still growing. n © The Washington Post
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BOOKS
From young refugee to cooking star N ONFICTION
T MY AMERICAN DREAM A Life of Love, Family, and Food By Lidia Matticchio Bastianich Knopf. 339 pp. $28.95
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REVIEWED BY
J OE Y ONAN
he title of the first chapter of Lidia Bastianich’s new memoir provides the first clue that her memories of childhood are going to include more than idyllic days of climbing fig trees and milking goats. It’s “Giuliana,” for the name she was called the first five years of her life. And the story of how and why it changed involves a baby smuggled in a bag out of a hospital in the middle of the night, a secret baptism — and plenty of risk. These days, Bastianich is a beloved restaurateur, cookbook author and TV personality with a grandmotherly demeanor and a quiet confidence. But in 1947, she was born into uncertainty. Earlier that year, the Italian region where her parents and brother lived was given to communist Yugoslavia. And while scores of other ethnic Italians on the Istrian Peninsula headed across the Adriatic Sea while the border was open, her parents hesitated because Lidia was only a month from being born — and after she was, they found themselves stuck when the border slammed shut. Rather than squeeze every drop of sentimentality out of sometimes-painful accounts, she reflects on her life with a matter-offactness that makes the stories all the more poignant. Here’s how she describes her time as one of the “profughi” in San Sabba, a refugee camp in Italy: “Guards watched everyone at the camp twenty-four hours a day. I no longer had a home, a bed, a place to call my own; I felt vulnerable, and the only security I found was when we were huddled together as a family, just like my cat and her kittens back home in Pola.” Before the family escaped from Yugoslavia to Italy, Tito’s rule was not kind to them and other Italians. They couldn’t openly practice their Catholicism (hence the secret baptism) or even speak their native tongue. Lidia’s father, Vittorio, had a trucking company,
BRAD BARKET/GETTY IMAGES FOR GRANA PADANO
Chef Lidia Bastianich, who came to the United States at age 11, says she was interested in cooking even as a child.
whose capitalist business practices were under scrutiny by the secret police. Her mother, Erminia, was a schoolteacher expected not just to teach her students Croatian but to indoctrinate them in the ways of communism. And even though little Lidia and brother Franco did have their fig-tree-and-goat-milking moments, things ultimately went from bad to worse in Yugoslavia. After a dramatic escape that involved temporary separation from her father in Italy, they registered as refugees and lived in San Sabba for two years before the United States opened for immigration when Lidia was 11. To read it now, Bastianich’s future as a food-world star seems almost preordained. As a toddler she would mimic her Grandma Rosa, “sitting on the rocks in the courtyard preparing ‘sauce,’ by filling old tin cans with rocks to emulate tomatoes and pouring them into my pretend pot to stir and simmer.” Later, she planted her own vegetables alongside Rosa, played her sous-chef, and learned about market shopping and food presentation from an aunt who was a private chef in Trieste.
Much of the later chapters of her memoir are devoted to her and her husband, Felice, opening their first, second and third restaurants and moving into public television; writing; and empire-building. Bastianich’s devotion to family infuses “My American Dream.” Her father died before Felidia could open, “but he was there with me that night, in my heart and in my soul.” She writes that she never could have raised two children on such a busy schedule if her mother hadn’t been there. Perhaps the most touching moments, though, are when she reunites with her Nonna Rosa on a return trip to Istria as a newlywed, and when she returns years later to the site of the former refugee camp where she and her family had spent some of their darkest days. With her daughter, Tanya, she co-founded the company that produces her public television shows, and with her son, Joe, she owns the restaurant company Batali & Bastianich Hospitality Group. And here’s where her account gets dicey. About four months before the book’s publishing date, the other B&B co-owner, Mario Batali, ac-
knowledged years of sexual misconduct and harassment of employees after multiple allegations were reported in Eater, The Washington Post and the New York Times. Did the news come too late for Bastianich to address it in her book? The omission is a shame — and makes for some jarring reading. Of a dinner she organized for the James Beard Foundation in the late 1990s, she writes: “One of the people I invited was Mario Batali, an up-and-coming chef at the time, who had his own place, Po, in the West Village. . . . That night, Joe and Mario met for the first time, and soon they were talking about going into business together.” The innocent statement now sounds ominous. And it’s hard to read without thinking of the accusations that Joe helped create a “boys’ club” atmosphere with Batali that facilitated the abuse, as Eater reported, and of Joe’s admission that he heard inappropriate comments and “should have done more.” In the wake of the allegations, B&B has undergone a corporate shake-up, with Batali pushed out of day-to-day operations and Lidia (along with Nancy Silverton) taking on a larger role. I hope one day she writes about it. It’s also strange to read the following, in Bastianich’s musings on the solidarity and obstacles of female chefs: “Physically, women have some challenges in the kitchen, like lifting heavy pots on and off the stove. You learn to adapt, you learn to find a way. But the biggest challenge for women in this industry is how to balance a family with such a demanding career.” Is it? I imagine that some of those who have suffered sexual harassment at the hands of Batali — and so many others — might have a different idea. n Yonan is food and dining editor of The Washington Post.
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BOOKS
KLMNO WEEKLY
A twisting thriller written by a pro
Taft’s bad career move: Presidency
F ICTION
N ONFICTION
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REVIEWED BY
C AROL M EMMOTT
isa Scottoline has the antidote for all the emotionally debilitating stories spewing from our daily news feeds: a deliciously distracting thriller. “After Anna,” her latest standalone novel, fits comfortably into the on-trend female-centric psychological suspense genre. In these popular works, women are the alleged victims of heinous crimes that are often solved by other women — police detectives, private investigators or friends and loved ones. Best known for legal thrillers featuring the wily women who work for an all-female law office in Philadelphia, Scottoline often makes mothers the heroines of her stand-alone works, and this holds true in “After Anna.” The last time Maggie Ippoliti saw her daughter, Anna was just 6 months old. Maggie was voluntarily institutionalized 17 years earlier when she feared her postpartum psychosis would lead to her harming her child. Maggie’s feckless, unfaithful husband took advantage of Maggie’s illness and whisked Anna away to Europe where he eventually dumped her in a boarding school, out of Maggie’s reach. Meanwhile, Maggie recovered and made a new life for herself with her new husband, Noah, and his 10-year-old son, Caleb. One day, Maggie gets a phone call from Anna, who wants to reconnect. Beside herself with joy — Maggie’s never stopped yearning for her daughter — they make plans to meet. And in less than a day, Anna is moving in with them. Early on, Scottoline quickly rolls out a stunner of a story line, and even its bare bones are meaty and scrumptiously intriguing. Just 17 days after Anna moves in, Noah is accused of sexually abusing Anna and then killing her. “After Anna” opens on the 10th day of Noah’s murder trial. The trial chapters, titled “Noah, After,” are told in descending chronological order and are interspersed
with “Maggie, Before” chapters, which tell the story of Anna from her reunion with Maggie up until the startling reveals of the book’s last pages. We learn quickly about the murder and whether Noah is innocent or guilty, but there’s plenty to keep us guessing. A former practicing attorney who lays out complicated legal strategies, Scottoline again puts her legal chops on display through the prosecuting attorney in Noah’s case. She is “simply dismantling him, the way a butcher breaks apart a chicken carcass, piece by piece, wedging back the legs and wings until the joint breaks, then tearing the limbs off.” Ouch! Anna’s accusations of sexual misconduct and the Protection From Abuse order she takes out against Noah just a few days before she dies keep us riveted. Scottoline dispenses plotline mind tricks. She makes us feel guilty for wondering if Noah might be innocent. She makes us feel equally guilty for doubting Anna. On the other hand, we also feel guilty for believing her. It’s a conundrum that whirls through Maggie as well. Readers always know more than Maggie but not everything. The real story about the explosive relationship between Maggie and Noah is episodically revealed with Scottoline illuminating the landing strip of revelations and truths in a deliciously slow and intense way. Maggie and the reader are mystified. If Anna’s lying about the abuse, why would she do it? And while you may have your own ideas about what’s going on, you’ll never really know until Scottoline decides to tell you. The last 100 pages of this book are nerve-rattling, shocking and explosively violent, even as Scottoline gets to the heart of what lengths a mother will go to protect her child. n Memmott is a freelance writer in Northern Virginia. This was written for The Washington Post.
‘S AFTER ANNA By Lisa Scottoline St. Martin’s. 352 pp. $27.99
WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT The American Presidents Series: The 27th President, 1909-1913 By Jeffrey Rosen Times. 183 pp. $26
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REVIEWED BY
H . W . B RANDS
ome are born great, some achieve greatness, and some are born in Ohio,” ran the Gilded Age riff on Shakespeare. How else to account for the string of Ohioans in the White House — seven of the 11 presidents from 1869 to 1923? It made electoral sense: All were Republicans, it was a Republican era in presidential politics, and Ohio delivered a hefty chunk of electoral votes. William Howard Taft got the job not because he was from Ohio, although his Buckeye roots didn’t hurt. He got it because Theodore Roosevelt deluded himself into thinking that Taft would continue the Roosevelt legacy. Or perhaps it was Taft who deluded Roosevelt. Either way, Taft received Roosevelt’s anointment and with it the Republican nomination in 1908, and he coasted to victory in the general election. It was a bad career move. Roosevelt would have been a tough act for anyone to follow; his personalization of the presidency and his eagerness to expand executive power raised the bar of presidential success several notches. Taft was the least likely person to clear the new standard. The glare of public scrutiny repelled him; the demands of democratic politics dismayed him; the violence done to the Constitution by Roosevelt’s aggrandizement offended him. He should have been a judge. He had been a judge, and he liked the work. But it didn’t satisfy his wife, who dreamed of more for her Will. And it didn’t satisfy Roosevelt, who saw in Taft something of what he had lost in the premature death of his younger brother. Roosevelt brought Taft to Washington to be secretary of war, and perhaps his successor. In his new biography of Taft, Jeffrey Rosen relates a White House moment when Roosevelt, after a private dinner with the Tafts, pretended to be clairvoyant. “There is something hanging over his head,” Roosevelt declared,
looking above Taft. “I cannot make out what it is. . . . At one time it looks like the Presidency, then again it looks like the chief justiceship.” “Make it the presidency,” urged Nellie Taft. “Make it the chief justiceship,” pleaded her husband. Roosevelt made it the presidency. His progressivism irked GOP regulars, and he feared they would reverse the reforms he had effected in rebalancing democracy and capitalism in American life. Taft let Roosevelt think he would carry the progressive torch forward. And so he did, but in his own way. Rosen aptly observes that by some measures — trusts prosecuted, acreage protected, tariffs reduced — Taft was more progressive than Roosevelt. Yet his style could hardly have been less Rooseveltian. Yet Taft’s career wasn’t over. Indeed, the career he should have had all along was just getting back on track. Rosen complements his coverage of Taft’s work with attention to private matters. For all her pushiness, Nellie was his true love, and the attention he devoted to her recovery after a stroke is deeply moving. He achieved his lifelong goal when Harding appointed him chief justice. Taft remained on the Supreme Court for nearly a decade, resigning just a month before his death in 1930. His administrative talents reemerged as he streamlined the federal court system, and a political savvy few had suspected in him helped persuade Congress to fund a new building for the court. Taft didn’t live to see it completed, but it served as a fitting monument to the most distinguished post-presidential career in American history. n Brands teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. His next book is “Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster, the Second Generation of American Giants.” This was written for The Washington Post.
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KLMNO WEEKLY
OPINIONS
Decent society is coming apart right in front of us KATHLEEN PARKER writes a twice-weekly column on politics and culture for The Washington Post.
Courage isn’t required to condemn the Syracuse University chapter of the Theta Tau fraternity for simulating a sexual assault on a disabled student. Video of this apeish display, now in wide circulation, should horrify anyone with an ounce of decency. That is, assuming people still recall what decency is. Alas, this once aspirational, if now uncommon, denominator of the American experience has been on the wane for the past several decades, so that apparently the most anyone can say about young men performing as no self respecting baboon would is that the video was “appalling and disgusting on many intersecting grounds.” This pronouncement came from university Chancellor Kent Syverud after the clip was released last weekend. Indeed, sir. Quite, quite. In the clip, we see a group of apparently drunk men surrounding an individual seated in a chair, who, his head bobbing, is pretending to be disabled. One of the young lads can be heard saying that the reason the supposedly disabled person is drooling is because “he’s retarded.” The video proceeds to show fraternity brothers approaching the seated fellow’s face in sexually aggressive maneuvers. In an earlier video released last week, one Theta Tau member is shown kneeling before another, who extends a penile-shaped something as if a lance to a knight’s shoulder. The kneeling member repeats as instructed that he’ll keep his heart filled with hatred toward blacks and Jews. (The video’s poor quality makes it difficult to follow, but this is how it has been described.) The foregoing would seem ample justification for the expulsion of these students for disgusting behavior unbefitting the school’s motto: “Knowledge crowns those who seek her.” The
university has begun disciplinary proceedings and referred the videos to the district attorney. Fine. In America, even knuckledragging quadrupeds are granted due process. Meanwhile, some consolation can be found in the university’s having already expelled Theta Tau — described as the “oldest, largest, and foremost” fraternity for engineers — from the campus. Let the record show that the national Theta Tau organization has condemned the actions of the Syracuse chapter, whose members insist they were merely satirizing political correctness and spoofing all things deemed off-limits. If you, dear reader, are thinking that the world has gone barking bonkers, then you might be one of The Decents, a very small social stratum whose constituents quietly wander in search of like souls. I’m reminded of novelist Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” a deeply disturbing story about a post-apocalyptic America in which survivors have sorted themselves into either cannibalizing criminals or, in the
JULIE MCMAHON/ASSOCIATED PRESS
The Syracuse University Theta Tau fraternity house in Syracuse, N.Y. The fraternity was suspended over videos with racist, sexist content.
case of a father and young son, guardians of the last burning ember of civilization. These two are among the last of a very few who remember what civilization looked like and what it takes to “carry the fire”: vigilance, dedication, unwavering courage, discipline, loyalty and commitment. Such guardians of the light are much needed in these overcast days of indecency, cruelty and behavior bereft of empathy. Campus protesters and others have described the Syracuse videos as proof of the toxicity of fraternities, generally. It is tempting to agree, but a fraternity gone bad is a symptom of a larger cultural disruption. The causes are many — from the high rates of broken families and fatherless homes to omnipresent pornography (and celebrity porn stars) to rampant narcissism (and the accompanying selfie obsession) — to name a few. Permissiveness in the guise of non-judgment has aided in the triumph of selfish expression predicted by cultural historian Christopher Lasch in his 1979 book, “The Culture of Narcissism.” Somewhere in his imagination, he may have envisioned a future president who would act out his infantile impulses on the world stage when he wrote that “the logic of individualism” would be carried to “the extreme of a war of all against
all, the pursuit of happiness to the dead end of a narcissistic preoccupation with the self.” Thus, Theta Tau’s disgusting frat theater was but a fresh episode in what should be understood as a gradual unraveling of decent society — a dimming of the light. But what, you ask, can anyone do to shift the chancellor’s “intersecting grounds” in such a rough culture? It’s an old saying, but charity begins at home, meaning that children learn the values of decency — do unto others — from their parent-leaders within the family’s miniature social system. It’s a big lift to fix, but history has determined that solid families best serve the community interest. This surely is Ground Zero for our ascent. Courage, it seems, is needed now to do the hard thing at Syracuse and expel the boys — not for expressing racism and antiSemitism, or for lampooning the disabled, none of which brought actual harm to anyone and is probably legally protected speech. Rather, they should be expelled because someone has to carry the fire. Expel them, Mr. Chancellor, because their behavior is beneath the dignity of your institution — and of a nation they little deserve to inherit. Courage, sir. I’ll lend you a candle. n
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OPINIONS
KLMNO WEEKLY
TOM TOLES
A guilty verdict years in the making MARGARET SULLIVAN is The Washington Post’s media columnist.
The guilty verdict against Bill Cosby might seem to say that American culture has changed overnight for women accusing powerful men of sexual misconduct. After all, a year ago, Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose dominated morning TV. Harvey Weinstein’s movie empire seemed untouchable. In just months, it’s all come tumbling down. The truth is that it’s taken decades — or more — for a slow heat to finally boil over. Anita Hill told her truths to a public unfamiliar even with the term “sexual harassment” in 1991, and the man she accused became a Supreme Court justice. But since the change began, it has come fast and relentlessly. There is now a clear shift toward believing credible accusers. This is because of the now-undeniable truth — revealed in painstaking reporting — that some of the most powerful men in American media, entertainment, business and politics for too long abused women with impunity. “This is fast culture change and an important milestone, but it’s taken centuries to get here,” said Nancy Erika Smith, who represented Gretchen Carlson in her lawsuit against Fox News cofounder Roger Ailes. He stepped down from his post atop the media world in mid-2016. Once the boiling point was
reached, there was no turning down the heat. The New York Times and the New Yorker wrote their first stories about Weinstein’s accusers barely six months ago. After that, so many other stories about sexual abuse and assault quickly followed. Congressmen, comics, business moguls, actors, journalists. Across many industries and workplaces, powerful figures have tumbled, one after another, like so many highflying birds falling from the sky. “Anita Hill suffered the horror, initially, of not being believed,” said Jill Abramson, co-author with Jane Mayer of “Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas.” A year after
the Thomas confirmation hearings, she told me, the number flipped: More Americans believed Hill than Thomas. “That was the beginning of mass understanding of how endemic the problem of sexual harassment is,” Abramson said. Cosby’s retrial — following a hung jury last spring when prosecutors first took him to court — was the first prominent criminal trial of the #MeToo era. And though the jury was instructed not to bring recent headlines into their thinking, no one can control the effects of a culture that is righting itself. “Things are much different now,” Steve Fairlie, a Philadelphia-area defense attorney, told my colleague Manuel Roig-Franzia earlier this month. Cosby’s defense team, Fairlie said, had to know that “the prosecution is marching into battle waving this banner of #MeToo.” For many women — including those who have suffered harassment or abuse without being believed — the guilty verdict against Cosby seems almost miraculous. It’s a day they never thought would dawn. Roig-Franzia wrote of the charged reaction in the
Pennsylvania courtroom Thursday, relating how, as the forewoman of the jury said the words “guilty, guilty, guilty,” the courtroom “rocked with emotion.” But while there was profound relief, and release, there remains a sense of what hasn’t happened yet. What hasn’t changed. Lauren Duca, the firebrand young writer for Teen Vogue, remained far from satisfied, tweeting that the verdict was just a start: “We’re all still part of the society that allowed him to traumatize over 60 women, silencing their stories with fear of backlash, while he thrived in the spotlight for decades.” A memorable New York magazine cover image in July 2015 featured 35 Cosby accusers in four long rows. Its message was clear: There is strength in numbers. That Cosby now faces perhaps decades in prison is almost unbelievable after all this time. And within that sense of wonder, paradoxes abound. The seismic change that seems so sudden didn’t happen overnight. And the verdict that centered on one brave woman’s truth-telling required the courage of hundreds. n
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KLMNO WEEKLY
OPINIONS
BY CHRISTOPHER WEYANT FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE
Stop turning killers into stars DAVID VON DREHLE writes a twice-weekly column for The Washington Post.
There it was again. On the car radio after this morning’s school dropoff: The killer’s motives are unknown. Maybe you heard it on the evening news. Maybe it popped into your mobile device. Maybe it appeared in the morning paper. The killer’s motives are unknown. Which killer? I’m not naming names. This morning on the radio, it was a man in a van in Toronto. But it could have been the guy with no pants at the Waffle House, or the kid at the high school in Florida, or the sniper with the bump stock in Las Vegas . . . the nightclub in Orlando . . . the grade school in Sandy Hook, Conn. . . . the movie theater in Aurora, Colo. . . . the university in Virginia . . . His motives are unknown. So we must hear the killer’s name over and over again. We must view the same mug shot or driver’s license photo with every update of the day’s headlines. The mass murderer’s unknown motives compel us to document his last weeks, last days, last hours, as if following his footsteps might lead us, like pirates with a treasure map, to a buried trunk full of why. I suppose there is nothing new in this pursuit. The murderer’s
mind is magnetic; drawing in Dostoevsky and Dreiser, captivating Capote, mesmerizing Mailer. This month, the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing was awarded to Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah for her powerful magazine essay in search of the motives behind the Charleston, S.C., church massacre. Indeed, I’ve gone myself in search of motives. I have combed the psychiatric files of a serial killer and traced the movements of a firebomber. But that was a long time ago, and in the ensuing decades I’ve noticed a dismal sameness to these projects. The killer is alienated, aggrieved and grandiose. He is oversensitized to his own hurt and dead to the pain of others. Take a narcissist, stir in some paranoia, season with sociopathy, and there’s your deadly stew. But it’s such an unsatisfying concoction. Our hunger for reason isn’t satisfied by a stew of
BY MORIN FOR THE MIAMI HERALD
irrational and non-rational factors. Mental distress is a what, not a why — or so it seems in the onward pursuit of motives. Sometimes, the killer spells out his reasons, as the Charleston murderer did. He hated black people and hoped to start a race war. There was no deeper gloss than that, he insisted. Yet it’s never quite explanation enough, because no motive ever matches the awful weight and finality of the crime. We want something commensurate, something symmetrical, an injury or crusade equal to all the blood shed by innocent strangers. Instead we have only these small men with their lethal inadequacies. If the only harm done were this communal disappointment — motives still unknown! reasons unexplained! — I would not be complaining. But evidence continues to accumulate that many of these killers are eager for their moment in this spotlight. “Directors will be fighting over this story,” said one of the Columbine High School gunmen in a pre-taped video testimony. “Just look at how many fans you can find for all different types of mass murderers,” observed the Sandy Hook gunman. “A man who was known by no one, is now known by everyone,”
the gunman who attacked an Oregon community college observed. Writing admiringly of yet another homicidal enigma he had seen on television, the Oregon gunman continued: “His face splashed across every screen, his name across the lips of every person on the planet, all in the course of one day. Seems like the more people you kill, the more you’re in the limelight.” And so it continues, new sickos stimulated by the images of the ones before, staking their own claims to a news cycle or two, their own faces flashed repeatedly on the screen, and their motives pronounced unknown. On the car radio this morning, there it was again: The reporter said the man in Toronto was a fan of the mass killer in Santa Barbara, Calif., who summed it up this way: “Infamy is better than total obscurity.” So I ask my fellow journalists: When the killers themselves are telling us they draw inspiration from the prospect of our coverage, why do we continue to say their names and show their pictures? Nothing is ever learned by doing this. No explanation requites the deadly facts. If nothing’s gained, what could be our motive — especially knowing that we might be supplying theirs? n © The Washington Post
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KLMNO WEEKLY
FIVE MYTHS
Recycling BY
B RIAN C LARK H OWARD
From the kitchen table to the editorial pages, people have been de bating the merits of recycling for decades. Does it really save energy and money? Can I recycle that yogurt cup or juice box? At the same time, recycling technology and global markets have evolved quickly, leaving some consumers confused or stuck in old, outdated ways. A lot of myths persist about those blue bins. Here are some of the most common. MYTH NO. 1 Recycling uses more energy than making something new. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, recycling aluminum cans saves 95 percent of the energy needed to make new ones from raw materials. Recycling steel and tin cans saves 60 to 74 percent, recycling paper saves about 60 percent, and recycling plastic and glass saves about onethird of the energy compared with making those products from virgin materials. The energy saved from recycling one glass bottle will operate a 100-watt light bulb for four hours. MYTH NO. 2 Items must be meticulously sorted for recycling. In general, people don’t need to sort their recyclables to anywhere near the degree they used to. More communities are now using “single stream” systems, in which people are encouraged to place all their recyclables into one container. Cleaner materials reduce odors and speed the process, but the recycling steps involve washing, shredding and crushing the material, and then often melting it. Food residue and impurities like paper clips are burned off or collected through magnets and other means. Items made from multiple types of materials, like juice cartons, can be more difficult to recycle, but each facility handles such materials based on its own equipment and needs. Right now, more than 60 percent of U.S.
households have access to carton recycling, and product manufacturers have been working on making packaging that is easier to recycle. MYTH NO. 3 Products made from recycled content are lower quality. Manufacturers have learned a great deal since the early days, and consumer and corporate demand for recycled products has risen so steadily that producers have made considerable strides in quality. “As more and more companies publish their sustainability goals, the use of recycled resins is transitioning from just a low-cost alternative to a specified part of many new products,” Ron Whaley, CEO of Geo-Tech Polymers, an Ohio recycler, told Plastics Technology. “. . . Products must now meet the same high quality and performance characteristics as virgin resin.” Glass, plastic and metal containers with recycled content have been approved for use with food products by the Food and Drug Administration.
signs of maturing. Nina Belluci Butler, CEO of research and consulting firm More Recycling, says markets have been relatively stable for plastic bottles, which means fewer recyclables headed for the landfill. Contamination can increase the amount of recyclables that must be discarded — across the United States, about 25 percent of items placed in blue bins can’t be recycled at their end point — but the solution is better consumer awareness, not abandonment of programs. As for the worry that rogue garbage collectors are simply tossing our carefully sorted materials into the dust heap, there’s just not much evidence of it happening on a large scale.
MYTH NO. 4 Recyclables just end up in the trash. Some material marked for recycling has landed in the trash: In 2013, China’s crackdown on imports of “low-quality” scrap materials caused some U.S. recyclers to divert some of their collected plastics to landfills. Since then, though, the domestic recycling industry has shown
MYTH NO. 5 Recycling should pay for itself. The idea that municipalities should make money, or at least break even, on recycling programs is a popular talking point. But cities can’t control world markets. Recycled materials are economic commodities, and their value rises and falls. When oil prices
VINCENT KESSLER/REUTERS
95%
Energy saved using recylced cans to make new ones compared with using raw materials, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
are low, it’s cheaper to make plastics from virgin materials. While many jurisdictions find that they can make money off a recycling program, some places struggle. A state-of-the-art recycling facility in Alabama was forced to close less than two years after its grand launch after global commodity prices tanked. A number of entrepreneurs are working on new business models to increase participation in recycling and make it more profitable for cities. Recyclebank rewards consumers who recycle with various incentives. Recycling can be a messy business, and sometimes it’s a net loss for a jurisdiction. But the long-term economics remain relatively sound, especially since prices for oil and other raw materials are expected to climb. And recycling creates jobs — some 1.25 million in the United States. Beyond short-term dollars and cents, it’s clear that recycling provides numerous benefits to the environment and society. n Howard is a senior digital writer and editor covering the environment at National Geographic. This was written for The Washington Post.
SUNDAY, APRIL 29, 2018
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