The Washington Post National Weekly - May 1, 2016

Politics Cruz’s conflicting stances 4

World Brazil’s poor leave party 11

Entertainment Comics are getting more colorful 16

5 Myths On Harriet Tubman 23

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KLMNO WEEKLY

THE FIX

Cruz throws a Hail Mary BY

C HRIS C ILLIZZA

T

ed Cruz has named Carly Fiorina as his vice-presidential pick in the event he becomes the GOP nominee. Why Fiorina? And why now?

The second question is easier to answer.

Cruz and his team understand that after the primary votes over the past two weeks, any momentum he might have had following Wisconsin on April 5 is now gone. And all of it has gone to Donald Trump who now looks darnnear unstoppable in his quest to become the GOP’s nominee.

Given that reality, Cruz needs to change the narrative of the race. Immediately. If Cruz loses to Trump this week in Indiana, the nomination fight will be effectively over. And if nothing changes in the race in the Hoosier State, Cruz will lose.

Announcing Fiorina is a big swing at storychanging. Every second that cable TV and local media outlets spend talking about Cruz and Fiorina is a second that Trump doesn’t dominate the conversation. And what recent history has told us is that when Trump dominates the conversation, he almost always wins.

This is rightly understood as a desperate attempt to retake the momentum in the race before it’s too late. To Cruz’s credit, he’s trying it.

(I’m a big believer in leaving it all out on the field. If you are going to lose, lose with all of your best plays called. Or something.)

Now to the first question: Why Fiorina?

Let’s take as a given that since Fiorina’s campaign ended and she endorsed Cruz on March 9, the two have found out that they have a genuine rapport and share a vision for the country.

What else does she bring Cruz? In order of importance: A woman: Trump’s numbers among female

KLMNO WEEKLY

TY WRIGHT/GETTY IMAGES

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) named former HewlettPackard chief executive Carly Fiorina as his pick for a possible running mate.

voters — especially in a general election — are disastrous. Cruz has struggled to drive that message home in the primary but is clearly hoping that by elevating Fiorina to I’ll-pickher-if-I-can-pick-anyone status that Fiorina can help reach female voters whom the senator from Texas needs, not just in Indiana but going forward in the race.

A Californian: Fiorina is a known commodity in California Republican circles due in large part to her 2010 Senate campaign, which, although she lost, got better post-campaign reviews than the gubernatorial effort run by fellow wealthy businesswoman Meg Whitman.

Cruz is banking on Fiorina as an able surrogate for him in California — both in front of

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the camera and behind the scenes — in advance of the state’s June 7 primary. By that point, Trump should be nearing the 1,237 delegates he needs to be the nominee, and depriving him of a handful here and there in California congressional districts may be Cruz’s only option. He believes Fiorina can help that cause.

An attack dog: This works on a near-term and long-term basis. In the near term, Cruz now has an attack dog who has proved to be relatively effective in battling Trump. Fiorina’s reputation on that front is largely built on a single exchange during a CNN-sponsored debate in September 2015 in which she appeared to get the better of the real estate mogul who has made comments about her face. (Yes, really.)

Long term — meaning if Cruz is the nominee — Fiorina is a potentially potent weapon to attack Hillary Clinton. In fact, during her own presidential campaign, Fiorina was, by far, the most willing to hit Clinton on personal matters — an approach she would probably continue if/when she was formally the Republican Party’s vice-presidential nominee. And Cruz probably believes Fiorina, as a woman, would have more leeway and be more effective in those attacks.

None of it is unreasonable. And if Cruz is going to pick a VP this far in advance of the party convention — and with so little certainty that he will ever actually be in a position to pick a second in command — he could do worse than Fiorina.

But make no mistake: This is a Hail Mary pass. It, like the deal that Cruz and John Kasich cut last week, amounts to a tacit acknowledgment that if nothing changes in the race, Trump is going to win.

Could it work? Sure. Sometimes Hail Marys get caught. But usually they get knocked down and the other team starts celebrating. n

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

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ON THE COVER Several thousand U.S. schools sit outside areas where high-speed Internet access is easily available, leaving students struggling. Washington Post illustration; original image from iStock

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POLITICS

Cruz builds broad base by shifting his stances

MICHAEL ROBINSON CHAVEZ/THE WASHINGTON POST

To suit a fractured GOP, he has touted policy positions that don’t always fit together

BY D AVID A . F AHRENTHOLD AND K ATIE Z EZIMA

A

t the start of the presidential campaign, Ted Cruz told voters he would be the only “consistent conservative” in a crowded Republican field.

Then he confronted the modern GOP — a fractured party, in which each faction has a different definition of what “conservative” means.

To consistently please all of them, Cruz has had to be inconsistent with himself.

Time and again he has shifted, shaded or obfuscated his positions

— piling on new ideas, which sometimes didn’t fit with the old.

Cruz, for instance, promised libertarians that he would show a strict respect for the Constitution’s checks and balances.

Then, the senator from Texas promised social conservatives that he would scrap one of those checks and balances, stripping lifetime tenure from Supreme Court justices.

He criticized Donald Trump’s plan for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. Then he seemed to support it. He appeared skeptical of military intervention in Syria. Then he vowed to find out

whether “sand can glow in the dark.”

Cruz’s maneuvering has helped him build and maintain a base of support among the party’s activist class: If Trump fails to win the GOP nomination outright, Cruz could have enough backing among Republican delegates to win it after the first ballot at the party’s convention in Cleveland in July.

But while Cruz’s rightward shifts might have been politically smart during the primary season, they probably would create major challenges during the general election, putting Cruz far to the right of most voters.

Republican Ted Cruz addresses his supporters at a Maryland rally just days before last Tuesday’s primary.

Cruz’s rightward policy shifts might have been politically smart during the primary season, but they could create major challenges during the general election.

“Now he’s in this wonderful position where he’s both the last antiestablishment candidate acceptable who is not named Donald Trump, and he’s also the last establishment candidate,” said Matt Welch of the libertarian magazine Reason, applauding Cruz’s policy shifts. “That’s just a genius level of maneuvering.”

“The question is: What might he believe, in the middle of all of that?” Welch said. “And I think people have a right to be very skeptical as to whether there is a real core belief system.”

Cruz’s campaign did not respond to a detailed list of questions about

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POLITICS his policy positions.

It’s clear that, on a number of issues, Cruz has been very consistent in his beliefs. He has opposed giving undocumented immigrants a path to U.S. citizenship. He says that climate change is not a significant problem, defying considerable scientific evidence. Cruz has consistently opposed abortion, including incasesinwhichthepregnancywas caused by rape. He opposes samesex marriage. But Cruz says that — despite those personal feelings — he would leave decisions on abortion and marriage to the states.

That was of a piece with Cruz’s politics during his early years in the Senate: He adhered to tea party originalism, which thought Washington could be corrected by a return to the limited vision of its Founding Fathers.

“We need to restore the Constitution as our standard,” Cruz says on his campaign website.

Then, after the Supreme Court decision last year that made samesex marriage a right nationwide, Cruz said the Constitution needed a change.

“I am proposing an amendment to the United States Constitution that would subject the justices of the Supreme Court to periodic judicial-retention elections,” Cruz wroteinanopinionpieceinNational Review. Now, Cruz said, the public would periodically get a chance to throw out “judicial tyrants” with whom they disagreed.

He didn’t actually file that proposed amendment, but a point was made. This was a different kind of conservatism, one in which some policies were so important that the Constitution should adapt to them.

“If Ted Cruz is a ‘constitutionalist,’ heisasore-loser,fair-weatherconstitutionalist,” David Vladeck, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, wrote in an email. “The Constitution’s framers would be aghast at Cruz’s proposal to undermine the Constitution’s main protection against a tyrannical majority.”

On immigration, Cruz once championed policies from his party’s business wing — including big increases in legal immigration. He called for doubling the caps on the number of green cards granted each year and supported a fivefold increase in the number of visas granted to high-skilled guest workers, known as H-1B visas. He demurred when asked what he would do with the millions of undocumented immigrants already living

MATT SLOCUM/ASSOCIATED PRESS

in the United States.

But then came Trump.

After the billionaire used promises of a sweeping immigration crackdown to rocket to the top of the GOP race, Cruz’s own policies grew sharply tougher. He was against any increase in legal immigration. He called for the highskilled visa program to be halted for 180 days so that reported abuses in the system could be investigated.

Rick Tyler, Cruz’s former communications director, said he thinks Cruz is “to the right of everyone who’s running” in the race.

“If he changed his position on H-1B — and it’s fair to say he did, but you have to look underneath it and say, ‘Did he change his principle on it?’ No, and I think that’s the important thing,” Tyler said.

On the question of what to do with illegal immigrants, Cruz’s answers grew tougher and tougher.

First, Cruz said, he wouldn’t offer them legal status. But he wouldn’t follow Trump’s lead and deport immigrants en masse.

Then, maybe, he would.

“Yes, we should deport them,” Cruz said on Fox News. When asked by host Bill O’Reilly if he would “look for them,” Cruz said yes.

“Of course you would. That’s what ICE exists for,” Cruz said, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “We have law enforcement that looks for people who are violating the laws that apprehends them and deports them.”

If Trump had redefined what the

most conservative position on immigration was, Cruz was going to keep up. At rallies now, Cruz makes this explicit without saying Trump’s name: He says he wants to build a border wall and that he already “has someone in mind to build it.”

Another noticeable shift was in Cruz’s approach to the federal budget. At the beginning of his campaign, his ideas seemed drawn to please anti-tax conservatives, whose biggest concern was to reduce what Washington raises and spends. Cruz proposed instituting a single flat income tax, set at 10 percent. That would be a massive boon to the rich, who pay much higher rates now: The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center found that the top 0.1 percent of earners would get a tax cut equivalent to 29 percent of their after-tax income.

It would also take a massive slice out of overall federal revenue: The Tax Policy Center estimated the loss at $8.6 trillion over a decade. That was a major departure from past GOP orthodoxy: 2012 nominee Mitt Romney didn’t want to reduce revenue at all. That was still not as big as Trump’s proposed tax cut, which the center said would eliminate $9.5 trillion in future revenue.

Cruz had specific suggestions for what he would cut to partially offset the loss. He would eliminate four Cabinet agencies — the departments of Commerce, Energy, Education, and Housing and Urban Development — and the Internal Revenue Service (Cruz would shift the

Ted Cruz prays with Maryann Lang, center, of Nanticoke, Pa., and Candace Haft of Factoryville, Pa., after a rally last month in Scranton, Pa.

“I think people have a right to be very skeptical as to whether there is a real core belief system.”

Matt Welch of the libertarian magazine Reason

KLMNO WEEKLY

tax-collecting function to a new office with less power and fewer employees). In fact, Cruz wanted a new constitutional amendment to require a balanced federal budget.

But then, while campaigning in hawkish South Carolina, Cruz added another piece to the plan.

Even as he slashed funding for the rest of the government, he promised a spending spree at the Pentagon: dozens more warships, hundreds more planes, thousands moretroops.Analystshaveestimated that the cost could exceed $1 trillion — and that it could reach $2.4 trillion — over a decade.

“All these promises can’t add up.

It’s not possible,” said Marc Goldwein of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. He estimated that if Cruz tried to make good on all of these promises — plus another pledge to fully fund Social Security benefits for the near future — he might have to cut all other spending by 85 or 90 percent. “It’s notrealisticallypossibletocuttaxes by $8 trillion and increase defense spending by $2.5 billion and balance the budget.”

That shift was connected to another, in Cruz’s policies toward the military. In the Senate, Cruz had voted repeatedly against the bill that sets policy and authorizes funding for the Pentagon, often objecting that it did not have enough civil-liberties protections for Americans accused of terrorism. Late last year, Cruz was deeply skeptical of U.S. military interventions overseas — even in Syria.

“We have no dog in the fight of the Syrian civil war,” he said.

Cruzhassaidheremainsskeptical of unnecessary foreign interventions,butinFebruaryhecalledforan extensive Pentagon buildup. He also began to call for aggressive tactics againsttheIslamicStateinSyria:The United States would carpet-bomb the militants, Cruz said, and find out “if sand can glow in the dark.”

That has left even proponents of a largerU.S.militarywonderingabout the sincerity of Cruz’s positions.

“I don’t buy that he understands what he’s trying to do,” said Chris Harmer,aretiredNavycommander and national security consultant.

HesaidheagreedwithCruzthatthe Navy was too small, but he wondered why he hadn’t said so before.

“TedCruzshouldhavespentthelast four years making a case for: This is why the end state of the Navy ought to be bigger . . . He hasn’t done any of that,” Harmer said. n

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POLITICS

Obama works to shore up party He has presided over huge loss in electoral power to GOP — but is trying to turn that trend around

BY

J ULIET E ILPERIN

B

arack Obama rose to prominence as a different kind of Democrat, an outsider who was not part of the establishment and who would chart a separate course. Eight years later, the president finds himself working hard to restore a party from which he was once eager to stand apart.

Obama has presided over a greater loss of electoral power for his party than any two-term president since World War II. And 2016 represents one last opportunity for him to reverse that trend.

But it is also a challenge for the president, who has experimented with establishing his own political base outside the Democratic National Committee and has downsized the scale of political operations inside the White House.

Between 2008 and 2015, Democrats lost 13 Senate seats, 69 House seats, 913 state legislative seats, 11 governorships and 32 state legislative chambers, according to data compiled by University of Virginia professor Larry J. Sabato. The only president in the past 75 years who comes close is Dwight D. Eisenhower, who saw a similar decline for the GOP during his time in office.

“The Republican Party is arguably stronger now than they’ve ever been in 80 years, despite not having the White House,” said Simon Rosenberg, a longtime Democratic operative and president of NDN, a liberal think tank.

Democrats also are concerned about whether the coalition Obama galvanized in 2008, and then reassembled in 2012, will turn out when he is no longer on the ballot. The current Democratic presidential primary contest has so far fractured that coalition, with young people flocking to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont while many voters of color — especially older ones — back former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.

Manyfactorshavecontributedto Republicans’ gains on the state and federallevels,includingaconcerted push by their donors to target state races and a midterm election that allowed them to lock in favorable

congressional district lines.

Obama’s defenders contend that after major victories in 2006 and 2008, it was predictable that Democrats would lose significant ground in the midterm elections of 2010 and 2014. But, they add, the president’s two successful White House bids have vastly upgraded the party’s voter outreach infrastructure by expanding the national voter file the Democratic National Committee first started in 2006. And they point to the huge increases in the number of Democratic campaign volunteers — from roughly 252,000 in 2004 to 2.2 million in 2012 — as evidence of that upgrade.

“Barack Obama has singlehandedly modernized the Democrats’ ability to wage campaigns on the local level,” said Jim Messina, who managed Obama’s reelection campaign.

Rosenberg agrees, saying that the president built on the work of Bill Clinton, the only other twoterm Democratic president of the last generation. “Clinton established the intellectual framework for the Democratic Party and Obama modernized its politics,” Rosenberg said. “What isn’t there yet is a large enough set of leaders from the next generation to carry it on.”

Some of Obama’s earliest decisions continue to reverberate neg-

atively for Democrats.

Organizing for Action (OFA), the nonprofit group that grew out of Obama’s campaign operation, has continued to compete with the Democratic National Committee for Democratic dollars — first as a parallel organization within the DNC and then as a separate entity.

In the first six months of 2013, the DNC raised $30.8 million, while OFA raised $13 million. And this was at a time when the DNC was carrying more than $18 million in debt.

Those fiscal constraints meant the DNC had to curtail the money it provided to state parties, a practice that DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) reversed in 2015 by increasing the monthly minimum transfer to each state from $5,000 a month to $7,500.

Close cooperation has taken time; OFA gave the DNC limited access to its list of supporters starting in 2013, but it turned over the entire list only in August 2015.

Now, according to Nevada Democratic Party chair Roberta Lange, “That voter file is used by everyone in our state.”

While many OFA volunteers have focused on local referendums and other local political battles, the group has earned the enmity of some party stalwarts for diverting resources. During a 2010 gathering of Democratic gover-

nors in Washington, according to multiple attendees, one governor asked a senior presidential political adviser, “Will the OFA please join the Democratic Party?”

But this White House, unlike that of Bill Clinton, has always kept its political operation on a separate track.

Under Clinton, the political affairs office boasted roughly a dozen people — in addition to the deputy chief of staff who oversaw political affairs — and the president got a political briefing once a week.

By contrast, Obama limited election activity in the White House, a reflection of both his desire to keep any scandal at bay and the influence of White House chief of staff Denis McDonough, who has little campaign experience outside of working on Obama’s first presidential bid.

Obama phased out the political affairs office after two years to move the operation to his Chicago campaign headquarters. He appointed David Simas, who directs the White House Office of Political Strategy and Outreach, to his current position only in January 2014, after congressional Democrats complained they did not have a direct White House contact for political matters.

Former Obama senior political adviser David Plouffe said that it will take the commitment of wealthy Democratic donors — not just top party officials — to target state contests the way Republicans have. “I think we all agree something has to be done,” he said.

“The question is how. It’s not going to be the DNC.” Obama, for his part, has set limits for what he will do in connection with super PACs while in office.

While he did fundraising events for the one that backed his reelection campaign, Priorities USA, McDonough and Obama’s lawyers curtailed what the president would do two years later for the Senate Majority PAC, a similar entity supporting Senate Democrats.

In an April 2014 memo to thenSenate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), the PAC’s counsel, Marc E. Elias, stipulated that to avoid any conflict of interest

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POLITICS Obama would not actually ask potential Senate Majority PAC donors for money even when appearing at one of the group’s events.

After a protracted and bitter exchange, Reid’s aides abandoned their effort to involve Obama in any more than a few super PAC events, and the president agreed to transfer $5 million from the DNC to both the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the fall of 2014. During the 2012 cycle, the DNC made no transfers to the two committees.

But with his popularity high among Democrats and no election ahead of him, Obama has been working to shore up his party, both financially and politically. And his aides say Obama has turned controversial issues, including immigration, gay rights and climate change, to the Democrats’ advantage.

“He will be aggressive, from the presidential level down to the state and local representative level,” Simas said.

Recently in Dallas, before dozens of guests who had each given thousands of dollars to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Obama diagnosed one of the problems: “Democrats just aren’t very good at focusing on down-ballot races,” he said, according to two participants.

The president may have been stating the obvious. But it reflected a shift in thinking among Democrats, who are working furiously to shore up state-level candidates to avoid getting beaten once again on redistricting. Since 2013, Obama has devoted considerable time to fundraising for the DNC and both congressional committees, doing more than 100 events for the DNC alone.

In 2014, many Democrats in conservative states were eager to tap Obama’s fundraising prowess but were reluctant to appear sideby-side with a president with sagging popularity ratings. Already, 2016 is different.

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Ben Ray Luján (N.M.) said in an interview that the president will help in unifying the Democratic base.

“He’s going to help boost turnout in November, which is critical when you’re winning races on the margins,” Luján said. n

KLMNO WEEKLY

THE TAKE CAMPAIGN .... 2016

Indiana may be last stand for the anti-Trump forces BY

D AN B ALZ

A

fter his clean sweep of five primaries Tuesday, the options for denying Donald Trump the Republican presidential nomination continue to dwindle rapidly — so swiftly, in fact, that this week’s primary in Indiana now appears to be a make-or-break event for the stop-Trump forces and especially the candidate running second, Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.).

What happened in Tuesday’s primaries was not wholly unexpected. Trump was playing on home turf, in states where Republican voters for the most part are less ideologically conservative than in other areas of the country.

But as with his victory in New York, just because something was predicted doesn’t mean it isn’t significant.

Which is why the losers — Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who are now in an odd-couple alliance to stop Trump — did what losing candidates have done throughout this long primary season. They tried to make the best case they could that the battles ahead, not those just concluded, are the ones that really count. They are left to cling to no more than that.

For Trump’s rivals, all is now a numbers game — including the challenge of making everyone think that the front-runner can be kept short of the 1,237 delegates needed to win on the first ballot at the convention. Based on raw arithmetic, it’s not unreasonable for Cruz, Kasich and others in the party who don’t want Trump as their nominee to express hope-toconfidence that he can be stopped.

Under the many possible projected outcomes in the remaining 10 states, Trump will end up either just over that magic number or somewhat short of it. At some point after June 7, the last day of GOP primaries, it will be known whether Trump has a hard list of delegates who will vote for him on the first ballot — those who are

bound to him on the basis of primary and caucus results, or those who are not bound but have made public pledges to him.

But there is more at work than just counting numbers. When Trump broke the 60 percent barrier in the popular vote in New York, it forced many Republicans to take notice and begin to acknowledge, if grudgingly, that he seemed more likely than before to prevail. That feeling could gather force on the basis of his powerful

RICKY CARIOTI/THE WASHINGTON POST

Donald Trump scored major wins in five state primaries last week, adding to his delegate count.

showing Tuesday night, when in state after state he rolled up huge margins.

Beyond his victories, there was evidence in the exit polls to suggest that the will among rank-andfile Republicans to stop a Trump nomination, even if he falls a bit short of 1,237 at the end of the primary race, might not be as strong as Cruz, Kasich and the GOP establishment would like to see.

Those exit polls indicated that majorities of Republicans who voted Tuesday say the candidate who has won the most — insert here your choice of states, delegates or raw votes — should end up becoming the nominee. Beyond that, there was evidence that in these states, at least — and granted, the five states composing Tuesday’s battlefield hardly constitute Cruz country — more voters said

they couldn’t vote for the Texan in November than said that of Trump.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus has said repeatedly that coming close won’t determine the nomination, that the nominee must break the 1,237 barrier. That’s a message some of the leaders in the stopTrump movement are trying to reinforce, no matter what has happened on the past two primary nights.

Katie Packer, who oversees the anti-Trump super PAC called Our Principles, said nothing that has happened this past week or earlier changes her group’s calculations about blocking Trump.

Packer sees California as the ultimate arbiter of the success of the stop-Trump forces, if only because the state will award 172 delegates on June 7. But as a practical matter, Indiana and the 57 delegates up for grabs in its winnertake-all contest Tuesday loom even larger. A Trump victory this week would amplify calls for the party to begin to rally behind him.

Cruz knows this, and that explains the unusual pact between the senator from Texas and the Ohio governor. Kasich, whose only strategy is to have the GOP nomination contest go beyond two or three ballots in Cleveland, has agreed to throttle back his campaign efforts in Indiana. That will give Cruz what he long has wanted: a clean matchup against Trump. In return, Cruz will not invest in later primaries in New Mexico and Oregon.

Cruz has had success in corralling delegates in inside combat at recent state conventions, outmaneuvering Trump to the point of embarrassment. But those delegates aren’t all available to him on a first ballot. Some will go to Cleveland bound to Trump.

Cruz needs to deny Trump those 57 Indiana delegates or face the reality that his candidacy could come to a bleak conclusion. n

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NATION

A shot-by-shot look at gun violence BY

T ODD C . F RANKEL

I

n Canton, Ohio, one of the most common complaints that police chief Bruce Lawver hears is about gunfire. Shots fired. That unnerving pop of a firearm being discharged.

Last year, at least 772 bullets were fired in one tiny part of Canton, a city of 73,000 people.

That is more than two bullets every day.

Yet, either by luck or intent, relatively few of these projectiles hit anyone. Gunfire across the entire city of Canton resulted in eight homicides, 11 suicides and 25 non-fatal injuries in 2015, according to police statistics.

This is how gun violence is usually measured — in the cold calculation of deaths and injuries.

But that familiar yardstick misses a lot.

It does not account for all the times when a gun is fired in anger, in fear or by accident and the bullet simply misses its mark. Yet whether a bullet kills or injures someone is an almost random outcome from a violent act. It is influenced by the shooter’s aim, if the bullet happens to strike vital organs and even how far a victim must travel to reach a hospital trauma center.

“It’s just not the whole picture,” said Jennifer Doleac, an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Virginia, who studies the connection between gunfire and crime. “There’s a lot more gun violence than what is reflected in homicide rates.”

The more telling number about gun violence might be “shots fired.” And now, thanks to broader adoption of new technologies, it is getting easier to show just how common gun violence is in America.

Last year, there were 165,531 separate gunshots recorded in 62 different urban municipalities nationwide, including places such as San Francisco, Washington, D.C., St. Louis and Canton, according to ShotSpotter, the company behind a technology that listens for gunfire’s acoustic signature and reports it to authorities.

SETH WENIG/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Tracking every discharge creates broader picture of a growing problem Even that eye-popping number captures only a fraction of the bullets fired each year. It does not include data from rural areas or the nation’s two largest cities — Los Angeles does not use ShotSpotter and New York City was excluded from the 2015 tally because it did not start until mid-year.

The ShotSpotter system also covers just a sliver of each city that it is in, usually higher-crime neighborhoods. ShotSpotter’s total coverage was 173 square miles last year. And the devices tend to not hear gunshots fired indoors.

Still, the data begins to provide

a fuller picture of the nation’s rampant gunfire.

Last year, those 165,531 gunshots were divided among 54,699 different incidents — an average of 150 gunfire incidents every day.

The busiest month for gunfire was May. The busiest day? Dec. 25, Christmas.

And if you want to avoid getting shot, it’s best to lie low from 2 a.m. to 3 a.m. on Saturdays. That was the busiest hour of the week for gunfire. The slowest hour was 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. on Mondays.

In Canton, where the ShotSpotter system covers about 10 percent

New York Police Commissioner William Bratton talks about ShotSpotter in March. His city was excluded from the 2015 ShotSpotter tally because it did not begin using the system until midyear.

of the city, Lawver said it has proven to be an effective crime-fighting tool. Each gunshot shows up as a red dot on a computer map in police cruisers and at police dispatch.

“We’ve found that if you follow the dot, it turns out to be very accurate,” Lawver said.

The gunman might be gone.

But police can still collect shell casings and use that evidence to trace a weapon, the chief said. A pattern develops. And repeated ShotSpotter reports — even without a victim — can lead to increased patrols to try to deter

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NATION further criminal activity. Lawver noted that Canton saw a 20 percent decline in gunfire incidents from 2014 to 2015.

The ShotSpotter system works by triangulating sound picked up by sensors placed on utility poles, light posts and buildings. The widespread use of what amounts to microphones in public has been criticized for privacy concerns.

But supporters say the system is focused on reducing gun violence.

Nationwide, the number of gunfire incidents fell in 2015 compared with 2014, according to ShotSpotter data. The median reduction was nearly 13 percent in the 46 cities that used the system for comparable periods. These limitations makes it difficult for comparisons with other statistics, such as the Gun Violence Archive, which relies on media reports of shootings and found that the number of shooting incidents grew by 2.6 percent last year to 53,195.

But researchers have begun to discover the value in this wealth of data on gunfire.

Doleac, at the University of Virginia, and Purdue professor Jillian Carr found that ShotSpotter data showed evidence of “severe underreporting” of gun violence when compared to the traditional metrics of homicides or 911 calls.

In Washington, D.C., just 1 in 8 gunfire incidents led to a 911 call for “shots fired” in the covered areas.

“It’s clear most people don’t bother to call 911,” Doleac said.

In Washington, there was one reported homicide for every 181 gunfire incidents.

In Oakland, Calif., the other city studied, it was one homicide for every 62 gunshot incidents.

They noted with interest that it appears Oakland’s gunfire was at least twice as deadly as Washington’s gunfire. Although the researchers couldn’t come up with the reasons behind this difference (Were Washington’s gunmen poor shots? Did victims in Oakland get to the hospital more slowly?), the difference points to how measuring gun violence with homicides is problematic.

Doleac said she looked forward to wider adoption of gunshot detection systems.

“We need more data like this,” Doleac said. “It allows for a much better understanding of gun violence.” n

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Millennials pass boomers as our largest living generation BY

T RAVIS M . A NDREWS

T

he term “millennial” comes with many connotations.

They like socialism.

They don’t eat breakfast cereal. They save more money than previous generations. They enjoy a work-life balance, and they often don’t think they’re millennials.

Now, they’re the largest living generation in the United States.

Pew Research Center broke down population estimates released last month by the U.S. Census Bureau. For this exercise, the millennial generation included anyone who was 18 to 34 years old in 2015. The oldest millennial was born in 1981; the youngest in 1997.

By that definition, there are now 75.4 million living millennials, which is a half-million more than the 74.9 million living baby boomers, who were defined as anyone who was 51 to 69 years old in 2015.

The interim generation — Generation X — is projected to follow suit and surpass baby boomers by 2028, Pew also projected.

This, of course, was bound to happen.

But the number is rising partly because of an influx of young immigrants, according to Pew. A 2014 White House report stated, “Many Millennials are immigrants or the children of immigrants who arrived in the United States as part of an upsurge in immigration that began in the 1940s. The share of people age 20 to 34 who were born in a foreign country is now around 15 percent — much higher than it was in 1950 and near the peak of almost 20 percent seen in 1910 during the last great wave of immigration to the United States.”

The generation’s population is expected to peak in 2036 with 81.1 million living members, when the oldest millennial is 56. For context, the baby boomer generation peaked in 1999 with 78.8 million members.

Last year, millennials became the largest generation in the American workforce, Pew reported.

As the country moves forward on issues like marijuana legaliza-

AMANDA VOISARD FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Ebonie Johnson Cooper, left, and Meico Whitlock take a selfie at a millennial reception in 2014 in Washington, D.C.

tion and same-sex marriage, the shifting population could have major political implications. A Gallup poll from last October found 71 percent of them supported marijuana legalization. That same year, Pew found 70 percent were in favor of gay marriage.

Hispanic millennials, in particular, are likely to be a rising influence in upcoming elections. This year, 44 percent of the 27.3 million eligible Hispanic voters are millennials, according to Pew Research Center Hispanic Trends.

That’s about 12 million votes, which are focused heavily in California, Texas and New York.

Projected population by generation In millions

Note: Millennials refers to the population age 18 to 34 as of 2015.

Source: Pew Research Center tabulations of U.S. Census Bureau population projections released December 2014 and 2015 population estimates PEW RESEARCH CENTER

The Democrats have noticed and are creating an organization called “Battleground Texas” with the goal of engaging young voters in that state — particularly Latino voters — and turning it blue, Politico reported. The project will cost tens of millions of dollars.

Of course, political changes aren’t the only ones that might be wrought by millennials.

The generation may change the banking industry by forcing banks to become more mobile. A report cited in Money by Mitek Systems and polling firm Zogby Analytics found that 54 percent of millennials “would pay for goods using their smartphone as a mobile wallet instead of credit cards.” Forbes suggests the generation may force fast-food chains to adopt higherquality ingredients. The Atlantic predicts “that the look and feel of work will undergo a dramatic makeover under the millennial generation,” which could include the abolishment of year-end reviews and the adoption of “millennial values.” The magazine cites Toms Shoes — which gives a pair of shoes to a child in need with each purchase — as a company embracing these values.

Of course, much of this is conjecture and prediction.

One thing is certain: Millennials will continue to surpass baby boomers in sheer numbers.

But will they ever begin to eat breakfast cereal? n

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WORLD

Japan’s most salacious crime news A NNA F IFIELD Tokyo BY

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angsters, the sex trade, gruesome murders, adult videos, body discoveries, suicides, police up to no good. These are the core things Brett Bull looks for after hours.

Not to participate, of course, but to write them up.

The 47-year-old Californian is an engineer in Tokyo by day, Tokyo Reporter by night. Bull has created a site that, as its tagline says, delivers “salacious news on crime and culture.” Think of a hybrid of the National Enquirer, the New York Post and Penthouse. Online. In Japan.

There is the recent story about the Buddhist monk charged with murdering a nail artist. And the one about the playboy antics of a limbless author who was being considered as a political candidate

by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s party. Not to mention the piece about the husband who used garden shears to cut off the penis of a man he suspected was fooling around with his wife (and then flushed it down the toilet).

“Japan is supposed to be a safe country. But based on what I read, I really don’t know that’s true,” said Bull, sitting in a bar in Kabukicho, the heart of seedy Tokyo, not far from his office.

Bull arrived in Tokyo 17 years ago, speaking no Japanese, on a short visit. But then he saw a job ad from a construction company and, well, the rest is history. He began taking some Japanese lessons and he started going out after work with his colleagues from the engineering firm to “hostess bars.”

Hostess bars — and their newer, much rarer cousin, the host bar — are a unique part of Japanese nightlife. Often viewed in the West as tantamount to brothels, for the most part they are just bars where men pay to chat with and be served high-priced drinks by young, attractive women.

“Back in the day, my office was taking me to these hostess clubs,” Bull said. “The everyday experience was not being touched upon in the regular media. Going to

ANNA FIFIELD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Gangsters, porn stars and gruesome murders are the draw for this American and his website hostess clubs was a very average thing to be doing and was not seen as over-the-top or nasty or dirty.”

So he started turning his conversations with hostesses into interviews and contributing them to a friend’s website, along with other pieces on film and culture.

In 2008, he started his own site, Tokyo Reporter, as a standalone home for all the grisly news that is under-covered in the mainstream media. He trawls Japan’s weekly tabloids in search of juicy tales about the Japanese mafia, the roaring porn industry and macabre murder cases. Then he translates the stories and posts them on his site.

He is modest about his language abilities. “I can do okay. It depends on the subject,” he said.

“I’m just reading the news.”

Bull’s first hit story on Tokyo Reporter, translated from a Japanese paper, was about the North Korean military training female agents as honey traps. “It really became big — it knocked the site offline.”

More recently, opponents of migration in Europe seized upon a report that two Turkish men applying for refugee status in Japan were accused of raping and robbing a woman in Tokyo. The opponents pointed to it as grounds for refusing refugees.

Tokyo Reporter gets about 120,000 unique visitors a month, mostly men in their 30s. About half are from Japan and the other half are from the English-speaking world, mainly the United

Brett Bull has created the website Tokyo Reporter, which delivers “salacious news on crime and culture.”

Shown in Tokyo’s red-light district of Kabukicho, the Californian says he realized that big parts of ordinary Japanese life were not being covered in English.

States. Advertising comes from Universe Club (“Explore Tokyo with a sugarbaby”) and covers the costs of the servers and meager fees for a few freelance translators.

While some of the stories, especially those involving crime, are reported in the mainstream media, these are often pared-down reports essentially dictated to reporters by the police press offices.

But the tabloids — recognized recently by David Kaye, the U.N.’s special rapporteur for freedom of speech, as having “significant vibrancy” — are unencumbered by reliance on the authorities and tend to go off-script, digging into the lurid details and coming up with much racier articles.

“It’s very easy to come up with an interesting story that other people aren’t covering,” Bull said.

There’s the husband-and-wife team from Fukuoka who were basically staging their own fight club, as he put it. The people who died ended up going through a rock grinder. “It was something like something out of ‘Fargo,’ ” Bull said, referring to the film in which a body goes into a wood-chipper.

Then there is the hostess who was prosecuted for killing three men but who Bull thinks probably killed six. And the voice actress who was going around drugging and robbing men.

The stories carry disclaimers that they are translations of Japanese reports that have not been verified. But they also have this unusual sentence: “The activities of individuals described herein should not be construed as ‘typical’ behavior of Japanese people nor reflect the intention to portray the country in a negative manner.”

Although Bull said he does not get much trolling for his stories, he is conscious that his site is at odds with the image of Japan that the government — and many in the media — want to portray.

The English versions of Japanese news sites are preoccupied with “trying to make Japan look good,” he said. “It’s almost like these are public-relations departments for the government of Japan. It makes for boring reading.” n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

The Workers’ Party loses its workers A LEX C UADROS Sao Paulo, Brazil BY

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t 24, Elen Rodrigues is part of a generation of Brazilians who have come of age under the Workers’ Party — a movement that promised to lift up the poor for the first time in this deeply unequal nation.

They were among the millions who saw their lives improve during an unprecedented boom that inspired talk of a “Rooseveltian dream” of broad well-being in Brazil. Rodrigues, who went to college on a government scholarship, had barely tasted prosperity, however, when the economy plunged into its deepest recession in decades.

Now she is one of the many working-class Brazilians to turn against the Workers’ Party, even rejecting their onetime hero, unionist-turned-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Amid a longrunning bribery investigation and allegations of budget malfeasance, his successor, Dilma Rousseff, could be impeached by the Senate as soon as this month. And Rodrigues would not mind seeing her go.

“Lula did a great job in so many areas, but the corruption really disappointed me,” Rodrigues said.

“And Dilma’s government has been total confusion — it seems like she simply doesn’t know what she’s doing.”

The crisis has taken a heavy toll on the lower classes. High inflation is eroding already tight incomes, and 3 million Brazilians have lost their jobs since last year — including much of the staff at a steel plant where Rodrigues had secured an administrative job.

Waning support from workers not only makes Rousseff’s removal more likely; disillusionment with her and especially the charismatic Lula, co-founder of one of the most enduring left-wing movements in any Latin American democracy, also has left a vacuum that no other politician can seem to fill.

Part of Lula’s appeal for ordinary Brazilians grows from his life story. Born in the desolate northeastern backlands, he started working in an auto-parts factory near Sao Paulo at 14. As a union

JOEDSON ALVES/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Brazil’s ruling party struggles as poor residents are denied prosperity amid an economic decline leader in the late 1970s, he stood up to the military dictatorship, and as the face of the Workers’ Party in the 1980s, he helped promote the transition to democracy.

Lula and the party came to power in 2003. He is the first president who grew up poor, and he raised the minimum wage every year. He also vastly expanded welfare payments with a program called Bolsa Família, which now keeps 14 million families from going hungry.

One of the ironies of the Workers’ Party’s fall from grace is that its leaders had once vowed to wrest power from a corrupt establishment but ended up producing scandals of their own. It is a story of idealism that wilted as it came into contact with power. To get their projects through a fractious Congress long motivated by patronage and finance political campaigns for their wobbly coalition, some of Lula’s and Rousseff’s closest allies resorted to bribery to grease the gears.

“I used to really like Lula,” said

Vera Santos, 28, a history student from the northeast who lives on the pension of her ailing adoptive mother. “I liked how he spoke, how committed he seemed to helping the poor win the same rights as everyone else. But the Workers’ Party isn’t what I thought it was.”

Lula is being investigated in the Petrobras scheme, in which billions were skimmed from the state oil company, but he has denied wrongdoing. He and Rousseff chalk up the impeachment effort to a “coup” by elites using the scandal as a pretext to gain power.

And indeed, many of the lawmakers who voted to impeach Rousseff in the lower house of Congress last month are implicated in this and other schemes.

But while the millions who have marched for Rousseff’s ouster are generally whiter and wealthier than the population at large, polls indicated that around 60 percent of the poor also support her impeachment.

Rousseff’s popularity with the

Anti-government demonstrators burn a Workers’ Party flag after the lower house of Congress voted to impeach Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff last month. Rousseff is accused of using accounting tricks in managing the federal budget to maintain spending and shore up support.

poor started sinking soon after they ensured her narrow reelection in 2014. With the economy showing signs of trouble, she had campaigned on the promise not to implement austerity measures.

Then once she had won, she abruptly changed course, scaling back social benefits even as interest rates and energy prices spiked.

Such reversals have provoked an identity crisis in the Workers’ Party. Celso Rocha de Barros, a party supporter who writes a column for the Folha de S.Paulo newspaper, says that losing the poor is the movement’s “worst nightmare.” He suggests, though, that the government may have itself to blame.

In the hope of creating “national champions” in industries such as beef and construction, the Workers’ Party transferred money to the top of the income pyramid, benefiting wealthy campaign donors even while adding hundreds of billions of dollars to the national debt.

This disconnection is not lost on ordinary Brazilians. Crisângela Barbosa, 36, makes a living cleaning houses. Standing on the sidelines of a march for impeachment in Sao Paulo, she said, “They’re lendingbillionstoCuba,Venezuela, Africa, while we’re rotting here.”

Still, considering the urgent wants of the poor, it is little surprise they have not switched their support to the opposition. Those leading calls for impeachment speak of slimming down the government, but surveys show that workingclass Brazilians tend to want the opposite: a strong state that will extend the social safety net.

Reflecting their broad disaffection with the political class, 9 out of 10 working-class Brazilians cannot name anyone to lead the country out of its crisis.

“Brazil has been through crises before, but this is the first generation of Brazilians to start losing what they had achieved,” said Renato Meirelles, president of the polling firm Data Popular. “And the debate that really matters to them, about how to create the opportunity to improve their lives again, isn’t happening.” n

ISTOCKPHOTO

COVER STORY

A poor connection to modern life

BY CHICO HARLAN in Lower Peach Tree, Ala.

T

oward the end of a potholed country road, in the computer lab of a one­story school, the Internet one morning choked out a final quiz question about melting icebergs and then sputtered to a halt. The image of a spinning wheel popped onto Tatiana Flowers’s computer screen. Then Cedric Garner Jr.’s.

Within 30 seconds, the problem had spread across the room, and 11 eighth­graders were again practicing the one skill their computer class seemed actually good for: patience. ¶ “Miss Washington, my Learning.com buffering,” Flowers, 14, said. ¶ “Mine buffering, too,” Garner, 13, said. ¶ Another student tried to refresh his screen. “There is no Internet connection,” his Web browser said, and just above the type, there was an image of a dinosaur. ¶ Monroe Intermediate, a K­8 school in rural Alabama, is a tech dinosaur only because it has little choice, sitting in an impoverished community of churches and trailer homes that telecom companies have little financial incentive to wire. Over the past decade and a half, corporations including AT&T, Comcast and Verizon have laid cabling that is capable of transmitting high­speed Internet across much of urban and suburban America. But educators say there is a problem: The companies have essentially finished building in every area continues on next page

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COVER STORY

PHOTOS BY MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON /THE WASHINGTON POST

Lacking dependable Internet, teacher Emilee Ricketts Dunnam works on paper with, from left, A’meria Davis, Daveon Gildersleeve, Jatavion Cunningham and LaDamian Cunningham.

from previous page

where they believe they can profit. And several thousand of America’s schools sit outside these zones, according to EducationSuperHighway, a nonprofit organization that measures Internet access in classrooms.

The experience of students at Monroe Intermediate shows how the financial decisions of telecom companies have put rural students at a disadvantage, leaving some without basic digital abilities that many in America take for granted. Federal regulators are working toward a fix for these out-of-reach of schools, but it’s unclear to what extent these efforts will solve the problem.

The schools with sub-par Internet are scattered around the country, spanning from the far-flung communities of Alaska to the desert towns of New Mexico. The danger is that students who attend these schools will struggle for years with the critical tasks that now require online fluency: applying to colleges, researching papers, looking for jobs.

“This is essentially the definition of the digital divide in education,” said Evan Marwell, the EducationSuperHighway founder and

chief executive. “Students on the wrong side don’t have the same opportunity to compete.”

Marwell added that “the providers are kind of done building to all the areas they can rationalize on their own. So we need to figure out how to get it to those last places.”

While having only one provider in a region might mean higher cable or Internet bills in cities, in rural areas it can have profound consequences. For Internet access, Monroe depends on a nearly two-decade-old T1 line that, by the time it reaches dozens of individual computers, delivers speeds comparable to dial-up service. The school district’s administrators have tried for nearly two years to persuade AT&T to upgrade its service in the area, to no avail.

“I thought, in my little naive head, if I could just talk to them, explain to them that we have these 60-odd children in the middle of nowhere, they would understand,” said Devlynne Barnes, the technology director for Monroe County Schools.

Instead, Monroe has daily computer classes that start and stall; students sometimes need 30 minutes just to log in. It has 29 iPads,

purchased with federal funding, that often go unused because of the hapless WiFi. It has students who talk about the Internet not as a reliable tool, but as a temperamental one. It works better in the mornings, they say. It works better on this side of the room. It works better when the sun is out.

Garner, in his morning computer class, groaned and stared at his idled Asus desktop computer. The room was made of cinder blocks, and on the wall was an antiquated poster defining 1990s computer terms: Boot, Click, CD/DVD, Cursor, Crash.

He opened Microsoft Word — a program that didn’t need the Internet — and whispered to Flowers, “I’m going to type out my own book.” But he had made it only one sentence (“This is the story of George Washington,” he had written) when he got bored. He placed his keyboard atop the computer tower and dropped his head on the desk.

Grasping for a wider reach Lower Peach Tree is one of the hardest-toreach places in Alabama, at the far western edge of a county most famous for being the

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COVER STORY home of the late author Harper Lee. In much of the county, including at six other schools, Frontier Communications provides good broadband Internet. But Lower Peach Tree sits on the other side of the Alabama River, AT&T’s territory, and is reachable from Monroeville — the county seat — only by intermittent ferry service or a looping, one-hour drive. Many who live in Lower Peach Tree work as loggers or truck drivers. The town of fewer than 1,000 residents has no restaurants or gas stations.

As one enters Lower Peach Tree, thick trees and ramshackle homes line the road, and but for an occasional flicker, cellphone service dies off. Only about one-third of students at Monroe Intermediate have Internet at home; to get even that, their families subscribe to a satellitebased service that malfunctions during bad weather. During his one-hour morning route along the community’s snaking red dirt roads, the school’s bus driver, Raymond McConnell, doesn’t even bother carrying a cellphone.

“If there’s some kind of accident,” he said, “I’m just supposed to go up to the closest house and ask to use a land line. That’s what my boss told me.”

Educators say that rural areas, with limited curriculums and resources, in particular could benefit from digital advances that allow students to reach far beyond their towns. Spanish classes could Skype with students in Mexico City. Advanced students could take high school classes remotely. The problem is that such small towns also provide a limited pool of customers for any company thinking about making an investment.

Monroe Intermediate “is a really, really small school in a precarious area,” said Jerome Browning, a coordinator at Alabama’s Department of Education. “It doesn’t make any sense for vendors to come to that area.”

The copper lines that run to the Lower Peach Tree school were placed in the ground in the late 1990s by BellSouth, a company that merged with AT&T in 2006. Since then, the district has encountered a problem facing other rural schools: There is little competition to provide services. Some 7 percent of schools nationwide fail to find bidders when looking to upgrade Internet — according to the Consortium for School Networking, a Washington-based group that advocates for technology in the classroom — and in the case of Monroe Intermediate, district officials had no choice but to deal with the one company operating in that area: AT&T. Beginning in 2014, Barnes said she grew frustrated enough with AT&T’s reluctance to wire Monroe Intermediate that she tried to contact a senior decision-maker. She was passed around from one contact to another, she said, and left “15 to 20” voice mails with four or five people. She also, for months, exchanged e-mails in which AT&T officials sound encouraging but don’t follow up.

Barnes, in one e-mail, said she was looking to find “the best solution for the most rural school in Alabama.”

“I can begin to take a look at capacity in the

Counting the cost Monroe administrators estimate that it will cost $1 million to run fiber to Monroe Intermediate. U.S. taxpayers will pay for 80 percent, but that leaves the district on the hook for $200,000 — something it still can’t afford.

Devlynne Barnes, technology director for Alabama’s Monroe County Schools, has been pushing AT&T for years to upgrade its connection.

area,” one AT&T account manager wrote.

The district’s request was complicated. It needed AT&T to cooperate with the neighboring telecom company, Frontier. If AT&T was to build new lines, they would have to connect with Frontier’s, allowing Monroe Intermediate to receive data from the hub in Frontier territory — and remain on the district server, so information could be shared across all schools. At one point last October, Barnes said, AT&T brought up the possibility of building new lines — but not ones that would connect with Frontier. The district wasn’t interested.

AT&T, in a statement, said it tries to provide strong service to its customers, but “in this instance our communication with this school fell short.”

“This in no way reflects the significant work we do to connect rural America and thousands of schools, including those in hard-toreach remote areas,” the company said. AT&T noted that 92 percent of schools in Alabama have high-speed Internet. It also said that, over the past six years, AT&T had invested more than “any other public company” to expand high-speed Internet availability.

Starting July 1, the Federal Communications Commission will provide a new option for schools that feel stuck: Those schools can hire their own outside companies to build their fiber connections, partially using federal funding, if the local telecom company won’t.

The goal is to provide more leverage to schools than before.

But there are doubts from local educators that the proposal will actually be the cure they need. Monroe administrators, after talking recently with other telecom companies, estimate that it will cost $1 million to run fiber to Monroe Intermediate. U.S. taxpayers will pay for 80 percent, but that leaves the district on the hook for $200,000 — something it still can’t afford. Barnes, the technology coordinator, said the district might solicit donations.

Teachers at Monroe Intermediate say the lack of a strong Internet connection creates everyday obstacles. The school must upload

KLMNO WEEKLY

emergency planning documents to a state portal. Daily attendance records are sent to the district office. Even when the Internet is working, bandwidth is so taxed during the school day that administrators wait until afterhours to perform some of their computer tasks.

For students, the tech limitations can breed some cleverness. Garner, an easy-to-smile eighth-grader, calls himself the community’s top “hacker,” in part because he has learned that he can make calls with his smartphone by placing it on a ceiling fan — one place where it gets occasional service — and connecting it with Bluetooth headphones. But he also said he has some anxiety about what happens when he enters ninth grade — a point when students from Monroe Intermediate head off to high school in a neighboring and more populous county and tend to realize that they are further behind than they expected.

“The rest of the world has this,” Garner said of the Internet.

Even though Monroe Intermediate was named in 2013-2014 by the state as one of six “torchbearer” schools that was beating the odds and “educating students of poverty,” few students who grow up in Little Peach Tree move beyond high school, Monroe Intermediate principal Betty Madison said. Some are bewildered by the assignments or too ashamed to admit what they don’t know, Barnes said. What is a Google Doc? What is a jump drive? How do I do my homework if I don’t have Internet at home?

“This is just the real world now,” Barnes said. “These are expected skills. And they are drowning.”

‘We’re down’ The Internet outages at Monroe Intermediate can last from minutes to weeks, and when they start, an administrator from the principal’s office speaks up over the intercom.

“We’re down,” a scratchy voice said on a recent morning, and Shirley Pate, the school’s technology coordinator, told her fourth-grade students to power off their devices — anything that might be sucking up bandwidth. She asked them to wait for a moment while she did some trouble-shooting.

“Can I get a book out of the library?” one of the students asked.

Another opened his backpack and removed a stack of plastic dinosaurs.

Pate walked over to a computer and ran a speed test.

Behind her, students spent the last 10 minutes before the bell re-creating the Jurassic era.

“You bit my tail, get out of here,” said Tomquarious Morrissette, 10.

“Mmm, fresh ankylosaurus,” said Jarquiese McCaskey, 10. “Bones and all.”

The speed test finished: The download speed was 0.76 megabits per second, less than one-fiftieth of what Verizon or Comcast offers residential customers in Washington, D.C. Pate took a closer look at the screen.

“Oh, look now!” she said. “Not bad.” n

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ENTERTAINMENT

RISE OF THE BLACK SUPERHERO

Eartha Kitt as Catwoman 1967

The comic-book world is getting more diverse

In the campy Batman TV show of the ’60s, Kitt’s performance in 1967 is one of the earliest instances of a black performer in a comic-book role. She went up against Adam West’s Batman in her own unique style — not nearly as sexually suggestive or romantic as Julie Newmar’s Catwoman, perhaps because of the social climate. But as a villain she was just as formidable.

BY D AVID B ETANCOURT AND M ICHAEL C AVNA

S

uperheroes have stood astride the American pop-culture landscape for eight decades, but racial diversity has largely been left in the margins. That’s why 2016 feels like a watershed year.

Cultural awareness and the lure of even bigger money have joined forces like a dynamic duo of change. As Hollywood seizes on the appeal of diverse casting, the markets for more inclusive superhero movies are riding this greater entertainment wave.

We have had black superheroes for decades, of course. (For the uninitiated, we’ve included a primer on notable characters.)

Some, such as Black Panther, spotlighted their initial niche by including “black” in their name. But in the movie adaptations, their roles have often been secondary.

Although “Batman v Superman” was a paler affair, this week’s “Captain America: Civil War” is the first mainstream movie to star three black superheroes: War Machine (played by Don Cheadle), the Falcon (Anthony Mackie) and the Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman). Also this coming month,, “X-Men: Apocalypse” will spotlight a half-Chinese actress (Olivia Munn) as Psylocke; and in August, DC Comics’ “Suicide Squad” will be led by Viola Davis and Will Smith.

This pop-cultural tipping point also reflects the ever-increasing diversity of characters on our comics-adapted TV shows (“The Flash,” “Arrow,” Netflix’s forthcoming “Luke Cage” et al.) and prominent comic books (including a biracial Spider-Man and a Korean Hulk).

The quintessentially American art form that is comics is embracing fictive worlds that look like America itself.

And in 2016, black capes matter.

POWERS: Stealthy master thief, highly acrobatic, trained in martial arts, deadly with a bullwhip

ACTION FIGURE PHOTOGRAPHS

BY DANIEL PICARD

Black Panther 1966

Falcon 1969

Arguably the most important and wellknown black superhero of all time, T’Challa the Black Panther made his Marvel debut in a Fantastic Four comic in 1966. What excited black comic fans, in part, was the fact that Black Panther, who didn’t have superpowers, could take on the Fantastic Four and win.

Making his first Marvel appearance in 1969 and a frequent partner to Captain America, the Falcon/Sam Wilson appears in multiple Marvel movies, including “Captain America: Civil War.”

POWERS: Superior intellect, suit laced with super-strong metal vibranium, expert combat skills

POWERS: Hand-to-hand combat skills, wings that let him fly

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ENTERTAINMENT John Stewart/ Green Lantern 1971 Stewart, an African American Green Lantern, debuted in DC Comics in 1971. He was introduced to a wider audience when he joined the Justice League animated series as the power-ring-wielding Green Lantern in 2001 on Cartoon Network. Whether he will be the Green Lantern in a future live-action Justice League movie remains to be seen.

Cage was a hero for hire in the pages of Marvel Comics when he debuted in 1972. Armed with indestructible skin, Cage made his live-action debut (played by Mike Colter) on Netflix’s “Jessica Jones.” In his early years in the comics, Cage would gladly save the day if you could pay the bill.

For many he is still one of the first names to come to mind when thinking of black superheroes.

POWERS: Super strength, invulnerability, indestructible skin

Storm 1975 Her appearance on the X-Men Saturdaymorning cartoon may have left more of an impression with a generation of fans, but Halle Berry’s portrayal of Storm in the first X-Men movie in 2000 was just as memorable. A mutant with the ability to control the weather, she debuted in Marvel’s X-Men comics in 1975.

Storm remains one of the most well-known black superheroes in comics.

POWERS: Ability to manipulate all forms of weather, can fly by affecting wind

Black Manta 1977 What the Joker is to Batman and Lex Luthor to Superman, Black Manta is to Aquaman. First appearing in an Aquaman comic book in 1967, this villain has always been one of Aquaman’s most recognizable foes — and the most mysterious. So it was a surprise

Wally West 2014

One of the more popular X-Men characters after making his comic 1991. book debut for Marvel in 1991 The time-traveling Bishop jumped from the pages of X-Men comics to the X-Men animated series before making his movie debut (portrayed by Omar Sy) in “X-Men: Days of Future Past” in 2014.

Although he has yet to show the super-fast speed he’s known for on the CW series “The Flash,” few doubt that West will be running alongside the Flash as Kid Flash.

Keiynan Lonsdale debuted as Wally West on the show in 2015. For decades, West was white, but DC Comics changed his race in 2014. The TV series decided to use those most updated versions of Wally and his sister (and possible future love interest to the Flash), Iris West, played by Candice Patton.

Spawn 1992

Luke Cage 1972 when it was revealed, in 1977, that the “black” in Black Manta may have referred not to his all-black underwater armor but to the man underneath it, who was African American.

POWERS: Battle suit allows him to function underwater, helmet fires optic blasts

War Machine 1979 The role of James “Rhodey” Rhodes, one of Tony Stark/Iron Man’s most trusted allies who first appeared in Iron Man comics in 1979, initially went to Terrence Howard in the first Iron Man film.

When it was time to suit up as War Machine in 2010’s “Iron Man 2,” however, it was Don Cheadle inside the armor. Cheadle has appeared in two Iron Man movies, an Avengers film and will fight alongside Iron Man in “Captain America: Civil War.” POWERS: Ability to fly, armed with a dizzying array of weapons via his heavily armored suit

Amanda Waller 1986 The boss of the Suicide Squad made her first comic book appearance in 1986 and is one of the coldest and most ruthless people in the DC Comics universe.

Which is what you have to be when in charge of a team of converted supervillains. The character will appear in the Suicide Squad movie in August alongside DC characters Deadshot, Harley Quinn and the Joker.

POWERS: Expert tactician, well-versed in espionage, master manipulator

WEEKLY

Bishop 1991

POWERS: Ability to absorb POWERS energy and redistribute it as an offensive attack

POWERS: Green Lantern ring allows him to turn anything in his mind into green energy

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Spawn’s popularity in the ’90s played a large role in the rise of Image Comics and even inspired an animated HBO series and a movie starring Michael Jai White in 1997. Spawn’s alter ego, Al Simmons, is a former Marine killed in a setup; he makes a deal with a devil-like being and is sent back to the land of the living as a demonic, superpowered antihero. The first issue of Spawn debuted in 1992.

POWERS: Superhuman strength and speed

Blade 1998 “Deadpool” isn’t the first time a Marvel Comics character had box-office success with an R-rated movie. Blade (Wesley Snipes) is a half-vampire, half-human who proved that comics characters don’t always have to be PG-13.

POWERS: Superhuman strength, resistant to age, accelerated healing powers

Nick Fury 2000 After Marvel Comics created an alternate “Ultimate” storytelling universe in 2000, Nick Fury, who had always been depicted as white, was re-created as a black man, eventually using actor Samuel L. Jackson as an influence. Jackson has portrayed Fury in his ongoing role as the leader of the Avengers in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

POWERS:: Advanced armed-combat skills, master technician, demolition expert

POWERS: Superhuman speed, highly intelligent, superhuman reflexes

Hawkgirl 2016 A popular character in the Justice League animated series, Hawkgirl is played by Ciara Renée on the CW’s new show “DC’s Legends of Tomorrow.” The winged warrior was white in her DC Comics appearances and in animated form but was cast as a person of color for “Legends of Tomorrow.”

POWERS: Ability to fly, enhanced strength, combat skills, armed with her signature mace

Deadshot 2016 Will Smith assumes the role of one of DC Comics’ most lethal marksmen (who in the comic books, cartoons and TV show has always been white) when he portrays Floyd Lawton/DeadLawton shot in “Suicide Squad” in August.

POWERS:: Extremely precise marksman/assassin, weapons expert

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BOOKS

The new fight to define America N ON-FICTION

F AMERICAN CHARACTER A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good

By Colin Woodard Viking.

308 pp. $29

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REVIEWED BY

D AVID M . O SHINSKY

ive years ago, Colin Woodard caused a stir with his book “American Nations,” a fascinating, if quirky, account of the different regional cultures that have shaped the course of North America. Woodard counted 11 regions in all, nine fully in the United States, such as “Yankeedom,” the moralistic, communitycentered territories of New England, New York and the Upper Midwest; “Tidewater,” the slaveholding parts of the Chesapeake Bay area and Virginia that produced civic-minded aristocrats such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson; “Greater Appalachia,” home to fiercely independent, antielitist folk like Andrew Jackson; and the “Deep South,” the lair of rapacious, ne’er-do-well leaders with no sense “of responsibility to the rest of society.” Later entries included “Far West,” the “high, dry, and remote” province of libertarian ranchers and timber barons; and “Left Coast,” the narrow spit of land from Southern California to Seattle famous for its liberal politics and live-and-let-live social attitudes.

“American Character,” the sequel, is somewhat less satisfying.

Woodard, an award-winning journalist for the Portland Press Herald in Maine, is a terrific writer, and his range is impressive. His musings about the impact of Ayn Rand on American conservatism or a day spent in the terrifying blackness of Nicolae Ceausescu’s crumbling Romanian dictatorship are elegant set pieces. The problem is with the larger thesis of the book.

It’s one thing to take on a huge subject such as “the epic struggle between individual liberty and the common good” in our history. It’s quite another to try to squeeze it into the multi-regional model that defined his earlier work. Despite some truly original insights, the result, too often, is a disjointed narrative, lurching from era to era, crisis to crisis, with the leading actors scrutinized by their places of origin — Yankeedom, Tidewa-

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY & MUSEUM

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, top, and Dwight Eisenhower bridged regional divides, author Colin Woodard says.

ter, Far West — as if personal geography was the determining factor in most everything they did.

America works best, Woodard insists, when the anti-government culture of radical libertarianism and laissez-faire conservatism (think Deep South as leader, with Greater Appalachia, Far West and Tidewater sometimes on board) is in balance with the pro-government culture of collective action for the common good (think Yankeedom and Left Coast as primary actors, with sprinklings from other regions). The problem, Woodard says, is that these competing

forces are rarely equal — or willing to compromise.

In the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, laissez-faire and libertarianism created the industrial behemoth that is modern America, during a time of extraordinary excess, inequality of wealth, political corruption and working-class misery. In response, the pendulum swung back hard the other way, giving the United States a Progressive Era of needed economic and social reform, but also a time of political overreach in terms of what many Americans expected their government to do.

With a few exceptions — the demands of a world war, an economic catastrophe — the competing regional cultures have kept the nation from reaching the sort of consensus that allows fundamental problems to be solved.

Woodard’s heroes are those who have somehow transcended this divide. It’s an eclectic list, and an interesting one. Woodard includes Franklin D. Roosevelt, an odd choice given FDR’s pure Yankeedom roots and reputation as the father of the modern welfare state. Yet, as Woodard notes, Roosevelt took the reins of power at a time when the nation was on its knees. He fought off attempts by the political left to bring socialism to Washington — his goal was to enact reforms needed to preserve capitalism — and steered a moderately liberal course that offended zealots at both ends of the political spectrum.

Like a growing number of observers, Woodard admires Dwight Eisenhower, “a Midland centrist” who “believed in fiscal responsibility, but did not consider that incompatible with making highreturn investments in collective projects like education, scientific research, and transportation infrastructure.”

The list goes on. But Woodard’s point, often obscured in this regional soup, is a valid one. America works best when its leaders find a middle ground between unfettered individualism and unrealistic communalism.

What Americans yearn for, he believes, is a government that ensures fairness in an aggressively competitive country.

Ever the strategist, Woodard asserts that “a political movement championing the fairness doctrine could capture a reliable majority in seven of our nine regional cultures.” n Oshinsky is a professor of history at New York University and the director of the Division of Medical Humanities at NYU Medical Center.

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Author thrives in dark thrillers

Alcohol and sex: Inside lives of girls

F ICTION

N ON-FICTION

E

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REVIEWED BY

M AUREEN C ORRIGAN

lizabeth Hand writes stories so disturbing, you almost wish you hadn’t read them.

Her novels fall into different genres — sci-fi, horror, fantasy, mystery — but they all clot at the darker end of the literary spectrum. It has been more than 20 years since I read “Waking the Moon,” Hand’s much-celebrated pagan fantasy tale set in Washington, but scenes from that uncanny novel haunt me still.

AndHand’ssupernaturallyinflected Cass Neary crime novels make mincemeat out of the assumption — still held by many an unwary reader — that mysteries are mere diversions, designed to pass an empty hour and then be forgotten. No way that’strueof“HardLight”:Thisthird novel in the Cass Neary series fades away as stubbornly as a bloodstain.

“A stolen passport will only get you so far,” Cass comments in the snap-to-attention opening line.

Brazenly flashing the passport of another lanky woman “of a certain age with substance abuse issues,” Cass has turned up at Heathrow in flight from a nasty time (a sudden volcanic eruption and a pileup of murdered corpses) in Iceland. The plan is that she’ll rendezvous with Quinn — her sometime lover and a seasoned contract killer — at a pub in Brixton. Easier said than done.

Cass, a photographer who has lived most of her outlaw life in a rent-stabilized apartment on New York’s Lower East Side, is disoriented by her maiden arrival in London during a torrential rain-and-sleet storm. Clasping her travel satchel close, with its precious contents of her old-school Konica and canisters of black-and-white film, Cass makes her way through twisting streets flooded not only with water but also with drunk businessmen, junkies and homeless kids. The elusive Quinn briefly surfaces and then disappears. Adrift, Cass gets caught up in the dark undertow of a cult film called “Thanatrope,” which was immediately pulled on its initial release in the 1970s. As Cass learns the hard way, the controversial film retains the power to

destroy lives.

Although the fictional “Thanatrope” is decidedly malevolent, whenever Hand describes its lingering eeriness, she may as well be describing the power of her own writing.AsCasssaysafterwatchingafew scenes: “The images were so weirdly oneiric — more nightmarish than dreamlike . . . . They reminded me of the night terrors I’d experienced in the last few months, the fear of some black arachnid nesting in my skull, unraveling the neural web that was my own consciousness.”

Hand’s tale, too, burrows in deep. Part of its power derives from the sheer exuberant strangeness of Hand’s storytelling. This odyssey takes Cass from London — where she’s forced by a criminal kingpin to work as a courier for a stolen-antiquities ring — to a ramshackle cottage in the wilds of Cornwall, where survivors and descendants of the original “Thanatrope” cast and crew still carve out an existence, of sorts.

Hand is also unflinching in her depiction of her bad-girl antiheroine. Cass has much in common with Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander, but Cass is older and more grimly set in her antisocial ways and blackstovepipe-jean wardrobe; she seems even more fringe than Lisbeth, who still has time left for therapy and second chances. Coming back to consciousness after being poisoned, Cass tells us: “I hastily sat up and splashed water on my face. I’d been living so long on speed and alcohol that the bones in my hands stood up like the tines of a rake.”

The spooky finale of “Hard Light” leads readers deep into a macabre murder scene that holds clues to the beginning of the art of photography itself. It’s a bravura ending that both lays some questions to rest and exhumes even more freshly disturbing images to trouble a reader’s peace of mind. n Corrigan is the book critic for the NPR program “Fresh Air” and teaches literature at Georgetown University.

A

HARD LIGHT

By Elizabeth Hand Minotaur.

359 pp. $25.99

GIRLS & SEX Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

By Peggy Orenstein Harper.

301 pp. $26.99

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REVIEWED BY

L AURA S ESSIONS S TEPP

t 16, Holly thought she knew the rules of sexual conduct. Sex in high school was something “only those skanky public school girls” did. But once she noticed that her friends at an East Coast private school were doing it, “I had to reevaluate,” she says. Although she abstained through high school, she was fully initiated by the time she was a sophomore in college, even boldly advertising her exploits: “I feel accomplished after I have sex with someone I wanted to have sex with. . . . Good for me.”

Holly is one of more than 70 young women Peggy Orenstein interviewed for her provocative and thoughtful book “Girls & Sex.” Orenstein, author of such books as “Cinderella Ate My Daughter,” here takes a hard look at the sexual landscape young women face today. “Even as girls outnumbered boys in college,” she wonders, did they “have more freedom than their mothers to shape their sexual encounters, more influence and more control within them?” The answer — gleaned from conversations with women and numerous experts — is both yes and no.

Take Holly, for example. Underneath her seemingly proud promiscuity lies a more complex, darker story. When she began college, Holly was, in her words, “very pure.” But after only four days on campus, things began to change.

Fueled by social pressures — Greek life, alcohol — she had a series of flings before getting involved in a relationship. When that began to crumble, she got drunk one night and did something she once vowed never to do: have sex outside a relationship. At first she was upset with herself — “I was a bad person” — but soon enough she changed her own rules: Now “I just care that I know the guy,” she tells Orenstein. Later, she slipped even further; one night she drank so much that she didn’t remember the sexual encounter with the guy she woke up next to. “I’ve pushed the line,” Hol-

ly acknowledges, searching for a justification: “I don’t know if it’s the culture around me that tells me my behavior is okay, so therefore I’m fine with it, or if it’s because I’m older and more mature and have grown as a person.”

Orenstein refrains from passing judgment on Holly or any of the women she profiles. Instead she turns her eye to the culture that has helped create and foster their behavior. Chief among the negative forces is excessive drinking.

Hookups, now well-known as casual sexual encounters, come in for criticism. The practice contributes to the spread of sexual disease and, apparently, has not produced a culture of young women in charge of their own relationships and pleasure. “The number one reason they do [oral sex] is to improve their relationships,” according to a study of high schoolers. Nearly a quarter of girls said this, compared with about 5 percent of boys.

Orenstein’s book is an examination of sexual culture and a guide on how to improve it. In the final chapters, she encourages young women to choose their partners carefully and, if necessary, request or even demand that they receive as well as give pleasure. Girls, like guys, should feel comfortable initiating contact and insisting on reliable contraception.

The breadth of Orenstein’s reporting is impressive. Yet she doesn’t give a full sense of these young women; I wish there was more on what their partners, families and school lives were like.

I also would have liked to see more on fathers. Fathers can play a critical role in building girls’ selfesteem and providing information about the way males think and behave.

Sounds like it’s time for a book called “Guys & Sex.” n Stepp is the author of “Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both.”

SUNDAY, MAY 1, 2016

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OPINIONS

We can celebrate Tubman without insulting Jackson JIM WEBB was a Democratic U.S. senator from Virginia from 2007 to 2013 and is the author of “Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America.”

One would think we could celebrate the recognition that Harriet Tubman will be given on future $20 bills without demeaning former president Andrew Jackson as a “monster,” as a recent Huffington Post headline did. And summarizing his tenure as being “known primarily for a brutal genocidal campaign against Native Americans,” as reported in The Washington Post, offers an indication of how far political correctness has invaded our educational system and skewed our national consciousness.

This dismissive characterization of one of our great presidents is not occurring in a vacuum. Any white person whose ancestral relations trace to the American South now risks being characterized as having roots based on bigotry and undeserved privilege. Meanwhile, race relations are at their worst point in decades.

Far too many of our most important discussions are being debated emotionally, without full regard for historical facts.

The myth of universal white privilege and universal disadvantage among racial minorities has become a mantra, even though white and minority cultures alike vary greatly in their ethnic and geographic origins, in their experiences in the United States and in their educational and financial wellbeing.

Into this uninformed debate come the libels of “Old Hickory.”

Not unlike the recently lionized Alexander Hamilton, Jackson was himself a “brilliant orphan.”

A product of the Scots-Irish migration from war-torn Ulster into the Appalachian Mountains, his father died before he was born. His mother and both brothers died in the Revolutionary War, where he himself became a wounded combat veteran by age 13.

Self-made and aggressive, he found wealth in the wilds of Tennessee and, like other

plantation owners such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, owned slaves.

He was a transformational president, hated by the reigning English American elites as he brought populist, frontier-style democracy to our political system.

Jackson became the very face of the New America, focusing on intense patriotism and the dignity of the common man.

On the battlefield he was unbeatable, not only in the Indian Wars, which were brutally fought with heavy casualties on both sides, but also in his classic defense of New Orleans during the War of 1812.

His defense of the city (in which he welcomed free blacks as soldiers in his army) dealt the British army its most lopsided defeat until the fall of Singapore in 1942.

As president, Jackson ordered the removal of Indian tribes east of the Mississippi to lands west of the river. This approach, supported by a string of

SUKRU GOKSU/ISTOCK

presidents, including Jefferson and John Quincy Adams, was a disaster, resulting in the Trail of Tears where thousands died. But was its motivation genocidal?

Robert Remini, Jackson’s most prominent biographer, wrote that his intent was to end the increasingly bloody Indian Wars and to protect the Indians from certain annihilation at the hands of an ever-expanding frontier population. Indeed, it would be difficult to call someone genocidal when years before, after one bloody fight, he brought an orphaned Native American baby from the battlefield to his home in Tennessee and raised him as his son.

Today’s schoolchildren should know and appreciate that Jackson’s July 1832 veto of legislation renewing the charter of the monopolistic Second National Bank prevented the creation of a permanent aristocracy in our country.

Jackson was virulently opposed in this decision, openly threatened by America’s elites.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Vernon Louis Parrington called this veto “perhaps the most courageous act in our political history.”

Just as significantly, in November 1832, South Carolina threatened to secede from the

Union. Jackson put a strong military force in position, letting it be known that if it attempted secession he would have 50,000 soldiers inside the state within 40 days, with another 50,000 to follow shortly after. Wisely, South Carolina did not call Jackson’s bluff, and civil war was averted for another 28 years.

Jackson was a rough-hewn brawler, a dueler and a fighter.

For eight years he dominated American politics, bringing a coarse but refreshing openness to the country’s governing process.

Jefferson called him “a dangerous man.” Quincy Adams termed him a “barbarian.” But as Parrington put it, “he was our first great popular leader, our first man of the people. . . . one of our few Presidents whose heart and sympathy . . . clung to the simple faith that government must deal as justly with the poor as with the rich.”

Mark Twain once commented that “to arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man’s character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.”

By any standard we should respect both Jackson’s and Tubman’s contributions. And our national leaders should put aside their deliberate divisiveness and encourage that we do so. n

SUNDAY, MAY 1, 2016

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

‘Thelma & Louise’ is still radical CAITLIN GIBSON is a feature writer at The Washington Post.

It’s been 25 years since Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon hit the desert highway in “Thelma & Louise,” Ridley Scott’s rollicking road flick that dared to put women in the driver’s seat — and kept them there to the iconic end, soaring into the open maw of the Grand Canyon in a turquoise Thunderbird convertible.

Finally! said feminists, excited to see complex, stereotypebusting female characters.

Revolutionary! said reviewers, acknowledging the unprecedented.

Misandry! said a few (mostly male) detractors, who thought the film vilified men and glorified violence.

“Thelma & Louise” told the story of a bored waitress and a disillusioned housewife whose road trip spirals into a crime spree after one kills a man who was attempting to rape the other.

But it was also funny and actionfilled and thoughtful — and a box-office success after it opened in May 1991, grossing $45 million in the United States. And it seemed to mark a cinematic and cultural milestone that could change the role of women onscreen.

“Ten years from now it will be seen as a turning point,” said the Boston Phoenix’s Peter Keough.

Geena Davis was definitely eager to believe it. She had already logged a decade in Hollywood and won a bestsupporting-actress Oscar, but “Thelma & Louise” was her first marquee role in such a highprofile film. “We were so unprepared for the reaction that it got, and it was sort of overwhelming and exciting,” she said, speaking by phone from her home in Los Angeles. “I thought, ‘Oh, yeah, things are going good for women.’ I just assumed things were getting better all the time.”

So much for that. Two new studies of current cinema recently underscored the lingering sense that women have lost their grip on the big screen.

One found that women have a disproportionate share of the nude scenes — three times as many as men.

The other found that men have a disproportionate share of the dialogue.

Even more startling, the latter study, from the website Polygraph, found in its analysis of more than 2,000 films that male characters speak more than women even in womencentric movies.

The new reports dovetail with research conducted by Davis’s own advocacy organization. The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media found that the percentage of female speaking characters in the top-grossing movies hasn’t changed in roughly half a century.

“We have so few parts, and they’re not often really good parts,” Davis says. “It’s like this Woody Allen joke about a restaurant — not only is the food so bad, but the portions are so small.”

Davis, a vocal women’s rights activist who launched the prodiversity Bentonville Film Festival last year, says the absence of women in film has become so standard that most of us don’t even notice it. Sure, there are exceptions, but they are so few that quibblers end up citing the same ones over and over.

Davis says the statistics prove that a few blockbuster hits for women aren’t enough to level the playing field. Her solution?

“Before you cast [a film], go

through and change a bunch of first names to female,” she says.

And make sure that any crowd scenes include an equal number of women. And remember that female characters also deserve powerful jobs.

Putting women and people of color on-screen is not about being charitable or politically correct, “it’s about reflecting the audience and showing the world as it actually is, which is 51 percent female and very diverse.”

The film forever changed Davis’s perception of gender equality on-screen, she says: “It was really a big wake-up call about how rarely we give women an opportunity to feel excited and inspired by the female characters.”

The industry is finally catching on, Davis says. Just not fast enough.

“In all the spheres of society where there is tremendous gender inequality, the one area where change can happen overnight is on-screen,” she says.

“It’s going to take forever to get Congress to be half women, but there could be a half-women Congress tomorrow in the next movie somebody makes.”

She laughs. “I’m an impatient optimist.”

(In Thelma’s words: Let’s keep going.) n

SUNDAY, MAY 1, 2016

22

OPINIONS

BY R. MCKEE FOR THE AUGUSTA CHRONICLE

Entitlement reform, RIP CHARLES LANE is a Post editorial writer specializing in economic and fiscal policy, a weekly columnist, and a contributor to the PostPartisan blog.

As you have probably heard by now, the stakes in November’s presidential election could not be higher. Control of the Supreme Court hangs in the balance. Ditto the fate of millions of undocumented immigrants. U.S. foreign policy could be in for its biggest shake-up since the Cold War. Yet in one crucial respect the election might make no difference at all.

Seventy-five percent of planned federal spending between now and the end of the next two presidential terms is mandatory: Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs, plus interest on the national debt, according to Congressional Budget Office forecasts. That money is going out the door no matter who’s president.

Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute has come up with an “Index of Fiscal Democracy” to express this vast, automatic commitment of resources, and the preemption of actual political choice it represents. The higher the index, the more possibilities we have for actually governing ourselves. At present, the index stands at 19.7, which is the percentage of federal receipts left over after mandatory

spending and interest, according to data compiled by Steuerle’s collaborator Caleb Quakenbush.

By 2026, however, the index will sink to 1.7, absent reforms.

That’s the sliver of money we’ll have to pay for research, natural disasters, defense and everything else. By contrast, in 1962, the index stood at 65.3; in 2007, 34.3.

Moreover, if the primary results demonstrate anything so far, it is that voters of both parties oppose trimming entitlements, especially the two giants, Social Security and Medicare, that benefit the elderly.

They have revealed this preference by anointing two front-runners who both promise to “protect” the programs.

Republican Donald Trump has long believed it was political suicide for Republicans to advocate “cuts” to Social Security and has campaigned accordingly.

Democrat Hillary Clinton has

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY HORSEY FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES

pledged not only to oppose reductions in Social Security benefits and cost-of-living adjustments but also to expand benefits for widows, paid for by higher taxes on high-earners.

Neither Trump nor Clinton proposes much more than tweaks to Medicare, though Trump, in a concession to GOP doctrine, backs converting Medicaid for the poor to a stateadministered block grant, leavened by his promise to “take care of people that are dying on the street.”

Never politically popular, entitlement reform now looks politically dead. It’s so dead that even the truth-telling types at No Labels would barely touch anyone’s benefits.

The bipartisan policy organization has just issued a campaign-year “playbook,” containing policy ideas that had to (a) make sense substantively and (b) poll well. Thus constrained, they chose to shore up Social Security mainly through higher payroll taxes — that is, using a politically difficult tax increase to preserve most existing benefits rather than for new needs.

There’s no mention of adopting the more accurate “chained” consumer price index to adjust benefits for inflation, as

the Bowles-Simpson debtreduction commission proposed in 2010. A version developed by the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities projected 10year savings of $112 billion while protecting the poorest elderly.

On Medicare, No Labels, like Trump and Clinton, nips at the edges, suggesting “more telemedicine” and reining in malpractice suits.

Yet there are many welldeveloped structural reform proposals for Medicare, some of which have had bipartisan support, that would cut costs without harming health or imposing undue hardship on the poor.

In fairness, the past eight years have not been a total loss for reform. Congress and the Obama administration agreed on modest savings to Social Security Disability Insurance and modernized military pensions.

They also ended an irrational formula for increasing Medicare physician reimbursements each year.

Minor as they were, these changes took major political effort. It will be harder still to make progress after a campaign like this one.

The only way to do it, in fact, would be for the winner to break their promises. n

SUNDAY, MAY 1, 2016

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Harriet Tubman BY

K ATE C LIFFORD L ARSON

We think we know Harriet Tubman: former slave, Underground Rail­ road conductor and abolitionist. But much of Tubman’s real life story has been shrouded by generations of myths and fake lore, propagated through children’s books, that has only obscured her great achieve­ ments. The truth about the woman who will become the new face of the $20 bill is far more compelling and remarkable.

1

Tubman was the Moses of her people.

This is a common sobriquet for Tubman, popularized by an early biography written by Sarah Bradford. The phrase is typically used to conjure the enormous scope of Tubman’s efforts to lead fellow slaves to freedom.

Bradford wrote that Tubman freed more than 300 people in 19 trips. But while Tubman is indeed a giant of American history, her Underground Railroad missions were more limited, though also much more complicated and dangerous, than they are often made out to be.

Tubman told audiences repeatedly during the late 1850s that she rescued 50 to 60 people in eight or nine trips. Her first biographer, Franklin Sanborn, suggested that she, directly and indirectly, brought about 140 or 150 people North. My research has confirmed that estimate, establishing that she brought away about 70 people in about 13 trips and gave instructions to about 70 more who found their way to freedom on their own.

Contrary to some narratives, Tubman’s missions did not extend throughout the South.

She returned only to Maryland — specifically to plantations on the Eastern Shore — to bring away family members and friends whom she loved and trusted. It was too dangerous for her to go places where she did not know the people or the landscape.

Tubman didn’t start the Underground Railroad, as Treasury Secretary Jack Lew

claimed recently. She tapped into a well-established network and helped expand it, making it stronger and more effective.

2

Tubman, at the time of her work with the Underground Railroad, was a grandmotherly figure.

In fact, Tubman was a relatively young woman during the 11 years she worked as an Underground Railroad conductor. She escaped slavery, alone, in the fall of 1849, when she was 27 years old.

She was also fierce. She carried a small pistol on her rescue missions, mostly for protection from slave-catchers, but also to discourage frightened runaways from turning back and risking the safety of the rest of the group.

As a teenager, Tubman was nearly killed when an overseer hit her in the head with an iron weight, and she suffered from headaches and seizures for the rest of her life, but she didn’t let those slow her down.

3

She followed the quilt code to the North.

This myth is a staple of school curricula. Students are taught that slaves and free people stitched secret, coded directions into quilts and then hung them outside at night to help guide freedom seekers to the next safe house. While it is a pretty story, it has no basis in fact.

Rather than bedding, Tubman depended on her great intellect, courage and religious faith to escape slavery and then go back to rescue others. She followed

HARRIET TUBMAN BETWEEN 1860-75; ASSOCIATED PRESS

rivers that snaked northward, and used the stars and other natural phenomena to guide her.

She relied on sympathetic people, black and white, who hid her, told her which way to go and connected her with other people she could trust. She wore disguises. She paid bribes.

4

Her work with the Underground Railroad was her most significant contribution.

While these activities made her famous, her service as a Union spy, scout and nurse during the Civil War, and her activism and philanthropy after the war, cemented her reputation as a remarkable American patriot.

In June 1863, Tubman became the first woman to lead an armed military raid when she guided Col. James Montgomery and his 2nd South Carolina black regiment up the Combahee River, routing Confederate outposts, liberating more than 700 slaves, and destroying stockpiles of cotton, food and weapons. It was of her service to the U.S. Army that she was most proud.

Tubman also was an ardent suffragist and began appearing

at suffrage conventions before the Civil War, becoming more active as the 19th century wore on. She fought for civil and political rights for not only women and minorities, but for the disabled and aged, too. She also established a nursing home for African Americans on her property in Auburn, N.Y.

5

Putting Tubman on the $20 bill is an insult, because she was anticapitalist.

While Tubman was adamantly against slavery, she wasn’t against capitalism. She flipped slave-based capitalism on its head by “stealing” her own body and those of others from its unpaid, unfree grip. Tubman was an entrepreneur: During the Civil War, she created a laundry and restaurant near Hilton Head, S.C., where she taught recently liberated women to provide goods and services to the Union Army for pay; and later she ran several businesses from her home in Auburn, where she supported a house full of dependents. n

Larson is the author of “Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero.”

SUNDAY, MAY 1, 2016

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