The Washington Post National Weekly

Worst Week Mayor RawlingsBlake 3

Politics High court may create a mess 6

Science Batterypowered homes? 16

Essay Baltimore boiling over 23

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, MAY 3, 2015

.

IN COLLABORATION WITH

Is our love affair with baseball unraveling?

In a quickly changing society, the sport is striking out with kids PAGE 12

SUNDAY, MAY 3, 2015

2

During the month of May, ditch your car and replace short trips and commutes with biking, walking or riding Link Transit.

What positive changes can you make for yourself and your community in a month?

- get some exercise - save money - be good to the environment - win prizes -

Text CARFREE to 67076

to learn more how about you can join the challenge, become eligible to win prizes and have some fun.

SUNDAY, MAY 3, 2015

3

KLMNO WEEKLY

WORST WEEK IN WASHINGTON

Stephanie Rawlings-Blake

by Chris Cillizza

B

altimore isn’t D.C. This isn’t news to you, gentle reader. But it may be your initial response when I tell you that Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings­Blake is my choice for the winner of the worst week in Washington.

How can that be, you ask? Well, because rules are made to be broken. Because Baltimore is close enough to D.C. And mostly because Rawlings­Blake’s horrendous handling of the riots that broke out in the wake of Monday’s memorial service for Freddie Gray more than makes up for the 40 miles that separate the two cities.

It would take a column far longer than this one to dissect all the mistakes Rawlings­Blake made as anger over Gray’s death, apparently from an injury he sustained while in police custody, roiled Charm City. But here are the biggies.

First, she waited until 8 p.m. Monday, after police in riot gear had already clashed with teenagers in West Baltimore, before making a public statement. The first rule for any politician when your city is in crisis is “be present.” It’s impossible to be too high­profile in those moments.

Second, at the news conference Rawlings­Blake finally held, she referred to the rioters as “thugs.” By Wednesday, she was apologizing for that word choice. “I wanted to clarify my comments on ‘thugs,’ ” she tweeted. “When you speak out of frustration and anger, one can say things in a

KLMNO WEEKLY

JESSICA GRESKO/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake speaks on Tuesday about the situation in Baltimore with Baltimore's Police Commissioner Anthony Batts.

way that you don’t mean.”

Yes, one can. For a supposed rising star in national Democratic politics, Rawlings­Blake seemed to wilt when her city needed her most.

Stephanie Rawlings­Blake, for so badly mishandling a crisis that I was forced to change my rules for who gets this award, you had the worst week in Washington. Congrats, or something. n

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2015 The Washington Post / Year 1, No. 29

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY SCIENCE BOOKS OPINION FIRST PERSON

4 8 10 12 16 18 21 23

ON THE COVER Baseball is a thriving business but the pervasive impact of new technology on how children play and the acceleration of the pace of modern life have conspired against sports in general and baseball in particular.

Photo illustration by ISTOCK

SUNDAY, MAY 3, 2015

4

KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

Rubio’s missteps on overhauling immigration MOLLY RILEY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Conservatives rejected the bill he helped pass. Now he, too, opposes it.

BY

D AVID A . F AHRENTHOLD

M

arco Rubio had changed his mind.

It was December 2012. The Senate gym.

Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) was making the ask. “You ought to be a part of this,” Durbin told Rubio (R-Fla.). Durbin and six other senators wanted to rewrite U.S. immigration laws. In the process, they wanted to give illegal immigrants a way to become legal residents and — eventually — citizens.

Just two years earlier, Rubio had been against doing that. “It is unfair,” he had said, as a tea party candidate for Senate, “to create an alternative pathway for individuals who entered illegally.”

But that morning in the gym, he was open to the idea. He was in.

With that, Rubio began the most consequential work he has done in

Washington. As part of a bipartisan “Gang of Eight,” he would write and pass a 1,198-page immigration bill through the Senate.

For a moment, that bill looked like the biggest success of Rubio’s career.

Now it looks like failure.

ItturnedoutthatRubiohadoverestimated conservatives’ willingness to accept his hyper-complicated bill — and his own power to change their minds. Ultimately, the billdiedintheHouse,hisright-wing allies began to doubt his judgment, and both sides of the immigration debate grew irritated over Rubio’s tendency to change his mind.

Instead of a triumph, Rubio’s involvement with the immigration bill became a cautionary tale about a gifted freshman who had miscalculated his capability.

Now, as he begins a run for president, Rubio is left trying to

run away from the most prominent item on his political résumé.

“It’s one of the worst squanderings of political capital I’ve ever witnessed,” said Steve Deace, an Iowa-based conservative radio host whom Rubio tried and failed to convince. “It was the first time he ever stepped out in public in leadership on an issue, and it was in diametric opposition to the base.”

The other week, when Rubio announced he was running, he made only a brief — and vague — reference to a desire to “modernize our immigration laws.” In an interview with NPR, Rubio sought to take credit for being — at varying times — on both sides of the same bill.

He had tried to pass it. And, at the same time, he had warned that it wasn’t good enough.

“I’ve done more immigration than Hillary Clinton ever did. I mean, I helped pass an immigra-

When Sen. Marco Rubio announced in April that he was seeking his party’s nomination for president, the Florida Republican sought to take credit for being — at varying times — on both sides of the same bill.

tion bill in a Senate dominated by Democrats. And that’s more than she’s ever done,” Rubio said. “It didn’t work because at the end of the day, we did not sufficiently address the issue of, of illegal immigration, and I warned about that throughout that process.”

The “gang” that recruited Rubio was led by four senators with a combined 66 years in office.

For Durbin and Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), success would show that the Democratic-led Senate could still do what a Senate is supposed to: strike big deals, solve big problems.

For Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), the goal was to fix Republicans’ terrifying disadvantage with Latino voters. Their party’s official “autopsy” of the 2012 election said Republicans had to embrace immigration reform. Or else.

SUNDAY, MAY 3, 2015

5

POLITICS “We’ll never see the inside of the White House” again, McCain liked to say, if there was no deal.

The other members were Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Michael F. Bennet (D-Colo.) and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.). Rubio made eight. And on paper, he was perfect.

Rubio’s parents were born in Cuba, and he spoke movingly about their experience as immigrants.

But Rubio was also beloved by the very sort of small-government conservatives who had blocked immigration reform in the past. With a foot in both those worlds, Rubio held enormous leverage, even with the veteran senators.

That was clear in one meeting, described by four lobbyists in the room, where the GOP senators were being asked to agree to more “guest workers” in the bill.

Without more of these temporary immigrants, the lobbyists said, some low-skill jobs would go unfilled. McCain, they said, suggested an answer. Couldn’t the children of illegal immigrants do those jobs?

Rubio spoke up.

“He says, ‘Pardon me, Senator, but I have to say that the children of those illegal immigrants will be doctors and lawyers,’ ” one lobbyist recalled. “In my mind, I was like, ‘Thank God somebody said it.’

Because nobody else could say that to McCain.”

Rubio’s influence also showed in negotiations over the details of the bill.

“People would talk, talk, talk.

And he’d say, ‘I can’t sell that.’ And that would be it,” one staffer recalled. If Rubio said that conservatives wouldn’t go for a particular idea, the group believed him.

In particular, Senate staffers said, Rubio insisted that the U.S.-Mexico border had to be much-better secured to stop the flow of new illegal immigrants before any current illegal immigrant could be granted legal status. Along with other Republicans, he pushed for more visas for highly skilled immigrants and for an independent “border commission” to provide oversight of federal enforcement efforts.

Still, even when Rubio got what he wanted, he could seem skittish.

“Reports that the bipartisan group of eight senators have agreed on a legislative proposal are premature,” Rubio announced one day, just before others in the gang were about to announce progress in their talks. The veterans saw it as a dangerous airing of

J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

doubts, which might turn conservatives against them. But they didn’t scold Rubio for long.

“McCain might pull out some article that somebody had given him and say, ‘What is this?’ And Marco would sort of say, ‘What do you want me to do? I’m under a fire here,’ ” the Democratic staffer said.

Other staffers familiar with the talks described the dynamic in similar ways. “What, are we going to kick him out? There was nothing we could have done to Rubio.”

After that break, Rubio came back to the fold. Finally, the gang agreed on a bill.

“Actually, I changed my mind,” Rubio said at the news conference, jokingly turning away from the lectern as if to flee.

Now the salesman had to sell.

“Isn’t it reasonable for these conservatives to assume that, uh, you’ve been duped here?” conservative radio host Laura Ingraham asked.

“No. It isn’t,” Rubio responded, citing items that Republicans had demanded in the talks. “They [Democrats] have come to our position. We haven’t gone to theirs.”

He did Limbaugh. He did Hannity. He did private meetings with influential activists and writers.

And on April 14, 2013, Rubio did the talking-head version of an ultramarathon: the top five Sunday chat shows in one day, a rare feat.

Then Rubio did two more, Telemundo and Univision, in Spanish.

But, on conservative media, he didn’t seem to be winning the fight.

Rubio’s right-wing interviewers were respectful but unconvinced.

Rubio also faced conspiracy theories from conservatives who had dug through the bill and thought they knew what it was hiding.

“Move over, Obama-phone.

This is the amnesty phone,” Ingraham said, mentioning a provision that some thought would give free phones to immigrants.

“That’s false,” Rubio said. It was.

The phones were meant for isolated ranchers on the border: They were for reporting illegal immigrants, not to reward them.

Rubio’s office had to debunk the rumor, then debunk it again when the first debunking didn’t take.

Then the rumor changed, and the debunking had to start over.

Democrats on the committee were impressed by his willingness to take fire. (“He didn’t realize what he was getting into,” a second Democratic staffer said. “And that’s part of the beauty of new members.”) But then, Rubio started voicing his own doubts. After weeks of trying to convince conservatives, it seemed that he had become unconvinced instead.

“We’ve got a bill that isn’t going to become law,” Rubio told radio host Hugh Hewitt. He said he couldn’t support his own bill, because it couldn’t pass the House.

That rift, too, was mended. Rubio came back. The bill was amended, to double the number of federal border agents. It came up for a vote, and on June 27, Rubio

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) speaks at a 2013 news conference as part of a bipartisan effort to pass an immigration overhaul that would have created a path to U.S. citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants. After the Senate approved the bill, Rubio’s commitment seemed to fade.

KLMNO WEEKLY

gave his closing argument.

The bill passed.

“An incredibly articulate spokesperson for the things we stand for and believe in,” McCain called Rubio, when the group assembled for a triumphant news conference after the vote.

But at that point, they were no longer a gang of eight.

Rubio didn’t show up.

“His goal was to get a bill through the Senate,” said Alex Conant, who worked for Rubio at the time and is now a spokesman for Rubio’s political committee. Since the Senate had passed the bill, he said, Rubio didn’t need to attend.

Rubio also did not participate in a massive effort, organized by Schumer, to lobby members of the House to take up immigration reform. In interviews, Rubio’s sense of urgency seemed to be fading.

As weeks passed, it became obvious that the House was not going to take up immigration anytime soon. It never did.

Now, with his presidential run underway, Rubio has changed his mind about a bill he helped write.

He says he would not support it today. Too big. Tried to do too much at once. Instead, Rubio wants to break the reforms up into smaller bills, starting with increased border enforcement.

“What I’ve learned is you can’t even have a conversation about that until people believe and know — not just believe, but it’s proven to them — that future illegal immigration will be controlled,” Rubio said at the Conservative Political Action Conference this year. After the border is secured, he said, Congress can start talking about what to do with those already here.

If immigration reform is ever proposed again in the Senate, Rubio probably will not be there to see it. If he continues his run for president, he cannot run for reelection in Florida. He goes to the White House, or he goes home.

That idea made Giev Kashkooli, who works for the United Farm Workers of America labor union, think of a moment with Rubio during the immigration fight. As they waited for a meeting with Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Rubio marveled at Feinstein’s office wall, covered with framed copies of bills she’d helped pass. The trophies of big fights won.

“I’d like to have an office like this,” Kashkooli remembered Rubio saying. n

SUNDAY, MAY 3, 2015

6

KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

What if gay marriages don’t stand?

BY

S ANDHYA S OMASHEKHAR

W

hen a federal judge declared same-sex marriage legal in Florida last year, it should have changed the way Bruce Stone does his job. The estate-planning lawyer had for years helped gay couples patch together legal documents to try to approximate some of the protections enjoyed by heterosexual spouses.

But with the Supreme Court set to decide later this year whether that decision and others ought to stand, Stone isn’t taking any chances. He is still writing up power-of-attorney forms and setting up trusts out of state, and he has some stark advice for his gay clients: “Do not get married here in Florida.”

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard arguments on whether gay couples have a constitutional right to get married. But if the court rules against that right, the ability to decide reverts to the states, and Florida and others might just slam the door.

Gay rights advocates have publicly proclaimed their confidence that the court will go their way, and many opponents reluctantly agree.

They think the court has telegraphed its intention to establish a broad new legal right by allowing marriages to proceed in several states where the right is contested.

But the possibility that the court may defy expectations, as it has so many times before — and the enormous consequences if it does — have caused people like Stone to make contingency plans in case the recent momentum in favor of same-sex marriage is suddenly reversed.

“It would be a mess,” said Dale Carpenter, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Minnesota, noting that marriage confers 1,100 rights and benefits at the federal level and hundreds more from the states, from filing taxes jointly to inheriting hunting licenses.

“There would be great uncertainty in the aftermath of such a ruling. All kinds of possibilities we can’t even think of would arise.”

The effect would be explosive in

ASTRID RIECKEN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Possibility that justices will defy expectations pushes advocates to make contingency plans the 21 states where same-sex-marriage bans were struck down by federal courts.

Groups for and against these unions say such a decision would set off a cascade of fresh litigation and spark dramatic new fights in state capitals, with each side jockeying to have its version of marriage enshrined in state law.

Some legal experts say the old laws in those states would snap back into place, immediately shutting the door on future marriages, while others contend that would require another round of litigation. Some believe the thousands of marriages that have taken place in those states would be deemed valid, though others think the matter would need to be settled by the courts — perhaps even the Supreme Court.

States’ different reactions The justices could specify how states should treat their ruling.

But the precise fallout would prob-

ably depend on the state.

In deep-red states such as Oklahoma, Utah and Kansas, officials probably would waste no time trying to put a stop to same-sex marriages. Groups may attempt to have existing marriages invalidated or may press state officials not to allow state benefits for gay couples who have wed.

Arizona state Sen. Steve Smith, a Republican from Maricopa County, predicted an immediate push to reinstate a constitutional amendment, approved in a 2008 voter referendum, defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

“I don’t know how much clearer the will of the people can be expressed than by a vote to that effect,” he said.

In states such as Oregon, where the political climate has become more favorable to gay marriage in recent years, there probably would be a scramble to enact legislation to allow same-sex marriages.

Gay rights supporters gather outside the Supreme Court on Tuesday as the justices heard arguments in a landmark same-sex marriage case.

But the process could be more drawn out in places such as California, whose prohibition on same-sex marriage was part of the state constitution.

If that ban was reinstated as a result of a Supreme Court decision, a voter referendum would be needed to get rid of it.

“People would be ready to fight,” said David Fleischer, a gay rights activist in Los Angeles.

Elsewhere, the battles could be more pitched.

In Virginia and Pennsylvania, for instance, freshly minted Democratic governors may resist attempts to revert to old laws, potentially clashing with conservative state lawmakers. And Republican leaders in Florida and elsewhere could find themselves squeezed between their conservative bases and gay rights forces that would label them bigots.

Social conservatives are split on how significant a decision favorable to their side would be. Some say it would be a victory on its own, while others stress that their goal is a national standard defining marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman. The justices are not considering whether to set such a standard.

‘Far from over’ A win at the Supreme Court this year would be “a big victory, but in terms of the battle, it’s far from over,” said Mat Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel, a law firm that defends conservative Christian values. “It means there’s a lot of work to be done.”

The effect would be more muted in the District of Columbia and 16 states that made same-sex marriage legal through the actions of local legislators and judges.

At the other end of the spectrum, bans have remained in place in 13 states because federal judges did not invalidate them or they stayed decisions overturning the bans. The laws wouldn’t change in these states in the wake of the court’s decision, but statehouse battles could nevertheless erupt as activists leap into action.

The biggest question: What would become of the thousands of

SUNDAY, MAY 3, 2015

7

POLITICS couples who got married in the 21 states during the brief period same-sex marriage was allowed?

James Esseks, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, pointed to several recent cases involving same-sex marriage that suggest courts generally think that “once you’re married, you’re married.”

But some experts think it could take years of litigation, and perhaps another go before the Supreme Court, to clarify that.

A cautious path Already, lawyers tend to recommend a cautious path for same-sex couples. A gay couple married in Iowa, for example, may cross the border into Nebraska and find that their union is not recognized.

As a result, lawyers suggest that couples have power-of-attorney paperwork in place to ensure their ability to make decisions for each other in an emergency.

And they recommend that gay non-biological parents formally adopt their children — even if the parent’s name already appears on the child’s birth certificate.

Stone recommends that his gay clients get married in New York or another state where the right to same-sex marriage was established through state action. That way, even if the couple’s relationship isn’t recognized in Florida, it remains valid in the eyes of the federal government.

Carla Petersen, who married her partner of 26 years in Florida in January, said she is accustomed to uncertainty. “It won’t make it any worse than it ever was before,” said Petersen, 65, a resident of Venice, Fla. Before marrying, Petersen and her partner, Sharon Van Butsel, 70, signed power-of-attorney documents for each other and made sure their assets are held in both their names. But they couldn’t get Social Security benefits, which they now enjoy as a formally married couple. And they struggled to explain their relationship to the perplexed receptionist at the doctor’s office.

If the validity of their marriage comes into question, they could lose those Social Security benefits.

But Petersen doubts she will ever again have to deal with confusion at the doctor’s office.

“Times have really changed.

The acceptance is there. Ours has become the right side.” n

KLMNO WEEKLY

THE DEBRIEF

The wedding zinger BY

R OBERT C OSTA

“W

ould you go?”

It began earlier this month as a question from Fusion television anchor Jorge Ramos, who asked Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) if he would attend a wedding for a gay family member or staffer. Rubio said he would and argued that he does not “necessarily have to agree with their decisions” in order to love them or participate in the ceremony.

Days later, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) told NBC he and his wife, Tonette, have attended a “reception” for a gay relative, but “haven’t been at a wedding.”

Rick Santorum bluntly declined to attend such an occasion.

Citing his Catholic faith in an interview with talk-radio host Hugh Hewitt, the former Pennsylvania senator said attending would be a “violation” of his values.

The gay-wedding question — repeated on television and the campaign trail recently — has become one of the most vexing queries so far for 2016 candidates.

Nearly every Republican presidential hopeful opposes same-sex marriage, but that doesn’t necessarily make it easy for them to oppose going to a same-sex wedding.

If candidates say they’re unwilling to go, they risk looking uncaring or, in the minds of some voters, bigoted. But if candidates say they’re willing to go, they risk looking like hypocrites and will annoy social conservatives.

GOP presidential candidates are struggling to find balance, sending mixed signals and uneasily discussing a topic that sits at the crossroads of past moral battles and efforts to build a coalition for the future.

Aware of the possibility for missteps, Hewitt — a California commentator whose program has become a must-stop for GOP stars — has taken it upon himself to make his show a forum for Republicans grappling with how to thread the political needle.

“Okay, last question, and this is

into the wedding wars. Every Republican is getting asked,” Hewitt said while questioning former Texas governor Rick Perry. “ I’m part of the problem if it’s a gotcha question, but it grows out of my belief that we’re focused on the wrong thing.”

Perry’s responded that he “probably would” go to if invited by a gay friend or family member but also blasted Democrats and the media for trying to draw out Republicans “so everyone will talk about” their views.

“We need to stand up and say,

BUSH: Says he would attend the wedding of a gay friend.

SANTORUM: Says attending would violate his values.

‘Hey, listen, you know what? That’s an interesting question, here’s my answer, but get this thing back to talking about how do we get Americans back working again, how do we get this economy back on track,’ ” Perry said.

Others in the presidential mix, like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), are choosing to ignore the question and stick to their talking points.

On the stump and in interviews, Cruz has kept his comments tethered to the law ahead of the Supreme Court’s ruling.

When Hewitt asked Cruz on April 16 whether he’d got to a wedding for a gay friend or relative, Cruz responded, “I haven’t faced that circumstance. . . . But the legal question, I’m a constitutionalist. And under the Constitution, from the beginning of this country, marriage has been a question for the states.”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who opposes same-sex marriage, told CNN this month that “people ought to be left alone” with regard

to their lifestyles. “I don’t care who you are or what you do at home or who your friends are . . .

What you do in your home is your own business. That’s always been who I am,” he said.

Rubio, who has courted the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay Republican group, infused his answer on Fusion with empathy: “If it’s somebody in my life that I love and care for, of course I would.

I’m not going to hurt them simply because I disagree with a choice they’ve made.”

Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R), a possible 2016 candidate, has taken a similar line. He recently told CNN he accepted a wedding invitation from a gay friend, though he opposes same-sex marriage.

Speaking Tuesday in Puerto Rico, former Florida governor Jeb Bush said “claro que si” — Spanish for “of course” — when asked the question. It was reflective of his evolution: A strident social conservative in office, Bush has recently said Americans should respect “couples making lifetime commitments to each other” and tapped David Kochel, an advocate for same-sex marriage, to manage his likely campaign. He has said he remains opposed to gay marriage, however.

Even Cruz has softened his tone. He made headlines the other week by attending a meet-andgreet hosted by two gay New York hoteliers in which he reportedly said he would love one of his daughters if she came out as gay, and did not mention his opposition to same-sex marriage.

In Iowa last weekend, Cruz urged conservatives to “fall on our knees and pray” as the Supreme Court deliberates. Walker, at that same gathering, held a devotional book titled “Jesus Calling” as he spoke out in favor of marriage between one man and one woman.

Mostly unmentioned at the GOP confab: same-sex weddings.

The format was controlled, the audience friendly, and the question that has bedeviled them for weeks was averted. The rest of the primary is unlikely to be as comfortable. n

SUNDAY, MAY 3, 2015

8

KLMNO WEEKLY

NATION

Wars’ toll reaches deep into families E MILY W AX- T HIBODEAUX Hartford, Conn.

Hughes has cumulative brain injuries from 10 bomb blasts during three deployments to Iraq. He was an infantry squad leader, performing hundreds of missions to push insurgent fighters from Iraqi villages. After the final blast in 2008, all he could see were blurry shadows. He couldn’t repeat back a basic list of four words and was flown to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, where an MRI showed bleeding in his brain along with injuries to his back, neck and right shoulder. He was in the hospital on and off for about three years. It was so long that Koen began calling the hospital “my dad’s office.”

BY

T

wice each day, Koen Hughes’s alarm beeps.

He yells out across the kitchen to his father, retired Army Staff Sgt. Jonah Hughes, an Iraq war veteran, who suffers from such a severe brain injury that it’s hard for him to remember things like whether he showered, and sometimes how to shower.

Koen is always there, reminding him to take his anti-seizure pills, nervously double-checking his medicine box and squinting as he monitors his father’s behavior.

Koen is 10.

“Daaad! Your medicine!” pants a frantic Koen, who has a mop of light-brown hair and loves geography, Legos and Indiana Jones.

His burly 38-year-old father speaks slowly, softly, searching for words his brain has lost.

“Got it,” he answers.

He’s what Koen calls a “wounded parent.” And, the boy says, lowering his blue eyes to the ground, “It’s different than having other kinds of parents.”

In households nationwide, hundreds of thousands of wounded parents have come home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their children are struggling to navigate invisible wounds — traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder, which together afflict an estimated 30 percent of 2.7 million former troops.

The everyday toll on children is unprecedented, advocates for veterans’ families say, because their parents have complex injuries that would have ended their lives in wars past, before recent medical advances, and suffer from the psychic scars of multiple deployments.

The wounded parents often live with extended trauma and uncertainty. These veterans suffer blind spells. There are brain surgeries.

And more brain surgeries. Hearing loss. Memory lapses. Excruciating sensitivity to bright light and noise. Dizziness. Insomnia. Addiction to painkillers. Agoraphobia.

Increased risk of suicide and depression.

YANA PASKOVA FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

The youngest caregivers of ‘wounded parents’ often face a steep cost to their childhood Their children often suffer social isolation. To avoid setting off their parents, they can be deprived of sleepovers or play dates or even a game of hide-and-seek. They’re anxious, worrying about whether their parents will survive.

While the children are often more resilient and compassionate than their peers, they are also more angry and frustrated. They can face self-esteem issues and a loss of childhood because they often take on a parental role, according to a study by the Caster Family Center for Nonprofit and Philanthropic Research.

“They have this parent that doesn’t know how to play with them anymore. Or just can’t. The kids can’t run up and say ‘boo!’ or scream or jump on the bed or do the things that let them just be kids, because these are such triggers for the traumatized parent,” said Kate Lipton, a program coordinator for military children at the Kids Serve II Camp outside Atlanta. “The household just becomes

this giant eggshell.”

In League City, Tex., Gabby Daughenbaugh, 11, has to remind her father, while completing a school assignment about family trees, that her great-grandfather died recently. Her dad, retired Marine Cpl. Donny Daughenbaugh, has trouble with his memory after he was shot in the face in Iraq, the bullet lodging near the base of his skull. It’s too dangerous to remove.

“I’m his backup memory,” Gabby says. To relieve stress, she takes dance classes.

In Atlanta, Christian Aguilar, 10, has watched his father, an Iraq Army veteran, be loaded into an ambulance more than a dozen times. He hugs his teachers so often — sometimes 17 times a day — that he’s now receiving therapy for “secondary PTSD,” a common diagnosis for the children of veterans.

In West Hartford, because of Jonah Hughes’s frequent medical treatments, his children missed so much school that his wife decided home schooling would be easier.

Iraq war veteran Jonah Hughes sits with two of his four kids, Everett, 18 months, and Koen, 10, at a matinee in Hartford, Conn.

‘Heightened alert’ It’s a Friday evening, and after eating pizza, Koen and sister Evie, 6, and brother Haakon, 5, are making explosion sounds as they plunge into beanbag chairs in front of the television.

“You can’t do those dangerous things,” his father cautions.

While their home is what Koen calls his father’s “safe zone,” the war followed him straight into their living room.

“He worries we’re never safe,” Koen explains, eyes rolling. “We can’t do anything, so I don’t always listen. Then he gets angry, which is disastrous.”

Koen often worries he’s doing something wrong, something that could trigger his father’s anxiety.

At home, Koen has a habit of leaving open the baby gate, although Jonah needs it closed. Easily distracted because of his memory problems, Jonah tends to forget to look after his 18-month-old son, Everett. Even if his wife, Blair, reminds Jonah, he can lose track.

When Jonah sees the gate open, he goes into a state of “heightened alert.” He gets exasperated, and Koen ends up chasing his baby brother around.

Jonah tries to help. But “sometimes he unloads the dishwasher into a sink of dirty dishes, or butters his toast and then puts it the toaster,” explains Koen.

“Yeah, I guess I do that,” his father says, looking embarrassed.

“We’re never afraid of him,”

SUNDAY, MAY 3, 2015

9

NATION Blair says. “It’s that we worry and empathize with him. What’s most difficult is the exhaustion from hyper-vigilance or anxiety, which means he doesn’t have the energy to just play or be a dad.”

Anything could be a trigger Jonah has a recurring nightmare. He’s been shot. He’s dying.

And “the bad guys” are hiding in his leafy West Hartford home.

He desperately needs Koen, who is younger in the dream, to go across the street to the neighbors.

But Jonah doesn’t know if Koen will safely cross the busy road.

He often awakes sobbing, sweating, unsure how to keep his son and family safe, unsure of how to cope with all that’s come before.

What’s come before includes Jonah struggling to understand that time in 2005 when his unit had trained more than 50 Iraqi army soldiers, only to find them burned to death in an attack. Or the time his unit came upon a vehicle engulfed in flames with Americans trapped inside.

“The smell. It never leaves you,” says Jonah.

These days, he can’t attend a barbecue with his kids because the smell reminds him of the carnage.

Families of veterans say this kind of phobia is common, according to Mary Jo Schumann, who serves as Caster Center associate director.

Her study found that while there are many support services for veterans and their spouses, “that doesn’t always trickle down to the children,” she said.

The family has visited the White House for special events where military and veteran families are invited. But in their daily lives in West Hartford, they often find it easier to just stay home.

Jonah’s been in counseling. And he’s participated in adaptive sports programs for veterans and gone snowboarding with Koen.

Then there was that trip to Disney World, a risky effort to lighten the family’s mood.

They needed to use a wheelchair for Jonah because his legs go numb if he walks a lot. A girl in line for a ride kept putting her foot under his wheelchair, bumping into it. Koen worried that the girl would hurt herself and that he needed to protect his dad.

“I didn’t want anyone to hurt him,” Koen said. “I look out for him.” n

KLMNO WEEKLY

Tyson’s huge step in the battle against superbugs BY

A NA S WANSON

A

ntibiotic-resistant superbugs are killing thousands of Americans a year. And the meat industry, the biggest breeding ground for these infections, is taking major steps to do something about the growing public health issue.

On Tuesday, Arkansas-based Tyson Foods became the latest chicken producer with plans to eliminate the use of human antibiotics for raising chickens in its U.S. operations. The company, which set a September 2017 timetable, says it will develop a plan for doing the same in its turkeys, cows and pigs, as well as the chicken it produces abroad.

The new Tyson policy means that more than a third of the U.S. chicken industry has pledged to eliminate routine use of “medically important antibiotics.”

Perdue, McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A and Pilgrim’s have announced steps to scale back their use of antibiotics. Panera Bread, Chipotle, Whole Foods Market and Applegate have also sworn off antibiotics. But Tyson processes more chicken than any of these companies, pumping out more than 38 million broiler chickens (chickens raised for meat) per week.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) called the Tyson news a “tipping point for getting the chicken industry off antibiotics.” Yet when it comes to protecting against antibiotic resistance, critics say the change may be too little, too late.

The trouble is that for years the meat industry hasn’t used antibiotics to just treat sick animals.

The antibiotics are also used to make animals bigger so they produce more meat and raise profits.

And because of the heavy use of antibiotics, these animals can develop resistant bacteria, which can then be spread to humans.

Antibiotics have been commercially available only since the 1940s, and antibiotic resistance has been around almost as long.

Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, warned the public of bacterial resistance to his drug as early as 1945, when he accepted the Nobel Prize for the discovery.

Today, antibiotic-resistant infections cause at least 2 million illnesses and 23,000 deaths in the United States each year — more deaths than are caused by drug overdoses, car accidents or firearm assaults. Sicknesses and deaths caused by antibiotic-relat-

MAX WHITTAKER/REUTERS

With the Tyson announcement, more than a third of the U.S. chicken industry has pledged to eliminate the routine use of human antibiotics.

ed superbugs, such as methicillinresistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Clostridium difficile colitis, are frighteningly common.

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria threaten not just the very sick, but also those undergoing procedures such as joint replacements, organ transplants or chemotherapy, as well as patients with diabetes, asthma and rheumatoid arthritis.

A report commissioned by the British government estimates that, by 2050, antimicrobial-resistant infections could kill 10 million people a year across the world — more than now die of cancer.

The meat industry is a primary breeding ground for these resistant strains. Estimates vary, but data from the Food and Drug Administration shows that the United States sells more kilograms of antibiotics for food-pro-

ducing animals than for people.

According to the Pew Charitable Trusts, up to 70 percent of the antibiotics sold in the United States go to healthy food animals.

The situation is especially dangerous when the same types of antibiotics are used in humans and animals, where animal use essentially creates a test lab for antibiotic-resistant strains.

The World Health Organization, the American Medical Association and the American Public Health Association have all urged a ban on growth-promoting antibiotics. The FDA called on animal pharmaceutical producers in 2013 to voluntarily eliminate growth-promotion antibiotics.

But little has been done in practice to change regulations.

More change is coming because of consumers, who are clearly turned off by the idea of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. A poll by Consumer Reports in 2012 showed that most Americans want meat raised without antibiotics at their local supermarkets.

Voluntary measures such as Tyson’s still leave questions. Namely, the company promised to phase out “human antibiotics,” and it’s not clear exactly what that means.

Even if the same antibiotic isn’t used in humans and animals, using antibiotics in the same class may spur development of crossresistance, the NRDC points out.

And beyond the chicken industry, there are bigger challenges.

The United States still faces the problem of overuse of antibiotics in humans — according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about half of the antibiotics that doctors prescribe each year are given unnecessarily or used improperly — as well as in turkeys, beef and pork. And in a world where the agricultural industry is increasingly globalized, other countries’ standards matter as well. China, which is home to a massive pork industry, uses about 10 times as much antibiotics as the Unites States per capita, and about half are consumed by people. n

SUNDAY, MAY 3, 2015

10

KLMNO WEEKLY

WORLD

Call to duty rings hollow in Ukraine K AROUN D EMIRJIAN Kiev, Ukraine BY

A

s the country’s eastern conflict drags into a second year, Ukraine’s military leaders are trying to learn from past mistakes.

They are trying to be better trained and prepared, because no one knows when the warm weather might push this conflict with pro-Russian separatists into allout war again. And they are calling up the able-bodied men of Ukraine in droves to turn the military that had only 6,000 battle-ready troops before the start of this conflict into a force a quarter-million strong.

But not everyone is heeding the call to arms.

“I decided a long time ago that I wouldn’t respond to the order,” said Igor, a 25-year-old worker with a nongovernmental organization within Kiev, who received a draft summons in February. “I am not at all interested in participating in such a conflict. They should have been acting much more effectively to have fewer victims — I don’t want to end up on the victim list myself.”

He and other prospective soldiers spoke on the condition their last names be withheld because of the risk of penalties if they were to be identified as draft dodgers.

Igor is, by most measures, a shoo-in for the service. He’s a reserve officer and a radio specialist, and he participated in the 20132014 protests on Kiev’s Independence Square.

But between one-third and onehalf of the more than 6,000 deaths in the Ukrainian conflict were in the military, and Igor cites systemic problems — such as draft commanders who ask for bribes, and commanders, including the president, who maintain Russian business ties while asking soldiers to die for Ukraine — as reasons why he and many others cannot bring themselves to serve.

“We do have some problems in the mobilization,” acknowledged military spokesman Vladislav Seleznev, when asked about cases like Igor’s. “That’s why we are trying to strike a balance: From one

SERGEI SUPINSKY/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Amid unofficial ‘war,’ high numbers of draft dodgers undercut military mobilization efforts side, the government provides benefits to those defending the country; from the other, there are very harsh criminal penalties for draft dodgers.”

Rank-and-file soldiers can make upwards of $200 a month, with commanders eligible for far more.

But those who shirk the call to duty — or go AWOL, as about 13,000 have — risk fines and years of jail time. In one recent case, a journalist speaking out publicly against the draft was charged with treason.

That isn’t enough to scare many potential draftees from dodging.

“I would rather sit in prison for three years — and be fed and secure — than serve,” said Andrey, 26, a metal plant worker who was drafted in March. “After a whole year of this government, we still have to work for two days to buy a loaf of bread. I don’t want to go fight for that kind of government.”

Andrey is from Slovyansk, an eastern city that came under heavy assault last summer, with troops eventually wresting the city from pro-Russian rebels. But the local

population’s sympathies are still divided, and of the approximately 40 people Andrey knows who recently received draft orders, he says only one is responding.

“We were fighting for autonomy, for the right to live and work in our own region. When the army came, they just bombarded us for two months in a row,” Andrey said.

“And now I’m supposed to go and fight for them? I don’t think so.”

The military says it has completed about three-quarters of the planned mobilization, now in its fifth wave, with a sixth already proposed. Response rates vary widely across the country, however: Igor’s home region of Kharkiv, for example, has the most abysmal turnout, with only about 17 percent of those receiving draft orders responding. Meanwhile Lviv, in the far west, reportedly boasts the highest response rate, with near full turnout.

But even with the majority of draftees turning up for medical checks, the military is worried. Rotating soldiers off the battlefield,

Ukrainian army volunteers take part in a ceremony in Kiev last June. In the unofficial “war” against pro-Russian rebels, many draftees do not think the fight is worth risking their lives. “I would rather sit in prison for three years — and be fed and secure — than serve,” said one.

they expect only 15 to 20 percent to return voluntarily. New soldiers get only 26 days of general training, plus a week or two to practice their specialization. So without a steady stream of recruits, they worry that the quality of soldiers could drop. Only 1 in 8 troops is a volunteer, not nearly enough to make up the recruitment gap.

Military experts say the recruitment system suffers most from bad management; the legacy of years of post-Soviet decimation.

“We don’t understand what we are fighting for, and the government does not inform people about the goals of this war,” said Aleksey Arestovich, a military expert based in Kiev, who added that after a year of hostilities, the conflict is still not officially a “war.”

Despite the databases the administration is building of soldiers, their skills and their defections, Arestovich pointed out that specialists are often ignored in favor of funneling more people to the front line, and families of slain soldiers often must fight to get their promised benefits.

As the Interior Ministry starts to prosecute no-shows, human rights advocates are also speaking in defense of the dodgers.

“We can’t win only by the numbers, we have to win by the quality of our soldiers,” said Oleksandra Matviychuk of the Center for Civil Rights in Kiev, arguing that the military should offer more draftees noncombat roles.

Maxim, 23, who was drafted in the fall, is a Seventh-day Adventist, and thus, a pacifist. But he is also a competitive athletic fighter, which he fears will make a military review board skeptical of his religious convictions.

More pressingly, Maxim doesn’t want to go to war because his wife is five months pregnant with their first child. If he has to, he said, he would try to get a Romanian passport, for which he is eligible as a resident of a border town.

“You know, I would go serve as something like a medical worker.

But I don’t have that education.

And after the physical exam, I know where they would send me — straight to the infantry.” n

SUNDAY, MAY 3, 2015

11

WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

Fear in world’s largest refugee camp K EVIN S IEFF Dadaab, Kenya BY

T

he Kenyan government is threatening to dismantle the world’s largest refugee camp, setting off a panic among the nearly 350,000 people who live here and the international aidorganizationsthatcareforthem.

Kenyan officials say the camp is a national security threat, a constellation of tents and huts used by the Somali extremist group alShabab to plan attacks, like the one on Garissa University College that killed 148 people last month.

Nearly 25 years after it was constructed as a temporary solution for families fleeing Somalia’s civil war, the Dadaab refugee complex (actually made up of multiple camps) is now a sprawling city.

Dispelling its occupants would not only be a logistical nightmare, aid officials say, but also a humanitarian disaster.

Some experts doubt Kenya will go ahead with the drastic step. But the announcement has created new concerns at a moment when the global number of refugees and displaced people has surged to its highest level since World War II, leaving aid organizations severely strained. More than 700 migrants died last month when an overcrowded boat capsized in the Mediterranean Sea, a vivid sign of the growing number of African and Middle Eastern residents fleeing oppression, war and poverty.

Sulekho Dahir, 20, heard about Kenya’s order on the radio while in her house made of sticks and a plastic tarp, similar to thousands of others on this expanse of scrubland near the border. The announcer read a statement from Kenya’s vice president, William Ruto: “The way America changed after 9/11 is the way Kenya will change after Garissa.”

Dahir was born here. She was married here. A few years ago, she gave birth to her daughter here.

Her “alien identification card” lists her nationality as Somali, but she has never been to Somalia. The voice on the radio said she would have to leave in three months.

When the camp was built in

KEVIN SIEFF/THE WASHINGTON POST

Kenya threatens to close the site, citing security.

But aid groups say that would be a disaster.

1991, it was just an agglomeration of white tents. There’s now a sense of permanence in its 52 schools and 11 police stations, the thousands of cinder-block huts with tin roofs and establishments such as the Yasir Driving School, the Amazing Grace Hotel and the Best Friends Electronics store. But mostly the permanence takes the form of people such as Dahir, who watch from afar as Somalia is buffeted by one crisis after the next.

Sending them back to Somalia when al-Shabab still controls vast swaths of the country “would be a disaster, a human tragedy and a humanitarian catastrophe,” said Leonard Zulu, the acting director for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Dadaab.

In North Africa, thousands of African migrants and asylumseekers board shoddy boats to flee to Europe, many of them dying en route. But Dadaab appears to be a symbol of a different kind of refugee crisis — an aging support sys-

tem for those fleeing conflict and famine, in which resources are stretched thin even as tension with host countries mounts.

UNHCR’s funding needs have grown by 130 percent since 2009, but its budget has increased by only 70 percent, according to a forthcoming report from the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute. Signs of the shortfall in aid are evident in Dadaab, where childhood malnutrition hovers at around 10 percent.

Although the camp was constructed as a temporary facility for people fleeing Somalia’s civil war, that conflict never ended. Instead, it evolved with the emergence of Islamist groups and eventually alShabab, which is linked to al-Qaeda. More refugees poured into Dadaab when Somalia faced a famine in 2011.

The Somalia crisis has gone on for so long that many refugees don’t have roots in any country.

Somalia is a place that Dahir hears about on the radio and television:

The Dadaab camp, built in 1991 for families fleeing the civil war in Somalia, today houses nearly 350,000 people.

“Bombs going off, people getting murdered, no schools or hospitals,” she said. Even Kenya — or the Kenya outside of the camp — is a distant land to Dahir, inaccessible with her alien identification card.

So the idea that she would go somewhere else, in either direction from Dadaab, made little sense to her.

“There’s nowhere else,” she said.

AsDadaabhasgrown,sohavethe security problems it poses. Al-Shabab militants have been able to slip into the camp, according to Kenyan officials, hiding weapons and recruiting young fighters. After Kenya sent troops into Somalia in 2011 to fight the extremists, a string of retaliatory bomb attacks targeted police trucks in the camp and six foreign aid workers were kidnapped.

Kenyan officials offer a range of reasons why some of Dadaab’s refugees support al-Shabab — clan ties, pressure from militants, financial compensation. But evidence supporting those claims has never been made public.

After the 2013 attack on a Nairobi mall left 67 dead, Kenyan officials reiterated their belief that Dadaab was a safe haven for terrorists. Parliamentarians and cabinet members, including the interior minister, asked for Dadaab to be closed. That didn’t happen, and many believe the current plan will similarly fade away.

Already, the Kenyan government appears to have backed away from the initial three-month timeline to close Dadaab. The foreign minister, Amina Mohamed, said the other week that the pace of repatriation “will depend on available resources.”

Many of the refugees in Dadaab say it’s unfair to depict it as a sanctuary for terrorists. The people who live here are victims of al-Shabab, they say, not sympathizers.

Ahmed Mohammed Salem, who said he was accused of theft by al-Shabab, rolled up his jacket sleeve to reveal the stump of his right arm, which he said was cut off in 2012 in Mogadishu, the Somali capital.

“If I go back they will kill me,” he said. “This place is hard, but the situation is much worse over there.” n

Behind the curve Baseball is losing fans, especially young ones, who are less and less likely to play the game growing up.

Is America’s pastime past its time?

BY

M ARC F ISHER

R

ob Albericci saw the curve coming. He saw his son Austin’s Little League baseball team struggle to recruit enough kids to fill a roster. He saw the rising demands of Austin’s football team, the growing pressure for kids to focus on a single sport, to specialize even before they hit puberty. And he saw a sharp swerve in his son’s passion. ¶ The father tried to steer his son toward sticking with baseball — because the injury risk is lower than in football, because baseball is “a thinking man’s game,” and because baseball is how father and son first bonded over sports. “I threw with him,” the father says, and he looks at his muscular son with a softness reserved for the littlest of boys. “I’d take him to cages and throw and hit.” ¶ But Austin, 15 now, a high school freshman in Demarest, N.J., wasn’t listening to his father’s pitch. Austin still admires baseball: “There’s nothing better than a sick double play on the Top 10” on ESPN’s “SportsCenter,” he says. But with Derek Jeter having retired, there’s not a single active baseball player on his list of sports favorites. Austin had had it with the imbalance in baseball between anticipation and action. ¶ “Most of the time, I was in center field, wondering, ‘When is the ball going to get to me?’ ” he says. “Baseball players are thinking ahead all the time, always thinking of the possibilities — ‘If I can’t get it to second, do I throw to first?’ Baseball is a bunch of

SUNDAY, MAY 3, 2015

13

COVER STORY

KLMNO WEEKLY

PHOTOS BY MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

thinking, and I live a different lifestyle than baseball. In basketball and football, you live in the moment. You got to be quick. Everything I do, I do with urgency.”

Rob Manfred hears Austin’s words read to him, and the new commissioner of Major League Baseball lets out a bit of a sigh. “That’s a particularly articulate kid,” he says. “Those are the sorts of issues we need to address, because the single biggest predictor of avidity in sports is whether you played as a kid.”

Baseball, for decades now the national pastime only through the nostalgic lens of history, is a thriving business. Revenue is at an all-time high. Attendance in the 30 major league parks and in minor leagues around the country is strong. But since he took office this year, Manfred has been sounding a startling warning bell: The sport must address its flagging connection to young people or risk losing a generation of fans.

On opening day of the 140th season since the National League was founded, baseball’s following is aging. Its TV audience skews older than that of any other major sport, and across the country, the number of kids playing baseball continues a two-decade-long decline.

Baseball has been defying predictions of its

fall — because of overexpansion, or because of the decline of small-town America, or because Americans soured on nostalgia — since the 1920s. And the game remains the second-most popular sport for kids to play, after basketball.

“Baseball is an extraordinarily healthy entertainment product,” Manfred says.

But the pervasive impact of new technologies on how children play and the acceleration of the pace of modern life have conspired against sports in general and baseball in particular.

According to Nielsen ratings, 50 percent of baseball viewers are 55 or older, up from 41 percent 10 years ago. ESPN, which airs baseball, football and basketball games, says its data show the average age of baseball viewers rising well above that of other sports: 53 for baseball, 47 for the NFL (also rising fast) and 37 for the NBA, which has kept its audience age flat.

Young people are not getting into baseball as fans as they once did: For the first time, the ESPN Sports Poll’s annual survey of young Americans’ 30 favorite sports figures finds no baseball players on the list. Adults 55 and older are 11 percent more likely than the overall population to say they have a strong interest in baseball, whereas those in the 18 to 34 age group are 14 percent less likely to report such

interest, according to a study by Nielsen Scarborough.

Baseball’s economic model is different from that of other sports. Its TV audience is primarily local and strong in pockets. In 11 markets where the sport does well — St. Louis, Detroit, Cincinnati and Boston top the list — the home team’s games are the most-watched programs on TV all summer.

And the sport is moving aggressively into digital culture — its mobile app, MLB.com At Bat, is the nation’s most popular sport-specific app, according to Nielsen. But in an era when local identity is taking a back seat to a national digital culture, the sport runs the risk of losing its place in the national conversation.

“If baseball does nothing, they’ll probably stay flat for another 10 years,” says Rich Luker, a psychologist and sports researcher who has run ESPN’s polling for two decades. “But 20 years from now, they’ll be moving to a secondary position in American life, doomed to irrelevance like Tower Records or Blockbuster Video.”

Less likely to ‘have a catch’ On a late March afternoon in the bedroom community of Closter, N.J., eager parents continues on next page

Logan Hinds, 12, of Closter, N.J., said he gave up baseball for lacrosse because he wanted more action.

Nationwide, participation in lacrosse has risen in the past five years.

SUNDAY, MAY 3, 2015

14

KLMNO WEEKLY

COVER STORY

from previous page

squeeze together on a narrow bench inside the Northern Valley Baseball Academy, a gleaming indoor facility staffed by coaches with college and pro experience. Every few minutes, a father or mother sidles over to a coach, eager to boost a boy’s chances.

“He’s a little rusty ’cause he hasn’t been out there with all the snow, but he’s got a good eye,” one father says.

“He just loves baseball,” a mother offers. “He sleeps with his glove.”

The coaches nod and stare across the room to where the boys field grounders. At these Little League tryouts, decisions are being made about which level of ball these kids will play this season. The 41 boys are in first and second grade, and they are bouncing around like pinballs.

The turnout looks great, but the image is

The Washington Nationals gave uniforms to the city’s 4,500 Little League players to build the team’s brand and ease the cost of playing.

illusory: Until last year, Closter ran its own Little League. So did the neighboring towns of Demarest and Haworth. But a severe decline in the number of kids signing up to play baseball led the towns last year to disband their own leagues and create the Tri-Town Little League — the kind of consolidation that officials at Little League headquarters in Pennsylvania say is happening more and more nationwide.

“We have seen a decline in participation over the past 12 years, 1 or 2 percent every year,” says Patrick Wilson, Little League’s senior vice president of operations. “There is a generation of parents now that don’t have a connection to the game because they didn’t play it themselves, and if you didn’t play, you’re less likely to go out in the back yard and have a catch.”

For many years, Little League detailed youth participation in baseball and softball, but as those numbers declined, from nearly 3 million in the 1990s to 2.4 million two years ago, the organization stopped releasing tallies. A Little League spokesman declined to explain why it no longer puts out those numbers.

The number of kids trying out for the TriTown league declined sharply across age groups this spring: Despite the good turnout

for first- and second-graders, fewer than half as many fifth- and sixth-graders showed up.

Among seventh- and eighth-graders, only 11 boys tried out. Cost is no barrier; the towns pick up the fee.

“If that’s not an indictment, I don’t know what is,” says Mike Tsung, manager of the baseball academy.

‘It’s kind of like fashion’ Starting last month, Major League Baseball pushed its millionaire performers to speed up their act. Hoping to catch up to the pace of a generation weaned on instant messaging and real-time video, baseball this season institutes the first clock to be associated with a proudly timeless pursuit — a countdown timer in the outfield that will limit the break between innings to two minutes and 25 seconds, plus a new rule requiring hitters to stay in the batter’s box to trim hitters’ fussing and fidgeting between pitches.

“It’s a reflection of the fact that our society’s constantly becoming faster-paced,” Manfred says.

But the commissioner is adamant that there’s no need to alter the basic character of baseball. “It’s kind of like fashion,” he says.

“Some people buy really flashy things, and they end up in the discard pile. We are like the kind of clothing that’s classic and stays with you all your life.”

Professional baseball has concluded that if the game can be shaved from last year’s average of three hours and two minutes (compared with 2:33 in 1981), an impatient society may find more to like.

But many of those who study baseball’s appeal say they don’t see evidence that pace is the problem or the solution. Football games are often longer than baseball games, and few complain about their length, says Michael Haupert, an economist at the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse who studies the business of baseball. “The problem isn’t the length, but the perception that nothing’s going on in the game.”

Haupert says boosting the game’s offense offers more promise; tweaks such as lowering the pitcher’s mound, limiting defensive shifts and restricting pitching changes are under discussion in pro, college and youth baseball.

But baseball’s troubles have at least as much to do with larger changes in society as with the rules of the game. In a time of rapidly shifting family structure, increased sports specialization and declining local identity, baseball finds itself at odds with social change.

Participation in all sports has dropped by morethan9percentnationwideoverthepastfive years, according to an annual study by the Sports and Fitness Industry Association. Only lacrosse has shown double-digit growth over that period.

Baseball participation dropped 3 percent, basketball fell by 2 percent, and football lost 5 percentofitstackleplayersand7percentoftouch players. About half of American children do not participate in any team sport.

What’s distinctive about baseball’s decline is

Though the majors are changing some rules to speed up the game in this increasingly fast-paced era, Rob Manfred, the new MLB commissioner, sees no need to alter baseball’s basic character.

SUNDAY, MAY 3, 2015

15

COVER STORY that kids leave the sport at a younger age than they fall away from basketball or football, though the dropoff is even steeper for soccer. A primary reason for kids switching out of baseball is rising pressure on youths to specialize in one sport.

Travel teams and other selective, intensive programs — including high-priced showcases and year-round academies — have had strong growth in recent years, as has the Cal Ripken Division of Babe Ruth League, which features a larger field than Little League uses. And some travel leagues have had so much demand that they have started teams for less-advanced players.

But some coaches, parents and researchers say the trend toward specialization has disproportionately hurt baseball. David Ogden, a University of Nebraska at Omaha researcher who focuses on youth baseball, says selective teams produce better-trained players for high school and college teams but diminish baseball’s appeal to the casual player.

The high cost — about $2,000 a year in many cases — limits opportunities for lower-income families, and the high level of play leaves more broad-based organizations such as Little League and YMCA teams with “a lot of kids who can’t get the ball over the plate, so the game is less fun and kids drop out,” Ogden says.

Specialization troubles baseball’s commissioner. “You’re not going to stop the natural funneling that goes on,” Manfred says, “but we’re interested in kids like me, who were not great players. Our goal is to make the pipeline as big as you can in the beginning.”

‘Not being socialized into the game’ A significant impediment to widening that pipeline to baseball may be the changes that have altered the structure of American families.

In a 15-year study of 10,000 youth baseball players, Ogden found that the sport is drawing a more affluent, suburban and white base than it once did. In another study he conducted, 95 percent of college baseball players were raised in families with both biological parents at home — at a time when only 46 percent of Americans 18 and younger have grown up in that traditional setting.

“We’re looking at a generation who didn’t play catch with their dads,” Ogden says, “and that’s at the core of the chasm between baseball and African Americans. Kids are just not being socialized into the game.”

The proportion of black players in the major leagues has fallen from 19 percent in 1986 to 8 percent last year. Ogden found that blacks make up only 2.6 percent of baseball players on Division I college teams.

Latinos, on the other hand, are both the fastest-growing component of major league rosters and an expanding part of the fan base; Hispanics are more likely than whites or African Americans to be avid baseball fans, according to Luker’s analysis of ESPN polling data.

Last winter, the Washington Nationals opened a youth baseball academy, where 108 elementary students get after-school academic instruction as well as baseball training on three

KLMNO WEEKLY

fields and in a state-of-the-art indoor facility.

Similar programs are launching in other major league cities, and Manfred says the sport is investing in other programs to lure African Americans and others who feel disconnected from the game.

Visiting the new academy this winter, Manfred said, “The single most important thing for our game is getting kids to play.”

Later, in his 31st-story conference room overlooking New York’s Grand Central Terminal, Manfred recalled his own, more traditional introduction to the game: “When I was 10, my father took the time to drive me from Rome, N.Y., for a weekend full of Yankee baseball, and that made me a lifelong fan.”

The commissioner, researchers and coaches all see the transmission of baseball fever relying heavily on the father-son dynamic, whereas other sports are often taught in school or by peers.

This field in Closter, N.J., was once used for Little League games but is now mainly used by residents for practice.

A bond between generations Baseball has lived for the better part of a century on its unchanging character, its role as a bondbetweengenerations,itsidentityasaquintessentially American game that features a oneon-one faceoff of individual skills tucked inside a team sport. Can a game with deliberation and anticipation at its heart thrive in a society revved up for nonstop action and scoring?

Baseball officials are confident that the game, which overcame a serious drop in attendance in the 1950s, will endure. Young people are often eager to express different passions and values from their parents, but so far at least, each new generation has returned to the fields of its fathers.

The answer this time will come from kids such as Austin Albericci, the New Jersey teen who dropped baseball to focus on football, the boy who, to his father’s disappointment, doesn’t sit with his dad and watch Yankees games like they used to.

Austin has put baseball aside for now, but he figures he may return to the game someday. “If I ever have a son, he’ll definitely have to try baseball,” he says. “Because my father loved baseball. That means something.” n

SUNDAY, MAY 3, 2015

16

KLMNO WEEKLY

SCIENCE

Making all the right connections BY

D REW H ARWELL

T

he future of home energy sits in Josh and Susan Fried’s basement near shelves of old tools and canned soup, an unadorned box the size of a wine cooler filled with a dozen silent batteries.

Annoyed by blackouts, the retired dentist and his wife paid $50,000 for the batteries and other technology that could keep their home supercharged. Now, if they lose power, they can run the air conditioning, a treadmill, even the espresso machine for three days before breaking a sweat.

Their power bill is smaller, too, because they can stockpile energy from their solar panels and power lines for when the sun isn’t shining or prices are high. When the batteries are fully charged, the couple can even sell some juice back, sometimes making $30 a month.

“The sun is out,” said Josh Fried, 67, one day last week. “I’ve been selling all day.”

The batteries that fuel our cars, laptops and lives have rarely, even in an always-on age, been wired to America’s biggest energy users: our homes. Only a few hundred U.S. homeowners — frustrated by their utility or seeking to go green — have worked with a small corps of battery makers to reduce their reliance on the national grid.

But improving technology, falling prices and backing from electric-car giant Tesla could soon make the battery-powered home cheaper and easier than ever, challenging the long-held utility model of dependence on outside energy — and revolutionizing how America flicks on its lights.

Homeowners have used solar panels for years, but the technology has a crippling flaw: They can’t work at night or under cloudy skies. But by storing solar power for anytime use, batteries could help tear down the biggest roadblock to mainstream homegrown energy, especially as the prices for both technologies rapidly decline, according to a report from the Rocky Mountain Institute, an energy think tank.

But home batteries are already

J. LAWLER DUGGAN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

With Tesla’s backing and improving technology, battery-powered homes become more realistic hitting resistance from big utilities, which are now fighting a broad battle with the budding solar industry. And before batteries can secure space in middle-class Americans’ garages and power grid, they will first need to make sense in their budget. The homebattery revolution, experts worry, could prove easily squashed if homeowners aren’t convinced the high-tech safety blankets are worth the cost.

Tesla, the swashbuckling tech firm led by billionaire Elon Musk, made a high-profile bet on the industry when it unveiled its own home battery this past week, based on the same type of rechargeable lithium-ion brick found in most modern laptops and phones.

As with the few batteries now on the market, Tesla’s would gulp down power, guard against blackouts and replace noisy and dangerous gas generators. But the Tesla battery’s real potential strength, say analysts, would be in its everyman simplicity: The size of a kitchen cabinet, it makes no noise,

needs no maintenance and can be installed in an afternoon.

Tesla has in the last two years quietly installed batteries in a few hundred test households across California, said Trip Chowdhry, an analyst at Global Equities Research. Musk said the Tesla Powerwall, with a capacity of 10 kilowatt hours, will cost suppliers $3,500, but that doesn’t include other costs such as installation, so customers will pay more than that.

Batteries already help power homes in places where energy grids are spotty, on islands and in developing countries including India and Bangladesh. But they have remained a niche for homeowners in the United States, even as more and more demanding connections on America’s aging power grid have pushed power outages up 285 percent since 1984.

Tesla, with its corporate star power, has quickly become the home-battery industry’s bestknown cheerleader, and its boosterism could give home batteries their best shot at finding accep-

You wouldn’t know it at a glance, but both Josh Fried’s car — a Tesla Model S — and his Rockville, Md., home feature battery power. He charges the Tesla through a solarpowered system. The batteries in the house have enough juice for three offgrid days.

285%

The rise in U.S. power outages since 1984.

tance in mainstream America.

The electric giant already boasts a unique head start. Tesla is building the world’s largest battery factory, a $5 billion “gigafactory” in the Nevada desert, that it says will drive the prices of batteries usable in homes and cars down by more than 30 percent.

A few companies are already switching on Tesla-brand battery power. SolarCity, the solar-panel installer for which Musk serves as chairman, has installed Tesla batteries at 13 Wal-Marts in California “to help manage peak energy demand,” and will likely add more in the coming years, Wal-Mart spokesman Kevin Gardner said.

Chowdhry said Tesla batteries have also been installed in Google offices and are in the blueprints for Apple’s sprawling new campus.

Even with Tesla’s backing, home batteries will remain a shrimp compared with America’s juggernaut of a power grid. With its nearly 3 million miles of transformers and power lines, it has been described by some as the biggest machine on Earth.

But traditional utilities are still concerned about how the “distributed energy” of home batteries and renewable energy could cripple their bottom line.

The industry’s trade group, the Edison Electric Institute, has said that batteries are among the very real “disruptive threats” that could allow ratepayers to slim their addiction to power lines.

For the Frieds, who moved from Poughkeepsie, N.Y., to Maryland to be closer to their grandchildren, all it took was a chain of annoying blackouts to convince them it was worth the cost.

Though theirs is the only home for miles, that they know of, powered by a battery, the trend away from the grid seems to be catching on. Recently, their neighborhood held a “going solar” meeting at the local community center.

It will take years, if ever, for them to make their money back in energy savings, but the couple is, as Susan Fried said, happy to have made “our teeny-weeny contribution to being environmentally conscious.” n

SUNDAY, MAY 3, 2015

17

LIFESTYLES

KLMNO WEEKLY

Making space for the rise of singles

SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES

America’s housing stock wasn’t built for the reality of today’s market Taylor Jones shows visitors a 325-square-foot apartment in the Museum of the City of New York’s exhibit on micro housing units.

BY

E MILY B ADGER

O

ver the past half-century in America, it’s become acceptable, then increasingly common, then entirely unremarkable, to live alone. Women who once lived with their families until their wedding day now live alone. Men delaying marriage later into their 20s live alone. Divorcés, more common today than in 1950, live alone. And seniors who live longer now than ever before — and who are less likely to spend those years in a retirement home — increasingly live alone, too.

Asaresultofalltheseshifts,more than a quarter of households in the United States now contain one person. In 1940, it was about 7 percent.

This trend has all kinds of consequences, including a particularly problematic one for where we live: Our housing stock wasn’t built for a society full of singles.

The increase of people living alone More than a quarter of households in the United States now contain only one person. In 1940, about 7 percent of households had one person.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, NYU Furman Center

Our communities instead are full of homes meant for the traditional nuclear family — two-bedroom starter homes, three-bedroom houses, apartments with more bathrooms than a singleton needs,

full-service kitchens when bachelors primarily dine by microwave.

The disconnect between these trends is particularly acute in big cities, as the Furman Center points out in a new research brief. In New

York, Austin and Denver, nearly 57 percent of adults were single in 2010 (although not necessarily living alone). In Washington, that figure is a whopping 71 percent.

But none of these cities has anywhere near enough small-size housing to accommodate them.

That means that a lot of people are probably living with unrelated adult roommates who would prefer to live alone. And people who do live alone are likely paying more for space they don’t want in a large one-bedroom because there aren’t enough alternatives.

The rise of singles calls in particular for more micro housing: apartments the size of studios and “accessory dwelling units” that might be built in a back yard.

Neighborhood opposition and existing regulation make this kind of housing hard to build though.

Parking requirements, for example, often mandate that new housing come with new parking spots.

But that rule is impractical for someone who wants to rent a cottage in her back yard. And it makes projects financially unworkable for a developer who wants to build micro units next to a train stop for residents who don’t own cars.

Other laws set minimum standards for how small a housing unit can be — in much of New York, it’s 400 square feet — making micro units effectively illegal. Or they limit density by capping the number of units that can be built on a given plot of land. Then there are laws thattellpropertyownershowmuch of their land they can build on.

Cities would have to change many of these regulations to make more micro housing possible, and there are a few places where that’s starting to happen. New York has begun to test the idea of smaller housing units with the development of a 55-unit modular apartment in Manhattan that would otherwise violate city code.

Many of these smaller units are decidedly upscale, with high rents and communal luxuries like club rooms. But micro housing could also, in theory, be affordable housing, making cities like New York accessible to single people who can’t afford a studio today. n

SUNDAY, MAY 3, 2015

18

KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

Behind Orson Welles’s final film N ON-FICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

D ENNIS D RABELLE

I ORSON WELLES’S LAST MOVIE The Making of ‘The Other Side of the Wind’

By Josh Karp St. Martin’s.

336 pp. $26.99

n a 1967 essay, film critic Pauline Kael recalled being on a train platform and overhearing a woman recite a litany of personal woes, to each of which her companion replied, “There ain’t no way.” Kael went on to apply that refrain to Hollywood’s treatment of Orson Welles after his triple-barreled debut — star, director and co-writer — in “Citizen Kane,” which performed tepidly at the box office in 1941.

“There ain’t no way,” she would say about the subsequent rejections and double crosses Welles had to endure.

Welles’s second picture, “The Magnificent Ambersons,” was snatched away from him after preview audiences gave it mixed reviews. Not only did the studio, RKO, scrap the bleak ending and shoot a new, anodyne one, it also ultimately destroyed the excised footage. After that disaster, Welles the director was given access to the unparalleled moviemaking resources of a Hollywood studio only three more times.

Welles made his other movies on the fly. He could raise money by acting in other directors’ movies and by doing TV commercials, but movie making is a costly game. He was accused of being neurotically reluctant to finish his projects, but the best way to test that theory would have been to turn him loose with a decent budget and the kind of autonomy an auteur deserves, and nobody was up for that. Kael ended her 1967 piece — a discursive review of “Chimes at Midnight,” in which Welles assembled the Falstaff story from Shakespeare’s history plays — by complaining that “because of technical defects due to poverty, Welles’s finest Shakespearean production to date — another near-masterpiece, and this time so very close — cannot reach a large public. There ain’t no way.”

Yet four years later, Kael turned on Welles in “Raising Kane,” her revisionist commentary on the “Citizen Kane” script.

LARRY JACKSON

Orson Welles, left, on the set of “The Other Side of the Wind” with fellow directors Peter Bogdanovich, center, and John Huston, who both starred in the unfinished film.

Kael argued that Welles didn’t deserve the screenwriting credit — and the Oscar — he received along with Herman J. Mankiewicz, who according to her had written “Kane” in its entirety.

Now we have Josh Karp, who teaches journalism at Northwestern, revisiting the image of Welles as a self-defeating perfectionist in a meticulously researched new book, “Orson Welles’s Last Movie.”

That last movie is “The Other Side of the Wind,” an unfinished, extraordinarily meta affair in which a Welles surrogate — legendary but washed-up director Jake Hannaford, played by actual legendary, though not washedup, director John Huston — fights against long odds to make a comeback movie. Those who took part in the movie’s drawn-out creative ordeal all testified to the path-breaking razzmatazz Welles brought to bear. He wanted to

depict Hannaford in an almost bewildering variety of ways, among them, in Karp’s words, “still photos and footage from 8mm and 16mm cameras — as well other formats — shot by a combination of documentarians making films about Hannaford, young directors, and video freaks. . . . In weaving together blackand-white and color images, the goal is to ‘sketch a film likeness of the man himself as he looked through all those different viewfinders.’ ” The story of how “The Other Side” came a cropper lies at the heart of Karp’s book. I don’t have the space even to summarize the difficulties, frustrations and selfinflicted wounds Welles suffered.

But Welles contributed to the delays with his insistence on having his own way. He rejected more than one offer of financing because the promise of final approv-

al was not air-tight — although, given his experiences in Hollywood, it’s hard to blame him for that. At other times, he seems to have been a man obsessed, especially during the editing process.

After Welles’s death in 1985, conflicts over rights to the film arose among Welles’s widow, Paola Mori; his daughter and heir, Beatrice Welles; his longtime mistress, Oja Kadar; and successors to his Iranian backers.

Last year, it was reported that all claims had finally been sorted out, all parties had reached agreement, and producer Frank Marshall and director Peter Bogdanovich were poised to deliver a final version of “The Other Side of the Wind.”

Could there be, at long last, a way after all? n Drabelle, a contributing editor of Book World, writes frequently about film.

SUNDAY, MAY 3, 2015

19

BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

A psychiatrist and sociopath face off

From Jamaica, with love for Bond

F ICTION

N ON-FICTION

E

l

REVIEWED BY

A NNA M UNDOW

ver since Oedipus insisted on getting to the bottom of things — and look how that turned out — murder mysteries have revolved around the conundrum of identity and self-knowledge. Modern crime novelists in particular tend to grant their villains rich if disfigured inner lives that are typically revealed in disquieting monologues. Think of Thomas Harris’s “Red Dragon” and “Silence of the Lambs.” Lisa Scottoline is not, of course, Thomas Harris, a fact that she playfully acknowledges in her latest novel. “I treat depressed people, anxious people, people in deep grief,” her protagonist declares. “It’s not ‘Silence of the Lambs.’ ” Well, no. But the killer in “Every Fifteen Minutes” is a sociopath with a weakness for selfrevelation (“I am a sociopath” is the novel’s opening sentence), and the hero is a psychiatrist. Her fans may rest assured, however, that Scottoline’s breezy, irreverent style prevails and that her gift for intimacy — for drawing the reader close to sociopath and victim — makes “Every Fifteen Minutes” as teasingly irresistible as any of this versatile author’s creations.

We meet the protagonist, Eric Parrish, chief of the psychiatric unit at a suburban Philadelphia hospital, in the emergency room where he has been summoned to evaluate a terminally ill woman and to calm her panicky adult grandson.

“Humor usually worked,” Eric knows from treating elderly patients, and soon he and Mrs. Teichner are trading quips while the grandson, Max, hovers anxiously. The interview ends with Eric agreeing to see Max as a patient and with one of the glamorous medical students in attendance, Kristine Malin, making an unexpected pass at the attractive Eric. Only much later, when Scottoline has deftly revealed layer upon layer of motivation, will we appreciate her economical skill in using that opening scene to set the novel’s key characters in lethal

orbit around the unsuspecting Eric. But who is the sociopath, and what lies behind his or her obsession with Eric?

Before that question becomes a matter of life and death, Scottoline introduces a parallel domestic drama staged on the immaculate suburban terrain of Little League games and groomed lawns. Here Eric and his estranged wife skirmish over their young daughter’s well-being and custody. As the acrimony intensifies, Eric understandably contemplates “the familiar purple DSM, the volume that categorized the mental and emotional disorders that plagued human beings, and he wondered if being heartbroken was one of them. Or all of them.”

Scottoline skewers the fake civility and phony respectability of that suburban realm with zest; the same goes for the managementspeak of Eric’s corporate employers. Equally impressive is her talent for dispensing chunks of psychiatric and legal information without stalling the narrative. The fact that Eric, for instance, suffered from an anxiety disorder that he recognizes in Max not only blurs the line between patient and physician but also intensifies the slowly building suspense.

Arriving midway through a novel whose tone is occasionally bland, the wisecracking attorney Paul Fortunato both tightens and toughens the narrative. “The firepower didn’t come from a kid with a musket,” he tells a detective sergeant after a mall standoff, “but from you and every other police precinct in the tri-state, loaded with AR-9’s and all the other toys the feds gave you as surplus from Iraq.” In true Scottoline fashion, the novel’s apparent denouement, though satisfying, merely sets the stage for the final, operatic unmasking of a sociopath who has, like any worthwhile maniac, been hiding in plain sight all along. n Mundow is a freelance journalist and reviewer.

L EVERY FIFTEEN MINUTES

By Lisa Scottoline St. Martin’s.

435 pp. $27.99

GOLDENEYE Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming’s Jamaica

By Matthew Parker Pegasus.

388 pp. $27.95

l

REVIEWED BY

J OANNA S CUTTS

ong before Goldeneye was a James Bond movie, it was a sparse modern house perched above a private beach in Oracabessa Bay on Jamaica’s north shore, its windows open to the breezes as well as the insects and tropical rains. Built in 1946, it was a beloved escape from London winters for its owner, Ian Fleming, who created there the ultimate alter ego in secret agent James Bond. Against a backdrop of the island’s evolution from colonialism to independence, Matthew Parker tells the story of Fleming’s Jamaican retreat, of the psychological fallout of the end of the British Empire and of how Bond parachuted in to offer solace in the form of escapist fantasy.

Fleming knew plenty about the desire to escape. The second son of a wealthy Conservative lawmaker, he was dispatched to boarding school at the age of 7, where the routine bullying and cheerless communal living fostered “a lifelong, almost neurotic craving for time on his own.” After his father’s death on active duty in World War I, young Ian went on to Eton and Sandhurst military academy, then failed at several career efforts — the foreign service, journalism, banking — while succeeding easily with women.

The drifting playboy was “rescued” by World War II, recruited into naval intelligence and given James Bond’s rank of commander.

After the war, thanks to a pal, he landed a job at the Sunday Times — with two months’ paid leave each year to spend in Jamaica.

It’s hard to feel much sympathy for Fleming as an individual and less for him as a type: the selfappointed elite, failing upward through the goodwill of friends and arrogantly convinced that the welfare state is making the country lazy and soft. In the Caribbean, awash in gin and nostalgia for the vanished plantation era, his aristocratic neighbors in their great houses were no less hypocritical.

Like them, Fleming was unable to

conceive of a world not structured and stratified according to race, in which a person’s “blood” dictated his or her character more powerfully than any other force. Small individual kindnesses, such as the mutual devotion of Fleming and his Jamaican housekeeper Violet Cummings, hardly mitigate the impact of this racist mind-set.

In February 1952, Fleming began his first novel, “Casino Royale,” at Goldeneye. The previous summer the double agents Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean had fled to Moscow, sending a “seismic shock” through the British intelligence services.

While he wrote, the world — and Britain’s place in it — was changing dramatically. After the newly inaugurated President John F. Kennedy listed “From Russia, With Love” among his favorite books in a Life magazine profile, Bond was on his way to global bestseller status. Then, amid Jamaica’s preparations for independence in 1962, the first Bond film, “Dr. No,” was shot on the island. Sean Connery’s performance, not to mention Ursula Andress’s bikini-clad emergence from the sea, firmly established the character as a global symbol of adventure and luxury and the island as a mass tourist destination.

Bond’s creator, however, was in free fall. After a first heart attack at the age of 52, he was advised by his doctor to change his habits if he wanted to live; in response, “Fleming cut down to fifty Morlands a day, and switched to bourbon” from gin. He died four years later, on Aug. 12, 1964, his son Caspar’s 12th birthday; Caspar committed suicide at age 23, his short life shadowed by drug addiction. With Goldeneye now a luxury resort and the public appetite for Bond movies undiminished, Parker’s book is an astute reminder of the price we pay for fantasy. n Scutts is a freelance writer and board member of the National Book Critics Circle.

SUNDAY, MAY 3, 2015

20

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Fulfilling the Arab Spring requires different strategy JACKSON DIEHL is deputy editorial page editor of The Post. He is an editorial writer specializing in foreign affairs and writes a biweekly column.

If the Arab Spring had fulfilled its promise, Maikel Nabil Sanad would be part of a lively political culture in a rapidly modernizing Egypt. Instead, the 29­year­old activist — who was Egypt’s first conscientious objector and is a pro­ Israel atheist, to boot — is in Washington, appealing for political asylum.

Nabil has the scant comfort of being one of thousands: There were more U.S. asylum applications from Egyptians in 2013 than from any other nation except China. He is lucky that he is one of the Arab liberals who is merely in exile, rather than in prison or the grave. But he is also living testimony to what is missing from the ongoing struggle over the future of the Middle East, as well as the Obama administration’s strategy for shaping it.

It’s easy now to forget that Arab proponents of democracy, market capitalism and rights for women were the instigators of the revolutions that swept Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen and, ultimately, Syria after 2011.

They did not come out of nowhere: For the previous decade, a movement had swelled in favor of ending what a famous 2002 report by Arab intellectuals called the region’s “freedom deficit.” In Egypt, its focal point, liberal newspapers and blogs sprouted like mushrooms and Facebook groups backing liberal causes attracted hundreds of thousands of followers.

Moreover, the liberals had a sensible agenda: To drag their countries away from the authoritarian nationalism of the 20th century — and the Islamism of the 7th — and adopt the successful development models of countries such as India and Indonesia, where hundreds of millions of Muslims prosper in 21st-century freedom.

That one country, Tunisia, has succeeded in establishing a working democracy, despite power struggles between

secularists and Islamists, and terrorism by jihadists, shows that the goal of democratic transformation was neither a pipe dream nor a Western imposition unsuited for Arab lands. It remains the only workable long-term solution for a region that must balance the interests of multiple religious sects and ethnic groups and find means to compete in global markets beyond oil and gas.

Four years after the revolution, however, democracy is the one option not being discussed as a way of ending the subsequent turmoil — in large part because liberals have been excluded from the debate. Tens of thousands have been driven into exile, including the leaders of Libya’s first liberal government; many more are in prison, including most of those who organized the Jan. 25, 2011, march in Cairo that

VIRGINIE NGUYEN HOANG/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Egyptians mark the Arab Spring’s anniversary in 2014. Since Egypt’s autocracy fell, most liberals there have found themselves outgunned.

triggered the downfall of Egypt’s rotting autocracy.

Some supporters of the liberal agenda, in Egypt and elsewhere, abandoned it when Islamists won Egypt’s first democratic elections in 2012. But, as Nabil points out, most simply found themselves literally outgunned. “You had Saudi Arabia and other gulf states backing the restoration of dictatorship in Egypt,” he says.

“You had Iran and Russia supporting the Assad regime in Syria, and money from the gulf going to ISIS [the Islamic State].

But no one backed the democratic forces — the United States and Europe decided not to take the risk of helping them.”

President Obama denied aid to secular moderate rebels in Syria, declined to defend Libya’s proWestern democrats against rogue militias and backed Egypt’s new military dictatorship even as it imprisoned the country’s most committed and effective liberal leaders. Now he envisions political solutions to the wars in Iraq, Syria and Yemen flowing from an “equilibrium” between Shiite Iran and the Sunni states.

Democracy is the one option not being discussed to end the turmoil since the revolution.

The United States would play the role of equalizer by moderating, through “engagement,” Iran’s hegemonic ambitions and by heaping new supplies of weapons on Saudi Arabia, Egypt and their allies.

Obama’s scheme might be worth supporting if it had a chance of ending Syria’s horrific bloodshed or saving a united Iraq.

But as Nabil notes, that is the real pipe dream. Would Iran’s supreme leader, or Saudi Arabia’s king, really accept a new political order for Syria or Iraq not led by a client of their sect? Who will argue for the defense of minorities, women’s rights or democratic choice at a conference table where the U.S. role is limited to balancing competing totalitarians?

A realistic U.S. strategy would start with the right long-term goal, which is putting the rest of the Middle East on the path that Tunisia is following toward building liberal institutions. It would then invest in the Arabs and Iranians who share that goal, of whom there are millions, and defend them from the despots who are tossing them in prison, dropping barrel bombs on their homes and forcing them into exile. It’s not a policy that would pay off in the short run. But it would recognize that the best Mideast future lies with young people like Maikel Nabil Sanad. n

SUNDAY, MAY 3, 2015

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Let’s talk bridges, not burritos FAREED ZAKARIA writes a foreign affairs column for The Washington Post. He is also the host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS and a contributing editor for the Atlantic.

The discussion of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy has, so far, thoroughly explored her video announcement, restaurant choices, clothes, health, ethics and, of course, husband. Relatively little attention has been devoted to her ideas — or the ones that should animate her campaign.

The easiest way for her to change the conversation would be to put out some big policy proposals. It would be good for the country as well.

Marco Rubio has staked out his claim as the champion of reform. In his latest book and other places, Rubio has argued intelligently for a revamping or replacement of systems that don’t address today’s needs. Some of his ideas are standard-fare Republican rhetoric, such as deregulation and the reduction of the number of tax brackets. Others are surprising and truly radical, such as phasing out the subsidy for employer-sponsored health care.

The United States, like most advanced industrial countries, needs reform and restructuring.

Regulations pile up and lobbies fight hard to keep benefits for established players. Meanwhile, there are no special interests for the industries of the future. The tax code is a corrupt mess. But is this the greatest and most urgent problem facing the U.S. today?

When you compare America with the rest of the world, it does not seem to be hobbled by inefficiencies. In the World Economic Forum’s latest Global Competitiveness Report, the

United States ranks third — and the countries before it, Switzerland and Singapore, are tiny. This is why America has outperformed almost every other advanced economy since 2008.

On the other hand, America is in dire need of investment — in physical and human capital. In the same report, the U.S. ranks 12th in overall infrastructure, 24th in quality of electricity supply and a stunning 101st in mobile phone subscriptions.

The American Society of Civil Engineers’ most recent Report Card for America’s Infrastructure details the dangers. The average age of the country’s 84,000 dams is 52 years and of its 607,380 bridges, 42 years. An estimated 240,000 water main breaks take place annually. And, as the report

notes, “forty-two percent of America’s major urban highways remain congested, costing the economy an estimated $101 billion in wasted time and fuel annually.”

The need for investment in human capital is less visible but in fact more urgent. Social mobility — the ability to rise out of the economic class you were born into — has stalled in America in large measure because poor children have inadequate nutrition, child care and education. As New York Times columnist Eduardo Porter has noted, the United States is virtually alone among rich countries in that it spends much less educating poor children than privileged ones.

Another crucial investment should be in science and research.

The federal government is spending less as a percentage of gross domestic product in these areas than it did in the 1970s. This has things backward. In that era, America had a large industrial economy, with tens of millions of jobs available for people with only high school degrees. Today those jobs are in China. The United States needs to create jobs in sectors and industries of the future. We should really be investing much more, not less, in science at this point. Newt Gingrich has suggested doubling

the budget of the National Institutes of Health. I would propose that Washington set a goal to double the percentage that the federal government spends on basic research.

To those who would raise concerns about the deficit, former treasury secretary Larry Summers put it well: “We’ve reduced the deficit from 11 percent of GDP to below 3 percent of GDP. It’s lower now, relative to the economy, than it’s been on average over the last 40 years. . . . The deficit I worry about is a huge backlog of deferred maintenance that we’re leaving to our children. The deficit I worry about is an educational system that’s not meeting the needs of more than half of the kids in American public schools. The deficit I worry about is in equal opportunity, when the gap between rich kids and poor kids in terms of their ability to go to college has never been greater. . . . That is a moment for us as a country to do what a business would do, which is to take advantage of low borrowing costs to invest in our future.”

If Hillary Clinton starts talking relentlessly about investing in America, maybe the media will stop asking what kind of burrito she ordered. n

SUNDAY, MAY 3, 2015

22

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

BY LUCKOVICH FOR THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

How not to help after a disaster NIXON BOUMBA was born in Haiti and works as an in-country consultant there to American Jewish World Service, an international aid and human rights organization.

Last weekend, I watched with the rest of the world as images emerged in the wake of Nepal’s violent earthquake: the dusty faces of survivors, bloodied bodies, the ruined historic buildings. It reminded me of the devastation I witnessed after the earthquake in my homeland, Haiti, five years ago — and it made me worry about what will come next in Nepal.

Soon the people of Nepal, with the help of international donors, will begin the rebuilding process. They will face some of the same challenges that we faced in Haiti — and I hope that they will be able to avoid the grave mistakes made by Haitians and by the well-intentioned donors who came to our aid.

There were two disasters in Haiti: the earthquake, and then the humanitarian crisis that followed. More than $10 billion in foreign aid still hasn’t enabled our country to recover from this disaster. In the hope that Nepal will learn from our experience, here are five lessons for effective and just disaster relief: 1. Listen to local people.

Most aid projects in Haiti promised “community participation,” yet most failed to truly include local people. What happened with housing provides a clear example. Many aid groups insisted on moving earthquake survivors who were living under tarps into “transitional shelters.”

They ignored the objections of

Haitians, who feared the flimsy plywood structures — prone to leaks and collapse — would become their permanent homes.

Aid groups spent more than $500 million on these transitional shelters,” but have built less than 9,000 new long-term houses.

Tragically, yesterday’s “temporary” shelters have become today’s permanent slums.

2. Put money in the hands of local people.

Many aid groups sent wellmeaning but barely trained volunteers and deployed foreign doctors and nurses to areas where skilled Haitian professionals were readily available. Of every dollar given to the earthquake response in Haiti, less than a penny went to Haitian organizations.

If these funds had supported local people and organizations, the

BY OHMAN FOR THE SACRAMENTO BEE

money would have gone much further. I saw the remarkable work of community groups that helped house and care for the more than 600,000 people who fled Port-auPrince to the countryside. The groups trained displaced people to become farmers so they could earn a living and rebuild their lives.

3. Reach the most vulnerable people.

When a disaster strikes, people who were already poor or oppressed — or who live far from the center of relief efforts — tend to suffer disproportionately. In Haiti, many villages on the periphery of Port-au-Prince didn’t receive food or water for weeks after the quake.

Oppressed minorities, including the LGBT community, were particularly vulnerable to discrimination and violence in displacement camps and were overlooked by aid groups.

4. Invest in infrastructure now to prevent larger disasters in the future.

Most aid after the earthquake focused on the short term, often ignoring long-term needs, especially infrastructure needed to prevent humanitarian crises in the future. My country is still struggling to contain the largest modern outbreak of cholera in history. The disease is thought to

have been introduced by United Nations peacekeeping forces after the 2010 earthquake, but the crisis does not end there. This epidemic has continued largely because relief funds have unfortunately not been used to help Haiti build sufficient sewage systems.

5. Aid must be coordinated, efficient and transparent.

Though coordinating aid seems like the most obvious thing to do, it didn’t happen in Haiti. Many aid groups clamored to support highprofile projects, which resulted in wasteful redundancies in some areas while allowing people in less well-known places to languish.

Lack of accountability about foreign aid was the rule, with donors and Haitians receiving little news about how this aid was being spent.

In the coming days, the people of Nepal will need essential supplies like food, clean water and blankets. Later, they’ll need support to rebuild broken infrastructure and prepare for future natural disasters. Given the great need, governments and aid organizations must carefully discern how they provide that assistance. The decisions the international community makes now will reverberate into Nepal’s future — and I hope it won’t look anything like Haiti’s recent past. n

SUNDAY, MAY 3, 2015

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIRST PERSON

Two Baltimores BY

M ICHAEL A . F LETCHER

It was only a matter of time before Baltimore exploded.

In the more than three decades I have called this city home, Balti­ more has been a combustible mix of poverty, crime and hopeless­ ness, uncomfortably juxtaposed against rich history, friendly people, venerable institutions and pockets of old­money affluence.

The two Baltimores have mostly gone unreconciled. The violence that followed Freddie Gray’s funeral Monday, with roaming gangs looting stores and igniting fires, demands that something be done.

But what to do?

Baltimore is not Ferguson, and its primary problems are not racial. The mayor, city council president, police chief, top prosecutor and many other city leaders are black, as is half of Baltimore’s 3,000-person police force. The city has many prominent black churches and a line of black civic leadership extending back to Frederick Douglass.

Yet, the gaping disparities separating the haves and the have-nots in Baltimore are as large as they are anywhere. And, as the boys on the street will tell you, black cops can be hell on them, too.

Freddie Gray’s life and death say much about the difficult problems that roil Baltimore. As a child, he was found to have elevated levels of lead in his blood from peeling lead paint in his home, leading to a raft of medical and educational problems, his family charged in a lawsuit. His friends remember him as a smiling, friendly guy who liked nice clothes and deplored violence. His criminal record says he operated on the periphery of the drug game. He did a short stint in prison, and according to news reports, his mother used heroin.

None of that is unusual in the West Baltimore community where he grew up — nor is it unusual in many of Baltimore’s impoverished neighborhoods.

The federal government has said that Baltimore has the highest concentration of heroin addicts in

the nation. Gray’s neighborhood of Sandtown-Winchester, once home to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and jazz bandleader Cab Calloway, has more recently distinguished itself as the place that has sent the highest number of people to prison in the state of Maryland.

It does not stop there, despite ambitious city efforts to build new housing and focus social services in Sandtown-Winchester.

More than half of the neighborhood’s households earned less than $25,000 a year, according to a 2011 Baltimore Health Department report, and more than one in five adults were out of work — double the citywide average. One in five middle school students in the neighborhood missed more than 20 days of school, as did 45 percent of the neighborhood’s high schoolers.

Domestic violence was 50 percent higher there than the city average. And the neighborhood experienced murder at twice the citywide rate — which is no mean feat in Baltimore.

So far this year, the city counts 68 murders, according to a Web site maintained by the Baltimore Sun. That is after 663 murders over the three previous years.

That is a lot of killing, but not nearly what it was in the 1980s and 1990s, when the body count routinely surpassed 300 a year.

Most of these problems are confined to the pockmarked neighborhoods of narrow row houses and public housing

projects on the city’s east and west sides. In the lives of the other Baltimore of renovated waterfront homes, tree-lined streets, sparkling waterfront views, rollicking bars and ethnic restaurants, those issues exist mainly through news reports. The two worlds bump up against one another only on occasion.

Still, this leads to a lot of police interaction. During my 13 years as a reporter at the Baltimore Sun, I heard many people complain that when the police got where they were going, they sometimes exacted their own brand of justice.

Baltimore police have faced a series of corruption allegations through the years. They have been accused of planting evidence on suspects, being too quick to resort to deadly force and, long before Gray’s suspicious death, of beating suspects. Like police everywhere, they have been accused of routinely pulling up black youth. When he was a teenager, my own son was pulled over while driving his old Honda Civic on several occasions. It has gone on for decades.

Not long after I moved to Baltimore, my wife’s car was stolen in front of our house, which then was just four or five blocks from North and Pennsylvania avenues, the epicenter of Monday’s disturbance. The police came and asked the usual questions before my wife piped up, “What do you guys do to find stolen cars?”

One of the cops responded that the cars usually turn up a few days later when the joyriders run out of gas. Then, without irony or, seemingly, malicious intent, he looked at us — a young black couple — and said: “If we see a group of young black guys in a car, we pull them over.” We were speechless. Several days later, my wife’s car turned up out of gas less than a mile from our home.

Now all of the pent-up anger and bitterness has boiled over.

On Tuesday, during daylight hours, the streets of the city were

fairly quiet. Schools and many businesses shuttered amid fears of more violence. A line of men — coaches and other grass-roots leaders — stood with police near the scarred remains of the CVS. But addressing Baltimore’s ills will be a long-term, and incremental, undertaking.

A far different scene played out on Monday. High school kids led the charge as looters stripped and burned a CVS. Later, roving bands of people smashed store windows downtown, near the Johns Hopkins medical campus. A senior citizens housing project under construction in a desolate corner of East Baltimore was burned to the ground.

Hundreds of people — including Jesse Jackson, Kweisi Mfume and Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake — had packed

MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

Jerome Scott walks his son Romello, 3, past police in Baltimore on Tuesday. He wanted to teach Romello not to be afraid of them.

New Shiloh Baptist Church for Gray’s funeral service. Many others turned out not because they knew Gray, whose death in police custody earlier this month remains unexplained pending outcomes of multiple investigations. Instead, they are concerned about what is happening to young black men in Baltimore and elsewhere. The pity is that more of us did not reach Gray sooner.

As Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D) said: “Did anybody recognize Freddie when he was alive? Did you see him?” n

24

SUNDAY, MAY 3, 2015