The Washington Post National Weekly - May 13, 2018

SUNDAY, MAY 13, 2018

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In vitro, we trust In 40 years, IVF has led to 7 million babies — and profound religious questions.

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Politics A paradox of ending Iran deal 4

Nation California hides its homeless 8

5 Myths British royals 23

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KLMNO WEEKLY

THE FIX

Lessons from Haspel’s hearing BY

A MBER P HILLIPS

I

s the United States about to install a CIA director who supported torturing suspected terrorists in the wake of 9/11? And would she do it again if President Trump demanded it?

Those are the central questions that Gina Haspel faced Wednesday in a Senate committee hearing, the first step to getting confirmed to lead the CIA. Here are four takeaways from the hearing and what it could mean for Haspel’s chances to get approved by the full Senate.

1. Everyone thinks she’s qualified.

Haspel’s résumé is hard to argue with: more than three decades of work, most of it as an undercover agent, for the CIA. Support from top intelligence officials in both Republican and Democratic administrations. Nominating herself for difficult, lonely and sometimes dangerous jobs throughout the world, especially after 9/11. Basically, Haspel is someone senators genuinely respect, a career spy who has steadily climbed the ranks while maintaining a congenial relationship with Congress.

“I like you personally very much,” said one of her fiercest critics in this hearing, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).

2. But Republicans and Democrats fundamentally disagree about what her role in torture years ago means today.

Here’s a classic argument from Republicans that Haspel’s role was much ado about nothing: “We shouldn’t be talking about what happened 17 years ago,” said Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.).

“We should be talking about what’s going to happen 17 weeks or 17 days from now.”

Especially since the CIA declassified a report ahead of the hearing that cleared her of any

KLMNO WEEKLY

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

Gina Haspel testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday for consideration to be director of the CIA.

wrongdoing in destroying evidence of the interrogation tapes.

But Democrats and some skeptical Republican argue the past can repeat itself. And they didn’t seem entirely convinced that Haspel would do things differently.

Haspel said she wouldn’t approve waterboarding nor would she destroy those tapes if they were before her today. But she didn’t do much else to help her case. Rather than say torture is wrong, for example, Haspel repeatedly cited U.S. law that bans it to explain why she wouldn’t restart it. Her technical explanations rang hollow to some in a time when torture is now nearly universally condemned in Washington.

3. Senators want to know if she can stand up to Trump.

Haspel’s effort to convince her critics that

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she won’t authorize torture was made infinitely more difficult by her boss, the president. Trump has said “torture works.”

Haspel said she doesn’t think torture played a “knowable” role in getting valuable information from the enemy. But what would she do if Trump asked her to waterboard someone anyway, senators wanted to know.

“If you’re in the room, will the president listen to you if you tell him that something is a bad idea?” Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) asked.

Haspel didn’t talk about ultimatums or engage in hypotheticals about storming out of the Oval Office or offering her resignation. But she was unequivocal that she would do everything she could to avoid torture.

“We’re not getting back in that business,” she said.

“I think we should hold ourselves to a stricter moral standard, and I would never allow the CIA to be involved in coercive interrogation,” she said at another time.

4. Her gender is a major selling point for her and her allies.

Haspel would be the first woman to lead the CIA, a fact her (all male) supporters took the time to emphasize. It’s “an achievement that is long overdue, considering the incredible contribution that women have given to the CIA,” said former senator Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.).

Haspel played up her gender, too.

“It is not my way to trumpet the fact I am a woman for the top job in the CIA, but I would be remiss in not remarking on it, not least because of the outpouring of support from young women in the CIA and across the [intelligence community], because they consider it a good sign for their own prospects,” Haspel said in a moment that was remarkable for its candor. n ©The Washington Post

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

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ON THE COVER The mother of Emily Caron, 7, and Courtney Caron, 2, used in vitro fertilization.

The process is widely accepted but still prompts religious and moral questions. Photo by CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN of The Washington Post

SUNDAY, MAY 13, 2018

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KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

The paradox of ending the Iran deal J OBY W ARRICK in Vienna BY

I

n the three years since the start of the Iran nuclear agreement, a cluster of buildings near the Austrian capital has served as an unblinking eye over Tehran’s most sensitive factories and research labs. But perhaps not for much longer.

Every day, workers arrive at the United Nations nuclear agency here to monitor live video from inside Iran’s once-secret uranium enrichment plants, part of an unbroken stream of data delivered by cameras and other remote sensors installed as part of the 2015 accord. Each week, scientists in lab coats analyze dust samples collected from across Iran, looking for minute particles that could reveal possible cheating.

Dispatchers track the movements of U.N. inspection teams that now work inside Iran every day of the year, checking and rechecking known nuclear facilities and occasionally venturing out to investigate tips about suspicious sites elsewhere.

The scrutiny by officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency is a key component of the agreement, and it is unprecedented — not just for Iran but for any country, anywhere in the world.

Now that the Trump administration has decided to withdraw from the pact, the U.N. watchdog agency is preparing for the possibility that its window into Iran’s nuclear affairs will abruptly slam shut.

President Trump announced Tuesday that the United States will pull out of the historic agreement, which was signed by the Obama administration as well as the leaders of Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China. While citing no evidence of major violations by Iran, Trump has repeatedly blasted the deal as a “disaster” while accusing Tehran of failing to live up to the spirit of the accord.

Trump’s animus toward the pact appeared to deepen the other week after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a dra-

JOBY WARRICK/THE WASHINGTON POST

Trump’s decision could shut down oversight and make it easier for Iran to pursue a bomb in secret matic television appearance to showcase evidence about nuclear weapons research conducted by Iran a decade before the agreement was signed. Trump asserted that the pact was useless because Tehran cannot be trusted to keep its word. “What we’ve learned has really shown that I’ve been 100 percent right,” Trump said.

Yet by walking away from the deal, the Trump administration may lose its most important instrument for gauging whether Iran is telling the truth, according to former U.S. and U.N. officials and experts familiar with the IAEA’s oversight role. Many experts believe a collapse of the agreement will trigger a suspension of the unique, wide-ranging access granted to the U.N. nuclear watchdog over the past three

years.

In effect, by rejecting the deal as inadequate for preventing Iran from getting the bomb, Trump could make it harder for U.S. officials to detect a secret Iranian effort to build nuclear weapons, the former officials and experts said.

“We know more about Iran’s program with the deal than without it,” said former CIA director Michael V. Hayden, echoing an assessment voiced by current Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats during congressional testimony this year.

Hayden, author of a new book that accuses the Trump White House of politicizing intelligence, said the Israeli revelations about Iran’s past nuclear research bolster the case for keeping the essence of the

Scientists at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Seibersdorf, Austria, review results from tests of nuclear material collected abroad. The agency is helping ensure Iran’s compliance with the 2015 nuclear accord that put restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program.

accord intact.

“The Iranians lie. They cheat,” Hayden said. “That’s why you need to have the best possible verification regime in place.”

Critics of the deal contend that its shortcomings outweigh the benefits of the IAEA’s intrusive oversight. Some argue that the agreement is inadequate for containing Iran’s long-term nuclear ambitions because several key restrictions are set to be phased out after 10 to 15 years. Others, including former officials of the watchdog group, fault the IAEA itself, saying the agency has not been sufficiently aggressive in demanding access to Iranian military facilities and fuller explanations about Iran’s past nuclear weapons research.

But U.N. officials say the pact’s transparency provisions have helped prevent war by replacing suspicions with hard facts. Yukiya Amano, the IAEA’s director general, told the agency’s 35-nation board of governors that Iran has complied so far with every request made by his inspectors. A collapse of the deal, he warned, would be “a great loss for nuclear verification.”

“The IAEA now has the world’s most robust verification regime in place in Iran,” the Japanese diplomat said in remarks after the board meeting in March. “As of today, I can state that Iran is implementing its nuclear-related commitments. It is essential that Iran continues to fully implement those commitments.”

Fraught history As the world organization responsible for preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, the U.N.-affiliated IAEA has a long history with Iran, much of it troubled.

When Western intelligence agencies discovered that Iran was secretly building uranium enrichment plants — one at Natanz, in 2002, and another at an underground facility called Fordow, in 2009 — the IAEA sent in its teams to investigate. In the years that followed, the agency confronted Iran repeatedly over what U.S. officials described as a clandes-

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POLITICS tine nuclear-weapons research program that Iran apparently ended in 2003. Iran has consistently denied that it ever sought to acquire nuclear weapons and says its programs are directed toward energy production and medical research.

The IAEA was not a participant in the negotiations over the Iranian nuclear deal, but it has been an indispensable partner in its implementation. Since 2015, the agency’s inspectors have recorded and certified Iran’s compliance with each of several key components of the agreement. They confirmed, for example, that Iran had shipped out or eliminated 95 percent of its stockpile of enriched uranium, and dismantled or idled two-thirds of its centrifuge machines used in making nuclear fuel. Inspectors watched as Iran poured concrete into its partially completed nuclear reactor at Arak, bending to international concerns that the facility could become a future source of plutonium for nuclear bombs. They verified that Iran had halted uraniumenrichment activities at Fordow, the underground facility originally built inside a mountain as protection against airstrikes.

But the most demanding task for the agency’s inspection teams is the daily monitoring of Iran’s nuclear sites. Iran has for years allowed IAEA inspectors to visit its nuclear facilities and even granted permission for the installation of a few video cameras. But since 2015, the agency has enjoyed unparalleled access to every facet of Iran’s current nuclear program, from its uranium mines to the factory where it built its centrifuges.

The new oversight duties have meant an expanded IAEA presence in Iran itself. For the first time ever, the agency keeps a small cadre of inspectors inside Iran every day of the year, so it can handle the heavier workload and quickly respond to any reports about suspicious new sites.

IAEA inspectors have roamed through a total of 190 buildings around the country, while also making 60 “complementary access” calls — visits to facilities that are not part of Iran’s declared nuclear program.

Back at headquarters, specialists pore over terabytes of data collected by inspectors and transmitted to the Austrian capital over

JIM HOLLANDER/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK

secure communications channels. In a large underground room beneath the IAEA’s office tower, banks of TV monitors flicker with live images from inside Iran’s sole functioning uranium enrichment plant. Computers keep tabs on the tamper-proof electronic seals placed by IAEA officials on more than 2,000 pieces of equipment, from storage bins to uraniumprocessing machines.

Each week, packages from Iran arrive at the IAEA’s laboratory complex in Seibersdorf, a village south of Vienna. Some of the packets contain samples of uranium, which are tested to ensure that Iran is abiding by its promise to make only low-enriched fuel used in generating electricity, and not the highly enriched material that can produce a nuclear explosion.

Other parcels contain cloth swabs that inspectors carry with them when making their rounds.

The swabs are used to scoop up dust from inside Iran’s nuclear facilities as well as from stair rails, window fixtures, vehicles and other random objects. Scientists in the Seibersdorf lab use electronic microscopes and other sensors to scour the swabs for the tiniest traces of plutonium or highly enriched uranium that could point to a hidden weapons program.

Lab officials are not permitted to discuss their work publicly because of confidentiality agreements as well as the diplomatic sensitivity surrounding the Iran

nuclear file. To ensure impartiality, the samples that arrive in Seibersdorf are stripped of identifying information, so the scientists never know the origins of the material they’re testing.

But collectively, the IAEA’s oversight provides priceless realtime information that can give U.S. officials confidence that Iran is honoring its commitments — or proof that it is not — said Ernest Moniz, a physicist and former energy secretary under the Obama administration who helped design the Iran’s deal’s verification mechanisms. Unlike the accord’s more ephemeral provisions, the IAEA’s expanded oversight role is permanent under the terms of the agreement, Moniz said.

“No other country has this kind of oversight. Iran has it forever,” Moniz said. “I don’t think this has been fully appreciated. The IAEA has increased its boots on the ground dramatically, and that’s being supplemented by advanced technology. They are collecting unbelievable amounts of data.”

‘Point of the spear’ Yet even to ardent supporters of the agreement, the recent revelations by Israel’s prime minister suggest that the IAEA has still more work to do.

In his televised speech from Tel Aviv, Netanyahu displayed thousands of captured documents and computer disks that he said contained a trove of details about

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu describes Iran’s nuclear capabilities during a presentation at the Israeli Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv on April 30.

KLMNO WEEKLY

“Project Amad,” Iran’s defunct weapons research program. The materials appear to show Iranian scientists conducting feasibility studies on the detonation of nuclear bombs and the mounting of warheads on Iran’s largest missiles.

Netanyahu said the records prove that Iran has consistently lied about its nuclear program when it signed the 2015 deal and thus can’t be trusted to live up to its current agreements. The Israeli leader has argued that the pact should be either drastically changed — in part to eliminate the agreement’s sunset provisions that would allow increased production of low-enriched uranium in the future — or completely scrapped.

U.S. and U.N. officials have known about Iran’s pre-2003 nuclear weapons program for more than a decade. In 2007, a major assessment by the U.S. intelligence community concluded that Iranian leaders had ordered the research, only to shut down the program in 2003 after the U.S. overthrow of Iran’s archival, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Technical studies may have continued until as recently as 2009, U.S. officials have said.

Officials familiar with the Israeli revelations say the documents contain additional details about Iran’s weapons initiative, while again exposing Iran’s failure to come clean about its nuclear past.

“Iran has to explain it,” said Olli Heinonen, a former IAEA official who once led the agency’s oversight mission in Iran and confronted its leaders when the reports of secret nuclear research first came to light.

Proponents of the pact agree that Iran should be compelled to address the revelations about its nuclear past, in a formal proceeding, led by the watchdog agency that is best positioned to get answers: the IAEA. “Real pressure needs to be put on the Iranians to explain the situation, and the IAEA has to be the point of the spear,” said Moniz, the former energy secretary. “This is an opportunity to use the tools of the [nuclear agreement] to apply that pressure. Unfortunately, those tools could go away” now that Trump has decided to walk away from the Iran deal. n ©The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Trump seizes chance to alter image BY

P HILIP R UCKER

W

ith three Americans freed from prison in North Korea touching down at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington just before 3 a.m. Thursday, President Trump was on the moonlit tarmac to greet them, with the full White House press corps in tow.

It was a cinematic homecoming produced by a president impatient to trumpet a foreign policy triumph — and a prelude to the most anticipated tête-à-tête in years: Trump’s summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, set for June 12 in Singapore.

By making risky moves on the world stage — from shredding the Iran nuclear deal to negotiating nuclear disarmament with the North Koreans to imposing tariffs on Chinese imports — Trump has a chance to change the way voters evaluate his presidency.

Trump is trying to convince Americans that they have good reasons — not only foreign policy advances but also a growing economy — to protect his presidency from the threats posed by the Russia investigation, not to mention impeachment charges that Democrats might file next year should they retake control of the House in the midterm elections.

For Trump, each bold stroke is like a spritz of Febreze on his narrative of domestic scandal, momentarily masking the expanding Russia probe of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Or the federal criminal investigation into his longtime attorney and fixer, Michael Cohen.

Or his reimbursement of the $130,000 hush-money payment to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels.

Or his support for Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt despite an avalanche of ethical lapses.

“Most of the coverage gets dominated by ping-pong-ballsized issues, which are hurled through the air, but it misses the bigger point of the Trump presidency,” said Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union and a Trump

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

With a showman’s flair, he touts his foreign policy moves and waves away his domestic scandals booster, arguing that foreign policy breakthroughs would be more resonant with voters than possible Russian collusion or obstruction of justice.

“These events absolutely can make a difference,” said former New York congressman Thomas M. Reynolds, a GOP strategist.

“There’s certainly people that say his approach to doing stuff isn’t necessarily how I am comfortable, just watching it or knowing it, but he seems to be getting it done.”

Democrats have a different interpretation.

“If he wanted to drown out domestic scandals, he’d have to stop having so many domestic scandals and so many self-inflicted wounds,” Democratic pollster Margie Omero said. “That kind of recklessness makes it hard to separate Trump’s day-to-day demeanor from his international performance.”

Trump is not the first president to focus on foreign policy in a

period of personal political crisis.

As the Watergate investigation intensified in 1973, President Richard M. Nixon tried to play up his role as commander in chief.

“Nixon tried to make the point that ‘you Americans may be upset by my scandal, but I am doing such important things in foreign policy that you should think twice before wanting to throw me out,’” presidential historian Michael Beschloss said.

Trump’s approval rating stood at 40 percent in a Washington Post-ABC News poll in mid-April, slightly more than his 36 percent approval rating in January and his highest level in Post-ABC polling since his first 100 days in office.

The April poll found that over half of all Americans, 56 percent, disapprove of Trump’s overall performance. But a clear majority of those surveyed, 56 percent, said they believe Trump should hold his summit meeting with Kim to try to get North Korea to give up its

President Trump disembarks a plane with first lady Melania Trump and three freed American prisoners after their arrival from North Korea at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland early Thursday. The prisoner release appears to be a gesture to set the stage for a landmark summit between Trump and Kim Jong Un in June.

nuclear weapons; 36 percent said he should not.

“The proof is in the pudding,” said Republican pollster Whit Ayres, who has been critical of Trump. But, he added, “we know that most Americans simply do not care about so much of the drama that consumes the Beltway.

It’s all a matter of what results are produced.”

Trump has vented frustration privately to advisers as well as in public statements that he is not given what he considers due credit in news coverage and in public opinion polls for what he sees as foreign policy and economic successes. To shape coverage, Trump took personal control over the North Korean prisoner story, directing it with the showman instincts that helped make his reality television show, “The Apprentice,” a ratings success.

It was the president who announced dramatically on Tuesday that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was en route to Pyongyang to meet with Kim and possibly secure the release of the three detainees. It was the president who revealed Wednesday morning that they were en route home to the United States with Pompeo and in good health. And it was the president who departed the White House in the middle of the night to meet their returning aircraft at Andrews.

There are inherent risks in Trump’s foreign policy, of course.

Ian Bremmer, a foreign policy expert and the founder and president of Eurasia Group, said there is high potential for Trump to misstep in foreign policy considering his lack of traditional experience.

“If you have the biggest stack of chips at the poker table, you can get a whole bunch of people to fold against you, all the time,” Bremmer said. “That’s what Trump has done with the North Koreans, with the South Koreans, all over the world. But eventually your bluff is going to be called. That strategy works very well until it doesn’t, and at some point Trump’s number of wins may lead to a big loss.” n ©The Washington Post

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POLITICS ANALYSIS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Democrat establishment wins big BY

P AUL K ANE

T

he Democratic establishment is alive and well, thriving after big wins last fall that have continued through this early political season.

In Tuesday’s primaries, Democratic candidates favored by party leaders advanced to the general election in every key House, Senate and gubernatorial race on the ballot.

Perhaps nothing summed up the environment more than Richard Cordray’s romp to the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in Ohio.

Cordray used his ties to former president Barack Obama, who appointed him in 2012 as a consumer advocate against banks, to defeat liberal Dennis Kucinich by a nearly 3-to-1 margin, despite questions about his record on gun rights.

Part of the establishment’s strength comes from the party’s movement to the left on some core economic issues, co-opting potential primary challenges from the left. Cordray overcame doubts about his past A rating from the National Rifle Association, as a state official, through his aggressive record as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

In the Senate, Democrats in Washington have essentially cleared the field in every remotely competitive race this fall, including several GOP-held seats where the party hopes to win and tip the majority in its direction. While they face an uphill battle for the chamber, defending 26 seats to Republicans’ nine, they point to a lack of damaging primary battles as an advantage as campaigns move from primaries to the general election.

On Tuesday, two Democrats without ideologically pure voting records advanced without much friction: Centrist Sen. Joe Donnelly of Indiana won renomination uncontested, and Sen. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia won by 40 percentage points. They are among the small group of Demo-

KIRK IRWIN/GETTY IMAGES

The party has shown more unity than the GOP, which saw the defeat of several sitting legislators crats who supported a rollback of some Obama-era Wall Street regulations and voted for some of President Trump’s nominees, including Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, but have so far faced only minor anti-establishment blowback.

The most bitter primaries are happening in House races, where a flood of candidates have been motivated by the energy of liberal protests against Trump.

Several of them are shaping up as ideological battles that echo the 2016 Democratic presidential primary between Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), but party strategists suggest most of them just pit a glut of candidates in a primary and have no clear front-runner.

Particularly in California, this may mean Democrats do not field the establishment-backed candi-

date and lose some opportunities to pick up Republican-held seats.

Evidence is mounting that Democrats are more unified than Republicans. In the GOP, anyone with ties to Washington officials seems to be at risk.

Take Tuesday’s primary results across four states. Two House Republicans from Indiana finished a distant second and third in their bid for the Senate nomination to challenge Donnelly. A House Republican in West Virginia lost in his bid for the Senate nomination to a state attorney general who last decade was a pharmaceutical lobbyist from New Jersey.

In North Carolina, Rep. Robert Pittenger (R) lost his primary to a perennial conservative challenger. And in central Ohio, a teaparty-style insurgent came within a few hundred votes of defeating the handpicked favorite of the

Richard Cordray, the former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director under President Barack Obama, beat Dennis Kucinich in Ohio’s Democratic gubernatorial primary on Tuesday.

recently retired Republican congressman, Patrick J. Tiberi, a close ally of House leadership.

While Democrats have largely avoided intraparty fights in big races, Republicans have deep concerns about potentially bitter primaries for statewide offices in Wisconsin, Arizona and Florida that happen in the late summer, with little time to unify ranks afterward for November.

“One of the hard parts is, some of them are very late. And obviously we’ve got to nominate people who can get elected in general elections,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), the No. 2 GOP leader.

The good news Tuesday for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Trump was the third-place finish of Don Blankenship, former coal executive who had spent a year in prison for violating safety regulations after a deadly mine disaster.

He ran his campaign almost entirely against McConnell as an establishment figure, but allies of McConnell poured money into an anti- Blankenship campaign with Trump’s support.

In Indiana, Republicans have Mike Braun, a distribution company chief executive, as their Senate nominee after he embarrassed the original front-runners, Reps.

Luke Messer and Todd Rokita, as creatures of Washington. Contrast that with how Democrats have handled their Senate races.

“We have 26 members up, I don’t know of any really serious primary in any of them,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (Md.), chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Van Hollen allowed for the California Senate race, where the incumbent, Dianne Feinstein (D), is facing a challenge from the state Senate Democratic leader, Kevin de Leon. “I will predict here that she wins by a strong margin,” Van Hollen said.

There are tough primaries ahead for the Democrats, particularly in House races, but with less than six months till the general election, they continue to be the much more unified party. n ©The Washington Post

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KLMNO WEEKLY

NATION

Where can California’s homeless go?

S COTT W ILSON in San Clemente, Calif.

BY

T

he search party pulled out of a McDonald’s parking lot, a collection of homeless men and women and their advocates squeezed into VW station wagons and old SUVs. They sought a patch of land or a spare building, a place — any place — where dozens of people might live for a while.

The cars passed neighborhoods of two-story homes along a ridgeline with views of the Pacific Ocean surf and then wound through a business park. They stopped next to a field of kneehigh grass that the guide warned was off-limits because of rattlesnakes.

No bus line runs here, and the nearest grocery is a hilly two-mile walk. The only real virtue of the one-acre lot was that, while people work in the neighboring tech warehouses, no one actually lives anywhere near here.

“We need our own area without a lot of people around,” Jennifer Juarez, who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and has been homeless for years, said as she surveyed the field. “But this? I don’t know.”

That this remote lot is even a temporary housing option for some of Orange County’s 5,000 homeless people speaks to the growing compassion fatigue that California is confronting. Frustrated with the slow pace of politics and demanding immediate, street-level action, residents in the wealthiest counties along California’s coast have been agitating for a solution — which increasingly involves pushing homeless people out of sight.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti (D) recently called it “the greatest moral and humanitarian crisis of our time.”

In recent weeks, local governments from the northern city of San Francisco to here in Orange County have cleared out homeless camps, some of them years old and long considered public safety and health concerns. The regions have little in common

PHILIP CHEUNG FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

The state is experiencing compassion fatigue; more residents just want the problem to go away politically but share a characteristic: extraordinarily expensive housing, which in March reached record highs in Orange County.

In the centers of many cities, tent encampments have become their own neighborhoods, often within areas that have been remade with public money and private investment.

Many of the state’s cities are thriving. But the gentrification that is taking place along the coast has made it far more difficult for local governments to afford housing options for those without homes. Hundreds of

homeless people, now marooned in wealthy urban neighborhoods, have tested the patience of new residents, who have spent small fortunes on the condos and townhouses in the city centers.

“People are tired of their politicians not wanting to step up to this problem,” said Dennis Ettlin, a retired economist, city planner and aerospace engineer who volunteers for the nonprofit Interfaith Homeless Outreach Project for Empowerment. He is helping scout sites for shelters in south Orange County, recommendations he will pass on to city officials.

Ashley Foster fixes her bike along the Santa Ana River Trail in Santa Ana, Calif. She lived in an encampment on the trail until officials shut it down early this year.

“Everyone wants to feed the homeless,” he said. “But food is not the issue here. Housing is the issue.”

Nearly a quarter of the nation’s homeless population lives in California — about 134,000 people who often have carved out patches of curb, riverbed, public park or town square to live.

California has the highest percentage of homeless people living outside or in cars — those advocates consider the “unsheltered.”

Eight in 10 homeless people here under the age of 21 live outdoors, nearly twice the rate in other states.

Though billions of dollars in public funds have been approved for homeless housing in recent years, the money has proved difficult to spend as quickly as needed. California’s auditor recommended in April that a single

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NATION agency oversee the money and ideas to address the problem, which shifts daily across city limits and county lines.

“The growing resistance to the homeless is small but very loud,” said Tim Houchen, a formerly homeless man who now advocates on their behalf. “Their problem now is that there are many people who do not want any new homeless shelters, but they want the homeless to go somewhere else.”

The public fatigue, manifested in hearing rooms, on the streets and in new policies, has been showing across the state for months.

In January, the city of El Cajon in San Diego County, where the worst outbreak of hepatitis A in the nation’s history emerged from homeless encampments last year, arrested a dozen people for breaking a new city law making it a crime to feed the homeless. The ordinance was rescinded a month later amid public protest.

That same month, it was revealed that a San Diego city work crew had nearly killed a homeless person a few weeks earlier. In clearing a downtown encampment, workers picked up a tent without looking inside and heaved it into a trash truck. The homeless person scrambled out before being crushed.

Malibu, a city that includes a neighborhood nicknamed “Billionaire’s Beach,” residents have urged a church to stop the weekly dinners it holds for the homeless.

Residents argued that offering charity just attracts more homeless people. The same thing happened in the less luxe city of Riverside.

The community concern has been borne out by some recent events.

A fire last fall that threatened the Getty Museum and Bel-Air started in a hillside homeless encampment, drawing calls from some of the richest Los Angeles neighborhoods for the government to do more to address the issue. Downtown businesses also burned as a result of cooking fires that got out of control in homeless enclaves.

A 51-year-old homeless man was arrested in April and charged with trespassing after breaking into the Governor’s Mansion in Sacramento through a side window. Gov. Jerry Brown (D) was

PHILIP CHEUNG FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

not at home, but his wife, Anne Gust Brown, was.

Days later, a homeless man walked into a steakhouse in Ventura, north of Los Angeles, and fatally stabbed a 35-year-old man as he ate dinner, his 5-year-old daughter sitting on his lap.

“Enough is enough. We are taking back our streets,” read a sign carried by one of dozens of marchers who made their way to Ventura City Hall a few days later.

San Francisco Mayor Mark Farrell began doing that during the last week in April. He ordered tents in the Mission District — ground zero for the city’s techmoney-driven gentrification, cleared of scores of homeless people. The city also has doubled the size of a city cleanup crew dedicated to disposing of hypodermic needles discarded on the streets.

In Orange County, the process has turned particularly bitter and has ended up in court. It has split the county’s crowded urban north, where the homeless population has been concentrated for years, and the richer suburban south, which has been ordered to bear more of the burden.

For a decade, as many as 1,400 people lived in tents along a mile-and-a-half stretch of the Santa Ana River, mostly a dry cement-lined channel running between highways within sight of Angel Stadium of Anaheim.

The camp scared off joggers, walkers and bikers, many of whom resented that a slice of

sprawl set aside for them had been grabbed by others. More than 11,000 people signed a petition this year urging officials to clear it out.

In January, local officials began accelerating plans to clear the camp. But a homeless advocacy group filed a federal lawsuit against Orange County and several cities to block the move, which officials defended by citing anti-camping laws that they said prohibited the tent cities.

U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter, a former Marine who served in Vietnam, said he understood the public safety risk the camp posed. But he took the unusual step of visiting the riverbed, seeing for himself the squalor and challenge. He declared that any eviction would have to be done “humanely and with dignity.”

The county agreed to pay for extra beds in several shelters and to fund 30-day motel vouchers for hundreds of homeless people.

The Board of Supervisors plans to spend nearly $100 million to accommodate and treat those displaced by the clearing along the riverbed and at the Plaza of the Flags, a camp in the heart of the county seat.

“The system here just didn’t have the capacity,” said Supervisor Andrew Do, who is the board chairman and worked in the 1980s as a homeless advocate while he attended law school in San Francisco. “The truth is, the capacity was reached even before

Portable toilets that were used by the homeless sit in the Plaza of the Flags, adjacent to Santa Ana’s city hall. The square was the site of an encampment of more than 200 homeless people until officials ordered it cleared in April and had the area fenced off.

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we began.”

As part of the lawsuit, local officials were ordered to find new locations for the homeless people once the camps were cleared. The most logical places were in the less-crowded south of the county, but the resistance was swift and strong from communities there.

After supervisors approved a plan to set up temporary housing — either in city-funded tents or hard-plastic Tuff Sheds — elected officials in several cities responded with legal threats to block the move.

Supervisor Todd Spitzer, who has referred to the homeless as “sex offenders and drug addicts,” strayed outside his district to fan the resistance.

The homeless, he told a local radio station, should not be located “where good, hard-working citizens of California are trying to raise their families and pay their taxes and just enjoy a quality of life.” He said his county’s homeless population should be sent to the San Bernardino County desert “and provided services.”

“We’re stuck again with this situation where just two of our cities take on the bulk of the problem,” said Do, whose office overlooks a bus station that has been turned into a shelter for hundreds of homeless people.

“The rhetoric and the image that has been created intentionally has caused the communities to react the way they have.”

Juarez, who volunteered for the site-location tour, lived along the Santa Ana River for years.

Since it was cleared, she has spent nights in an extended-stay motel with help from a county voucher that has now expired.

Now 51, Juarez is an Orange County native and characterizes the current resistance to hosting the homeless as “the same people who have always been against us and are still against us.” She also said she understands some of their concerns, saying that “the homeless do bring drugs and crime. I do get that.”

Juarez wants to find a place to live outside on her own terms.

“But this is such as small piece of land, and by the time they set aside a place for all the dogs, it won’t be much at all,” Juarez said, looking over the high grass of the San Clemente lot. “It just seems so desolate.” n ©The Washington Post

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WORLD

An opening for cooperation in Iraq

BY T AMER E L- G HOBASHY AND M USTAFA S ALIM

in Mosul, Iraq

I

n advance of national elections this weekend, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has been the front-runner here, and if he ultimately prevails, he will make political history as a Shiite politician in this overwhelmingly Sunni city.

The electoral strength of Abadi and his ticket in Mosul, the country’s second-largest city, underscores his nationwide popularity and bodes well for his reelection, which U.S. officials have repeatedly indicated they would like to see.

But beyond that, Abadi’s success in a place that had been the jewel of the Islamic State — an extremist Sunni group — would represent an opening for cooperation between Sunni and Shiite Muslims in a country long bedeviled by sectarian violence.

When campaigning officially kicked off last month, the boulevards of this city were instantly lined with candidate posters. But it was Abadi’s face, smiling softly and ubiquitous on the streets, that stood out as both familiar and entirely unexpected.

For the first time since Iraq began electing a legislature in 2006, a Shiite politician is headlining an electoral ticket in Mosul.

Abadi’s list is named “Nasr,” or “Victory,” a reference in part to his role in ending the city’s Islamic State trauma by orchestrating the military campaign that liberated the city last year.

Mosul may now be the ultimate proving ground for Abadi’s message of nationalism over sect.

“Abadi is a symbol of shedding sectarianism,” said Rana alNaemi, 44, an English teacher from Mosul running on the prime minister’s list. “The people of Iraq are ready for this.”

Alluding to the traditional colors worn by Sunni and Shiite clerics, she added, “Sectarianism is what destroyed us — whether it was a white turban or a black turban.”

Once considered a weak and unremarkable leader who stum-

AMMAR SALIH/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK

Ahead of elections, the Shiite prime minister has gotten strong support from Mosul’s Sunnis bled into power in the midst of the Islamic State blitz that conquered about one-third of Iraq, Abadi has been campaigning on a message of national unity in hopes of breaking the cycle of sectarian fighting that has marked Iraq’s politics since the U.S. ouster of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Abadi’s popularity has soared since he managed the successful military campaign to claw back Iraqi cities from the Islamic State while artfully juggling the interests of the United States and Iran.

He also won plaudits from many Iraqis when he dispatched troops to block an attempted secession by Kurds in the north late last year.

“One thing that we see consistently is that Prime Minister Abadi has a more balanced degree of support across all regions and across all ethnic and sectarian religious groups,” said a senior U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss Iraq’s

internal politics.

For the United States, Abadi’s presence in Mosul and other Sunni areas, such as Fallujah, is reassuring. He has worked closely with Washington in the fight against the Islamic State while maintaining cordial ties with Iran and reestablishing relations with regional powers such as Saudi Arabia.

The war against the Islamic State has significantly altered the political map in Iraq, where Shiites are the majority.

In previous elections, one or two major Shiite coalitions dominated the vote and subsequently the formation of the government.

This year, the support of the Shiite political establishment is fragmented among Abadi and challengers old and new. His predecessor, Nouri al-Maliki, though severely diminished because of losses to the Islamic State, is headlining a ticket that is running on a traditional platform of Shiite su-

An election campaign poster is seen next to destroyed buildings in Mosul, Iraq, last month. The election is this weekend.

premacy.

Hadi al-Amiri, the head of the powerful Badr Organization, is the face of a new coalition called “Fatah,” or “Conquest,” which represents Shiite militias that helped defeat the Islamic State, earning much public support. Many of those militias, including Badr, are backed by Iran, and a key element of their campaign has been urging the expulsion of U.S. forces from Iraq. In a sign of confidence, a number of the militias are running candidates in Mosul even though Abadi kept many of them out of the city during the battle because of their ultra-sectarian leanings.

With those major blocs essentially splitting the vote in Iraq’s Shiite heartland, any candidate hoping to become prime minister must run well in Mosul and other Sunni areas.

The province of Nineveh, of which Mosul is the capital, is quickly emerging as one of the hottest contests in the election.

This year, 940 candidates have been registered, compared with just 455 in 2014.

Nineveh holds 31 seats in Iraq’s upcoming 329-member parliament, second only to Baghdad’s 69. Iraq’s parliament elects the prime minister and president, and those 31 votes could prove critical to Abadi winning a second term.

His Nasr coalition is the only one fielding candidates in all 18 provinces, and many observers have concluded that he is the only candidate who can credibly claim to be a genuine centrist leader — even though his rhetoric of making a fresh, nonsectarian start has also been embraced by many of his opponents.

Rasha Al Aqeedi, a political researcher at the Dubai-based alMesbar Studies and Research Center and a Mosul native, said that Iraq’s minorities are unlikely to be enthusiastic about the prospect of another Shiite head of government but that Abadi is the only candidate with the credentials to garner votes among Sunnis.

“If you compare him to everyone else, he does stand out for sure,” she said. n ©The Washington Post

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WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

Ethiopians finally embrace hope P AUL S CHEMM in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia BY

W

hen Ethiopia’s prime minister resigned in February after more than five years in office, there was little reason to think his successor would be an improvement.

The East African country was under a state of emergency that followed a years-long crackdown on opposition political activity.

Thousands of activists and dissident journalists had been detained, and hundreds had died in demonstrations crushed by government forces.

Then came Abiy Ahmed, who at 42 is one of the youngest leaders on the continent. In his first month as Ethiopia’s premier, he has ushered in an unlikely wave of hope and even optimism in this close U.S. ally that serves as something of a linchpin to the stability of East Africa.

While ostensibly a democracy, Ethiopia is a highly centralized state with only the ruling party and its allies in Parliament. In recent years, however, unrest has grown, and on April 10, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution urging the government to increase its respect for human rights and the rule of law.

In a riveting speech at his inauguration on April 2, Abiy acknowledged some of Ethiopia’s enduring problems. He apologized for the deaths of protesters at demonstrations, welcomed differences of opinion and promised to heal the wounds of ethnic strife.

The accession of Abiy, who hails from the Oromo community, brought a sharp drop in tension.

Since he took office, Internet service has been restored to the countryside, charges against dozens of activists have been dropped, and he has embarked on meetings around the country, listening to grievances and promising reform, including term limits for his position.

“As someone who grew up in Addis Ababa, one thing that is very foreign was seeing a prime minister come and organize town hall

ZACHARIAS ABUBEKER/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Weeks into Abiy Ahmed’s term as prime minister, tensions nationwide have eased noticeably meetings and just sit down with people and discuss things,” said Zecharias Zelalem, a journalist and frequent commentator on Ethiopian affairs. “That has never happened, and it’s been going on for the past three weeks.”

Activists, many of whom were released in the days after Abiy’s inauguration, pronounced themselves “cautiously optimistic” that, at long last, Ethiopia may be changing.

“Our release means something.

It is a signal for change, that he wants change,” said Eskinder Nega, a journalist who spent part of his youth in Washington and had just spent six years in an Ethiopian prison for his writings.

He was released in February but detained again during the state of emergency a month later for meeting with friends — ironically in celebration of their release. Ten of his colleagues were also arrested.

“But, ultimately, this is not what

the nation wants,” Nega said. “The nation wants two things: the lifting of the state of emergency in the next 100 days and a call for an all-inclusive dialogue. This will set things right.”

“Right” is not where Ethiopia has been for the past three years, and its partners abroad have been worried. It is difficult to overstate the importance of Ethiopia to the stability of East Africa. It has the largest army in the region and the continent’s fastest-growing economy, and it is surrounded by disintegrating states such as Somalia and South Sudan.

This regional rock of stability has looked shaky in recent years, with persistent anti-government protests by the country’s largest ethnic group, the Oromos, as well as unrest among the secondlargest community, the Amharas.

At the same time, clashes between Oromos and ethnic Somalis elsewhere in the country have left

People in Ambo gather to hear Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, 42, one of Africa’s youngest leaders.

Abiy has welcomed different opinions and promised to heal the wounds of ethnic strife in Ethiopia.

hundreds dead and displaced more than a million.

All that has been compounded by the return of devastating droughts that have put millions in need of food aid.

In the midst of the crisis, Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn resigned, and a state of emergency was declared as strikes erupted around the capital.

As soon as he took office last month, Abiy started visiting the centers of dissatisfaction. He went to the Oromo town of Ambo and complimented the young men at the forefront of the demonstrations for protecting democracy. He visited the Somali region to discuss the ongoing clashes that have displaced so many, and he journeyed north to the Tigray region, seen by many government critics as unfairly dominating the military and economy, to put the population at ease about having an Oromo in charge.

He also met with opposition politicians and said that he welcomed their views and saw them as legitimate competition rather than as enemies of the state.

In a speech before 20,000 people in Addis Ababa on April 15, he acknowledged that the bureaucracy and justice system have not been serving the people and promised reforms, including in the security services.

“We will work closely to make the security and intelligence institutions free from political partiality,” he told the crowd.

The international reaction to Abiy’s first few weeks has been remarkably positive.

Zeid Raad al-Hussein, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, who has clashed in the past with the government, was invited back to the country and allowed to visit areas and talk with people he had previously been prevented from seeing.

“I was impressed by his commitment to openness and impressed by his apology for the irrevocable damage suffered by so many people during the repression of the recent protests,” Hussein later said. n ©The Washington Post

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COVER STORY

‘A GIFT FROM GOD’

CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Religions grapple with the moral implications of rapidly advancing fertility technologies A RIANA E UNJUNG C HA in New York BY

E

sther Friedman held the Book of Psalms with both hands as she peered over her glasses at the fertility lab monitor. There were eight beautiful round eggs, retrieved from a young woman earlier that day.

“A good number,” Friedman said, nodding.

A technician grabbed a long glass tube, filled it with sperm and,

within a few minutes, the eggs were fertilized. Eight potential new lives had just been conceived.

Friedman — an Orthodox Jewish rabbinical observer hired by the prospective parents — took a step back, lowered her eyes and began to pray.

Forty years ago this July, the world’s first “test tube” baby was born at a British hospital in the industrial city of Oldham, heralding a radical change in the creation of human life. Until Louise Joy Brown arrived, hopeful par-

ents had been at the mercy of fate, and a barren marriage could feel like divine punishment.

Afterward, as one of the doctors involved in Brown’s birth put it, it seemed that science — not God — was in charge.

Since then, in vitro fertilization, or IVF, and related technologies have produced some 7 million babies who might never have existed — roughly the combined population of Paris, Nairobi and Kyoto — and the world’s fertility clinics have blossomed into a

From left, triplets Rosalie, Rocco and Regan Mullane, age 2, are seen in October at a Bostonarea gathering of families with IVF children. About 7 million babies have been born through in-vitro fertilization in the past 40 years.

$17 billion business.

The procedures have amplified profound questions for the world’s theologians: When does life begin? If it begins at conception, is it a sin to destroy a fertilized egg?

What defines a parent? Is the mother the woman who provides the egg or the woman who gives birth? What defines a marriage? If a man’s sperm fertilizes an egg from a woman who is not his wife, does that constitute adultery?

The moral questions are rapidcontinues on next page

SUNDAY, MAY 13, 2018

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COVER STORY ly becoming more complex. Researchers are working to advance gene-editing tools that would allow parents to choose or “correct for” certain preferred characteristics; to create artificial wombs that could incubate fetuses outside the body for nine months; and to perfect techniques to produce “three-parent” babies who share genetic material from more than two people.

The risks, both scientific and moral, are enormous — particularly with gene editing, which could be used to produce babies with superhuman eyesight, speed and intelligence. “Off target” effects could result in fundamental changes not just to human bodies but to human nature.

Some religiousleaders have objected to using gene editing on embryos or in ways that could affect future generations, arguing the human genome is sacred and editing it violates God’s plan for humanity. The U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine have invited religious critiques of the technology, and the Vatican is convening meetings to discuss its moral implications.

On the guest list is Harvard geneticist George Church, who helped launch the Human Genome Project to map human DNA and is part of a team that announced plans in 2016 to use the gene-editing tool CRISPR to create synthetic human genomes to advance medical research.

Church said he believes critics from the faith community will come to accept gene-editing technology, just as religious leaders eventually adapted to the discoveries of Galileo, Copernicus and Darwin.

“In the Bible, it says we are given dominion over the Earth,” Church said. “Inventing newer and newer advanced technologies is almost a key component of human nature.”

Most major religions have indeed come to tolerate — and even embrace — IVF, which was originally viewed with equal alarm.

But the increasingly commonplace procedure is still condemned at the highest levels of the Catholic Church.

“Technology is a great thing, but technology does change us,” said the Rev. Michael J.K. Fuller, executive director of the Secretariat of Doctrine and Canonical Af-

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ALEJANDRO AND ADRIANNA VANAS, 6

CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN/THE WASHINGTON POST

fairs for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “At some point, we need to ask — how much is it changing us, and is that a good thing?”

‘A blessed event?’

The world’s 7.6 billion people practice an estimated 4,200 religions, each with various ideas about the soul and human destiny. So when British scientists Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards helped produce the first IVF baby, born on July 25, 1978, the event was viewed through heavy filters of wonder and suspicion.

Newspaper and TV reports recognized the birth of a child conceived in vitro — literally “in glass” — as a milestone in human history, akin to Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon. London’s Evening News declared little 5pound, 12-ounce Louise Brown a “Superbabe.” Newsweek compared her birth with a “first coming.” The New York Daily News wondered, “Test tube birth: a

blessed event?”

Some faith leaders — especially Catholics — expressed grave misgivings and concern that the birth was unnatural, immoral and possibly dangerous. Some wondered whether children born through IVF might be superhuman or exceptionally frail or plagued by unforeseen defects introduced by the process.

Brown’s parents, who had been trying to conceive for nine years, saw divine intervention.

“Louise is, truly, a gift from God,” Lesley Brown tearfully told reporters. Her husband, John, added: “I am not a religious man, but I thank God that I heard our little girl cry for the first time.”

Steptoe emphasized the mundaneness of the science, arguing he was neither a wizard nor Dr. Frankenstein.

“We have merely done what many people try to do in all kinds of medicine — to help nature,” Steptoe said. “We found nature could not put an egg and sperm together, so we did it.”

Ariannet Vanas, 39, of Boston struggled with the idea of IVF because she knew the Vatican disapproved. But she said, “I don’t think the Lord can judge us because we want to be a family and we love our children.”

Edwards, who won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2010 for the breakthrough, was more direct in challenging critics in the religious establishment.

In a rare interview in 2003, he told the London Times the experiments were “about more than infertility.”

“I wanted to find out exactly who was in charge, whether it was God Himself or whether it was scientists in the laboratory,” he said.

He was confident of the answer: “It was us.”

A long debate Numerous research teams quickly set out to replicate the breakthrough. Candice Reed, Australia’s first IVF baby, was born in 1980. Elizabeth Jordan Carr, the first American, followed in 1981.

In those early years, scholars from the world’s major religions expressed uneasiness about IVF. Some faith communities were quicker to accept assisted reproduction — including within the

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COVER STORY

from previous page

Hindu, Buddhist and Protestant traditions. In other places, many couples were left waiting for a signal from religious leaders.

Egypt’s Gad el-Haq Ali Gad el-Haq, a grand imam, was among the first major Muslim leaders to take a clear stand.

In 1980, he issued a fatwa, or ruling, permitting IVF and similar procedures, so long as they involved a husband and a wife and no eggs or sperm from a third party.

The grand imam compared sterility with a disease and — noting the prophet Muhammad spoke of the need to seek remedy for disease — concluded IVF is permissible as a cure.

If a “trustworthy physician recommends in vitro fertilization and shall be responsible for its appropriateness, then it is permissible and obligatory as a treatment of a woman who has pregnancy impediments,” el-Haq wrote, according to a translation published by Marcia C. Inhorn, a Yale medical anthropologist.

Nearly two decades later, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of Iran weighed in, loosening restrictions further for his Shiite Muslim followers. For example, men were permitted to engage in “mut’a” marriage to egg donors — a temporary union — to take advantage of technological advances without the taint of adultery.

Today, IVF is a widely accepted intervention in the Muslim world, and el-Haq’s fatwa is prominently displayed on many clinic walls.

‘Lost’ embryos The Vatican saw things differently. When Louise Brown was born, Cardinal Albino Luciani, who would soon become Pope John Paul I, congratulated her parents and wished the baby a happy and blessed life. He also said IVF raised many questions that would require a deeper moral response.

Nine years later, in 1987, the church issued the “Donum Vitae” (the Gift of Life), a guidance document on biomedical issues that has become the definitive Catholic teaching on IVF. In it, the church divided fertility treatments into two categories: Those that help achieve pregnancy through sex — fertility drugs,

BELLA FANKHAUSER, 12

CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN/THE WASHINGTON POST

ovulation charts, surgery to remove blockages — are moral.

Those that replace sex with technology, including IVF and artificial insemination, are immoral.

The division reflects the church’s view that the physical expression of love within marriage is godly and that sex alone can produce a child who is loved unconditionally as a person independent of the parents’ will and desires. Techniques like IVF end up “producing” a child in a lab where the parents are completely absent.

“The birth of a baby is always reason for joy. But the question was, what did they do to get there, and what does that mean?” said Richard M. Doerflinger, a scholar who recently retired from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, where he served for 36 years as a liaison to Congress on bioethics.

The other primary objection to IVF involves the treatment of fertilized eggs as “products” in a marketplace, as well as their routine creation and destruction.

The church teaches that life be-

gins at the moment of conception, and it has condemned the destruction of embryos as an evil on par with abortion and euthanasia.

Despite his liberalism on some issues, the current pope has been unwavering on the subject.

“We are living in a time of experimentation with life. But a bad experiment,” Pope Francis said in 2014 shortly after he was elected to his position. “Making children rather than accepting them as a gift, as I said. Playing with life. Be careful because this is a sin against the Creator.”

Much like church teaching on contraception, the guidance on IVF is out of step with public opinion in the United States. The Pew Research Center found in 2013 that, while Americans are divided on the morality of abortion, nearly 80 percent of U.S. adults consider IVF morally acceptable or not a moral issue — a finding that holds regardless of gender, political affiliation or religion.

John S. Grabowski, director of

Davina Fankhauser, 47, sought a rabbi’s advice about the idea of using donor eggs: Would the children still be Jewish? “I didn’t realize I would care so much until I started talking about it,” she said, crediting “a mixture of science and God” for her two children.

moral theology at Catholic University, acknowledged “a disconnect between official church teaching and Catholics’ practice.”

In interviews, Catholic couples who have undergone IVF said they felt a successful birth had been blessed by God or was otherwise “meant to be.”

Still, many Catholics are troubled by the destruction of embryos.

Ariannet Vanas of Boston struggled with the idea of IVF because she knew the Vatican disapproved. Ultimately, she said, she concluded God would not “judge us because we want to be a family.”

After her twins were born six years ago, doctors told Vanas, 39, she would be unable to sustain another pregnancy.

So she removed the laboratory tubes containing her unused embryos from cryo-storage and arranged them next to pictures of grandparents and other relatives who had died.

“It kind of weighs on you,” she said, “the journey that was needed.”

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15

COVER STORY The rabbi and the doctor Some of the first scholarly writings about IVF from Jewish experts were also negative. Rabbi Eliezer Yehuda Waldenberg, one of the most important authorities of his generation on medical issues, wrote that a baby produced from the procedure was not related to his biological parents. Rabbi Moses Feinstein, known for his writings about women’s issues, raised questions about the waste of “seed,” or semen.

Attitudes began to change with greater understanding of the procedure. And since the soul does not enter the embryo until 40 days after conception, according to some interpretations of Jewish scripture, unused embryos did not raise the same moral questions. Many Jewish leaders began to actively encourage assisted reproduction, viewing it as a way to heed God’s instruction to “be fruitful and multiply.”

Technical worries remained, however: Could a woman’s eggs be joined with the wrong man’s sperm? The solution was rabbinical observers such as Friedman who supervise fertility clinics to make sure they conform to Jewish law and there are no questions about the child’s lineage.

The idea originated in Israel, where IVF is universally covered by national health insurance.

Working with Friedman and Rabbi Avrohom Friedlander, the Genesis Fertility and Reproductive Medicine clinic in Brooklyn was among the first American clinics to adopt the practice to meet the needs of its large population of Orthodox and Hasidic patients.

“Religious couples who go through infertility, no matter what religion, suffer because it feels like divine punishment,” clinic founder Richard Grazi said.

Having an abortion

“And that makes everything more dramatic and painful.”

Monitoring IVF is similar in intensity to certifying kosher restaurants, Friedlander said: Religious observers keep the keys to cryo-tanks where frozen eggs, sperm and embryos are stored and must be present whenever lab technicians handle genetic material. They verify labels and make sure separate surfaces and sometimes equipment are used to avoid mix-ups.

Embryonic stem cell research Non-embryonic stem cell research

Not a moral issue 49%

22 16

Using in vitro 12 fertilization

32

42 46

Morally wrong

Not a moral issue

Protestant 13%

15% 36

Rabbi Avrohom Friedlander, chief chaplain at Maimonides Medical Center, with Richard Grazi, founder of the Genesis Fertility and Reproductive Medicine clinic.

Grazi was one of the first in the U.S. to use independent supervisors to monitor IVF.

Percent who say that using in vitro fertilization is:

Morally acceptable

23%

While there are many industry protocols to ensure the integrity of the IVF process, Friedlander said, “rabbis were more comfortable having a divine presence” in the lab.

“When you are dealing with God’s creation, you want to make as sure as possible that things are being done right,” he said.

Friedman, 63, a mother of six, grandmother to 29 and greatgrandmother to one, said she got into the work after seeing so

Catholic 13

Morally acceptable

45% 46 51

31% 31

33

Unaffiliated 9

34

33

Survey: March 21 - April 8, 2013, among a representative sample of 4,006 adults nationwide.

The margin of error for the survey is plus or minus 2.1 percentage points.

Note: Responses of those who volunteered “depends on the situation” and those who did not give an answer are not shown.

Source: Pew Research Center

WEEKLY

CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Percent of U.S. adults who say each of these is: Morally wrong

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THE WASHINGTON POST

many in her community suffer from infertility. “I believe in a higher being and that He is good and will help us,” she said.

Esther Fixler, who lives near New York, was among the first patients to use the rabbinical monitoring process. Fixler spent a decade trying to get pregnant before coming to Genesis, where she quickly learned her chances of conceiving were abysmally low. In an outburst of emotion, she told Grazi to throw away her genetic material.

Instead, Grazi told her to pray and to have faith. Within a few weeks, she was pregnant with the first of her three children.

“When the pregnancy took, I thought, ‘This is God.’ I had seen it in black and white, whether I had a chance or not,” said Fixler, now 51. “But it wasn’t for human understanding how this happened.”

Her son, now 20, was married in December 2016. Three months ago, he and his wife welcomed their first child, a girl, Fixler’s first grandchild. n ©The Washington Post

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LITERATURE

Poetry verses take a viral turn BY

L AVANYA R AMANATHAN

M

ahogany L. Browne’s first taste of Internet fame came when her poem “Black Girl Magic” — which she had recited in a single, self-assured take for PBS’s “NewsHour” in 2016 — found its way to Facebook.

“You ain’t ’posed to get married.

You ain’t ’posed to want no dream that big,” she spat in the twominute video. “You ain’t ’posed to dream at all.” Her words traveled far, on a wave of likes and shares.

“I didn’t know what viral was until I went viral,” Browne says now. “As a poet, I’d never experienced it.”

Poets, after all, pen chapbooks.

They lecture at esteemed universities. They drop verses at poet stomping grounds such as New York’s legendary Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Going viral, on the other hand, is for drunken Eagles fans who face-plant into poles.

But social media is upending what it means to consume poetry and what it means to create it. It has birthed a new cohort of bards known as “Instapoets” who share on Instagram tidy compositions that have the feel of literary selfies, often in retro-looking fonts that evoke a dusty old typewriter. And it has allowed writers of verse to reach a generation that grew up with Twitter, emoji and memes. It has turned the Coachella crowd into a promising new market for poetry.

Lily Myers couldn’t understand why she was getting so many messages about her poem “Shrinking Women,” which she performed at a 2013 slam competition. “And then I saw it on Facebook,” she said. Today, it has racked up more than 5 million views. Not uncommon for a music video — but stunning for a poem.

It’s as if social media is the defibrillator that has zapped the age-old art back to life, at a time when some feared it was becoming extinct. But if you think poetry was eager for the shock — well . . .

“There was something about this that felt over the top touchyfeely ultra new age feministy,” a

ISTOCK

Once it was the slam; now it’s Instagram. With poets on YouTube and Twitter, many find it sweet — and bitter. commenter groused beneath the YouTube video of Myers’s performance.

“It’s just not for me,” a writer for Deadspin lamented about the work of Rupi Kaur, the reigning queen of the Instapoets — and the target of much literary backbiting.

(Responding to her critics, Kaur told Rolling Stone “that just because your work is successful does not make it bad work.”)

“There’s a lot of negativity,” sighs Sam Cook, 34, a founder of

Mahogany L. Browne is a poet whose twominute performance of a poem called “Black Girl Magic” went viral online.

While poets are experiencing the pleasure of reaching new audiences on social media, some worry about what it means for the ageold art.

Button Poetry, which specializes in spreading the gospel of poetry through YouTube. “Poetry has been such a niche space for so long, and the people in it feel like they’re entitled to decide what is good and what is bad.”

They fret that the artlessness of Twitter, and the heightened selfconsciousness of Instagram, is diluting poetry’s power, if not making a mockery of the whole canon.

“There are people,” Cook says, “that think it never should have gone to the Internet.”

No one riles them up quite like Kaur, an Indian Canadian poet who has emerged as the Sylvia Plath of Instagram. A couple of times a week, she posts one of her short, elegiac poems, illustrated by delicate line drawings, to be lapped up by an audience of more than 2 million followers. (A sample poem, in its entirety: This place makes me exhausted/ the kind of exhausted that has/ noth­ ing to do with sleep/ and every­ thing to do with/ the people around me.)

But Kaur’s real impact on poetry has been book sales. She’s sold millions of copies of her books “The Sun and Her Flowers” and “Milk and Honey” — which, even three years after its initial publication, scored the No. 2 spot on Amazon’s bestseller list for last year, above J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” and Hillary Clinton’s “What Happened.”

There are others, such as Reuben Holmes, a self-proclaimed feminist poet who goes by the handle “r.h. Sin.” His bite-size, prowomen works command a million followers on Instagram; his new book “She Felt Like Feeling Nothing” just landed on the New York Times paperback bestseller list at No. 15.

But if you look at the work of Browne, Myers, Kaur and others like them, it’s largely made by women — young women — for audiences of young women. The poems are highly personal messages of self-esteem and empowerment, deeply rooted in call-out culture — taking aim at abusers, bad boyfriends, and all the (generally, male) oppressors of the bed-

room and boardroom.

The popularity of such poetry on social media “demystifies this idea that poetry is some high, academic art of white men brooding in corners, trying to write poems that nobody understands,” says Rob Casper, head of the Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress, which appoints the U.S. poet laureate. Its success suggests the old guard may be increasingly irrelevant, along with its rules.

He adds, “a lot of first-time readers have come to poetry through Instagram poets. It gives them an ‘in’ to the art. Rupi Kaur makes sense in our Instagramoriented lives.”

When poets though no one cared about their work, they turned toward themselves, and poetry became an echo chamber.

Until the viral poets came along.

Sarah Browning, a poet who has for 10 years organized the Split This Rock poetry festival in Washington, D.C., said she welcomes new voices. “Ten poets can’t run the literary world anymore,” she says. “The gatekeepers are losing power.”

But ask her about the viral poets, the Instapoets, and she begins taking long pauses between words. “It seems to spin . . . in a different sphere . . . somewhat.”

“And sometimes,” she laughs nervously, pausing again, “it intersects.”

Danez Smith, a Minneapolisbased poet and National Book Award finalist whose own work is frequently cited for straddling both worlds, agrees. Smith’s poems, for example, have appeared on BuzzFeed. On YouTube, Smith has a poem, “Dear White America,” that has garnered more than 300,000 views.

“I’m not interested in writing short bite-sized pieces that can fit into a square on Instagram,” Smith says but adds, “We’re not thinking about our work in the same way. They’re thinking about their work to be quick and digestible. In a more traditional sense, we’re trying to build poems that people get to marinate on for a while.” n ©The Washington Post

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‘Nancy’ gets drawn into a new age BY

M ICHAEL C AVNA

F

or most of its 80 years, “Nancy,” that hailed masterpiece of formal minimalism, has felt more like stripped comic than comic strip — a bare-bones visual enterprise that could have been set nearly any time in the 20th century.

Now, however, “Nancy” is getting an update. The feature about the precocious, red-bowed girl and her layabout ragamuffin pal Sluggo is suddenly referencing bots and apps, video games and social-media posts. Those are just some of the dramatic changes that new writer and artist Olivia Jaimes (the cartoonist’s nom de toon) has been making to the Andrews McMeel-syndicated strip since she took over last month. The distinct stylistic shift, after Guy Gilchrist shepherded the strip for two decades, has attracted a bright spotlight of attention, as readers have hotly debated this new-look “Nancy.”

Jaimes embraces this swarm of fresh readers, saying, “I’m happy to have all these new eyeballs on a classic comic strip I love.”

In “Nancy” last month, our frizzy-haired hero turns an “age me” app on her slow-to-grow azaleas. Nancy has also been expounding on rampant negativity on the Internet (“It’s probably all bots anyway”) and on what Sluggo liking a social-media post really means.

In the strip’s comments section on GoComics.com, the daily remarks have jumped into the hundreds, as readers react to every change under the Jaimes administration — from the tone of the skin (“liver disease”? inquires one reader) to the tone of the humor.

“Olivia must be channeling her inner Bushmiller,” wrote one positive commenter on the syndicate’s website, referring to longtime “Nancy” cartoonist Ernie Bushmiller, around whom a cult of top comics professionals has formed. Another commenter noted how Jaimes nods to the comic’s tradition even while including modern touches, writing: “It is refreshing to see a return to its

PUFS

Classic comic strip character picks up 21st-century gadgets — and fans — with a new female creator original style and humor.”

Others have not been as pleased. One commenter wrote: “This is ridiculous. You’d never catch Ernie Bushmiller doing a joke about Snap Chat. Bring back, Ernie!” And a reader expressed to The Washington Post, “Since the characters have not aged in 85 years I don’t think it’s necessary to change them now.”

One thing’s for sure: Controversy and conflict are good for business.

Before the change in creator, “Nancy” averaged about 5,000 page views a day, says the Kansas City-based syndicate. In late April, the Jaimes version of “Nancy” attracted 133,000 page views on a Wednesday, then spiked to 390,000 views the next day, according to publishing company Andrews McMeel.

Nancy debuted on the comics page in 1933 in the United Feature strip “Fritzi Ritz,” which was launched in 1922 by creator Larry

Whittington. Bushmiller later took it over. After Nancy appeared as Fritzi Ritz’s niece, the girl’s popularity increased until, by 1938, the strip’s title was changed to “Nancy.”

(In response to fans clamoring for Jaimes’s Fritzi Ritz, the syndicate says Nancy’s aunt will debut this Monday. Jaimes tells The Post about rendering her Fritzi: “I’m definitely looking at old Bushmiller comics for inspiration, as well as my own fashion choices. Look out for Fritzi wearing pointy flats she bought because she saw the same ad on Facebook 2,000 times and it finally got her.”)

“Nancy” was created for more than a half-century by Bushmiller, an Eisner Hall of Fame cartoonist, under whom “Nancy’s” client list grew to nearly 900 papers.

Beyond the numbers, the syndicate embraces the stylistic shift of the gag comic, which is now

“Nancy” comic strips are seen from 2018, top, and 1955, above. For years, the strip drew about 5,000 page views a day on the syndicate’s website.

On a day in late April, under new creator Olivia Jaimes, that number jumped to nearly 400,000.

syndicated to about 75 newspaper clients.

“There’s something warm and silly and magical in the facial expressions, the rhythm and the body language,” says John Glynn, Andrew McMeel’s president and editorial director. “Olivia is channeling Ernie Bushmiller while giving it her own unique, 21stcentury voice.

“I think the fates led us to Olivia,” Glynn adds about Jaimes, who previously worked in webcomics and is the first woman to create the strip since it debuted.

“She’s got the gift.”

She had forewarned readers that her version of the strip would bring technological change. Now, she says, “Nancy’s going to use all the social media and technology I use.

“People will be able to figure out exactly how behind the times I am by watching what apps she’s using,” continues Jaimes, who is in her 20s. “It took me until last month to try Spotify, so that should give you an idea of where I’m at.”

“Nancy” has also recently featured meta-jokes that seem to nod to the strip’s change in creator. In one strip, Nancy says her Aunt Fritzi has removed everything from the strip she doesn’t love. The effect? This makes it easier “for the cartoonist.”

So now that she’s several weeks into her “Nancy,” how does she feel about the massive reaction — does all the feedback affect her?

“It’s exciting, but since I’ve also been avoiding the Internet a lot over the last couple weeks, it’s not changed my approach or perspective much,” says Jaimes, noting that she hasn’t yet seen the reader comments and has stayed off all social media since her launch.

(Jaimes also notes that she uses a pseudonym to keep her “brands separate.”)

Adds Glynn: “I’ve been lucky enough to see the next few weeks, and I dare say it just keeps getting better.”

The online armies following Jaimes’s every line will certainly be the judge of that. n ©The Washington Post

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BOOKS

Stop trying to avert death; just live your life N ONFICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

R ACHEL N EWCOMB

A

NATURAL CAUSES An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer

By Barbara Ehrenreich Twelve. 234 pp. $27

mericans have a history of obsession with fads designed to help us live forever. But to what end?

Death, notes Barbara Ehrenreich in her new book, “Natural Causes,” still awaits us all. In this lively cultural history of our attempts to control our fate, she details the extreme lengths we will go to keep from dying.

Take the idea of preventive medicine, based upon the seemingly helpful notion that the regular physical or mammogram can detect an illness before it takes over and kills us. Yet when Ehrenreich was diagnosed with osteopenia, or thinning of the bones, for which an expensive pharmaceutical product was indicated, rather than being a compliant patient, she decided to dig a little deeper. Osteopenia, it turns out, is common in anyone over age 35, and the medicine prescribed for her “condition” was later shown to advance bone degeneration.

“A cynic might conclude,” she writes, “that preventive medicine exists to transform people into raw material for a profit-hungry medical-industrial complex.”

In the 1970s, consumer advocates discovered that many medical tests were performed without scientific proof of their effectiveness, leading to a demand that such testing be justified. Yet a number of common procedures are still done, despite questionable evidence that they prevent deaths.

Challenging the received wisdom that early detection saves lives, Ehrenreich, who was diagnosed with breast cancer at the turn of the millennium, cites repeated international studies indicating that mammograms have not been shown to reduce mortality from breast cancer and even expose women unnecessarily to cancer-causing levels of radiation.

Similar issues arise with screenings for prostate and colon cancer.

Beyond the doctor’s office, Ehrenreich takes us into the world of

ANTONIO BRONIC/REUTERS

Americans have embraced fads like standup paddleboard yoga, but do they really help people live longer?

wellness, where, from CrossFit to gluten-free diets, we obsessively follow the latest trends that promise eternal health. She traces this “surge of interest in physical fitness” to the 1980s, when disillusionment with the failure of the 1960s counterculture movement led to an inward turn, a type of self-involvement “where if you could not change the world or even chart your own career, you could still control your own body.”

Even another apparently positive development, the rising popularity of mindfulness, is nothing more in Ehrenreich’s eyes than a corporate attempt to shift our attention away from addictive electronic devices and improve our focus on productivity. However, as with cancer screenings, yearly physicals and corporate wellness programs, Ehrenreich writes that large studies have shown that

meditation is no more effective for stress than muscle relaxation, medication or psychotherapy.

Finally, Ehrenreich turns to the gnarly problem of death, which we seem to think we can stave off by dutifully adopting a healthy lifestyle. Culturally, many believe that bad choices (whether sugar, carbs, fats or cigarettes) are to blame for an early demise. Ehrenreich traces this insistence on personal responsibility to the collective shift away from the notion of a divine cause for unfortunate events and toward the idea that we are masters of our own fates.

In the final section of the book, Ehrenreich, who holds a PhD in cellular immunology, switches to biology to demonstrate the futility of our quest for immortality.

Sometimes, despite our best efforts to think positively and treat the body like a temple, it nonethe-

less betrays us.

If all the yoga classes and paleo diets in the world can’t save us, then what prevents us from descending into total nihilism? For Ehrenreich, the answer seems to be that we should relax and enjoy being part of this complex world, rather than stressing about how to stay in it as long as possible.

This book takes an important, albeit uncomfortable, look at the health-seeking practices of our era, documenting the tendency toward self-righteous cultural absolutism that has always accompanied American health fads. n Newcomb is an anthropologist and the Diane and Michael Maher distinguished professor of teaching and learning at Rollins College. She is the author of “Everyday Life in Global Morocco.” This was written for The Washington Post.

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KLMNO WEEKLY

If you like despair, you’ll love this

Thorough look at a musical genius

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

M

l

REVIEWED BY

R ON C HARLES

ore than a week before the release of Rachel Kushner’s new novel, “The Mars Room,” the New York Times published an excerpt in a special 12-page section. A Times book critic followed up with a review calling “The Mars Room” “a major novel.”

That may be the problem with this bleak tale about people trapped in the U.S. prison system.

“The Mars Room” shuffles along shackled with so much Importance that it barely has room to move. Swollen with certainty, the story tolerates little ambiguity and offers few surprises. Kushner told the New Yorker that several years ago she decided “to learn everything I could about California prisons.” And now she is determined to teach it to her readers, who are sentenced to more than 300 pages of despair, cruelty and illness.

The heroine is Romy Hall, a 29-year-old white woman who has just begun serving two consecutive life sentences plus six years for murdering a stalker.

“I don’t plan on living a long life,” she tells us, “or a short life, necessarily. I have no plans at all.

The thing is you keep existing whether you have a plan to do so or not, until you don’t exist, and then your plans are meaningless.

But not having plans doesn’t mean I don’t have regrets.”

As you might gather from that existential reflection, Romy is better educated than her cellmates, who are a handy assortment of the poor, desperate and deranged.

If you’ve seen a few episodes of “Orange Is the New Black,” you’ll recognize the structure here.

Romy has no chance of getting out, but she’s frantic to make some kind of contact with her little boy, a struggle that provides a faint overarching story line. But constrained by the prison setting, the plot mostly relies on shifts in focus and point of view to create movement.

Kushner cycles through the women’s tragic stories, mingling horrific anecdotes from before they were incarcerated with grim events in prison. The result is a terrifying survey of what it means to be poor and female in the United States.

Among Kushner’s most pointed themes is the absurdity of America’s ideology of choice, the nation’s cruel devotion to the fantasy of free will. Throughout their miserable lives, these women are beaten, tricked, thwarted and poisoned, and yet when they’re finally snagged by the prison system, some pompous man reminds them, “Your situation is due one-hundred percent to choices you made and actions you took.”

Recalling a crime committed against her when she was just 11, Romy lashes out at her readers’ self-satisfied superiority: “You would have been safe and dry and asleep, at home with your mother and your father who cared about you and had rules, curfews, expectations. Everything for you would have been different but if you were me, you would have done what I did. You would have gone, hopeful and stupid.”

These are undeniably heartbreaking stories that reflect the actual, dreadful experiences of millions of people caught in America’s poverty-and-prison industry, a machine greased by our inane drug laws. But there’s something so calculated about “The Mars Room” that even the most progressive readers are bound to feel like they’re being marched down a narrow hallway.

Ironically, “The Mars Room” is best in its minor incidents. In these rare spaces, we’re allowed the freedom to choose how we feel, to escape this novel’s thematic bars and experience something closer to art than instruction. n Charles is the editor of The Washington Post’s Book World.

C The Mars Room

By Rachel Kushner Scribner. 352 pp. $27

PAUL SIMON The Life

By Robert Hilburn Simon and Schuster.

439 pp. $30

l

REVIEWED BY

S IBBIE O ’ S ULLIVAN

laude Gassian’s cover photograph of Paul Simon does more than identify the subject of Robert Hilburn’s new biography. It suggests how we should read it. By photographing Simon full-faced but shadowed, serious and pulsing with importance, Gassian rejects the rougher, often louche images he’s created of other rock icons.

Instead, the photograph reminds us of the portraits by John Singer Sargent, who painted the societal titans of late 19th-century society.

Hilburn could hardly discourage such a comparison, given that his thorough, balanced and insistently chronological biography, “Paul Simon: The Life,” reminds us how titanic this musician is.

Simon didn’t start out a titan.

He began his career singing in a duo named for two cartoon characters, Tom & Jerry. Art Garfunkel, who Simon befriended in sixth grade, was Tom. By 1964, they had renamed themselves Simon and Garfunkel, and within a few years they had become a musical sensation, selling millions of records and touring widely. They went on to win multiple Grammys over their long but fragmented career.

As a solo performer, Simon’s awards are even more eye-popping: more Grammys, the Johnny Mercer Award from the Songwriters Hall of Fame, a Kennedy Center Honor and the first Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. Simon has also lectured at colleges and befriended famous intellectuals and artists. These awards and associations substantiate Simon’s most visible personality traits: ego and the propulsive pursuit of his art.

He learned early from his competitive father, a successful bandleader, who told him that “music was something to be treated with respect.”

The he said/he said history of Simon and Garfunkel’s halfcentury collaboration is well known, and Hilburn supplies enough examples of their kvetch-

ing to wear down any reader. It’s the songs that matter, beginning with their megahit, “The Sound of Silence.” First recorded in 1964, by the beginning of 1966 it was No. 1 in America. By his mid-20s, Simon was a millionaire with many productive years ahead of him.

Hilburn is not an exciting writer, though Simon chose him as his biographer. Instead of feeling suspenseful, this version of Simon’s life story seems inevitable, and reading the long history of his career never quite zings as it should, despite his many accomplishments.

Simon is widely quoted in the book. He hates being short, sometimes gets depressed and loves his family, but when he does take us into the shadows, he reveals nothing unexpected or particularly dark. Not much drug use, though beginning in 1994 he started using ayahuasca, a South American hallucinogenic. He views his time with Garfunkel as “merely the first stage of his career,” yet it’s a stage he habitually repeats. Readers are apt to wonder why.

Simon’s comments about his own lyrics, many of which are printed in full throughout the book, are informative, but explaining the intricacies of poetic creation seems to elude him.

Simon does discuss his exploration — some would say exploitation — of cultural rhythms from Africa and South America and how these new sounds made him rethink his songwriting.

Whether we prefer Simon fullfaced or shadowed, he certainly can write great songs. We’ll have to wait and see if he ever writes another now that he’s announced his Farewell Tour. But titans seldom stop, so why would Simon?

Silence does not become him. He’s always liked the sound of his own voice, as do millions of others. n O’Sullivan, a former teacher at the University of Maryland, writes frequently for The Washington Post about culture and the arts.

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OPINIONS

Schneiderman’s fall should prompt reflection ANA MARIE COX is the host of Crooked Media’s “With Friends Like These.” This was written for The Washington Post.

F

ormer New York attorney general Eric Schneider­ man is only the latest ally of feminists to turn out to be an accused abuser as well. In recent weeks, we’ve also learned of a prominent liberal tech con­ sultant, Clay Johnson, whose career was not at all derailed by rape allegations and sexist verbal abuse. Multiple wom­ en have accused MacArthur “genius grant” winner Junot Díaz, a rape survivor, of actions ranging from unwanted kisses to rageful outbursts. Rep. Tony Cárdenas (D­Calif.) is facing an ethics investigation for allegedly sexually as­ saulting a 16­year­old girl.

I repeat these examples (with the knowledge that every step backward in time would add more to the list) not to highlight any particularly egregious irony but to underscore the uselessness of trying to segregate sexism — and sexual violence — by ideology.

There is no ideological monopoly on misogyny or patriarchy or sexual harm, a fact that most women have learned from bitter experience. I’m not so naive as to believe that a man’s voting record is going to be predictive of his potential for violence. That he seems to go to the same political rallies as I do doesn’t mean he won’t draw me into an inappropriate conversation. The cool bumper stickers on his car won’t guarantee my safety if he drives slowly by while I’m on my evening run. And whenever I hear about the latest political comrade or well-respected colleague to be the subject of other women’s stories, I am never surprised when his actions do not match up with his attested ideals. When the difference is great, I am only disappointed. Surprise is the privilege of someone who has never been assaulted by someone they know.

So I suspect it is mostly men who are fascinated by the

overblown irony in anyone’s descent from hero of the #MeToo movement to a culprit caught up in its rough justice. On the right, this fascination has taken the form of mainly resurrecting the left’s unfortunately quasiromantic swoons over Schneiderman (see the coverage of a Samantha Bee segment literally engaging in Schneiderman hero worship).

Schneiderman’s fall was particularly steep, and the details of his story have provided political enemies with irresistible opportunities for schadenfreude.

But rather than draw some broad lesson about hypocrisy, the specific tragedy surrounding Schneiderman suggests that those who are serious about ending sexual violence stop pointing fingers, or stroking chins, and start looking in the mirror.

Whether Schneiderman (or any other man in his situation, with his record) was “really” the #Resistance warrior he appeared to be or “really” a hateful thug isn’t as important as the fact that he could be both of these things at the same time. How he managed to contain and sustain these opposites isn’t as important as how he reportedly gaslighted his targets into inaction, catching

SETH WENIG/ASSOCIATED PRESS

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman resigned Monday after being accused of physically abusing four women.

them between his gallant crusader public persona and his cruel intimacies. He may be complicated, or have a chemicaldependency issue, or he may be an exceptionally talented liar.

What men (and many women) need to realize is that the protection against allegations of abuse afforded by having the “right” political attitudes is not something granted by the attitudes themselves, but by the people who share them. Believing that women should get equal pay for equal work or be able to make their own reproductive choices or even personally campaigning against domestic violence can’t stop a man from raising his hand against his partner behind closed doors. But progressives believing that any one man’s work is more important than the marks he makes on a woman’s body can keep us from taking action.

That Schneiderman’s former romantic partners say he engaged in his abusive behavior primarily under the influence of drugs or alcohol (the same is true for consultant Johnson) should force progressive-minded men and women into urgent selfreflection: It suggests that the right set of circumstances can undo the inhibitions of even the most strident supporter of the

#MeToo agenda. Just as the proper political position can’t be insulation against accusation, the correct beliefs won’t necessarily restrain one’s behavior.

Not all or most or even many allies of the movement — men or women — have committed sins on the scale of what Schneiderman is accused of. But many of us have been guilty, at one time or another, of enabling those sins in the name of ambitions both large and small. We are the people who told Schneiderman’s girlfriend not to say anything about his alleged violence because he was “too valuable a politician for the Democrats to lose.” We’re the coworker who heard that Johnson assaulted a colleague and, in the moment, “really wasn’t sure what you do.”

The individual transgressions of these would-be confederates are the product of personal choices and perhaps even genuine sickness, the individual consequences of which deserve individual redress and amends.

What needs more general public scrutiny is the context in which such behavior continued for so long. Society doesn’t make any one abuse another, but social structures enable men to get away with it — and only individuals can put that to an end. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

McCain’s example is one to follow DAVID VON DREHLE is a Washington Post opinion columnist.

In a matter of months, maybe weeks, maybe days, the president of the United States will try to speak for the nation on the death of Sen. John S. McCain III. At 81 , McCain has been the model of stoic virtue in reckoning with his terminal brain cancer, so this prediction will neither surprise nor offend him. “What is your life?” asks the Book of James, Chapter 4, verse 14. “You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.”

Because President Trump makes up in shamelessness what he lacks in principles, he should easily find something fulsome to say, or tweet, about this magnificent and maddening patriot. He will likely be brief and vague, though, because he’s more comfortable with genuine duplicity than with feigned sincerity. When thencandidate Trump scoffed at McCain’s heroism in 2015 — “I like people who weren’t captured,” he said, as if a draft-dodging sybarite could calibrate heroism — we knew we were hearing the real Donald.

Whatever seemingly decent thing he says when the time comes will carry the stink of an inauthentic apology.

This is one problem, among many, with choosing a president based on how disgusted the choice will make the losing voters.

Our major parties in the last

election nominated candidates who were loathed by the other side; polls indicated they were the least-popular standard-bearers in the history of polling. And while this might be an effective way to rev up true believers (hate being a powerful motive), it cripples the survivor’s transition from campaign antagonist to voice of the nation. To speak with, and for, the whole country at key moments is a big part of the job, yet for some reason, our modern politics is failing to elevate candidates who can do it well.

I was never sure McCain was such a candidate, though I watched him seek the presidency in 2000 and 2008. He was an interesting campaigner, which is rare, but he wasn’t a great one. He resembled a racehorse that loves to surge from back in the pack, closing a length per furlong, yet

loses focus if given the lead.

Thus the charm of McCain’s “Straight Talk Express,” the bus he chartered in the winter of 2000 when he was 20 lengths back of George W. Bush and spoiling for an upset.

With the cockiness and ease of a former Navy aviator, the shootfrom-the-lip candidate soon had celebrities and news executives clamoring for bus time, and as he narrowed (but never closed) the gap, McCain’s delight was infectious.

On the other hand, he blew whatever small chance he had of beating Barack Obama in 2008 when his victory in the primaries caused him to break stride.

McCain stumbled with GOP elders by pushing for a Democrat as his running mate. When they vetoed the choice, he impulsively chose the untested and unready Sarah Palin.

At the time, I asked a veteran Republican for the backstory. “He didn’t get his way so he threw his peas against the wall,” came the answer.

But if McCain has proved less than the ideal messenger, he has achieved something larger: He is an ideal message. When the time comes, his whole life story will be recalled, but its essence can be distilled to a single choice.

Shot down over Hanoi in 1967,

McCain was taken prisoner with three of his limbs broken, his shoulder crushed and a bayonet wound in his gut. But this was no ordinary prisoner. In the long history of the U.S. Navy, McCain was the first to be both son and grandson of full admirals, and his father was in command of all operations in Vietnam. When his captors learned this, they offered McCain his freedom. He had only to exercise his privilege, look after himself, and leave his fellow prisoners behind.

They tortured him nearly to death for refusing, bound his broken arms, beat his unhealed wounds. Decades later, I watched him limp into rallies on a leg that could never be properly repaired and raise his shattered and rebroken arms waist-high — their full extent. And I heard him ask his fellow Americans to trust, as he had trusted through more than five years of avoidable suffering, in duty, service and one another.

If this eulogy is premature, the reason for delivering it now is this moment cries out for it. John McCain reminds us that American greatness is made by those who understand that character is the sum of one’s hardest choices; that reality is not a TV show; that fame is mist but honor granite; that heroes don’t need fixers on retainer. n

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OPINIONS

BY DAVID FITZSIMMONS FOR THE ARIZONA STAR

We’re ill-prepared to fight diseases RONALD A. KLAIN is a Washington Post contributing columnist and was the White House Ebola response coordinator from 2014 to 2015 and a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

Summer is coming. And if you think a warm-weather surge of mosquitoes and ticks is not as frightening as the fictional winter’s White Walkers from “Game of Thrones,” you haven’t read the recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the rapidly escalating danger of infectious diseases spread by insects.

The CDC’s key findings: The number of Americans infected with such diseases, including Zika, West Nile and Lyme, has more than tripled in a decade, jumping from about 30,000 cases a year in 2006 to almost 100,000 in 2016. This total includes nine types of infections never before seen in the United States, including Zika and chikungunya. Looking ahead, 80 percent of state and local health departments are not ready for the insect-borne threat we are facing in just a couple of weeks.

Why the surge? Global travel is a major cause; as commerce, culture and tourism spread rapidly, so do diseases. Scientists also identify more infections, thanks to new research tools. But there’s another factor slipped into the CDC report: Certain mosquitoes and ticks are “moving into new areas.” This anodyne language refers to the fact that, as temperatures and moisture rise across the United States, disease-bearing insects expand their reach. Thus, we face another risk posed by the threat that Trump administration officials dare not speak aloud: climate change.

Coincidentally, the day before the CDC’s report, a man who has worked mightily to save millions from disease threats — Bill Gates — went public with a recent conversation he had with President Trump. Gates told Stat News that they had discussed Gates’s work to try to find a universal flu vaccine.

However, no single individual has the resources to protect us from the growing array of infectious diseases confronting us: Only government action has that scope.

However, there are reasons to be skeptical that this president’s administration is up to the

BY MATT DAVIES FOR NEWSDAY

broader challenge. As Gates reminded the president, nearly a year and a half into his tenure, Trump still does not have a science adviser. John Bolton’s purge at the National Security Council pushed out the official there overseeing pandemic preparation, Tom Bossert.

Trump’s controversial CDC director, Robert Redfield, has been busy explaining why he will, or won’t, get paid double what his predecessors made.

But the biggest challenge is Trump. When the United States faced the West African Ebola epidemic in 2014, Trump attacked science-based responses to the threat and essentially argued that President Barack Obama should leave American health-care workers in Africa to die when they were sickened while fighting the disease. (Obama didn’t, and they were saved.) Trump has “energized” the anti-vaccine movement that imperils all that Gates and his allies are trying to achieve. He has proposed an 80 percent reduction in programs designed to stop dangerous diseases overseas before they come to the United States.

The xenophobia that Trump preached during the 2016 campaign contributed to congressional delay as reports emerged about a Zika outbreak

arriving here. While Congress dithered, Zika took root in parts of Florida and Texas.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

The solutions are well known: Empowered leadership at the White House. A public-health emergency fund that a president can quickly deploy before Congress acts. More investments in research, epidemic prevention, and well-equipped and trained teams at regional hospitals.

Increased support for state and local public-health departments, our front-line defense. More research on vaccines and therapeutics, and clearer policies on their rapid approval and deployment. And most important: robust investment in global health security to help other countries identify, isolate and respond to outbreaks before they become global epidemics.

This month, the Smithsonian opens an exhibit on the 100th anniversary of the Spanish flu epidemic that killed more Americans than both world wars combined. We are far from prepared for the sort of threats that the exhibit highlights, and retreating from the world is no answer: There is no wall high enough to keep America safe from infectious diseases in today’s connected world. And summer is coming. n

SUNDAY, MAY 13, 2018

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

British royals BY

A UTUMN B REWINGTON

The wedding of Britain’s Prince Harry and American Meghan Mar­ kle is Saturday and royal fever is running hot. If U.S. television rat­ ings for the nuptials of Harry’s brother (about 23 million viewers) and parents (17 million) are any guide, millions of Americans will wake up early to watch Markle’s transition from television actress to real­life royalty. For all the U.S. interest, though, the British crown remains surrounded by misconceptions.

MYTH NO. 1 The monarchy has embraced a new, progressive attitude.

The ancient institution is modernizing — but that doesn’t make it modern. It remains the world’s most iconic example of hereditary aristocracy (sitting atop a class- and race-conscious society), a system long since discarded in most liberal and democratic nations. Relaxed rules on divorcées remarrying and eliminating gender bias in the succession to the throne merely reflects 20th-century norms rather than 21st-century progressivism. Another problem, as a New York Times op-ed put it, is whether “more people of color will come to feel they have a stake in the country’s most oldfashioned institution” — Markle’s biracial background notwithstanding.

MYTH NO. 2 The Windsors are multibillionaires.

A report concluded last year that their net worth is about $88 billion. A Reader’s Digest write-up pegged the net worth of 3-year-old Princess Charlotte at $5 billion and that of Prince George, 4, at $3.6 billion. The astronomical sum includes the combined value of assets such as Buckingham Palace, the crown jewel collection and the Windsor “brand” that attracts tourists to Britain each year.

The queen personally owns Balmoral Castle in Scotland and Sandringham House in Norfolk, England. But official residences

such as Windsor Castle are not her private property. They’re part of the Crown Estate, a system formalized in 1760 under which King George III signed crown lands and assets over to the government in exchange for a salary. The queen couldn’t sell Buckingham Palace, and she is not wholly responsible for its upkeep. Similarly, while the royals have personal jewelry, the regalia worn at coronations and state occasions such as the opening of Parliament passes from monarch to monarch.

MYTH NO. 3 When Charles is king, Camilla Parker Bowles won’t be queen.

When the couple became engaged in 2005, Clarence House (Charles’s residence) announced, “It is intended that Mrs Parker Bowles should use the title the Princess Consort when the prince accedes to the throne.”

Yet while polls suggest that many Britons oppose the idea of Camilla as queen, Queen Elizabeth II signaled her approval in 2016 by adding her to the Privy Council, a senior group of advisers to the sovereign. The language about Camilla becoming princess consort has been removed from the Clarence House website, and articles and biographies of Charles and Camilla have suggested that Charles intends for his wife to be queen.

MYTH NO. 4 Markle’s child could be in line for the throne and run for U.S.

EDDIE MULHOLLAND/POOL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Britain’s Prince Harry and American actress Meghan Markle are set to marry Saturday at St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle.

president.

Without an exemption from Congress, any child of the couple who is in line for the British throne would run afoul of the foreign emoluments clause: Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution says that “no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States], shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

So even if a future daughter broke with the royal tradition of steering clear of politics, she would need to renounce the throne — or get special permission from Congress to maintain her claim. It’s hard to imagine a candidate winning an election without first having pledged exclusive allegiance to the United States.

MYTH NO. 5 It is unpatriotic to care about the wedding or royals.

A lot has changed since 1776.

The powers that Britain’s monarchs once wielded have largely shifted to Parliament. It might officially be Her Majesty’s

military, but the queen doesn’t order forces into battle. Taxes are collected in her name, but the legislature sets rates. Britain has evolved from an empire of colonies to membership in a Commonwealth of allied governments.

Meanwhile, American interest in the royals is nothing new.

Queen Elizabeth II, 92, first made the cover of Time magazine at age 3 in 1929. A fascination with the Duchess of Cambridge’s wardrobe or charity works does not threaten U.S. citizenship or governance. And that’s partly why so many enjoy it. For Americans, following royal characters has none of the complications of politics or responsibility for the monarchy’s costs. Some see the royals as a real-life fairy tale; others, a long-running soap opera. For some in a celebrityobsessed culture, princes and princesses are simply a higher caste. n Brewington, a freelance journalist in Washington, was an editor at The Washington Post from 2001 to 2014 and anchored The Post’s Royal Wedding Watch blog in 2011. This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, MAY 13, 2018

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