The Washington Post National Weekly - May 29, 2016

Politics Clinton’s invisi-Bill campaign 4

World An artist inspires Afghans 11

Technology Dark side of the Internet 16

Data Crunch When will mosquitoes be biting? 23

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, MAY 29, 2016

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

From belief to outrage The decline of the middle class reaches the next American town PAGE 12

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wvbusinessworld.com/30under35/ Questions? Contact Editor Cal FitzSimmons at fitzsimmons@wenatcheeworld.com or 509-665-1176.

SUNDAY, MAY 29, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

THE FIX

Clinton’s problems get worse BY

C HRIS C ILLIZZA

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ne of the two big dominoes in the Hillary Clinton email controversy toppled Wednesday: The State Department’s inspector general released its report on the email practices of Clinton and a number of other past secretaries of state. (The other major domino is, of course, the FBI investigation into Clinton’s decision to exclusively use a private email server while serving as the nation’s top diplomat.)

The report badly complicates Clinton’s past explanations about the server and whether she complied fully with the laws in place governing electronic communication. And it virtually ensures that Clinton’s email practices will be front and center in Donald Trump’s fusillade of attacks against her credibility and honesty between now and Nov. 8.

Here’s the key passage from The Washington Post’s article on the report: “The inspector general, in a long-awaited review obtained Wednesday by The Washington Post in advance of its publication, found that Clinton’s use of private email for public business was ‘not an appropriate method’ of preserving documents and that her practices failed to comply with department policies meant to ensure that federal record laws are followed.”

Clinton used an inappropriate method of preserving her documents. Her approach would not have been approved if it had been requested by a more junior member of the State Department staff. The report also suggests that despite a Clinton aide’s insistence that the method of preserving her emails had been submitted to a legal review back in 2010, there is no evidence that such a review took place. And, here’s the kicker: Clinton refused to sit for a formal interview.

Oomph.

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The Clinton campaign will push back hard on this report — as it has against anything that suggests she was at all in the wrong in the creation and protection of her email server.

Here's how her press secretary, Brian Fallon, put it on Twitter: “GOP will attack HRC because she is running for President, but IG report makes clear her personal email use was not unique at State Dept”

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

Clinton’s team has spent months casting the State Department inspector general’s office as overly aggressive and working with congressional Republicans to cast the former secretary of state in the worst possible light.

That’s a very hard story to sell, given that the current inspector general was appointed

by President Obama. It is, by the way, the same problem Clinton faces when she tries to cast skepticism on the ongoing FBI investigation.

This is an FBI that is overseen by an attorney general — Loretta E. Lynch — who was also appointed by Obama. It’s tough to make the case that a Democratic administration filled with Democratic appointees are all somehow out to get the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.

Then there is the argument, which Fallon makes above, that Clinton was far from the

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2016 The Washington Post / Year 2, No. 33

first secretary of state to use less-than-airtight methods to ensure the preservation and security of her email correspondence. As the IG report makes clear, she wasn’t. Again, from The Post’s article: “The 83-page report reviews email practices by five secretaries of state and generally concludes that recordkeeping has been spotty for years.”

There are two very important differences among Clinton, Secretary of State John F. Kerry, and former secretaries Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice when it comes to email practices.

The first is that Clinton is the first and, to date, only secretary of state to exclusively use a private email address and server to conduct her business as the nation’s top diplomat. All of the other names above maintained both a private and a government-issued email address. That alone doesn’t make her guilty. But it does make her unique.

Second, Clinton is the only one of that group who is currently (a) running for president and (b) the very likely nominee for one of the country’s two major parties.

Because of her elevated status in our political world, she is — and should be — subject to more scrutiny than, say, Powell, who hasn’t voiced an interest in running for president in 20 years. That’s particularly true because Clinton has put her time at State at the center of her argument for why she should be elected the 45th president of the United States. Look at what I have done and judge me by it, she says. That has to include the bad as well as the good.

Clinton remains blessed that Republicans are on the verge of nominating Donald Trump, a candidate whose numbers on honesty, trustworthiness and even readiness to lead are worse — and in some cases, far worse — than hers. But Trump’s task of casting her as “Crooked Hillary” just got easier. n

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY DINING BOOKS OPINION DATA CRUNCH

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ON THE COVER One of several shuttered factories in Huntington, Ind. Photograph by MICHAEL ROBINSON CHAVEZ, The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Bill Clinton finds his stride K AREN T UMULTY Cayey, Puerto Rico BY

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n a rural roadside restaurant here in the heart of Puerto Rico, the lunch rush was over, leaving only a handful of patrons to see a snowy-haired figure in black jeans and a polo shirt emerge from an SUV that pulled up outside.

It was the 42nd president of the United States. Within minutes, just about everyone in the place had pulled out a smartphone for a photo with Bill Clinton. He lingered a bit with a group at the bar, accepting a cold bottle of Medalla, and toasting with them: “To Hillary!”

“Good beer,” he declared.

That was one of the six stops that Clinton made on May 17, as he scouted for votes from the northern coast of the island to the southern one. His day also included three rallies, lunch with local political leaders at a San Juan restaurant and a tour of a distillery, where he sipped 27-year-old rum tapped straight from a barrel.

Bill Clinton’s schedule many days is more packed than Hillary’s, though by design it rarely registers on the national radar.

This is the invisi-Bill campaign.

The former president who flickers occasionally on cable news channels remains a big draw on the off-Broadway circuit of presidential politics. It is a lowaltitude tactical deployment that leaves a light footprint, aiming to maximize his value as a political asset without stirring the negatives that also trail him.

His new duties have not come without stumbles, and they conjure the implications of a Clinton restoration. Presidential spouses are expected to exert their influence over china patterns, not China policy. No one, however, is under the illusion that Bill Clinton would remain cloistered in the East Wing. Still open to question is whether voters will welcome his return or worry about it.

Clinton has not sat for a formal media interview since last fall.

But he pops up in obscure and unlikely places, where the presence of the former president is

ERIKA P. RODRIGUEZ FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

The former president keeps a low profile wooing voters, politicians certain to dominate local front pages and evening newscasts and generate buzz in the community.

Usually, he draws no more than a few hundred people, in contrast to the crowds of 10,000 and up that flock to the mega-rallies of mogul Donald Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Clinton almost never takes questions from his audiences. Instead, when he is finished speaking, he wades into them, lingering at the security barricades until the last person who wants one gets a selfie, a hug or an empathetic ear.

And he gathers intelligence.

Campaign officials say he is in constant contact with Hillary’s Brooklyn campaign headquar-

ters, sending back reports of what he is hearing from donors, activists and ordinary voters.

Clinton’s Puerto Rico swing was a noteworthy investment in a territory that cannot even vote for president in the November election. But it will have 60 Democratic convention delegates at stake in its June 5 primary. The island and its issues also resonate with Hispanic voters across the country.

He has a feel for the blue-collar white voters with whom his wife has struggled to connect. With two days to go before the Democratic primary in Massachusetts on March 1, Hillary Clinton was gaining on Sanders in a state where he had been favored.

Charlie Baker, Hillary’s state di-

Bill Clinton greets supporters of his wife, Hillary Clinton, during a campaign event in Cayey, Puerto Rico. The former president is said to be in constant contact with campaign operatives, sending back reports of what he is hearing from donors, activists and ordinary voters.

rector there, got a call from Tina Flournoy, Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, asking whether Democratic Rep. Jim McGovern might arrange an election-eve rally with the former president in McGovern’s working-class hometown of Worcester.

But there was a catch: Clinton wanted to do it at 11:30 p.m.

As the clock ticked into election day, the former president lit a fire with the crowd in Massachusetts’s second-largest city, Baker said. “We probably would have lost Worcester if he hadn’t come.”

When the polls closed, Hillary Clinton had edged out Sanders by less than two points in the Bay State.

People who have not seen Bill Clinton in awhile are sometimes

SUNDAY, MAY 29, 2016

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POLITICS surprised at the appearance of a man who will turn 70 in August.

He is drastically thinner than he was in his days of gobbling Big Macs and doughnuts — a function of both time and the vegan diet he now follows as a heart patient.

When he first hit the trail for Hillary last January in New Hampshire, Clinton’s rustiness was obvious, the effect of eight years that have passed since her last campaign. His post-presidential endeavors have put him on a very different kind of stage, doing work for his foundation around the world and giving lucrative speeches before adoring audiences.

His stump speech sounded more like a TED talk. Clinton seemed to spend more time rhapsodizing about his own record than her vision; his voice at times was so raspy and weak that technicians had to turn up the volume to make him audible in a modestsize gymnasium.

Lately, he has hit his stride. In inner-city Baltimore before the Maryland primary, he preached from the pulpits of three African American churches, quoting the prophet Isaiah and the Book of James.

His presence there also displayed some of the personal ties he has built over decades.

At Bethel AME, in a depressed neighborhood, Pastor Frank M. Reid III recalled when Clinton invited him to lunch with Nelson Mandela.

Yet Clinton does not confine his efforts to friendly territory. In Kentucky, he coolly handled jeers of miners and their families in the mountain town of Prestonsburg.

“I don’t mind being booed. I’m too old to worry about it,” he told them. “All I’m telling you is, go vote for who you want to. Do whatever you want to do. But don’t pretend that we can get anything done by screaming.”

Five days later, his wife would lose that Kentucky county to Sanders by nearly 2 to 1. But after her husband’s (and her own) blitz of the state, including one day that Bill packed with four appearances, she pulled out a razor-thin victory.

Tallahassee Mayor Andrew D. Gillum was rushing to the airport one day in February when he got a phone call from the former president, whom he had never met.

Gillum was inclined to stay uncommitted in the Democratic primary, he told Clinton, who then

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

enlisted campaign chairman John Podesta to talk to Gillum as well.

By the time the tag team was finished, Gillum had agreed not only to endorse Hillary Clinton but to stump for her the following week in South Carolina.

Later, Clinton asked the 36year-old mayor to help him get to know other up-and-coming political leaders in Florida, a crucial swing state. Gillum arranged a private session in Orlando between Clinton and 20 young elected officials — many of whom were supporting Sanders.

“For an hour and 15 minutes, he sat there and listened to their thoughts,” Gillum said.

There have been times in the past — and may well be in the future — when it was unclear whether Bill Clinton was more an asset or a liability to his wife.

Early on, her team’s concern was that his star power would burn so brightly that it would put her in his shadow. But as her front-running presidential campaign was being overtaken by that of a first-term senator from Illinois in the 2008 Democratic primary, her husband compounded her problems with churlish and undisciplined outbursts.

At one point in that year’s heated and bitter South Carolina primary, Sen. Barack Obama lamented, “I can’t tell who I’m running against sometimes.”

This time around — for perhaps the first time in his public career — Bill Clinton seems to be finding his

groove within the narrow boundaries of a supporting role.

“In service of his wife, he is best used as a conventional weapon, deployed on these retail missions in swing states, rather than as a spokesman in the media, where he can be brilliant, but sometimes lets his emotions run away with him,” said David Axelrod, who was Obama’s chief campaign strategist.

“He’s also likely to be a collateral target of Trump, so these lowkey assignments hedge against it becoming a shoot-out between them,” Axelrod added.

Nor does Bill Clinton appear to have any inclination to take the bait from Trump, who has been dredging up the more unsavory chapters of Clinton’s past, both real and rumored, with increasing frequency.

Trump has gone so far as to call Clinton a rapist. As the former president made his way through the Lechonera El Mojito restaurant here, a reporter asked him to respond to a tweet by Trump earlier that day accusing him of being “the WORST abuser of woman in U.S. political history.”

“No, I won’t,” Clinton said brusquely. “I think people are smart enough to figure this out without my help.”

Then he turned his back and moved on to shake a few more hands.

Still, Clinton can be thinskinned, particularly when his own presidential legacy is chal-

“In service of his wife, he is best used as a conventional weapon, deployed on these retail missions in swing states.”

— David Axelrod, who was Obama’s chief campaign strategist, about Bill Clinton. The former president, shown above with Hillary at a rally in Las Vegas, has been campaigning for her 2016 bid since January.

KLMNO WEEKLY

lenged, as it was by a couple of Black Lives Matter activists in Philadelphia. Though he had in the past said that the crime bill he signed in 1994 had gone too far, he erupted when the protesters made the same argument.

“I did something yesterday . . . I almost want to apologize for,” Clinton said the next day.

Part of the adjustment for Clinton comes from the fact that the Democratic Party in 2016 is significantly more liberal than the centrist one that he had reshaped in the 1990s. Even Hillary Clinton has moved away from some of the policies he championed — not only criminal justice but also areas such as free trade.

As he was making his way through a recent street concert in downtown Lexington, Ky., the band broke into Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop.” In 1992, it was his presidential campaign’s anthem of generational change; today, it’s a baby-boom oldie.

Both Clintons have begun talking more about the role he might play as the spouse of a president who has also been president.

It is a tricky issue, reminiscent of the stir the Arkansas governor caused in 1992, when he boasted that voters would be getting “two for the price of one” if they elected him president and brought his brainy wife to the White House.

Her subsequent foray leading his effort to transform the health care system turned into a political disaster that helped cost the Democrats their majority in Congress.

She has indicated that she wants him to be involved with job creation: “I’ve told my husband he’s got to come out of retirement and be in charge of this, because, you know, he’s got more ideas a minute than anybody I know.”

In Kentucky, Bill Clinton said he also envisioned such a job for himself, though he, too, paints his role in vague and glossy terms.

“I was governor when the Ozark Mountains where I lived had three of the four poorest counties in America. I get this,” he said. “I know it’s hard when places are physically isolated. I’m not pretending. All I’m telling you is, I volunteer that if Hillary got elected president, I would like to be tasked with responsibility to take you along for the ride to America’s future.”

Or as they might have put it in another century: Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow. n

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POLITICS

Getting photo ID is difficult for many New state voting laws are seen as ‘common sense’ by some, ‘poll taxes’ by others

S ARI H ORWITZ Houston BY

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n his wallet, Anthony Settles carries an expired Texas identification card, his Social Security card and an old student ID from the University of Houston, where he studied math and physics decades ago. What he does not have is the one thing that he needs to vote this presidential election: a current Texas photo ID. For Settles to get one of those, his name has to match his birth certificate — and it doesn’t. In 1964, when he was 14, his mother married and changed his last name. After Texas passed a new voter-ID law, officials told Settles he had to show them his namechange certificate from 1964 to qualify for a new identification card to vote.

So with the help of several lawyers, Settles tried to find it, searching records in courthouses in the D.C. area, where he grew up. But they could not find it. To obtain a new document changing his name to the one he has used for 51 years, Settles has to go to court, a process that would cost him more than $250 — more than he is willing to pay.

“It has been a bureaucratic nightmare,” said Settles, 65, a retired engineer. “The intent of this law is to suppress the vote. I feel like I am not wanted in this state.”

In November, 17 states will have voting restrictions in place for the first time in a presidential election.

Eleven of those states will require their residents to show a photo ID. They include swing states such as Wisconsin and states with large African American and Latino populations, such as North Carolina and Texas. This past week, the 15judge U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans began hearing a case regarding the legality of the Texas law, considered to be the most stringent in the country.

Supporters say that everyone should easily be able to get a photo ID and that the requirement is needed to combat voter fraud. But many election experts say that the process for obtaining a photo ID can be far more difficult than it looks for hundreds of thousands of

MICHAEL STRAVATO FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Myrtle Delahuerta, left, with lawyer Abbie Kamin, has had difficulty obtaining a photo ID so that she can vote in Texas.

New voting restrictions for 2016 States requiring a photo ID to vote in a presidential election for the first time NH VT

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Source: Brennan Center for Justice

people across the country who do not have the required photo identification cards. Those most likely to be affected are elderly citizens, African Americans, Hispanics and low-income residents.

“A lot of people don’t realize what it takes to obtain an ID without the proper identification and papers,” said Abbie Kamin, a lawyer who has worked with the Campaign Legal Center to help Texans obtain the proper identification to vote. “Many people will give up and not even bother trying to vote.”

A federal court in Texas found that 608,470 registered voters don’t

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THE WASHINGTON POST

have the forms of identification that the state now requires for voting.

For example, residents can vote with their concealed-carry handgun licenses but not their stateissued student university IDs. Across the country, about 11 percent of Americans do not have government-issued photo identification cards, such as a driver’s license or a passport, according to Wendy Weiser of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R), compares his state’s new

voter-ID requirement to what is needed for “boarding an airplane and purchasing Sudafed.” Texas officials, who say the laws are needed to combat possible voter fraud, recently said in court papers that the Justice Department and civil rights groups suing the state are not able to find anyone “who would face a substantial obstacle to voting.”

But former attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. has called the costs associated for voters seeking a photo ID a “poll tax,” referring to fees that some Southern states used to disenfranchise blacks during the Jim Crow era of laws enforcing racial segregation between the late 1800s through 1965.

Soon after Obama’s election, a surge of Republican-led state legislatures passed laws requiring photo IDs. “Voters who have to show ID constantly in their everyday lives certainly don’t see ID as a problem,” said Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “It is a common-sense, basic requirement needed to ensure election integrity, which is an essential part of free and fair elections.”

Opponents say that the laws were designed to target people more likely to vote Democratic.

This month, during the federal trial on Wisconsin’s voter-ID law, a former Republican staffer testified that GOP senators were “giddy” about the idea that the state’s 2011 voter-ID law might keep Democrats, particularly minorities in Milwaukee, from voting and help them win at the polls. “They were politically frothing at the mouth,” said the aide, Todd Allbaugh.

A recent voter-ID study by political scientists at the University of California at San Diego analyzed turnout in elections between 2008 and 2012 and found “substantial drops in turnout for minorities under strict voter ID laws.”

“These results suggest that by instituting strict photo ID laws, states could minimize the influence of voters on the left and could dramatically alter the political leaning of the electorate,” the study concluded.

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POLITICS The question of whether photo IDs are difficult to obtain has become central to cases across the country, where government and civil rights lawyers are challenging new state laws.

Three courts have in fact struck down the voter-ID law in Texas, but the state’s governor has not backed down and has promised to keep it in effect in November.

In 2012, a federal court in Washington concluded that the burden of obtaining a state voter-ID certificate would weigh disproportionately on minorities living in poverty, with many having to travel as much as 200 to 250 miles round trip.

Voter-ID laws are also being litigated in North Carolina and Virginia, in addition to Texas and Wisconsin. Election experts predict that one of these cases could go to the Supreme Court before November.

Many of the residents struggling to obtain a valid photo ID are elderly and poor and were born in homes rather than hospitals. As a result, birth certificates were often lost or names were misspelled in official city records.

Myrtle Delahuerta, 85, who lives in Huntsville, Tex., has tried unsuccessfully for two years to get her ID. Her birth certificate does not match her pile of other legal documents that she carts from one government office to the next. The disabled woman, who has difficulty walking, is applying to have her name legally changed, a process that will cost her more than $300 and has required a background check and several trips to government offices.

“I hear from people nearly weekly who can’t get an ID either because of poverty, transportation issues or because of the government’s incompetence,” said Chad W. Dunn, a lawyer with Brazil & Dunn in Houston, who has specialized in voting rights work for 15 years.

“Sometimes government officials don’t know what the law requires,” Dunn said. “People take a day off work to go down to get the so-called free birth certificates.

People who are poor, with no car and no Internet access, get up, take the bus, transfer a couple of times, stand in line for an hour and then are told they don’t have the right documents or it will cost them money they don’t have.”

“A lot of them just give up,” Dunn said.n

KLMNO WEEKLY

In this Syria, Trump talk of a Muslim ban is welcome sign M ARY J ORDAN Syria, Va. BY

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nlike its faraway namesake, this Syria has no Muslims. It’s a pretty village with trout in its rivers and black bears in its hills, home to many who cheer one of Donald Trump’s most derided proposals: a ban on Muslims.

Laurie Richards, the cashier at the general store, thinks the way others do: She doesn’t like everything about Trump, but she thinks he is right to talk about temporarily barring Muslims from entering the United States. Islamist fanatics, responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, continue to commit murder from Brussels to San Bernardino, Calif. It only makes sense, she said.

“Do I think he will be perfect as president? No,” said Richards, 43.

But his provocative ideas — such as his talk of a giant wall on the U.S.-Mexico border — show an “attitude,” she said. It tells her that Trump is open to dramatic fixes.

Of all Trump’s ideas, the ban on Muslims is considered by his critics to be particularly off the rails.

With 1.7 billion Muslims in the world, it aims to shut out nearly one in four people on the planet. It has been called racist, unconstitutional and unenforceable. Hillary Clinton has said that it is “shameful” and “dangerous.”

Yet the idea turns out to have broader support than many critics expected. Nationally, 64 percent of Republican voters said in a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll that they approve of the ban — as did 45 percent of independents — while 26 percent of Democrats do.

In Syria, Va., a Republican-leaning town in a pivotal state, talk of the ban is exactly what is rallying people behind Trump. It is a case study of one of the qualities of the Trump candidacy: His popularity has grown — not despite his extreme rhetoric, but because of it.

Just as confounding for his foes, perhaps, is the that many of his supporters don’t take the idea literally. They hear it as a rhetorical nod that he will change things.

Several people said that it made little sense to pay attention too closely to proposals because candidates rarely deliver when in office, especially if Congress is needed to approve a new measure.

Richards, for instance, said she doesn’t think a ban will occur, just as she knows that Mexico probably won’t pay for the giant wall Trump talks about building. But she said that no other candidate is telling her what she thinks: Just about anybody can set foot in the United States, and those days should end.

AMANDA VOISARD FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Jimmy Graves is a Donald Trump supporter angered by government regulations.

Trump is no angel, she said, as she rang up a customer’s $3 sandwich in a store that stacks items including milk and rifle carriers.

In fact, she said, Trump sometimes is “belligerent and crude,” and she doesn’t like his crass judgments about women’s bodies and looks.

But until the government can give a “100 percent” guarantee it can screen out Islamist terrorists, “there should be a ban,” she said.

Ask Trump voters about Hillary Clinton, or vice versa, and the charitable words used are “wacko” and “liar.” Many suggested avoiding talk about the November election.

“I don’t want to get in an argument. I just want to sell my plants,” said Molly Sanford at Hollerfolk Nursery. She talked, but not too

loudly, about what a ridiculous idea a ban on Muslims is.

“Ban people of a certain religion in a country founded on the idea of freedom of religion?” Sanford said, shaking her head.

Ten miles down the road in Madison, Willie Lamar is a pharmacist and mayor. “There are such extremes in this election,” he said, so it’s smart to steer talk in his drugstore to anything but politics.

“People are keeping their opinions close to the vest. . . . I have some very good friends who believe differently than I do.”

Lamar, who hasn’t decided who he’ll vote for, said a Muslim ban and other border-security ideas that Trump is suggesting “are not really viable.” But people give him credit “for talking about issues that need to be addressed.”

“For people to take the wall literally or banning Muslims literally is as outrageous as Trump thinking he can do it. It’s a rhetorical comment. . . . Whether his methods are doable or make any sense is beside the point.”

Trump is right that border security is a critical issue, Lamar said.

But he thinks that banning people based on religion is un-American.

After foreign leaders denounced a ban, Trump said there would be “exceptions” and “ideally” it would be in place “just until we figured things out.”

A short drive from Syria, leaders of Northern Virginia’s American Muslim community say Trump’s talk about Islam is bigoted and scary, whether he intends to follow through or not. Many applauded Clinton when she said, “It is not in keeping with our values, it’s not effective in protecting us and it plays into the hands of terrorists.”

But around this village, many are supporting Trump and welcome his proposed ban, even though they said it will never pass Congress — and shouldn’t. More significantly, said Jimmy Graves, the 79-year-old owner of the Graves Mountain Lodge, people hear a new, clear voice saying the country needs to do more to “keep out people who are unsuitable. n

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NATION

A sizeable gift wrapped up in distrust B RADY D ENNIS East Millinocket, Maine BY

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he nearly 88,000 acres were meant to be a gift, donated along with a $40 million endowment so that part of Maine’s pristine North Woods might be protected forever as a national park.

But it’s not easy to give away a national park; Roxanne Quimby, the wealthy, polarizing co-founder of Burt’s Bees, has been trying for more than a decade. Her effort has bitterly divided this corner of New England, where shuttered paper mills have led to crippling unemployment and a shrinking population, and where distrust of the federal government runs as deep as the rivers and streams.

“We don’t need you here!” one man at a packed public meeting recently shouted at National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis.

“You really, truly don’t care what these people think!” another man fumed.

The emotion isn’t surprising.

Out West, ranchers and farmers have long complained of federal encroachment on private land. But the fight over the Maine woods involves a private landowner wanting to hand over property, along with an unprecedented amount of funding. A century ago, philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr. tried a similar approach to create the first national park east of the Mississippi — Acadia National Park on Maine’s Mount Desert Island. History has been slow to repeat itself.

In a single day, on a swing that included the angry crowd in East Millinocket, a more supportive crowd at a university auditorium in Orono and a couple of other stops, Jarvis got both slammed and supported. He heard what a great idea the proposed national park would be — and what a terrible idea. He heard the government hailed as a potential savior for the area’s economy — and as a landgrabbing force that could harm the timber industry and destroy a way of life.

Some accused Quimby of trying to buy a legacy through her dona-

YOON S. BYUN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

A Maine family wants to donate a national park and $40 million. Neighbors want no part of it. tion, and they criticized her son, who has taken over the effort in recent years, as a smooth talker full of empty promises. Others praised the family, calling their offer an act of extraordinary generosity, a “once-in-a-century gift.”

Clad in his green-and-gray Park Service uniform and a stiffbrimmed ranger hat, Jarvis did his best to allay fears and correct misconceptions about the Park Service using eminent domain or imposing a litany of new regulations.

A national park could give the local economy a boost, he said. But he acknowledged it wouldn’t be a panacea.

“What I have heard here today are a lot of concerns, deep concerns,” Jarvis told the mostly suspicious audience in East Millinocket. “I take every one of these concerns very seriously.”

“How many times do we have to say, ‘No, it’s not what we want for the area?’ ” Millinocket resident Lorri Haskell said, noting that residents in towns near the proposed

park voted against its creation, that the governor and legislature are opposed and that Maine’s congressional delegation refuses to introduce the measure necessary to create a national park.

That leaves only the prospect of President Obama using his authority under the Antiquities Act of 1906 to declare the land a national monument — something he has done nearly two dozen times while in office.

“It has nothing to do with us anymore,” Haskell said as she sat at her kitchen table. “It has to do with whether President Obama is going to betray us. Is this how democracy works?”

A mile away, not far from empty storefronts and the mill where Great Northern Paper churned out paper and prosperity for more than a century, Bret Doe said it was time to embrace a different future.

“The paper mills are gone, and they’re never coming back,” said Doe, the son of a police chief and grandson of a paper maker. “The

Lucas St. Clair, the son of Burt’s Bees co-founder Roxanne Quimby, stands near Orin Falls in the North Woods in North Penobscot, Maine. He now runs his mother’s effort to give away land and a $40 million endowment to keep it protected.

area is slow to realize that.”

Quimby’s quest took root in the early 2000s. Flush from the success of Burt’s Bees — the skin-care company famous for its lip balm — she had been busy acquiring huge swaths of land east of Baxter State Park, home to Katahdin, the state’s highest peak and the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail.

From the start, her dream faced skepticism, and her actions stirred only more acrimony. She closed her land to hunters and snowmobilers, violating a long-held Maine tradition of allowing such uses on private property. She also evicted people who had leased long-established camps along the East Branch of the Penobscot River.

“The only landowner up here who ever closed off land to the public is Roxanne Quimby,” said Anne Mitchell, president of the Maine Woods Coalition, a group opposed to the national park. “She ruffled a lot of feathers.”

In 2012, Quimby stepped away from the project and handed the reins to her son, Lucas St. Clair, who returned to his native Maine to salvage the effort.

St. Clair is 37, a tall, bearded father of two, a one-time thruhiker on the 2,180-mile Appalachian Trail who also worked as a fishing guide in the Pacific Northwest. From the start, he took a more conciliatory approach, determined to win hearts and minds in a way his mother never did.

He restored public access to tens of thousands of acres east of the Penobscot River and vowed to keep them as a recreation area for hunting, snowmobiling and fishing even if a national park or monument were next door. He built an 18-mile loop road around the proposed park, along with camping areas and hiking trails, and invited the public to come see it for themselves.

He spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a public relations agency and a Washington lobbying firm, part of an effort to “reset” the conversation with residents, Maine’s congressional delegation and the White House. He commissioned economic studies detailing how other communities

SUNDAY, MAY 29, 2016

9

NATION had benefited from proximity to national parks and cited poll findings that two-thirds of residents in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District, which covers much of the state, would support a North Woods park.

St. Clair also pounded the pavement, trying to assure folks that the government would not use eminent domain or impose air quality standards or buffer zones that would hurt the forestry industry.

Mostly, he listened.

“I’ve had 10,000 cups of coffee with just about everyone,” he said.

“I’ve stood at the end of the grocery store checkout line and asked people what they thought. I’ve sat in a million town meetings. I went to bean-hole suppers and knocked on doors.”

His work has thawed oncechilly relationships and won allies around the state. The Katahdin Area Chamber of Commerce endorsed the proposal. The Bangor Daily News also backed it, saying the “region needs new life.”

Still, opposition has remained fierce — and fiercely outspoken.

“Sometimes big ideas are just plain bad ideas,” a group of opponents, including leaders of the Maine Forest Products Council and the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine, wrote to St. Clair and his mother last year. “This is a region with incredible assets and huge potential, but unless you end your quest, the prospect of a national park or some other version of federal control, such as a national monument, will hang over the region like a dark cloud, scaring off the investment the region needs and deserves.”

Away from all the emotions, St. Clair’s Jeep Cherokee bounced along bumpy logging roads recently and onto the 18-mile loop of his family’s proposed national monument.

It was remote and scenic, serene and undisturbed — everything the towns he had left behind were not.

“It’s easy to get caught up in the fight,” he said. “It becomes this, ‘Are you for it or against it?’ But there’s more to it than that. . . . It’s a magical place.”

The spruces and pines towered along the banks. The snow kept falling. Rapids crashed over ancient boulders. For a moment, all the arguing seemed far away, and the only sound was the roar of nature. n

KLMNO WEEKLY

Polar, grizzly bears are warming to each other A DAM P OPESCU Barrow, Alaska BY

M

ost Alaskans and Canadians have a bear story — tales of fearsome grizzlies, even polar bears.

But a mix of the two?

They’re known as pizzlies or grolars, and they’re a fusion of the Arctic white bear and their brown cousins. It’s a blend that’s been turning up more and more in parts of Alaska and Western Canada.

Recently, a strange-looking bear was shot by a hunter in Nunavut, a remote territory that curves around Canada’s Hudson Bay. Its head was large, like a grizzly’s, but its fur was white. The bear’s genetics were not tested, but Arctic researchers seem unified in their analysis: It’s a polargrizzly mix. A hybrid.

Textbooks say these two species aren’t supposed to inhabit the same environments. Polar bears are marine mammals; grizzlies are terrestrial. But as the Arctic warms, sea ice is shrinking and the tundra is expanding. And the bears’ disparate populations are meeting, mating and creating a new breed that’s capable of reproducing.

Bears sharing both species’ DNA have been recorded several times over the past decade. So why are these two species linking up?

It’s called flexible mate choice: The bears are mating with the best possible partners as opposed to not mating at all, and they’re mating because they share relatively close territories and the same branches of the same evolutionary tree.

Intraspecies mixing between the two happened thousands of years ago, thanks to the advance and retreat of glaciers, and of late, it has been boosted by climate change. Scientists say it’s also probably been assisted by policies that protect both bears from culling and hunting, affording further opportunities for mingling.

The crossbreeds found in Alaska and Canada are not genetic anomalies. Scientists have found

the mix in the islands off Southeast Alaska, where bears resemble grizzlies but contain polar bear DNA. That indicates decades of sporadic interbreeding, said Steven Amstrup, chief scientist at Polar Bears International.

The polar-grizzly cocktail is also far from the only recent animal hybrid. The coywolf — a coyote-dog-wolf amalgamation — and a lynx-bobcat mix have been popping up along the northern Atlantic coast. The more scientists

A.E DEROCHER/UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA

A bear that was three-fourths grizzly and one-fourth polar bear can be seen at the Ulukhaktok Community Hall in Canada.

analyze species’ genomes, the more they realize that animals we label as “pure breeds” actually share DNA — and that includes us.

Many humans carry traces of DNA from Neanderthals, which means we’re all hybrids. It also means there’s no such thing as genetic purity. And what may be most surprising about this, researchers say, is the role interbreeding plays in the futures of endangered species — or, as the case may be with polar bears, accelerating their end.

Amstrup has studied bears in the Arctic since the 1970s and was instrumental in helping list the polar bear as a threatened species in 2008. He, like other experts, characterizes this “new” bear relationship as more beneficial to grizzlies than polar bears. That’s because there are more grizzlies than polar bears and because grizzly territory is expanding while polar bear territory is contracting. What

that adds up to is a good chance grizzlies could essentially dilute the polar bear population until it doesn’t exist at all, they say.

Polar bears are getting the short end of the stick in this relationship, not “gaining any genetic diversity,” said Geoff York, who led research on polar bears at the World Wildlife Fund for almost a decade before joining Amstrup at PBI. Andrew Derocher, a professor of biological studies at the University of Alberta, has spent three decades studying bears throughout the Arctic. He, too, has a sobering view about where the hybridization is heading.

“I hate to say it, but from a genetic perspective, it’s quite likely grizzly bears will eat polar bears up, genetically,” he told me. And he says the changes are already at play.

All hybrids that have been analyzed had grizzly fathers, because grizzly males roam to establish territory and come in contact with receptive female polar bears. Female grizzlies tend not to stray far from their home ranges, and male polar bears don’t usually creep into grizzly habitats.

Derocher said it will not be long before we start seeing female grizzlies bump into male polar bears, further straining the polar bear’s genetic variation. “I suspect at the same time that that’s occurring, we’ll start to see polar bears on their way out.”

When will that be? Impossible to say, but some experts think that as the Arctic continues warming, it may be only a few decades, perhaps a century.

No matter what bear ends up as the Arctic’s future apex predator, scientists say, if the issues up north aren’t solved, it won’t matter what bears are there.

Hybrids are “a normal part of the evolutionary process,” Derocher said. But if the ice disappears, “we won’t have grizzlies or polar bears in this area. If you roll the clock ahead another number of decades or a century, quite clearly it’s going to be no bears eventually.” n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

WORLD

Immigrant influx fuels anti-E.U. vote G RIFF W ITTE Peterborough, England BY

S

een from London, Edinburgh, Oxford or other havens of the cosmopolitan British elite, this country’s vote next month on whether to quit the European Union may appear to be a relatively easy choice.

Not a day goes by when a foreign leader, renowned economist or military chief doesn’t warn of the dire consequences of a vote to leave — for Britain and for the world.

But venture just 45 minutes north of London by train to the ancient market city of Peterborough, and it soon becomes clear why, with just over a month to go before the referendum, the polls are running nearly even.

Here, the initials E.U. are spat rather than spoken, Brussels is a dirty word, and all the prophecies of doom seem a small risk compared with the opportunity to unshackle Britain from Europe.

For in Peterborough — by at least one measure the least E.U.-friendly city in Britain — Europe doesn’t mean the world’s most prosperous and peaceful continent. It means a mass influx of Eastern European immigrants across open borders that residents say has transformed this city beyond all measure.

“This used to be the posh part of Peterborough. Look at it now,” David Jackson, a 41-year-old teacher said as he ruefully surveyed the scene on Lincoln Road, the commercial heart of the city’s multiethnic immigrant communities.

“Romanians pissing in the park.

Lithuanians out on the street drinking, doing drugs. Even the rats here are on heroin.”

If Britain does vote to leave the E.U. on June 23, analysts say that a powerfully emotional backlash against decades of immigration in cities like Peterborough will be the primary driver.

“Immigration is by far the best issue for the ‘Leave’ campaign,” Freddie Sayers, editor in chief of the polling firm YouGov, wrote in a recent analysis. “If the coming referendum were only a decision on immigration, the Leave campaign

SHANNON JENSEN WEDGWOOD FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

June decision on leaving European Union may hinge on discontent in Britain with open borders would win by a landslide.”

Although the E.U. itself ranks near the bottom of surveys measuring the issues that matter to Britons, immigration — levels of which have been at historic highs — often tops the list. Advocates for a British exit have hammered the point, arguing that getting out of the E.U. is the only way for the country to control its borders, because the 28member club guarantees its citizens freedom of movement.

The anti-E.U. campaign’s emphasis on metaphorically walling off the British isles and, in some cases, demonizing immigrants as criminals, addicts or welfare cheats has generated comparisons to the xenophobia and nativism of another political movement that is shaking the Western political establishment this year.

“The Leave campaign is really the Trump campaign with better hair,” William Hague, a pro-E.U. former British foreign secretary, wrote recently, describing a

“transatlantic mirror-image” of resentment toward foreigners and protest against the political class.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee has endorsed Brexit, as the British departure from the E.U. is popularly known. That’s in sharp contrast with the stand of virtually every major world leader, except Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But the Leave campaign has not welcomed Donald Trump’s support, and it bristles at any parallel.

To Stewart Jackson, Peterborough’s ardently anti-E.U. representative in Parliament, Trump is nothing more than a “mediadriven buffoon” who has built his campaign on prejudice and bigotry. The push for Brexit, by contrast, is in his eyes a rational rejection of a super-national union that limits British control over its own laws, “something that no American would accept.”

“We have an old-fashioned view that the best people to run Britain

Art dealer Chris Brooks of Peterborough, England, doesn’t like the changes that have come to the city and backs the campaign for the country to leave the European Union.

are the British,” Jackson said. “That shouldn’t be a radical concept.”

Still, Jackson acknowledged that when it comes to immigration, there are similarities in the fervency of the backlash in Britain and the United States.

The foreign-born population in both countries is about 13 percent.

But immigration has grown significantly faster in the United Kingdom, with the number of foreignborn residents more than doubling over the past two decades. Last year, net migration to Britain — the difference between inflows and inflows — hit a record high at 336,000. Of those, 180,000 were E.U. citizens, who can move to Britain simply by hopping aboard a plane or a train. Unlike in countries across continental Europe, refugees made up only a relatively small portion of the inflow in Britain.

Peterborough — a modest agricultural city set on the exceptionally fertile plains of eastern England — has been a particular magnet for Eastern Europeans, who have come by the tens of thousands to work the surrounding fields of asparagus, potatoes and beets, or to take relatively lowpaid service jobs in the city center.

Those immigrants have helped make Peterborough one of the fastest-growing cities in Britain — with an unemployment rate lower than the national average — and they describe it as a land of opportunity.

“I love this country, and I love this city,” said Simona Budvyte, a 27-year-old Lithuanian who moved to Peterborough nearly five years ago, along with her newborn. “My daughter goes to school here. She’s learning English better than me.”

Jackson said his constituents have been poorly served by governments that cheer the overall economic benefits of immigration without accounting for the downside: Hospitals and schools are strained, waiting lists for public housing grow longer, and workers — particularly those with low skills — are squeezed out of the labor market.

“We’re creating a subculture of people who are alienated from society,” he said. “And that fuels anger and resentment.” n

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WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

An Afghan artist symbolizes hope A NTONIO O LIVO Kabul BY

M

ostly paralyzed and often alone, Robaba Mohammadi could have easily given in to the despair that swallows her warravaged country, and few would have blamed her.

Instead, the stubbornly determined 16-year-old, born with clawed hands and feet, picked up a pencil and started drawing — with her mouth.

As she sketches, producing increasingly detailed portraits of animals, still objects and people, the girl, who has a form of palsy, is gaining modest fame as a symbol of unyielding hope in what looks to be another bloody year of war with Taliban insurgents.

“I was alone, and I wanted to find a way to pass the time,” Robaba said inside a small family home that sits among dirt roads on the outskirts of Kabul. “That’s the way I started drawing. Now, I want to pursue this as a profession. It’s not for fun anymore.”

Over about 15 months, Robaba has progressed from simple drawings of birds and dolls to serene portraits of flowers with delicate wrinkles on their petals, animals with glistening eyes framed by light and shade, and unveiled women with glamorous hair and bold expressions.

When Robaba makes a mistake, she clutches an eraser between her lips and rubs away the error — a task she is learning to avoid.

On a recent afternoon, the girl positioned her frail figure before her easel in the sunlit room she uses as a studio.

Robaba’s mouth moved back and forth rapidly as she added depth to the face of an Afghan police officer, Serajuddin Afghan Mal, who has reportedly defused several thousand improvised explosive devices left along the roads

by Taliban fighters.

This was her first commission, which came after a member of the Afghan parliament saw a story about Robaba on a Kabul TV news show last month and contacted her with a request to produce a portrait

ANTONIO OLIVO/THE WASHINGTON POST

Unable to use her hands or feet, a determined girl taught herself to draw with her mouth that would honor the officer.

The subject suits her, Robaba said, because she wants her art to reflect Afghanistan’s better nature — to be a reminder that there is still cause for celebration in a country more often paralyzed by suicide bombings and the uncertainty wrought by nearly 15 years of war.

“Usually, people are hearing about fighting, explosions and blasts,” she said. “If they listen to my story, it’s a story of hope.”

For Robaba, drawing was initially a response to a lifetime of frustration and loneliness.

Her parents brought her to Kabul from the country’s central Ghazni province when she was 3, settling into a largely undeveloped corner of Kabul that sits near a sprawling lumberyard.

They carried Robaba over the neighborhood’s jagged, dusty roads during repeated searches for a doctor who could unfurl her arms and legs and make them work.

The doctors could only speculate about the cause of her condition and, after about five years, the family gave up.

“We lost hope,” said Robaba’s

mother, Masuma. Like many Afghans, she uses only one name.

Robaba spent most of the time inside the house, maneuvering her torso to get around and whiling away the hours as her three younger siblings grew up around her.

When Robaba was 7, she began to resent that her younger sisters attended school while she stayed inside, often alone for hours.

She found a school notebook belonging to one of her sisters and stashed it under a rug. Later, she did the same with two pens.

While the rest of the family was away, she grabbed a pen with her left foot and tried to write.

When that didn’t work, Robaba held the pen in her mouth and slowly copied the first two letters in the Dari alphabet: “alif” and “baa.”

“For six months, nobody knew what I was doing,” she recalled, laughing. “My sister was saying, ‘Where is my notebook?’ They didn’t think I could steal it because I can’t use my hands or feet.”

But as her writing improved over the years, the teenage Robaba still had no outlet for her frustration.

So she started drawing. That

Robaba Mohammadi’s first commissioned work is a portrait of an Afghan police officer who has reportedly defused several thousand improvised explosive devices positioned by Taliban fighters.

meant enduring the pain that came with firmly and repeatedly guiding a pencil across what became countless sheets of paper.

“I cannot leave the house. I am not free,” Robaba said about her determination, her usually playful eyes widening for emphasis. “I have a desire to draw nature, natural beauty. I’m not free to see these things with my own eyes.”

Now, what she can see with her own eyes is the possibility of a future beyond the walls of her home.

And maybe even beyond Kabul.

An aide to the parliament member who commissioned the police officer’s portrait arrived recently at Robaba’s home to retrieve the illustration. In his hand was an envelope holding the equivalent of $72 — a sum that made the young artist’s face blush with pride.

Robaba signed her name at the top of the drawing and thanked him.

Farkhunda Zahra Naderi, the parliament member, said that when she saw Robaba’s story on television, she recognized an opportunity.

“She’s someone who can give courage to other Afghans,” Naderi said. “She’s actually sending a message: If we have hope, we can try. We can move forward.”

Naderi said she is pushing to have Robaba enrolled in school, with an emphasis on art instruction so the teenager can further develop her talent.

She said she also intends to unveil the portrait of the officer at a ceremony to be held in his honor that will double as a public introduction for Robaba.

Robaba said she hopes to master drawing and then graduate into painting more sophisticated portraits and natural landscapes.

To that end, she stopped talking and went back to work.

As the lumberyard workers outside used a buzz saw to shave fresh planks of wood, Robaba drew a rough sketch of a dove carrying a peace sign.

The effort took about 20 minutes.

When she finished, the dove had a broken wing.

“Flying with a broken wing is art,” she wrote over the picture, before glancing around the room with a look of defiance. n

COVER STORY

‘ pretty soon there won’t be anything left ’

C

BY ELI SASLOW in Huntington, Ind.

hris Setser worked a 12-hour graveyard shift while his children slept, cleaned the house while they were at school and then went outside to wait for the bus bringing them home.

He stood on the porch as he often did and surveyed the life he had built.

The lawn was trimmed. The stairs were swept.

The weekly family schedule was printed on a chalkboard. A sign near the door read, “A Stable Home Is A Happy Home,” and now a school bus came rolling down a street lined by wide sidewalks and American flags toward a five-bedroom house on the corner lot.

“Right on time,” Setser called out to the driver, waving to his children as they came off the bus.

A man walks past buildings, many vacant, in downtown Huntington, Ind. As the local economy has soured, the town has seen more foreclosures and illegal drug use. Bottom, a man sits in the dining room at Nick’s Kitchen, which has been serving meals in Huntington for more than a century.

Photos by Michael Robinson Chavez The Washington Post

It had been two months since Setser and 800 others in Huntington were told their manufacturing jobs would soon be outsourced to Mexico, but so far nothing about his routine had changed. He was still making $17 an hour on the third-shift line at United Technologies.

The first layoffs wouldn’t take place for a year, maybe more. “We’ll be fine because we’ve always been fine,” Setser had said again and again, to his fiancee, his four children, and most of all to himself, but he was beginning to wonder if the loss of something more foundational in Huntington was underway.

Into the house came 10-year-old Johnathan, who had heard a rumor at school that factory workers would also be moving to Mexico. “No way, bud,” Setser told him. “We’re staying right here.”

In came 14-year-old Ashley, holding a payment notice for a school field trip. “Are we going to become one of those families with a voucher?” she asked.

“Don’t worry,” he said, handing her $20 from his wallet.

All around him an ideological crisis was spreading across Middle America as it continued its long fall into dependency: median wages down across the country, average income down, total wealth down in the past decade by 28 percent. For the first time ever, the vaunted middle class was not the country’s base but a disenfranchised minority, down from 61 percent of the population in the 1970s to just 49 percent as of last year. As a result of that decline, confusion was turning into fear. Fear was giving way to resentment. Resentment was hardening into a sense of outrage that was unhinging the country’s politics and upending a presidential election.

But Setser remained a believer in what he called the “basic guarantees” of the working class. He had his work history of near-perfect attendance. He had his home mortgage, his two cars, his weekly bowling night and his annual family trip to a small Indiana lake.

Most of all he had the assurances of what life had always been in Huntington, a town of 17,000 that remained a living museum to the iconic middle class. It was located not on the marginalized fringes of America but on the Heartland Highway, a place where 85 percent of the residents were considered working class.

For generations it had helped manufacture the country’s baby shoes, ice cream cones, barbecue grills and dentures, and even if the recession had taken many of those good-paying jobs from Huntington, it had yet to take away from the middle class mythology at the town’s core.

“Time honored American strength,” read one motto on a city website. “Tenacious! Industrious! Resilient! Strong!”

Now Setser’s oldest child, 16-year-old Krystal, walked into the house holding an envelope from Indiana University. It was her first college solicitation letter, and she tossed it aside on the kitchen counter. She was a smart student and a voracious reader. She had always assumed she would go to college, but lately she wasn’t so sure. “Like we are going to be able to pay for that,” she said.

“Things have a way of working in the end,” Setser said.

“Yeah, right,” she said.

The family china was polished in its cabinet. continues on next page

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KLMNO WEEKLY

COVER STORY

from previous page

The spices were alphabetized on the shelf.

“You’ll see,” he said. “Life always evens out.”

T

hat was the philosophy he had been living out for 13 years by packing a lunch and leaving for the third shift at exactly 9:30 p.m., which was what he had done one night in February, back when his biggest complaint about a job in the middle class was its utter predictability. He had driven past the same farms and Little League fields to the same United Technologies factory. He had parked in the same space and then changed into the same blue uniform to plug the same small parts into the same electronic control boards for heating and air conditioning units.

The temperature inside was always set to 70 degrees. Oldies music piped onto the factory floor. A few minutes before 10 p.m., the regular call came over the speakers. “Lights.” “Positions.” “Lines are rolling.”

Setser had heard rumors earlier in the day that the company had decided to move its operations to Mexico, but he found them hard to believe. While dozens of other manufactures had left Northeast Indiana, his factory, United Technologies Electronic Controls, or UTEC, was still taking back contracts from China and winning president’s awards for performance. It was the area’s largest employer and also a rare place where America’s fraying social contract had remained mostly intact: Employees helped the factory’s parent corporation earn more than $6 billion in annual profit. In return they got a decent hourly salary with good overtime, bonuses for completing work-training programs, a turkey to take home on Thanksgiving and a ham on Christmas. “Successful businesses improve the human condition,” read one sign posted on the factory wall.

Setser and his parents had moved to Huntington in the 1990s in part because of that idea.

“The Town That Works!” was what one Huntington advertisement had promised in those years, and so they had moved from Chicago for lower rent, better schools and reliable union work. First Setser’s mother had been hired at UTEC, then his brother-in-law, and then eventually Setser himself was called in off the wait list. “From Day One to Day Dead,” was the saying about a job at UTEC, because once people were hired they usually stayed until retirement.

But on that night in February, another announcement had come over the factory speakers, instructing all UTEC employees to report to the cafeteria. The factory manager was standing at the front of the room, holding a piece of paper and reading into a microphone.

“A difficult decision,” he said.

“Relocation is best,” he said.

“Northern Mexico,” he said.

“No questions,” he said, and then he told employees they would have an hour-long break in the cafeteria to process the news before returning to their lines.

A similar announcement had come earlier that day at one of UTEC’s partner factories, a Carrier air conditioning plant in Indianapolis,

where the mention of Mexico to the plant’s 1,300 employees had been followed by cussing and boos. Donald Trump had issued a statement — “disgusting,” “un-American” — and some Carrier employees had threatened to destroy equipment in the latest wave of the betrayal and rage that had become so much of a part of the political moment.

But in polite-and-steady Huntington, the cafeteria stayed quiet except for the hum of the vending machines. A psychologist who had been brought in to counsel workers waited alone at her table. The company security guards eventually wandered off to eat lunch.

UTEC employees sat quietly in the cafeteria and watched the clock, until finally Setser stood and motioned for others to follow. “Let’s go,” he had said, and none of his co-workers had any doubt about where he was going, because there was no other choice.

They still had their jobs. Those jobs were the thing keeping them in the shrinking 49 percent of the middle class. So with five minutes left before the end of the hour, all 250 UTEC employees returned to their places on the lines.

H

is solution to every problem had always been work. Work harder. Work weekends. Work doubles. Work a second job.

In Northeast Indiana, the epicenter of American manufacturing, everything was right there if you were just willing to work for it, so in the weeks after the announcement, Setser had taken every available shift, increasing his hours and working 19 consecutive nights while still making it back home on school days to stand on the porch and wait for the bus.

Every evening was a sit-down family dinner.

Every dinner they took turns going around the table to talk about their days. Every night they finished dinner and sat together to watch movies in the living room, where now Setser’s fiancee, Jennifer Bowers, was looking over plans for their summer wedding. It would be

Chris Setzer, rear, jokes around with his family, including his fiancee, Jennifer Bowers, rear right, Krystal, 16, left, Stephanie DeLeon, 19, front center, Zach Setzer, 12, center and Johnathan Setzer, 10, right front, in Huntington, Ind., on April 29. Setzer works the overnight shift at United Technologies Electronic Controls, a manufacturing firm that recently announced they are moving to Mexico and taking about 700 jobs with them.

her first marriage and his third. She had been looking online for a photographer, but so far the only one she liked charged more than $1,000.

“I know we have to start cutting corners, but we don’t want to cut on this,” she said.

“It’s just bad timing,” Setser said. He had done the math, and the photographer would cost the equivalent of a little more than two weeks in take-home pay. And while that wouldn’t have mattered before February, now it did.

“We’re only getting married once,” Bowers said. “A good wedding, some nice family pictures — that seems like a basic thing to have.”

“What about building up a little cushion?” he said, because that seemed like a basic thing, too.

Together between his overtime and Bowers’s small salary at another manufacturer in Fort Wayne, they had remained firmly in the middle class by finding ways to make their money stretch. When they wanted to drive to Florida for their first overnight vacation in a decade, Setser could volunteer for more overtime to save up the cash. When they wanted a new TV, he could spend the 10 percent premium he earned for working third shift. He had cashed out part of his 401(k) account to pay for his daughter’s braces, purchased some of their basic household items with credit cards and taken out a no-money-down loan on their $95,000 house.

He had never worried too much about saving money, because there was always more to make.

Every night was another shift. Every week was another paycheck. It was Day One to Day Dead, but now a few executives from Mexico had begun visiting the UTEC factory to prepare for the move and the layoff was closing in.

“I don’t want to spend too much and put us in a bad position,” Setser said, thinking of the photographer.

“We’re talking about a family heirloom,” Bowers said. “This is what we will look back on.

This is who we are.”

He squinted and pursed his lips. He looked back at her and nodded.

“You’re right,” he said. “We can make it work.”

I

t was beginning to seem to him as though that was the new ethos of Huntington: from “The Town That Works” to making it work, and now the sun was rising on the cornfields, the local radio broadcaster was shouting, “Good morning, Hoosier Heartland!” and Mark Wickersham was in his downtown office as director of economic development.

It was his job to recruit businesses into Huntington — to sell the viability of the town and its workforce — and for generations the product had mostly sold itself. It had state-ofthe-art manufacturing parks and easy shipping by train or freeway. It had two lakes, an operating drive-in theater and a museum to honor Vice President Dan Quayle, a longtime resident whose endorsement of the city during one campaign stop in the 1980s had been reprinted and displayed all across town: “Here we’re taught the values of middle America, like faith in God, family, neighbor helping neighbor,

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COVER STORY the dignity of work, morality, integrity and personal responsibility,” he had said.

“Through hard work and determination we can achieve anything!” Wickersham had written in his own business recruiting pitch, and somehow during his career he had successfully helped Huntington’s leadership stave off one crisis after the next while upholding a middleclass life for the 85 percent. They had saved downtown from the drain of the freeway bypass. They had opened job centers and retrained the manufacturing workforce. They had used generous state and local tax breaks to lure manufacturers from Germany, Japan, Brazil and Australia. A year after the recession, the town’s manufacturing parks were nearly full and the unemployment rate had dropped to 5 percent, even if some of those new jobs paid 10 or 15 percent less than what the middle class had been earning a decade before.

“We are certainly aware and concerned that Joe Lunchbox is still behind the eight ball,” Wickersham said, and now he was already at work staving off another crisis, this time at UTEC. “There’s always another big blow, but we always recover,” he said. “That’s ingenuity.

That’s a community that comes together during the hard times and pushes ahead.”

But that was also first-shift optimism in a three-shift town, where it was Tom Lewandowski’s job to protect the other two shifts. “We’ve got a whole lot of smart people in smart suits, just whistling their way through a graveyard,” said Lewandowski, a union organizer in Fort Wayne, who was now traveling to Huntington to survey the mental health of employees at UTEC. He had made the drive enough times to already suspect what he might find. Stride Rite had left Huntington for Mexico at the tail end of the recession; Breyers Ice Cream had closed its doors after 100 years. In the weeks after each factory closing in his part of Indiana, Lewandowski had listened to politicians make promises about jobs — high-tech jobs, right-to-work jobs, clean-energy jobs — but instead Indiana had lost 60,000 middle-class jobs in the past decade and replaced them with a surge of low-paying work in health care, hospitality and fast food. Wages of male high school graduates had dropped 19 percent in the past two decades, and the wealth divide between the middle class and the upper class had quadrupled.

“These jobs aren’t the solution so much as they’re part of the problem,” Lewandowski said, and now the result of so much churn was becoming evident all across Indiana and lately in Huntington, too. Fast-food consumption was beginning to tick up. Poverty was up. Foreclosures were up. Meth usage up. Heroin up.

Death rate up. In Dan Quayle’s Middle America, one of the biggest news stories of the year had been the case of a mother who had let her 3-week-old child suck heroin off her finger.

“Despair is our business, and business is booming,” Lewandowski said. “Workers have lost all agency in their lives. They’ve based their lives on believing in something that turned out to be a lie. They work when they can, for what

they can, for as long as they can until it ends.”

As second shift finished in Huntington, several of those UTEC workers gathered at an Applebee’s that displayed construction hats on the wall. Earlier in the day, an employee had been suspended for taping a “Run for the Border” bumper sticker to one of the company’s roving robots — the biggest act of rebellion yet.

A few employees had been trying to popularize a boycott of United Technologies products, and others had started using their regular 10-minute breaks to campaign for Trump in a traditionally Democratic factory. But for the most part their work was continuing unchanged, with attendance steady and factory production on the rise. They couldn’t risk losing their jobs or their UTEC severance packages, so the only way to vent was to come here, where the discussion on this night was of a country in decline.

“This is how it feels to be sold out by your country.”

“It’s pure greed.”

“They wanted to add another 6 feet to their yachts.”

“You’re telling me those people down there are going to be able to crank out 12 million units a year — no drop in quality, no incidents, no safety issues? Yeah. Okay. Good luck with that.

There’s a reason they’re going to make $3 an hour.”

“We’re becoming like a third-world country.

We’re going to have nothing left but fast food.”

“Fast food and hedge funds. That’s where we’re going.”

“W

hat in the world is happening to this neighborhood?” Setser was saying now, waiting again for the school bus on his front porch. In the months since the announcement at UTEC, the steady march of anger and anxiety had been moving down his manufacturing line, part after part, shift after shift, and lately he had begun to notice things

Alisha Pressler, 19, pushes her son Aydan, 3, in Huntington last month. The town has staved off one crisis after another, but the middle class there continues to decline — as it has in many other parts of the country.

KLMNO WEEKLY

about Huntington that he had once overlooked.

There were weeds creeping up around the neat craftsman homes, a stray needle in the alley and a fresh layer of graffiti on the nearby apartment building. “Can’t anyone keep up a house anymore?” he said.

His children came home on the bus, and they sat down for family dinner and took turns talking about their days. Bowers had booked the wedding photographer. “Expensive but worth it,” she said. The two boys had decided they wanted to go back to Florida, where they had vacationed, because they thought it might be nicer than Indiana. Krystal had met with an adviser at school and decided she wanted to become a dental hygienist, because the adviser thought there were lots of openings, and if so, Krystal was happy to clean teeth.

Setser had begun looking for his next job, too, because he had heard rumors that UTEC might begin layoffs sooner than he originally thought. He had inquired about work at a local milk factory and at the General Motors plant in Fort Wayne, but both places already had waiting lists and both would probably require a shift change and an initial pay cut.

“We’re getting to the point where there aren’t really any good options left,” he said. “The system is broken. Maybe its time to blow it up and start from scratch, like Trump’s been saying.”

Krystal rolled her eyes at him. “Come on.

You’re a Democrat.”

“I was. But that was before we started turning into a weak country,” he said. “Pretty soon there won’t be anything left. We’ll all be flipping burgers.”

“Fine, but so what?” she said. “We just turn everything over to the guy who yells the loudest?”

Setser leaned into the table and banged it once for emphasis. “They’re throwing our work back in our face,” he said. “China is doing better.

Even Mexico is doing better. Don’t you want someone to go kick ass?”

“That doesn’t really seem like you,” she said, and for a few seconds she stared back at him, as if examining someone for the first time. The spices were alphabetized on the shelves. The family schedule was printed on the wall. Theirs was a happy home, a stable home.

“You said it always evens out,” she told him.

“Maybe I was wrong,” he said, but now his voice was quiet.

“You said things just have a way of working.”

“Maybe not,” he said, because with each passing day he was seeing it more clearly. The town was losing its best employer, and all around him stability was giving way to uncertainty, to resentment, to anger, to fear.

He stood up from the table and looked at the clock. For now the factory in Huntington was still open, and he had a routine to follow. He washed the dishes. He helped his children with their homework and got them ready for bed. He told them everything was going to be okay.

Then he waited as night closed in on a three-shift town, and at exactly 9:30 he left for work. n

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TECHNOLOGY

The struggle to look away

MATT CHASE/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

H AYLEY T SUKAYAMA Fall City, Wash.

BY

I

t was group discussion time at reSTART, a woodsy rehabilitation center about 30 miles outside Seattle. Four residents sat around the living room and talked about their struggles with addiction, anxiously drumming their fingers on their legs and fidgeting with their shoelaces. One young man described dropping out of college to seek treatment for the crippling problem that brought them all here: compulsive Internet use.

It is easy to scoff at the idea of Internet addiction, which is not officially recognized as a disorder in the United States. Medical science has yet to diagnose precisely what is going on in the brains of the addicted, and there is no clear definition of what entails an Internet addiction. Yet a growing number of parents and experts say addiction to screens is becoming a major problem for many young

Americans, causing them to drop out of school, withdraw from their families and friends, and complain of deep anxieties in social settings.

A recent study by Common Sense Media, a parent advocacy group, found that 59 percent of parents think their teens are addicted to mobile devices. Meanwhile, 50 percent of teenagers feel the same way. The study surveyed nearly 1,300 parents and children this year.

It is evident from the demand for centers such as reSTART — which will soon launch an adolescent program after fielding hundreds of pleading calls from parents — that many struggle with a dark side of tech use, even if our data-obsessed world can’t yet quantify it. Some parents think the condition is serious enough that they are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars to send their children to get treatment, because insurance won’t cover it.

“It’s not as obvious as substance addiction, but it’s very, very real,”

said Alex, a 22-year-old who had been at reSTART for five days with a familiar story: He withdrew from college because he put playing games or using the Internet ahead of going to class or work. (Like the other patients, he declined to reveal his full name, for fear he would be stigmatized as an addict.)

His parents, he said, had always encouraged him to use technology, without realizing the harm it could do. They were just trying to raise their son in a world soaked in technology that didn’t exist when they were his age.

Those who say they suffer from Internet addiction share many symptoms with other types of addicts, in terms of which chemicals are released into the brain, experts say. The pleasure centers of the brain light up when introduced to the stimulus. Addicts lose interest in other hobbies or, sometimes, never develop any. When not allowed to go online, they experience withdrawal symptoms such as irritability, depression or even physi-

Parents, experts worry about overuse of Internet among young people — but is it an addiction?

cal shaking. They retreat into corners of the Internet where they can find quick success — a dominant ranking in a game or a well-liked Facebook post — that they don’t have in the real world, experts say.

Peter, 30, knows. Before he began the reSTART program, he was homeless and unemployed. He also struggled with alcoholism but believes that his compulsive tech use led him to some of the darkest moments of his life.

“I was totally dependent. It cost me relationships,” he said.

Peter’s tech dependence started when he was 13, after his father died. He retreated into gaming to cope, playing from sunup until sundown, sometimes without taking breaks to eat or even to use the bathroom. He spent more and more time playing games, watching online videos, and getting into arguments on social media and forums.

He withdrew from the rest of the world, avoiding the pain and feelings of worthlessness that hit him when he tried to address his problems. His schoolwork suffered. His physical health declined because he never learned to cook, to clean, to exercise — or, as he put it, “to live in an adult way.” That helped push his relationship with his mother to its breaking point, he said.

Hilarie Cash, co-founder of reSTART and its chief clinical officer, knows these behaviors all too well. She first treated someone for Internet addiction in 1994: an adult man whose addiction to text-based online gaming cost him his marriage. Many of her young clients have poor impulse control and an inability to plan for the future. Even the thought of having to plan a meal, Cash said, can lock some of her patients up with fear.

Some experts are less sure that these problems add up to a specific condition. In the United States, there is no definition of Internet addiction. It is not recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which sets the official standards for disorders in the United States. A draft definition covering video-game addiction is included in an appendix for fur-

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DINING ther research review, but there is no entry for general tech use.

It’s difficult to tease out from existing research what exactly an addiction to the Internet entails, said Nancy Petry, a doctor and professor at the University of Connecticut’s medical school. She was on the American Psychiatric Association’s committee that evaluated behavioral addictions for the DSM’s fifth edition. Is an addiction to online pornography, for example, an indication of an Internet addiction or of a sexual disorder? Or could it be both?

Even when looking at something like an addiction to video games, Petry said, researchers have yet to define what aspects of gameplay are uniquely addictive.

“I think that’s part of the issue with this particular condition,” Petry said. “It shouldn’t be technology-specific. You don’t have a medical disorder based on a technology per se; that’s led to inconsistencies about what are people assessing. And when you open it up to [broader] Internet addiction, it gets messier and messier.”

Other countries, however, do officially recognize some forms of Internet addiction as serious conditions. In South Korea, Internet addiction has a formal definition; there, students are diagnosed and sent to government treatment centers. In China, militaristic government “boot camps” have treated millions of children. Japan, too, has tested an Internet “fasting camp” for young people.

But researchers say the problem in America needs more study.

“We’re largely flying blind because we’ve done so little research about this,” said Jim Steyer, the executive director of Common Sense Media, whose study found that no one can agree on a definition.

Reluctant insurers Without a definition of what Internet-related addiction is, it is hard to get insurance coverage to help pay for intensive rehabilitation programs such as reSTART. The program costs $25,000 for 45 days at the center, on par with high-end drug recovery clinics.

Cash said that while insurance won’t pay for any of that treatment, some clinics can get payment if addicts have another disorder, such as alcoholism, that is recognized by the DSM. There is also debate about what

kind of treatment works best.

At reSTART, which has treated roughly 150 patients between the ages of 18 and 30, the mission is to help detox residents and teach them the basic life skills they need to properly balance their tech use.

The center is a converted house on a five-acre lot with plenty of trails and a small brood of chickens.

There is little tech in the house — certainly no smartphones or game consoles. Even fantasy books are confiscated at the door to keep patients from withdrawing into their own worlds.

Residents — generally young men, mostly sent by their parents — sleep in twin beds. They exercise, and they learn about goal-setting and balance, and how to handle the anxiety and depression that can feed addictive behavior. Residents learn to shop for groceries or do laundry; many come not even knowing how to clean a bathroom.

Everyone agrees that parents play a significant role in establishing healthy habits, since technology use is unavoidable.

“I tell them, you’re the drug dealer,” said Kimberly Young, a physician who founded the firstof-its-kind Center for Internet Addiction in 1995. “You need to understand what you’re modeling to this child.”

Common Sense Media’s director of research, Michael Robb, said all parents should have conversations with their kids about balanced technology use. Heavy use doesn’t necessarily signal a problem, Robb said; parents have to know their own kids.

Delaney Ruston, a physician and filmmaker, explored a wide range of issues surrounding everyday tech use in her film “Screenagers.” The film followed her own struggle with her young daughter over how to monitor and moderate tech use.

Ruston thinks we should be careful about how we use the word “addiction” in casual conversation about tech use. For serious cases, she agrees that Internet addiction is a real problem. But for the kid who just won’t put her phone down during dinner? Calling her an addict may do more harm than good.

“We should be careful to stop using the word ‘addiction’ so kids can have an internal sense of control,” she said. “They have to know that the device does not control them.” n

KLMNO WEEKLY

City bites Estately.com, a Seattle-based real estate website, used Yelp data to find the five best cities for various foods. It scored the cities based on restaurants per capita, restaurants per square mile and the percentage of all area restaurants that each type makes up. n — Annys Shin

Buffets

Burgers

Chinese

1. Mesa, Ariz.

2. Washington 3. Atlanta 4. Las Vegas 5. Kansas City, Mo.

1. Atlanta 2. Detroit 3. Miami 4. Washington 5. Mesa, Ariz.

1. Oakland, Calif.

2. San Francisco 3. Washington 4. Atlanta 5. Baltimore

Fast food

Food trucks

Halal

1. Atlanta 2. Mesa, Ariz.

3. Washington 4. Miami 5. Sacramento

1. Oakland, Calif.

2. Austin 3. Portland, Ore. 4. San Francisco 5. Washington

1. Washington 2. San Jose 3. Oakland, Calif.

4. San Francisco 5. Seattle

Pizza

Soul food

Steak

1. Detroit 2. Washington 3. Boston 4. Miami 5. Baltimore

1. Atlanta 2. Oakland, Calif.

3. San Francisco 4. Memphis 5. Washington

1. Miami 2. Atlanta 3. Las Vegas 4. Washington 5. Omaha

Tex-Mex

Thai

Vegetarian

1. Atlanta 2. Dallas 3. Washington 4. Austin 5. Fort Worth

1. Seattle 2. Oakland, Calif.

3. Portland, Ore. 4. San Francisco 5. Washington

1. Washington 2. San Francisco 3. Oakland, Calif.

4. Portland, Ore. 5. Mesa, Ariz.

SOURCES: ESTATELY.COM, YELP.COM; ICONS: ISTOCKPHOTO

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BOOKS

A colonial clash of character N ON-FICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

C AROL B ERKIN

N VALIANT AMBITION George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution

By Nathaniel Philbrick Viking.

427 pp. $30

athaniel Philbrick knows how to tell a good tale. In “Valiant Ambition,” he tells not one but three of them. The first is an account of the early years of the Revolutionary War, with the battlefield victories and defeats, the ebb and flow of the public’s support for the cause, and the endless struggles between the civilian government and military leadership that hamper the war effort. This story, which could stand alone, provides the context for the finely drawn character studies of George Washington and Benedict Arnold that are the central tales of the book.

In less skillful hands, the war’s narrative could have been an exhausting account of battle after battle, producing little more than a scorecard of wins and losses for the American Army. But Philbrick wants his readers to experience the terror, the suffering and the adrenaline rush of battle, and he wants us to grit our teeth at our early politicians who, by their pettiness and shortsightedness, shape military events as profoundly as generals and admirals do. Finally, he reveals the emotional and physical cost of war on colonial society. He succeeds on all fronts.

Consider how vividly he captures the destruction of Philadelphia by the British occupation: “The city was a shambles. The British had used the State House as a prison, and the floors of its once immaculate rooms were heaped with human waste. . . .

‘Genteel houses’ had been used for stables by the British, who cut holes in the floors so that the dung could be shoveled into the cellars.”

Washington’s and Arnold’s tales take shape under similar circumstances. Washington has, of course, been the subject of countless books and articles, paintings and sculptures. His records, including the daily business of his plantation, his military order books, his personal correspondence, and his political addresses

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION

British officer John André, second from right, is captured after conspiring with Benedict Arnold. Nathaniel Philbrick portrays André as a ruthless con artist beneath a mask of dignity and patriotism.

and proclamations, have been edited, annotated and digitized, and used by scholars to plumb his depths. But Philbrick brings us a Washington we may not have appreciated before, a man who was less hero than thoughtful leader, a man given to musing and contemplation, and a man of empathy as much as action. The author captures this Washington in a single scene: The general was wrapped in his cloak, lying amid his men through the long night after the Battle of Monmouth. When a soldier hesitated to wake him, Washington relieved him of his concern.

“I laid here to think,” he told the officer, “and not to sleep.”

Washington was a man of “valiant ambition,” but his striving was social rather than personal: Its goal was the independence of his country. Here is the critical contrast with Benedict Arnold, a man of unbounded personal ambition who saw the war as a vehicle for his own elevation and profit.

Arnold was not so much a villain as a narcissist; he was, in Philbrick’s view, high-strung and libidinous, impatient, greedy and

self-serving, an elitist contemptuous of the men who admired him and vengeful toward those who did not. He had a temperament and character that made him oblivious to the harm he did to others, but he had neither the malice nor the sadism of a true villain.

In starkest terms, Washington was a leader of men while Arnold was a user of them. Among the synonyms for “valiant” are “heroic,” “gallant” and “lionhearted,” which defined Washington; “bold,” “daring” and “audacious,” which defined the man who betrayed him.

Philbrick’s reading of these two men is nuanced and absorbing, but it is his revisionist portrait of Maj. John André that makes this book an important one. Traditionally, this young, handsome and charming British officer who collaborated with Arnold in the West Point plot is presented as a sympathetic, even noble figure. But Philbrick tells us that we have been duped. André has far more in common with Arnold than we had supposed; beneath his mask of dignity and simple patriotism, André is ruthless and ambitious. The

André we think we know, Philbrick explains, is a con artist, skilled in ingratiating himself with anyone who can advance his career or write him into history as a man of dignity and honor. From beginning to end, the relationship between Arnold and André is the most compelling tale in the book.

Only two things mar this book.

The first is that the multiple tales do not flow into one another smoothly. There is a jerky shifting, back and forth, between the larger picture of war and politics and the intimate portrait of Washington, just as there is too abrupt a shift in perspective between the betrayed general and his former protege.

The second is a flawed interpretation of the significance of Arnold’s thwarted plot. Philbrick’s insistence that Arnold’s treason awakened Americans “to the realization that the War of Independence was theirs to lose,” that his betrayal taught them what they were fighting for and that it spurred them to focus on transforming 13 colonies into a nation is a serious misreading of the era.

The revolution, it turns out, was the French navy’s to win or lose — something Washington knew well. Men like Thomas Paine and Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, not to mention hundreds of patriotic women who entered politics as “daughters of liberty,” gave ample testimony to the purpose of the war. And Arnold’s betrayal did not jump-start the consolidation of 13 independent and separate mini-nations into one. It would take two constitutions, a farmer’s revolt in Massachusetts, the combined genius of nationalists such as James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, and a second war with Great Britain to turn “these” United States into “the” United States.

The tales Philbrick tells do not need such lofty consequences to be worth reading. n Berkin’s latest book is “The Bill of Rights: The Fight to Secure America’s Liberties.”

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Doom never felt so close or so real

Connecting to the World Wild Web

F ICTION

N ON-FICTION

F

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REVIEWED BY

E LIZABETH H AND

ear takes countless supernatural forms in Stephen King’s works — teens and children with deadly pyrotechnic or telekinetic gifts, murderous clowns, global plagues and haunted resort hotels. But few of these myriad terrors feel as visceral and close to home as the sense of human mortality that looms over King’s new book, “End of Watch.”

Third in a recent series of novels (“Mr. Mercedes,” “Finders Keepers”) and linked by the same cast of characters and the same inciting catastrophe, “End of Watch” is as much melancholy elegy as it is an undeniable page-turner.

The disaster that puts all these balls in play occurs in 2009. Thousands of displaced workers have lined up outside a Midwestern city center, waiting for a job fair to open, when an out-of-control Mercedes-Benz plows through the crowd, killing eight and seriously injuring many more. The murderer, Brady Hartsfield (dubbed Mr. Mercedes by the press), was apprehended the following year as he attempted to blow up an auditorium where 2,000 tweens were gathered for a boy-band concert. Brutally injured during his capture, five years later Brady resides in a traumatic brain injury clinic in an incurable vegetative state.

Or is he truly brain dead? Retired police detective Bill Hodges doesn’t think so. Proprietor of a detective agency called Finders Keepers, Hodges is the guy who collared Brady at the concert, though he suffered a heart attack in the process — Hodges’s assistant, Holly, delivered the blow that left the killer unable to move or communicate or think or dream.

But now several employees at the brain clinic have reported strange instances of objects moving in Brady’s room, seemingly by telekinesis. Hodges suspects that Brady is faking it.

Turns out that the apparently comatose Brady has been very busy indeed. A homegrown, if murderous, computer genius be-

fore Holly clobbered him, Brady’s consciousness has returned, augmented by illegal drugs. While he’s still unable to move from his bed, Brady’s consciousness can leapfrog from his brain into those of others, controlling them.

Worse, he uses all of these human puppets to buy up hundreds of Zappits, discontinued computer tablets. Among the many games bundled into each Zappit is one called Fishin’ Hole. The fiendish Brady reprograms the benign game into a demonic version of Candy Crush or Angry Birds: Anyone looking at the demo becomes hypnotized by its brightly colored fish, whereupon Brady commands them to kill themselves.

And even more nefariously, Brady has plans to give away the Zappits to all those kids who attended that boy-band concert five years earlier, thereby igniting a suicide epidemic.

More intriguing is the novel’s emotional heart, which resides in Hodges. As the book opens, the aging detective learns he has pancreatic cancer. He refuses treatment and tells no one, though the loyal Holly quickly figures out the truth. King sends Hodges, and the reader, on a death march in pursuit of Brady. Exhausted and in gutwrenching pain, Hodges knows this will be his last case.

Quantum advances in neuroscience, computers and social media make “End of Watch” seem creepily plausible, especially in its vivid depiction of the diabolical game Fishin’ Hole, and the reactions of those vulnerable people, mostly teenagers, who are susceptible to its deadly subliminal message.

Throughout his tale, King nimbly pulls together numerous plot threads and characters. One finishes this novel feeling great empathy for its resolute protagonist, and even greater trepidation about that next round of Candy Crush. n Hand’s most recent novel is “Hard Light.”

W

END OF WATCH

By Stephen King Scribner. 432 pp. $30

ANIMAL INTERNET Nature and the Digital Revolution

By Alexander Pschera New Vessel.

207 pp. $14.95

l

REVIEWED BY

M EGAN M C D ONOUGH

hen you hear the words “animal” and “Internet,” what is the first thought that comes to mind? Sneezing Panda?

Pizza Rat? Dramatic Chipmunk?

The Internet delivers a wealth of animal-related information and entertainment. But these days, digital technologies provide us with much more than the latest viral cat video.

In his book “Animal Internet,” German author Alexander Pschera charts the new digital frontier in the human-animal relationship. Gone are the days of an untouched natural world. We have entered wilderness 2.0, where problem animals such as sharks can be tracked and monitored for human protection and vulnerable creatures such as snow leopards can signal us and receive support.

The Internet, according to Pschera, can serve as a powerful tool to provide insight into the inner lives of animals. “We are standing on the threshold of a new era of interaction with and awareness of nature,” he writes.

Not long ago, we had only ourselves and our human senses for examining the natural world.

Now, we have online images, GIFs, emoji and videos that provide a perceived closeness to nature.

Pschera maintains that we now have the ability to go further than that. New technologies allow a kind of dialogue between humans and animals that can sharpen our connection with the natural world and help ensure the survival of animals by enhancing our emotional and personal closeness to them.

The Web is already expanding our knowledge through continuous animal monitoring. By equipping creatures with high-tech tools, we can track their travels; real-time updates on changes in their bodies and environments posted automatically to social media can help familiarize people with the animals’ way of life.

“People who will at least en-

gage emotionally with animals on a digital level, are more likely to be willing to do the same in real life,” Pschera says. Through the automated technology, animals, in essence, can post their personal histories and establish their voices and identities online. Humans can tune in and follow along on Twitter, Facebook and other smartphone apps anytime, anyplace, anywhere.

Take, for example, Mary Lee, the shark with serious Twitter game; the 16-foot, 3,500-pound great white has garnered more than 92,000 followers since she joined the service in 2012. With the help of sensor technology, she “pings” her location every few minutes, much to the enjoyment of her fans.

As humans gain this new, detailed insight into animal lives, they will probably have a better understanding of and empathy for the plight of wild creatures.

Pschera hopes the heightened interest and public concern will lead to long-term wildlife conservation and increased animal education and awareness. As he puts it, “Transparency in nature engenders awareness, which itself invites obligation.”

An enhanced symbiotic relationship between people and animals can bring added benefits, Pschera believes. The digital technologies could help humans tap into animals’ unique and highly attuned senses to predict and avert natural disasters, biodiversity loss and the spread of diseases. Detecting and employing animal awareness of disasters before they occur could save many lives.

Inspired by Pschera, I befriended David, a wild turkey vulture, on the app Animal Tracker. And though our paths will probably never cross, the new connection has promise. Every day, if only for a moment, my touchscreen helps narrow the gap between us. n McDonough is a weddings writer and editorial aide for The Washington Post.

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OPINIONS

I’m a veteran, and I hate ‘Happy Memorial Day’ JENNIE HASKAMP is a Marine Corps veteran who continued to work for the Corps as a civilian after leaving active duty in 2006 because her friends were still deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan.

I have friends buried in a small corner of a rolling green field just down the road from the Pentagon. They’re permanently assigned to Section 60. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it’s 14 acres in the southeast corner of Arlington National Cemetery that serves as a burial ground for many military personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are fresh graves there.

I spent my formative years in combat boots and all of my friends are in the military, were in the military or married into the military. I have several friends buried at Arlington, and know of dozens more men and women interred in that hallowed ground.

Section 60 is a place I visit often.

On a recent night, sitting in a pizza joint in the Bronx, watching the world go by, I was upset and couldn’t put my finger on why.

Then I heard a commercial on the radio screaming through the tinny speakers.

“Beaches, beats and BBQs!” it said. “We’re your Memorial Day station with everything you need to kick off the summer in style!”

That’s when it hit me. I’m angry. I’ve come to realize people think Memorial Day is the official start of summer. It’s grilled meat, super-duper discounts, a day (or two) off work, beer, potato salad and porches draped in bunting.

But it shouldn’t be. It’s more than that.

Nearly 150 years ago, Memorial Day— first called Decoration Day— was set aside to decorate the graves of the men who’d recently died in battle. America was still reeling from the Civil War when Gen. John Logan, national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, issued a proclamation in 1868, according to a PBS account of his decision. “The 30th of May,” he declared, “would be an occasion to honor those who died in the conflict.”

He chose the date because it wasn’t the anniversary of any particular battle.

Here’s how it was outlined in General Orders No. 11, Washington, D.C., May 5, 1868: “The 30th day of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet church-yard in the land. In this observance, no form of ceremony is prescribed, but posts and comrades will in their own way arrange such fitting services and testimonials of respect as circumstances may permit.”

How is it then, some century and a half later, after more than a decade of war in two countries that claimed the lives of some 6,861 Americans, we are collectively more concerned with having a barbecue and going shopping than pausing to appreciate the cost of our freedom to do so?

A friend reminded me that plenty of people use the weekend the way it was designed: to pause and remember the men and women who paid the price of our

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Soldiers of the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment place flags at grave sites at Arlington National Cemetery in preparation for Memorial Day.

freedom, and then go on about enjoying those freedoms.

But I argue not enough people use it that way. Not enough people pause. Not enough people remember.

I’m frustrated by people all over the country who view the day as anything but a day to remember our WAR DEAD. I hate hearing “Happy Memorial Day.” It’s not Veterans Day. It’s not military appreciation day. Don’t thank me for my service. It’s a day to take the time to pay homage to the men and women who died while wearing the cloth of this nation you’re so freely enjoying today.

I realize I’m not alone in this crowd, but for a decade my every day included reading reports about men and women killed or wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan and managing how the media reported or didn’t report, as time went on, the circumstances.

I share their names and talk about their lives and their deaths because if we don’t remember, we’ll forget. If we don’t share, they’ll be lost: Gannon, Fontecchio, Winchester, Rowe, Clay, Best, May, Torres, Gibson, Valdez, Dunham, Nice, Funk, Fitzgerald, Galvez, Newman, Kenyon, Williams, Baucas, Butterfield, Hanson, Watson, Stevenson, Stahlman, Holmason, Modeen, McClung, McElveen, Martinez, Kaiser, Huhn, Bedard, Escobar,

Spears, Figueroa, MartinezFlores, O’Day, Graczyk Love . . .

I had the privilege of escorting my friend Gunnery Sgt. Elia Fontecchio home for burial in August 2004. That assignment, escort duty, remains one of the single most honorable things of which I’ve ever been a part. It was certainly the hardest.

So yeah. I’m frustrated by Memorial Day. And I’m angry about apathy.

I want to see people besides the small percentage of us who are veterans, know veterans, love veterans or lost veterans, understand what the day is about. It’s the one day on the American calendar meant to exemplify what it costs to be American and to be free . . . and we’ve turned it into a day off work, a tent sale and a keg of beer.

I’m not going to Arlington this weekend. Instead I’ll spend time on the phone with friends whose lives were changed as a result of someone’s personal sacrifice.

We’ll talk, laugh, share stories, say their names and we’ll remember. I’ll surround myself with those who lived and we’ll raise a glass in honor of those who died.

We’ve all heard, “Freedom isn’t free.”

Since 1776, it’s actually cost us more than 1.3 million lives.

I hope you enjoy your weekend — but I hope you pause to remember, too. n

SUNDAY, MAY 29, 2016

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Zika is coming, but we’re not ready RONALD A. KLAIN was the White House Ebola response coordinator from 2014 to 2015.

The good news is that both the House and Senate have finally passed bills that would provide some funding to combat the Zika virus. The bad news is that this action comes more than three months after President Obama requested the aid. Moreover, the House bill provides only one-third of the response needed; pays for this limited, ineffective response by diverting money allocated to fight other infectious diseases; and necessitates a conference committee to resolve differences with the Senate bill, meaning we still do not know when any money will finally get through Congress to fund the response.

Of all the things that Congress could be truculent about, fighting an epidemic is the worst imaginable. Zika is not “coming” to the United States: It is already here. Hundreds of people who caught the disease abroad are in the country; more than 250 cases of pregnant women in the United States and its territories with Zika have been logged by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Soon, as summer arrives, the Aedes aegypti mosquito will become active in Southern states, and the disease will spread there.

Cases of sexual transmission will take place as well. It is not a question of whether babies will be born in the United States with Zika-related microcephaly — it is a question of when and how

many. For years to come, these children will be a visible, human reminder of the cost of absurd wrangling in Washington, of preventable suffering, of a failure of our political system to respond to the threat that infectious diseases pose.

Moreover, once local transmission of Zika begins in a few weeks, authorities will face the hard question of whether women living in such areas — here, in the United States — should be instructed to delay becoming pregnant, and whether those who are already pregnant should be relocated.

Domestic travel warnings also loom. And still, Congress fritters away precious time on a dispute over funding that amounts to what the Defense Department spends every seven hours.

As befuddling as Congress’s refusal to approve funds for the Zika response is, perhaps even more of a mystery is why such approval is needed in the first place. If nature was threatening us with serious injury and evacuations via fire, flood or hurricane, the president could use his authority under the Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act to provide immediate aid without waiting for Congress to act. The fact that epidemic “natural disasters” are the result of disease and not an earthquake or tornado should not constrain the federal government’s ability to provide a timely, comprehensive response.

The man who led the effort to wipe out smallpox, Larry Brilliant, often says that the seemingly complex challenge of successful epidemic control can be summarized in one phrase: “early detection, early response.”

Yet in the United States, the idea of “early response” is impaired by the absence of a public health emergency fund that the president can tap to respond to an epidemic. Slowness in getting the response to Ebola moving had devastating consequences in West Africa and led to panic and confusion here in the United States. Now, congressional

delays on Zika funding risk a human cost of unknown dimensions.

If it seems like the world is being threatened by new infectious diseases with increasing frequency — H1N1 in 2009-2010, MERS in 2012, Ebola in 2014, Zika in 2016, yellow fever on the horizon for 2017 — that’s because it is. These are not random lightning strikes or a string of global bad luck. This growing threat is a result of human activity: human populations encroaching on, and having greater interaction with, habitats where animals spread these viruses; humans living more densely in cities where sickness spreads rapidly; humans traveling globally with increasing reach and speed; humans changing our climate and bringing disease-spreading insects to places where they have not lived previously. From now on, dangerous epidemics are going to be a regular fact of life.

We can no longer accept surprise as an excuse for a response that is slow out of the gate.

The Zika-spreading mosquitoes are not going to wait to learn what a conference committee has decided on the Hill. Summer is coming, and Zika will be tagging along with it. n

SUNDAY, MAY 29, 2016

22

OPINIONS

BY DARKOW FOR THE COLUMBIA DAILY TRIBUNE

It’s time to end the Olympics CHARLES LANE is a Post editorial writer specializing in economic and fiscal policy, a weekly columnist, and a contributor to the PostPartisan blog.

If anyone reading this column still believes in the “Olympic ideal,” please give me a call: I’ve got a stadium in Rio de Janeiro I’d like to sell you.

Discredited long ago by the very corruption and nationalism they were originally meant to transcend, the Olympic Games are embroiled in a wave of scandal that’s embarrassing even by the sorry standards of this hypocritical “movement.”

It’s hard to say what’s more outrageous: credible new allegations of a clandestine statesponsored doping scheme carried out by the 2014 Winter Olympics’ host nation, Russia — or the fact that the International Olympic Committee entrusted the event to a despotic regime run by a gloryhungry former KGB agent in the first place.

Meanwhile, the integrity of the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing — another dictatorship’s showcase — has been retrospectively undercut by the discovery of doping by a reported 31 athletes from 12 countries; similar findings may be about to taint the 2012 London Games.

French prosecutors are investigating allegations that the IOC’s decision to award Tokyo the 2020 Summer Games was greased by payoffs, as many previous games have been.

In Brazil, where the 2016

Summer Olympics are supposed to begin Aug. 5, police and prosecutors have found evidence that Olympics-related infrastructure development became a font of payoffs and kickbacks. Potentially involved are some of the politicians implicated in the wider corruption scandal that has destabilized the Brazilian government, at precisely the moment it should have been devoting full attention to the security and efficiency of the Games.

In response, IOC officials spout indignant rhetoric and issue earnest threats against wrongdoers, just as they have on what seem like a million previous occasions.

These promised reforms are no more likely to succeed than those of the past. The truth is that incentives influence behavior.

And participants in the Olympics,

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY WALT HANDELSMAN FOR THE NEW ORLEANS ADVOCATE

at all levels, face overwhelming incentives, financial and political, to cheat — or to try to cheat — whether by using performanceenhancing drugs, rigging the venue selection or raking off government funds, which host nations borrow and spend like water in pursuit of ephemeral economic stimulus. And don’t get me started on the judges and referees.

It’s all become a grandiose mockery of the fine sentiment declared by the Games’ modern founder, Pierre de Coubertin of France: “The important thing at the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part; for the essential thing in life is not to conquer but to struggle well.”

Equally hollow, in view of the historical record — which includes the hideous 1936 Berlin Olympics hosted by Adolf Hitler — are the words of the Olympic Charter: “The goal of Olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.”

In fact, the Olympics have repeatedly provided a flashpoint for international rivalry, as in the alternating boycotts carried out by the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War,

and for terrorist attacks, such as the ones that marred the 1972 and 1996 Summer Games. The threat of another such incident casts a necessary but unseemly security pall over the contemporary Games, as each host nation mobilizes its police and armed forces to patrol the celebration of international peace and harmony.

Some host governments have used Olympic preparations as an excuse to rid themselves of inconvenient domestic elements, whether it was Mexico massacring student protesters to prevent unrest from spoiling the 1968 Summer Games, or South Korea rounding up thousands of homeless people in Seoul before the 1988 Summer Games.

If the Olympics have not, and cannot, achieve their lofty aims, then exactly what special purpose does this quadrennial exercise in corporate and governmental gigantism serve — other than to enrich well-connected businesses and aggrandize states?

None that I can think of. Highlevel athletic competition, in the form of international championship events for every sport, already exists.

A world without the Olympic Games might be a little less exciting every two years — and considerably more honest all the time. n

SUNDAY, MAY 29, 2016

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

DATA CRUNCH

When the mosquitoes will be biting C HRISTOPHER I NGRAHAM

M

osquitoes may be the absolute worst organism inhabiting Earth today. Setting aside the garden-variety aggravation of billions of mosquito bites each year, the bugs are vectors of horrible diseases that kill hundreds of thousands of people annually.

We’ve all become acutely aware of this latter point with the sudden rise of the Zika virus, which is linked to birth defects and is now inching its way north through the Americas on the backs of several mosquito species. Given that it’s now the end of May and what is colloquially known as “mosquito season” is underway, concern over the virus and the bugs that carry it is mounting.

When exactly is mosquito season, though? There’s no easy answer to this. According to the American Mosquito Control Association, there are 176 mosquito species active in the United States.

They all have slightly different life cycles and become active under various conditions (some hibernate over winter, others lay eggs that hatch in the spring).

But at some point every year, we all have that experience of going outside one evening and feeling that first piercing itch or hearing that first high-pitched drone, and we know that this season’s War On Mosquitoes has officially begun.

One way to quantify the seasonal changes in mosquito activity is to look at Google search data.

After all, when the bugs start biting, people tend to look up good repellents, itch remedies, preventive measures and the like.

In the chart at top, I’ve taken Google search data for 2014 and 2015 and averaged them together to get a typical, composite year of search interest in mosquitoes in the United States.

As you can see, people start searching for mosquito stuff in the spring, and interest shoots up rapidly through May, reaching a small peak in late May. Then interest ex-

The shape of mosquito season A year (Jan. -- Dec.) of typical Google search interest in mosquitos in the United States

More interest

BY

Jan. Feb. Mar. Apr.

May

Jun.

Jul.

Aug. Sep. Oct. Nov. Dec.

WAPO.ST/WONKBLOG

Source: Google trends.

Mosquito season around the country

A year (Jan. -- Dec.) of typical Google search interest in mosquitos, by state AK

ME

WI

V VT

WA

ID

MT

ND

MN

IL

MI

OR

NV

WY

SD

IA

IN

OH

CA

UT

CO

NE

MO

K KY

AZ

NM

K KS

AR

OK

LA

HI

WAPO.ST/WONKBLOG

T TX

NY

MA

PA

NJ

CT

WV

V VA

MD

DE

TN

NC

SC

MS

AL

GA

NH

RI

FL

Source: SOURCE: Google GOOGLE trends. TRENDS. Grid map template

by Jon BY Schwabish.

WAPO.ST/WONKBLOG GRIDS MAP TEMPLATE JON SCHWABISH

plodes again through June, putting the annual peak in interest at almost exactly halfway through the year. From July, the numbers show a steady decline in interest all the way through until winter.

I should stress that although these numbers almost certainly correlate with actual mosquito activity, they’re probably not a perfect match. People could be searching for mosquitoes for reasons completely unrelated to whether their back yard is currently a bug-ridden hellscape.

Still there’s good reason to believe that this is a pretty good barometer of mosquito activity.

Google’s data show the top search topic related to “mosquito” is “itch - symptom.”

Of course, the biggest weakness with national-level data is that ours is a big country, encompassing many different environments, and mosquitoes are very likely to become active at different times in different places. One way to tease this out would be to look at the same data but do it for each of the 50 states. That’s what the lower cartogram shows — each state has a mini-chart showing search interest in mosquitoes over the course of a typical year (2014-2015 average).

In dry states in the mountains and plains (the Dakotas, Nebraska, Wyoming and others), there’s a sharp burst of mosquito search activity in the middle of the summer and then little interest the rest of the year. But in places like the Gulf Coast states and elsewhere in the South, the annual curve is more rounded, suggesting a certain baseline level of mosquito activity all year round.

Keep in mind that the actual magnitude of search interest conveyed here isn’t comparable between states. That’s because some states are a lot more interested in mosquitoes than others.

Still, the Google search data may prove to be useful to public health authorities looking to mitigate exposure to mosquitoes in the coming months. n

SUNDAY, MAY 29, 2016

24

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