Washington Post National Weekly - July 19, 2015

Worst Week Planned Parenthood 3

Politics Walker doesn’t yield 4

Botany This rose is a Knock Out 16

Opinion Ex-Reddit CEO talks trolling 23

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, JULY 19, 2015

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

AN OPPORTUNITY GAMBLED AWAY

For a county in the Deep South that reaped millions from casino business, poverty is still its spin of the wheel PAGE 12

SUNDAY, JULY 19, 2015

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KLMNO WEEKLY

WORST WEEK IN WASHINGTON

Planned Parenthood

by Chris Cillizza

I

t’s never a good look to be sipping red wine while discussing the costs associated with fetal tissue culled from abortions.

But that’s the situation Planned Parenthood found itself in this past week after a senior official was secretly taped by the Center for Medical Progress. (On its Web site, CMP calls itself a “group of citizen journalists,” but it opposes abortion and quite clearly has an agenda in these matters.)

In the video, two CMP activists posing as biotech firm representatives inquire about the costs associated with buying specific specimens of fetal tissue. The Planned Parenthood official says costs range from $30 to $100.

At issue is whether the Planned Parenthood doctor was referencing the costs associated with transporting the tissues or the sale of the tissues themselves. The first is legal, the second isn’t — if Planned Parenthood is profiting from the sale.

Republicans quickly leapt on the video, denouncing the doctor’s callousness and Planned Parenthood’s alleged profiteering in one fell swoop. Jeb Bush called it “a shocking and horrific reminder that we must do so much more to foster a culture of life in America.”

Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood, released a video Thursday amid the hubbub — apologizing for the tone of the employee but defending her organization’s practices. “This is unacceptable, and I personally apologize for the staff member’s tone and

KLMNO WEEKLY

Deborah Nucatola, senior director of medical research, is seen on video describing Planned Parenthood’s work donating fetal tissue to researchers.

statements,” Richards said, before adding: “The allegation that Planned Parenthood profits in any way from tissue donation is not true.”

No matter. A congressional investigation had already been launched in response to the video, ensuring that Planned Parenthood and its practices will be front and center in the days to come.

Planned Parenthood, for being flip about aborted fetuses, you had the Worst Week in Washington.

Congrats, or something. n

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2015 The Washington Post / Year 1, No. 40

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

4 8 10 12 17 18 20 23

ON THE COVER the Horseshoe Casino Hotel still draws tourists and locals in Tunica, Miss. But the heyday of windfall earnings from the casino business seems to be gone. Photography by MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON, The Washington Post

SUNDAY, JULY 19, 2015

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POLITICS

Unbending (and unexcitable)

NAM Y. HUH/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Even polite politicians can polarize, and being uncompromising is Walker’s calling card BY

M ICHAEL F LETCHER

H

e tells the story without a dose of excitement or flash of charisma. Scott Walker is standing on the stage of a Denver convention center, shirt sleeves rolled up, microphone cradled in both hands. Before him is an eager audience of more than 4,000 Republican activists at the Western Conservative Summit.

In a slightly nasal, Midwestern monotone, the Wisconsin governor talks about the furor he created. He describes how 100,000 protesters descended on the state capitol to denounce his plan to curtail

collective bargaining for public employees. And he shares, in the least fiery way possible, how he forged ahead with other polarizing policies, overcoming a precipitous slide in the polls and a fevered recall effort that inspired headlines asking whether he had become “Dead Man Walker.”

The bruising fights once threatened his political career. But he survived a recall campaign and was reelected after that. By prevailing, Walker transformed his battles into his calling card. He says one supporter summed up his appeal in a tweet: “I like Walker because he wins without caving.”

At 47, Walker’s polite unwillingness to bend, his placid determination to stand his ground at all cost, both animates and complicates his presidential candidacy.

Partisans love hearing about how he decimated Wisconsin unions, cut taxes, defunded Planned Parenthood and required photo identification at the voting booth — all while calmly staring down political opponents. It has helped catapult him to the first rank of Republican presidential hopefuls.

The question is whether voters will see his style as evidence of clear vision or the mark of a man unwilling to compromise. And

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker waves to supporters as he announces he is running for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination on July 13 at the Waukesha County Expo Center in Waukesha, Wis.

how far can he go without backing down as he enters an arena where the issues are more complex and the politics more treacherous?

Already, there are cracks.

Speaking to farmers in Iowa earlier this year, he endorsed the federal ethanol mandate, a reversal of his previous position. Years ago, as Milwaukee County executive, he supported a plan that would create a path to legal status for the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants. He said in March, “My view has changed.”

But Walker is betting that voters want an unwavering, unflappable leader who knows exactly where

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POLITICS he wants to go and won’t stop until he gets there. He tells audiences he refused to back off on making change in Wisconsin even in the face of death threats, including against his wife, Tonette, and their children.

“It is a myth that winning the center requires moving to the center,” he wrote in his autobiography.

“The path to a conservative comeback lies not in abandoning our principlesbutinchampioningbold, conservative reforms and having the courage to see them through.”

Pleasant. That’s even how Walker’s bitterest political foes describe him.

In the heat of the state’s showdown with its union four years ago, Rep. Peter Barca, the Wisconsin State Assembly’s top Democrat, publicly denounced the governor at protests across the state.

But Walker, who declined to be interviewed for this article, never took it personally. “I’d give a speech in front of 50,000 protesters saying, ‘Walker’s got to go,’ ” Barca says, “and you’d see him the next day and you’d think I just sent him a coffeecake or something.”

Barca is part of a small group of leaders who meet regularly with Walker during the legislative session, but Barca said those gatherings are almost never satisfying.

“Generally, when you meet with him on the major issues, you don’t feel like it’s a dialogue,” he says.

“We get along just fine. . . . But you just feel like that on the big issues he is just there to tell you, ‘Here’s what I am going to do.’”

The roots of his immovability may lie in what he calls being a “P.K.” — a preacher’s kid.

In the tiny farming community of Plainfield, Iowa, where Walker moved when was 2, his father, Llewellyn Walker, was pastor at First Baptist Church and served on the city council. His mother, Patricia, was head of the Sunday school. The family, which would soon include Walker’s younger brother, David, lived in a parsonage next door to the church.

Walker credits his no-frills upbringing and parents’ example for imbuing a deep religious belief and a clear moral vision that has guided him for as long as he can remember.

He relied on that resolve, he says in his 2014 book, “Unintimidated,” even as tens of thousands of protesters marched on his office in Madison and, at times, outside

COURTESY OF THE SCOTT WALKER CAMPAIGN VIA THE MILWAUKEE JOURNAL-SENTINEL

Walker credits his no-frills upbringing and parents’ example for imbuing a deep religious belief and a clear moral vision. his home in Wauwatosa.

“It wasn’t always easy,” he writes. “What gave me the inner strength to go on was my faith.”

Classmates, teachers and friends say Walker has always been earnest, the kind of guy people used to call a “straight arrow.”

As a young boy, he founded a “Jesus USA” club. He was so concerned that Plainfield’s city hall did not have a state flag that he grabbed an old container, punched a hole in it, and started collecting donations. Before long, he had enough money to buy a flag that he presented to the city.

“Scott has a very strong sense of right and wrong,” says Stephen Satran, who was in an antiabortion group with Walker in college.

In 1977, his family moved to Delavan, Wis., an agricultural town about an hour’s drive southwest of Milwaukee.

Walker was focused and busy as a teenager. Yearbooks from his days at Delavan-Darien High School are filled with pictures of Walker in his numerous and varied roles: on the track, cross-country, basketball and football teams; playing percussion in the pep and symphonic bands; as a member of the foreign-language club; and

performing the “Stray Cat Strut” with the Swing Choir.

He became an Eagle Scout after completing a project that used old telephone poles to shore up a steep slope behind his father’s church.

He also worked part-time washing dishes at a restaurant and later flipping burgers at McDonald’s.

But the unyielding determination that defines Walker as governor was not evident the first time he ventured to the nation’s capital in 1985 to attend Boys Nation, the mock-government program run by the American Legion. In those days, Walker stood out as someone adept at forging compromise.

“The dichotomy is he is no longer the person I knew then. He was an intelligent, compassionate young man who seemed to care about solving problems and bringing people together,” says Scott Adrian, who as a youth counselor recommended Walker for Boys Nation and now works as a Democratic staffer in the Wisconsin legislature.

Walker returned from Boys Nation with a new sense of purpose.

Seeing the capital’s monuments and being able to confer with the nation’s youth leaders in Washington was mesmerizing.

Scott Walker with his father, Llewellyn, and mother, Patricia, on Scott’s graduation day from Delavan-Darien High School in 1986.

Walker’s father was pastor at First Baptist Church, and his mother was head of the Sunday school.

KLMNO WEEKLY

At Marquette University, a Jesuit school in the heart of Milwaukee, Walker dove into student politics with much more enthusiasm than he hit the books. He helped lead a campus antiabortion group and won a seat on the student Senate, heading an investigation that ended up with student leaders resigning for charging a lavish dinner to organizational accounts.

As a sophomore, he ran for student government president. Walker, who was known to wear suits to class, cited the job he did with the student Senate investigation, as well as his status as an Eagle Scout and his opposition to abortion.

The campaign turned bitter, with charges about election violations by both sides, and Walker lost.

For some young men, a defeat might have ended any political aspirations. But not for Walker.

“It’s funny — his friends were the ones losing their minds about the election,” says Satran, who supported his candidacy. “He was not upset. It was almost weird. He accepted it as God’s will.”

Walker left Marquette without graduating, and soon after he made his first attempt at public office. He ran for an Assembly seat against Democratic incumbent Gwen Moore, now a member of Congress. He pushed an anticrime message and papered the district with handouts. The odds were stacked against him in the heavily Democratic district, and he was trounced.

Again, the defeat did little to curb Walker’s political ambitions.

He volunteered in the campaigns of other GOP candidates and kept an eye peeled for possibilities.

Soon Walker moved to Wauwatosa, the Milwaukee suburb that he still calls home. He ran again for an Assembly seat, and he won.

Democrat Sheldon Wasserman, a former member of the State Assembly, says that, at first, Walker was a typical backbencher in all ways but one: He would not budge on the issues.

At one point, Republican leaders wanted to raise the state gasoline tax to cover the cost of a new road construction. Walker had joined a group of Republicans who opposed the legislation, causing the leadership to turn up the heat.

“They started working him over,” Wasserman recalls. “Leaders were coming over telling him: ‘You are part of the team. You have continues on next page

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POLITICS

from previous page

to do this.’ Some were yelling at him. Scott just sat there like a stone, with a little smile on his face. He never got upset. He just shook his head no, no, no. He was not going to change.”

By the time Walker decided to run for Milwaukee County executive, his unbending political style was in full effect. In 2002, he saw an opening in the heavily Democratic county because of a pension scandal that prompted the incumbent to resign. Walker ran as a fiscally conservative reformer. Although he was by then the father of two sons, he promised to return nearly half his salary as county executive. He won.

Finally, he had a chance to put his ideas into action. He moved to privatize services, cut social service programs and reduce taxes. He pushed to lay off unionized county workers, although often the unions blunted his efforts.

Members of the county’s Board of Supervisors, which was controlled by Democrats, recall an annual budget ritual in which Walker would propose a series of tax cuts and offer a series of spending reductions. The board would undo many of the changes. Walker would then veto the budget, and the board would override his veto.

“We overrode more than 80 percent of his vetoes,” says Michael Mayo (D), a county supervisor. “He is a nice person, very pleasant. But he was determined.”

Despite the pitched battles, Walker was reelected twice, and he took credit for reducing the county workforce by 20 percent. And in 2010, his uncompromising posture helped him win election as Wisconsin’s governor.

Now Walker is running for president with his trademark brand of bland but unshakable certainty.

“The closer you get to being at the point of running,” he says when asked what’s fueling him, “the more you realize you have got to be crazy to want to be president of the United States. The only reason you should do it is you feel called.”

Walker invokes all that he and his family have endured the past four years: the union protests, the death threats, the bitter recall, the tough reelection campaign.

“If we made it through all that,” he says, “maybe it’s a little bit of God’s providence to say . . . this is what we are supposed to do.” n

Latinos find a silver lining in Trump’s comments M ARY J ORDAN Kansas City, Kan. BY

I

t took a while for Edgar Galicia to realize that maybe Donald Trump had done him a favor.

As it turns out, Trump’s disparaging comments about Mexicans have been a morale boost to Latinos who consider the sharp public rebuke of the billionaire Republican presidential candidate evidence that they are a rising force in the United States.

“At first I was upset. I felt insulted” when Trump called Mexicans “criminals” and “rapists,” said Galicia, a graphic designer and business leader in Kansas who is from Mexico. “Now I see this as the wakeup moment, the time when our eyes were opened to our power.”

“It’s an ‘aha!’ moment,” agreed CiCi Rojas, chief executive of Central Exchange, a large women’s business group in the Midwest.

“This has ignited the ordinary person, those of Hispanic heritage. It’s motivating and mobilizing.”

Nationwide, Latino leaders say they are energized by the response from Macy’s, NBC, NASCAR, Serta and a growing list of other companies that have severed ties with Trump because of his remarks.

Latinos lit up social media and online petitions to complain, and their concerns were heard. Trump, however unintentionally, many said, has triggered what some are calling “the Latino moment.”

Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, a network of more than 6,000 Latinos, said that public figures have made disparaging remarks about Hispanics in the past but that there was little, if any, fallout.

“Now the moment has arrived, a standard has been set,” he said.

“You can’t do that and get away with it.”

The country’s stunning demographic changes have a lot to do with the new corporate and mainstream respect Latinos are feeling.

Nationally, the number of Hispanics has soared from 9 million in

MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Hector Rodriguez and others demonstrate against Donald Trump outside the future site of the Trump International Hotel in Washington.

1970to55million—nearlyoneinsix Americans. In California, the number of people who identify themselves as Hispanic surpasses those who classify themselves as white, according to a new census report.

In parts of the Midwest, Latinos are driving population growth, such as here in Kansas City, where Latinos account for more than 30 percent of its 150,000 residents.

In the past 15 years, a swell of Latino immigrants moved here and reversed a steady decline in population, said Mayor Mark Holland, a fourth-generation Kansan.

The mayor says his city is richer for its diversity.

“What Trump has done is pull back the thin veil of racism underlying the immigration debate” and arguments against a path to citizenship for law-abiding, hardworking Latinos, he said.

Holland said Trump’s unapologetic bashing of Mexicans has started “a great coming-out party” for Latinos, who are saying, “We are here. We don’t have to pretend we are not.”

Even Latinos who haven’t paid much attention to politics are tuning in — Trump’s remarks are featured prominently on Spanishlanguage television, Facebook and Twitter, and anti-Trump chants

have become wildly popular at televised soccer matches.

Medina said he went from being “mad at Trump” to being “mobilized by Trump” when he realized that the negative comments were uniting Latinos from Puerto Rico, Guatemala and many other countries and causing them to pay attention to the presidential campaign.

Medina said he has heard only “disappointing” or “lukewarm responses” from most Republican candidates — although he thinks Jeb Bush “gets it more, understands more,” noting that Bush’s wife was born in Mexico. He thinks Democrats have been more forceful in repudiating Trump.

On Monday, across the river in Kansas City, Mo., Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley all drew thunderous applause when they criticized Trump at a huge gathering of Latinos.

Before Trump started his antiMexican rant, Macy’s had been making a pitch to Latinos, Gomez said. “It’s a special time” he said, because big U.S. corporations are standing with them, telling them they matter.

He said the message Latinos are hearing is: “You are the customer.

You are the voter.” n

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Rewiring how the race is financed 2016 may mark the first time outside groups outstrip the clout and resources of the individual candidate

BY M ATEA G OLD AND A NU N ARAYANSWAMY

A

small cadre of superwealthy Americans are dominating the fundraising for the 2016 Republican presidential nominating contest, doling out huge sums to independent groups that overwhelm total contributions to the candidates.

Nearly $4 of every $5 raised so far on behalf of GOP White House contenders has gone to independent groups rather than the official campaigns. Outside groups have already amassed more than $235 million — more than four times the $60 million raised collectively by the Republican field through June 30, according to reports filed this past week with the Federal Election Commission.

So far, the dynamic is different on the Democratic side, with 80 percent of the nearly $78 million raised so far to support Hillary Rodham Clinton and her competitors flowing to their campaigns.

The lopsided war chests on the right underscore how the financing of campaigns has been fundamentally rewired in the five years since federal courts loosened restrictions on political spending by corporations and rich individuals.

Those decisions triggered a rush of big donations and political operatives to independent groups that can accept unlimited donations, a trend that has dramatically accelerated this year. This election cycle has already seen bolder collaboration between super PACs and campaigns than previous races, as well as a proliferation of nonprofit groups aligned with individual candidates.

The 2016 elections are now poised to mark a tipping point: the first time outside groups outstrip the clout and resources of many campaigns.

“It’s pretty clear that the super PACs are playing an unprecedented role,” said Michael Malbin, executive director of the nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute, which tracks political contributions.

“This whole development to me is staggering,” he said. “You’re in a

fundamentally different system than12yearsagooreightyearsago.”

The huge pack of well-funded independent groups flanking the Republican candidates has fueled anxiety among party elders that the GOP is in for a drawn-out, bloody primary fight — one that could possibly roll into the nominating convention in July.

“It could end up with the Republican vote split up in a lot of different ways,” said Ron Weiser, a former finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, who is neutral in the 2016 race. “No one is going to go away if they have a lot of money in their super PAC.”

“There are people who are concerned that this could end up a long and very extensive primary that could allow the opponent to gain substantial advantage,” Weiser added.

Former Florida governor Jeb Bush is far ahead of his rivals in the money race with $119.4 million raised by various entities supporting his bid. In second place, Sen. Ted Cruz is being bolstered by $51.3 million raised by his campaign and aligned super PACs, while supporters of Sen. Marco Rubio have donated $45.2 million between his campaign, a super PAC and a nonprofit.

Strip away their outside allies and the top contenders are more evenly matched. Cruz, who jumped in the race first in late March, has raised $14.3 million for his campaign. Rubio pulled in about $12.2 million, while Bush collected $11.4 million in just two weeks as a declared candidate. Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson is not far behind, with $10.6 million.

Even longer-shot candidates are able to tout big fundraising hauls by their outside allies. Former Texas governor Rick Perry raised about $1 million for his campaign but has generated nearly $17 million in super PAC money, largely from three wealthy backers. The biggest sum came from his campaign finance chair, oil pipeline executive Kelcy Warren, who donated $6 million.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who pulled less than $600,000 during his first official week as a candidate, will benefit from three different groups — a super PAC and two nonprofits — that have collected more than $8 million so far.

Brad Todd, the GOP strategist running the pro-Jindal Believe Again super PAC, said an expanding universe of donors has helped fuel the big takes.

“It used to be that once you went through the Bush ambassador list, you were at the end of the rainbow,” he said. “But there are people who are very engaged in this presidential contest who were never a Ranger or a Pioneer,” the titles given top bundlers for former president George W. Bush.

The biggest campaign haul in the second quarter was by Clinton, who pulled in over $45 million in 21/2 months. Priorities USA Action, a super PAC backing her, raised another $15.6 million.

One of her challengers, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, also posted a strong showing, raising $15.1 million — the majority from small donors who gave less than $200. But other contenders lagged behind.

Several contenders — including Scott Walker and Chris Christie — declared their runs after the close of the last quarter, so will not file their reports until mid-October. n

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NATION

Big Water gets heated over park plan BY

L ISA R EIN

T

he National Park Service thought it had a good strategy for reining in the discarded water bottles that clog the trash cans and waste stream of the national parks: stop selling disposable bottles and let visitors refill reusable ones with public drinking water.

But Big Water has stepped in to block the parks from banning the plastic pollutants — and the industry found an ally on Capitol Hill to add a little-noticed amendment to a House spending bill that would kill the policy.

As environmental groups and local officials campaign for a sales ban to reduce park waste and carbon emissions, the titans that manufacture Deer Park, Fiji, Evian and 200 other brands of water packaged in disposable plastic have mounted a full-court lobbying campaign on Capitol Hill to stop the Park Service’s latest effort at sustainability.

“This is a prominent, misleading attack on bottled water that has no justification,” said Chris Hogan, vice president of communications for the International Bottled Water Association (IBWA), which represents 200 bottlers from Glacier Springs to Evian and is leading the charge against bottled- water restrictions.

Beyond the threat to its bottom line, the industry is warning the Park Service that its “misguided” attempt to help the environment is actually helping Coke and other “unhealthy” packaged beverages by forcing park visitors needing to hydrate on hot summer days to guzzle them instead of water.

Park Service Director John Jarvis’s goal seemed logical enough when he issued a memo to the system’s 407 parks, national monuments and historical sites in 2011, allowing them to eliminate sales of disposable plastic water bottles.

The bottles were clogging the waste stream, he wrote, eating up recycling budgets at a lot of parks.

“We must be a visible exemplar of sustainability,” Jarvis wrote.

“When considered on a life-cycle basis, the use of disposable plastic

GABRIEL BOUYS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Industry titans move to stop government from banning the sale of plastic disposable bottles water bottles has significant environmental impact compared to the use of local tap water and refillable bottles.” The impact is magnified in remote parks, which pay a premium for litter removal and waste disposal, he wrote.

In an interview, Shawn Norton, the Park Service’s branch chief for sustainable operations and climate change, said: “We came to realize we were in a sea of plastic water bottles. The garbage cans at some parks were overflowing.”

Parks that want to swear off sales of bottled water are required to study the potential savings in recycling costs, plus the costs of buying and installing refilling water stations.Theparksneedplentifulsigns to tell visitors where to refill their bottles. And bottles are not banned: Visitors still can bring their own.

Today, about 20 parks have sworn off water sales, and they include some of the most popular tourist attractions in the country: the Grand Canyon, Canyonlands, Arches, Zion and Bryce national

parks, and Mount Rushmore. Park officials say the number could be higher, because parks are not required to notify headquarters when they change their policies on concessions.

Zion National Park calls its water-filling stations a “sustainability success story,” saying on its Web site that the park has eliminated the annual sale of 60,000 bottles of water, “the equivalent of 5,000 pounds of plastic not entering the waste stream.”

But Jarvis had acknowledged that the policy ran the risk of “leaving sugary drinks as a primary alternative” to bottled water.

“Even reasonably priced reusable water bottles may be out of reach for some visitors, especially those with large families,” he wrote.

This became the foundation of the $13.1 billion bottled water industry’s public relations campaign: The parks are reneging on their pledge to encourage a healthy lifestyle.

The IBWA wrote to Jarvis in

NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah is one of the parks to stop selling bottled water. A group of 200 bottlers has mounted a full-court lobbying campaign to stop the Park Service’s effort to clean up its parks.

April, alleging that the reduction in bottled water sales may be “having adverse impacts on public health and safety” by encouraging visitors to substitute “less healthy beverages” for “clean, healthy bottled water.”

The association, which has spent about $510,000 to lobby members of Congress since 2011, records show, made the national parks one of its top lobbying targets this year.

At a hearing on the Park Service budget this spring, Jarvis was grilled by House Republicans on the bottled water policy. He noted that parks have not prohibited visitors from bringing in bottled water.

In recent weeks, the industry has turned to legislative maneuvering to stop the restrictions on water sales, finding an ally on Capitol Hill to add a last-minute amendment to the government appropriations bill the House passed last week. The measure prohibits the Park Service from using taxpayer money to eliminate disposable plastic bottles in parks.

“Families who don’t own expensive camping equipment and aren’t experienced hikers and climbers will be surprised to find out that they can’t buy their child a bottle of water at one of our national parks,” Rep. Keith Rothfus (R-Pa.) said on the House floor as he introduced the bill. “Temperatures at the Grand Canyon just this week will top 100 degrees. Visitors who may have forgotten or have run out of water could be put at risk of dehydration.”

But park advocates say the bill shows the clout of an industry that’s worried about losing profits.

“There’s no reason for this bill to come out of left field,” said David Nimkin, senior regional director for the Southwest for the National Parks Conservation Association, an advocacy group.

Nimkin called the bottled water policy a “reasonable and appropriate move on the part of the Park Service to help its visitors recognize that water is critically important.” He noted that the by providing water stations to refill bottles, the Park Service is “encouraging visitors to hydrate for free.” n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

There is plenty of room at the top BY

M ORIAH B ALINGIT

T

he top student in a high school’s graduating class used to earn the honor of being the valedictorian, and traditionally that one student delivered a commencement speech that helped send his or her classmates into the adult world.

But Long Beach Polytechnic in California had 30 valedictorians this year. At Washington-Lee in Arlington, Va., there were 117 out of a class of 457. And at some schools — including North Hills near Pittsburgh and high schools in Miami — there were none.

The nation’s high schools are changing the way they recognize top students, struggling to balance praise while also quelling unhealthy competition as the college application process grows more cutthroat.

The result? Some say schools have deflated the meaning of a well-earned and time-honored accolade while also vexing college admissions officers, who don’t know whether a student finished first or 100th in the class. Others say getting rid of valedictorians entirely allows students to focus on their achievements without worrying about where they fall in the pecking order.

“Education’s not a game. It’s not about ‘I finished first and you finished second,’ ” said North Hills Superintendent Patrick J. Mannarino, who was the North Hills principal when the school got rid of the valedictorian designation in 2009.

“That high school diploma declares you all winners.”

Long Beach Polytechnic designates all students who earn straight A’s valedictorians, even though some students can have higher grade-point averages taking Advanced Placement courses.

Julia Jaynes, 17, who shared the valedictorian title with 29 others, said that if her school chose only one, it would destroy collegiality among her classmates. “If everyone wants to be the best, I feel like there’d be less collaboration,” she said. “It makes it so you’re only out for yourself.”

COURTESY OF GERRI ZHANG

The redefining of school valedictorians has some classes with more than 100 — and some with 0 Believing that the honor should be reserved solely for the student with top grades, some schools continue to select only one valedictorian. At the selective Whitney M. Young Magnet High School in Chicago, that tradition still holds, Principal Joyce Kenner said.

“I don’t plan to change our system as long as I’m principal,” Kenner said, adding that allowing multiple valedictorians “would water down the valedictorian title.”

Jim Bock, vice president and dean of admissions at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania worries that allowing several students to share a top rank diminishes the achievement of a student who otherwise would have been alone in the top spot.

“It’s sort of like the Lake Wobegon effect, where everybody is above average, where everyone is No. 1,” Bock said. “When you have what I think is an artificial ranking, is that really meaningful? I would

say for selective admissions, that’s not doing them a service.”

David Hawkins, executive director of educational content and policy at the National Association of College Admissions Counselors, said colleges are weighing rank less in the admissions process, perhaps because so many high schools no longer provide it. In a survey of 352 colleges in 2013, the association found that just 15 percent of colleges weighed class rank as a factor of “considerable importance” in admissions. In 1993, 42 percent of schools surveyed considered it an important factor.

The process of choosing a valedictorian also has risen in complexity because more students are taking multiple Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses, where A’s are worth more than top grades in standard courses. A 4.0 is no longer considered the gold standard of academic performance when weight-

Gerri Zhang was the sole valedictorian at Chicago’s Whitney M. Young High. She had a 5.3 GPA. The school allows only one student to be named valedictorian.

ed grade-point averages can be much higher; Gerri Zhang, the valedictorian at Whitney M. Young, had a 5.3 GPA. Guidance counselors and principals worry that students who want to be a school’s lone valedictorian will forgo taking classes that will not boost their GPA — such as band or drama. In Long Beach, the school district did away with using weighted GPAs to determine valedictorians so students could take the courses they wanted without hurting their chances of earning the title.

Valedictorians — both those who shared the honor with several classmates and those who stood alone — said class ranks and academic superlatives are just two elements of the competitive and stressful experience of angling to get into elite colleges.

“Even if they got rid of the title and there were no rankings, I think kids would still be pushing themselves and being stressed about the future and their grades,” said Zhang, who will head to the University of Chicago this fall on a full scholarship. She called the competition “friendly.”

Even at Long Beach Polytechnic, where the school changed the policy to reduce the stress around the designation, Jaynes said a friend who got her first B during her senior year was so distraught she stayed home from school.

Jaynes and the other valedictorians at her school say the system is a good one — even if it cut out those who fell a few points short.

But some said it is an honor they would not want to share. Fiona Young, who was the lone 2014 valedictorian at Greenwich High School in Connecticut, set her sights on the title early on.

“I knew I wasn’t going to be the sports captain. I wasn’t going to be prom king or queen . . . so I wanted to set a goal for myself that embodied what I really valued,” said Young, who attends Harvard.

“Giving my speech, being up there and seeing the sea of people . . . and knowing that I was the only one, that’s a feeling I would not want to give up.” n

SUNDAY, JULY 19, 2015

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KLMNO WEEKLY

WORLD

Russian patients’ unending pain K AROUN D EMIRJIAN Nakhabino, Russia BY

F

or the five years that doctors have battled the cancerous tumor pressing on her son’s spine, Elena Knyazeva has faced an everharder struggle to help him weather the pain.

Diagnosed with virulent neuroblastoma at 4 months, Artyom — now 5 — has had multiple surgeries and rounds of chemotherapy.

As a Russian citizen whose family has state-mandated health insurance, he is, in theory, entitled to all the benefits of the Russian public health-care system.

But in practice, while doctors treat his cancer, his family carries the burden of treating his pain.

And as the Russian economy has faltered, pain management for people with severe illnesses, like Artyom, has become all but unaffordable.

The fall of the ruble has driven the price of drugs — many of which are imported — nearly out of reach for many people. That has complicated an already bleak outlook for palliative-care patients in Russia, who are often thwarted in their quest to lessen their pain because of entrenched cultural prejudices and doctors’ legitimate fears of legal repercussions for prescribing controlled narcotics.

When faced with such barriers, desperate patients and families are forced to find a way around the system.

“The government helps, but only a very little bit,” said Knyazeva, 38, explaining that her husband’s salary as a military officer didn’t cover skyrocketing medication costs. “We practically have no free medicine or free medical care. You have to pay for everything.”

Knyazeva is one of the lucky ones. Two months ago, she contacted the Vera Hospice Charity Fund on the advice of a friend.

Artyom made the cut for private aid, keeping Knyazeva from having to choose between going broke and continuing to care for her only child, whom she’d con-

KAROUN DEMIRJIAN/THE WASHINGTON POST

The country’s economic crunch puts medication to provide relief out of reach, even for the sickest ceived after 12 years of trying. Not that it was ever a choice.

Others are not so lucky. Private charities such as Vera, which provide comprehensive physical and mental health services to families of children with severe and terminal diseases, are few. Demand is so great that they have to turn away dozens each month, and there is no public option: Russia has no dedicated pediatric hospices.

“A palliative-care patient needs medical equipment and drugs. Parents usually pay their own money to get that, and it’s about $1,000 a month,” said Lida Moniava, who runs children’s programming at Vera. That is about 11/2 times the salary of the average Russian urbanite. “Nobody helps. Parents try to raise money themselves. They create Web sites for their children.

But the drugs are much more expensive.”

Adults in pain wrench fewer hearts. And while public hospices for adult cancer patients exist,

there are not nearly enough, forcing many families into financial straits when they find they can’t rely on increasingly complex routes to public aid.

As a result, a number of adults with life-threatening conditions are reportedly choosing a more drastic way out: suicide.

Following a high-profile case last year in which a naval officer took his life because of lack of access to pain medications and, in his note, blamed the government, officials punished his doctors and doubled down on enforcing a law against reporting the causes of suicides.

“There’s a huge, huge problem,” said Irina Agayan, a nurse at the First Moscow Hospice, describing a days-long process of securing signatures, waiting in lines and shuttling between clinics to obtain medications. “There are ways to get around it, through paid services, but that’s not the system.

Even if you pay, there’s still a problem, because you have to be

Renata Valeyeva, 8, was treated for a brain tumor, but when her symptoms returned, ambulances refused to take her to the hospital. Her greataunt and chief caretaker, Natalia Sultanova, sits with her.

registered to go through many agencies. And all this time, the person is in pain.”

As Russia’s palliative-care patients struggle with the rising cost of pain relief in a worsening economy, they have also become collateral damage in the government’s intensifying war against drug trafficking.

According to Russian reports, less than 1 percent of illegally trafficked drugs are peddled through prescriptions, yet more than half of drug-trafficking cases are brought against health-care workers. This spring, lawmakers pushed for rules prohibiting promotion of narcotics as “propaganda,” further spooking doctors who might otherwise help palliative-care patients.

“The sphere of painkilling is very much regulated by the Federal Drug Control Service. They have a lot of money and so-called quotas of how many people they have to imprison in a year,” said Nyuta Federmesser, who founded Vera. “It is much easier to find the guilty among nurses and doctors and patients rather than be somewhere out in Tajikistan or Afghanistan looking for people who bring illegal drugs into the country.”

What results is problems that are avoidable. Renata Valeyeva, 8, had a brain tumor. Doctors found it when she was 5, drained it and left in a stent. But when she began complaining of headaches again in January, nobody wanted to treat her.

For two days straight her family called for an ambulance, Renata’s great-aunt and chief caretaker, Natalia Sultanova, said, showing the medical workers who responded health forms documenting her condition. But they refused to take her to the hospital, offering only a light analgesic.

On the third day, Renata fell into a coma. Now, she struggles to hold her head up, has difficulty eating and drinking, and cannot speak.

“Can you imagine? Two days in a row we called the ambulance, and they just did not want to take a child with such symptoms,” Sultanova said. n

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WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

From fear of war to diplomatic deal BY

J OBY W ARRICK

T

hree years before Tuesday’s nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration dispatched a pair of senior military commanders to the Middle East for a different, if equally urgent, set of negotiations.

The purpose: persuading Israel to delay an imminent military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

At the time, the chances for military action were judged to be so high that U.S. officials debated when, not if, the bombs would fall.

“We’ve admitted to each other that our clocks are turning at different rates,” Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said after talks with Israelis in 2012.

Three years later, White House officials are instead toasting a major victory: an agreement to severely restrict Iran’s nuclear program. In a remarkable reversal, the goal of freezing Iran’s progress was achieved not with warplanes but with handshakes.

The deal closes, at least for now, the most perilous chapter in 35 years of turbulent relations with Iran. By effectively freezing Iran’s uranium stockpile for at least the next decade, the accord eases tensions around a controversy that has given rise to cyberattacks, assassinations and economic sanctions, all set against a backdrop of fear over the potential for a Middle East war.

“It’s momentous,” said Cliff Kupchan, a former State Department official now with the Eurasia Group. “There’s only a very remote chance for the next 10-15 years that Iran can acquire a nuclear weapon. The United States during that period won’t have to choose between accepting a nuclear-weapons-capable Iran and using military force against that country.”

Critics pounced on perceived flaws in the agreement and vowed to fight to block its implementation. But assuming the basic contours remain intact, the accord effectively halts progress along two paths that could potentially give Iran a nuclear weapons capability. Both Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium and its ability to produce plutonium from a nu-

LEONHARD FOEGER/REUTERS

The nuclear accord closes a perilous chapter in 35 years of turbulent U.S.-Iran relations clear reactor will be restricted under the agreement’s terms.

Assuming it is fully implemented, the agreement also represents a major foreign-policy victory for the administration, which from its first days, sought to transform relations with Iran, first through offers of diplomatic engagement and then, when those overtures were rejected, by coordinating an unprecedented international campaign of sanctions that crippled Iran.

While Iran denied any interest in the bomb, its nuclear facilities have long been a potential flash-

Iran sanctions by targets Arms Nuclear/Missile Energy Financial Assets freeze Travel ban Trade ban Other

US EU UN 6 3 2 7 3 4 11 1 0 16 3 1 18 4 4 7 4 2 9 3 0 3 1 3

Source: International Crisis Group

point with the United States.

Iran’s interestin nucleartechnology dates back to the 1970s, when the pro-American shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, approved plans to construct up to 23 nuclear reactors. But all cooperation between Washington and Tehran was halted after the 1979 Iranian revolution.

Near the end of Iran’s disastrous war with Iraq in the 1980s, Iran secretly obtained blueprints from Pakistan for machines used to enrich uranium. More than a decade later, in 2002, Iranian exiles revealed the existence of a massive uranium-enrichment plant under construction near Natanz. The George W. Bush administration accused Tehran of seeking to acquire a nuclear-weapons capability, while Iran insisted it was developing energy for electricity.

Over the following years, the Bush White House pushed for U.N. sanctions while also participating in multiple rounds of negotiations between Tehran and the sixnation bloc known as the P5-plus-1 — Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States. Iran would twice agree to

Secretary of State John F. Kerry delivers a statement about the Iran nuclear accord July 14 in Vienna. The deal will effectively freeze Iran’s uranium stockpile for at least a decade.

temporarily freeze production of enriched uranium. But under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, work expanded at Natanz and a second, secretly constructed facility called Fordow, inside a mountain bunker near Qom. Obama came into office vowing to end the nuclear threat and transform relations with Iran. But Ayatollah Ali Khamenei spurned Obama’s overtures. And by mid2013, experts believed Iran already possessed the technical capacity to construct a nuclear bomb.

That’s when Israel began openly signaling an intention to attack the nuclear facilities, an act U.S. officials feared could spark a war.

The Obama administration lobbied fiercely to delay an attack, while simultaneously expanding covert efforts, begun under Bush, to disrupt Iran’s progress. A computer worm known as Stuxnet damaged hundreds of Iranian centrifuges between 2009 and 2010, and five Iranian scientists were killed by unidentified assailants.

Ultimately, it was economic pressure that prodded Iran to begin serious negotiations. With support from Congress and European allies, the administration rallied backing for harsh sanctions.

Though some branded Obama’s early outreach to Iran as naïve, his efforts to engage Iran diplomatically were key to rallying international support for the tough sanctions that ultimately forced Iran to seek relief, said Robert Einhorn, who negotiated under Obama and Bill Clinton. The administration “recognized it needed leverage if it wanted real negotiations,” he said.

It will be years before the success or failure of the accord is fully clear. But by reducing, for now, the threat of an Iranian nuclear bomb, the prospect of imminent military conflict can recede, opening the door to progress on other issues, from regional terrorism to the holding of American hostages, said Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, an Iranian-American grassroots organization that has lobbied for a nuclear deal. “This is about so much more than just the nuclear issue,” Parsi said. n

r

A region left behind BY

Deep South Somebody born today in any of the states highlighted above is far more likely than someone born elsewhere in the U.S. to attend a poorer school, drop out before high school, work a low-paying job, struggle with debt, go to prison and die young, according to national statistics.

C HICO H ARLAN in Tunica, Miss.

Her one­story house was slumping inch by inch, day by day, into the wet ground of the Mississippi Delta. Rot climbed up the wooden beams and mildew crept across the ceiling. Soft spots spread across the damp and buckling plywood floor. Holes opened up that led straight to the soil. ¶ Linda Fay Engle­Harris, 60, had always tried to manage on her own, and so when she found new openings in the floor, she crumpled paper into tight wads and jammed them into the gaps. When she awoke to find slugs oozing across her living room, she fetched a dustpan, opened the front door and gently ushered them back into what she called “their natural ecosystem.” One night, when she grew particularly panicked about the future of her home, she handwrote four pages in a notebook left over from her teaching days, trying to gather her thoughts. ¶ “My biggest fear,” she wrote, “is that our house will collapse.” ¶ For two decades, ever since her county of plantations and

r Tunica Population: 10,000 l

Earnings from gambling venues between 1993 and 2015: $760 million l

Percentage spent on social programs to help the poor: 2.5% l

Percentage devoted to the public school system: About 12%

SUNDAY, JULY 19, 2015

13

COVER STORY shotgun shacks had struck it rich, she’d been awaiting the prosperity. Great jobs for all, she’d imagined. Improved living standards. Perhaps no place in America’s Deep South had ever received a better chance to create new economic opportunities for its people. Starting in the early 1990s, Tunica had become a neon-lit casino destination. The county has since raked in $760 million, a fortune for a county with 10,000 people.

But as she worried about her house, EngleHarris — like many in Tunica — was beginning to sense that the greatest windfall in the history of the rural South had failed to lift up a community where many African Americans still lived in crumbling, shacklike homes.

Despite all the casino money, a county that ranked in the 1980s among the nation’s poorest today had one of Mississippi’s highest unemployment rates. A county lashed 30 years ago in a CBS News “60 Minutes” segment for its “apartheid” schools still had a mostly white private academy and a public school system that was 97 percent black and was given a “D” grade by the state. A county that the Rev. Jesse Jackson once described as “America’s Ethiopia” had changed little in its poorest neighborhoods, even as riverfront casinos and other lavish development had sprouted up along the farmland hugging the Mississippi River.

Tunica’s strike-it-rich narrative is a rarity in the Deep South. But the disappointing way it played out shows how fundamental — and possibly intractable — the problems are in an area that lags behind the rest of the country as the poorest region with the least economic opportunity. A major study last year on upward mobility, measuring a poor child’s chances of climbing the economic ladder, found that Tunica had less opportunity than all but six other counties in the United States — scattered across Alaska, South Dakota and Virginia. The Deep South itself is home to more than half of the most punishing counties.

It is a downbeat reality for a region that for much of the second half of the 20th century was closing its gap with the rest of the country, helped by the federal war on poverty and the end of legalized segregation. But during the past 15 years — and particularly since the Great Recession — the catch-up has stalled. By some measures, it has reversed. Somebody born today in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia or South Carolina is far more likely than someone born elsewhere in the United States to attend a poorer school, drop out before high school, work a low-paying job, struggle with debt, go to prison and die young, according to national health, labor and education statistics.

Hundreds of years of segregation are now creating a “very hard-to-break pattern of human behavior and economic relations,” said Robert C. Lieberman, the provost at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University and an authority on race in America.

But the troubles in the Deep South go well beyond race to include frayed state finances, which have eroded the safety net for the poor, as well as public school underfunding, which

PHOTOS BY MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

leaves those who can afford it scrambling to private schools. And it extends to a growing technological divide that has left significant rural areas without access to the digital world; a rise in single parenthood, which is a major indicator for generation-to-generation poverty; and the decline of rural job opportunities in states that have long relied on agriculture rather than on urban hubs.

What went wrong in Tunica is a matter of perspective. For many African Americans — and the county’s current officials — it was a story of a largely white political leadership that did not grasp the depths of poverty facing many black residents and did not choose to use in an equitable way the casino revenue that flowed into the county. So instead of funding skills training and providing programs for the vulnerable, county officials poured money into a riverfront wedding hall, an Olympic-size indoor swimming pool and a golf course designed by a former PGA Tour pro — all while implementing a massive tax cut that primarily benefited the wealthy.

“It is a success story for those in the right social circle,” said Engle-Harris, who is black,

At top, Linda Fay Engle-Harris, 60, takes a walk on her block in Tunica, Miss. Many homes, including her own, are in alarming disrepair. A county program to fix or replace such dwellings has been plagued by funding shortfalls despite a $759 million windfall over two decades from the casino industry which, like these Bally’s slot machines, has fallen on hard times.

KLMNO WEEKLY

echoing the perspectives of many African Americans interviewed here.

To the political leadership that developed the casino plans and spent that money, however, the story is one of good intentions gone awry, an attempt to boost an industry that could potentially create jobs in a corner of the country that never had much of an economy or hope for the future.

Whatever the intentions, the results have left Tunica and, more specifically, some of its residents, in an economically dangerous place.

Of the hundreds of millions of dollars that Tunica earned from its gambling venues between 1993 and 2015, just a sliver — about 2.5 percent, according to county records — was used onsocialprogramstohelpthepoor.Inthelargest of those programs, the county chose a selection of low-income senior citizens for major home renovations:Thoselivingintheworstconditions would get $25,000 for repairs; or, if the house proved too dilapidated, a new mobile home.

Until recently, Engle-Harris hadn’t considered the program. As her home fell apart, she dived into her own savings — built up over years as a public school teacher — to pay for the repairs herself. But then, nearly $20,000 was gone, used to pay for new flooring, a new roof and shingles, new linoleum in the bathroom.

Engle-Harris had $1,400 left in the bank and was forced to retire from her middle school teaching job last December when old hip pain grew to be excruciating. She earned $733 per month in disability pay, and even if she wanted to use it for home repairs, she couldn’t; a contractor visited in January and refused the work, calling it pointless.

“You need to knock this thing down,” she recalled him telling her.

Engle-Harris had long considered herself to be what she called a “self-dependent” achiever.

She grew up in this very house, went to college, got a master’s degree — all while hobbling around on a left leg that wouldn’t bend properly, the result of a childhood bike accident. But Engle-Harris was beginning to question whether she could halt what she said was a slide from the middle class into poverty. “I’m terrified,” she said.

Engle-Harris thought she had a case to receive county housing support because, she said, the county was partly responsible for the problem. When it paved all the roads, it did not grade them. So the roads rose well above the lawns. Every time it rained, water rolled off the asphalt and toward the houses, collecting under flimsy porches. The neighborhood’s drainage system was overloaded and barely functioning, and Engle-Harris, like many of her neighbors, was living atop a man-made bog.

“It’s like quicksand under the house,” she said. She called the money she’d spent on repair work “a small bandage on a large wound.”

So one Tuesday in mid- January, she drove to the county administrative building and found the housing office.

“I am out of money,” she recalled saying, “and I need help.” continues on next page

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COVER STORY

from previous page

I

n the years just before gambling, Tunica looked much as it did a century earlier — one of the most preserved places in the Deep South. A few dozen white families owned nearly all the land. Blacks took meager jobs on cotton and soybean farms. The poverty rate was 56 percent, extreme even by the standards of the Mississippi Delta.

A CBS “60 Minutes” segment, filmed in Tunica in 1985, depicted a county with neartotal racial separation. African Americans lived in homes that lacked running water.

Whites lived just blocks away in comfort. They prayed in separate places, learned in separate places and spoke of the other race as if it was a competing team. The white Tunica public superintendent sent his own kids to private school. “Apartheid without passed laws or barbed wire,” CBS correspondent Morley Safer called it. “It is as if there was no Little Rock, there was no Selma.”

Tunica’s leaders pitched the advent of casinos in 1992 as a means of progress. “Everyone in Tunica County who wants a job, regardless of their education or skill level, can have one,” Kenneth Murphree, then the county’s administrator, said in 1998.

Encouraged largely by Mississippi’s relaxed casino taxes, the slots and blackjack tables moved in fast. Faux Western saloons and medieval castles rose along the river. Land prices in some areas spiked 100-fold. “One of America’s success stories,” the county called itself in promotional pamphlets. At the height of Tunica’s boom, there were nine casinos; it was the country’s third-largest gambling destination, behind Las Vegas and Atlantic City.

And then, the boom was over. First, new competing casinos popped up across the region. Then, the economic crisis caused millions of Americans to pull back on leisure spending.

A 2011 report by a consulting firm called it a “perfect storm.” Visitors plummeted, with the largest casino, Harrah’s, shutting down last year, resulting in a loss of 1,300 jobs.

The county is now facing its own financial problems, pinched by declining gambling revenue, and many in Tunica fear that a massive opportunity has been squandered. Reams of county records and other data going back two decades, coupled with interviews with dozens of longtime residents, as well as past and current leaders, show how Tunica struggled to use the windfall in a way that produced sustainable benefits for more of its residents.

Almost nobody second-guesses the decision to welcome casinos, but many residents and current leaders criticize the use of the money generated. They say that it was, at least in part, misspent, used to nurture a tourism industry that is now sliding backward. Poverty experts who have studied the county say the government would have been better off trying to foster broader economic growth by paying greater attention to job training, building skills and trying to recruit better-paying industries.

Tunica’s leaders “didn’t do a good job in building opportunity for those who were vul-

PHOTOS BY MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

SOURCE: TUNICA COUNTY REPORTS

nerable,” said Cynthia “Mil” Duncan, an expert on poverty at the University of New Hampshire who has extensively studied the Deep South.

The Tunica of today physically looks much like other areas in the downtrodden Delta — but with a jarring collection of half-used tourist sites and an airport built to handle 737s that hasn’t serviced a major carrier since 2011.

Tunica’s 30 percent poverty rate, compared with the pre-casino days, shows substantial improvement but is on par with the most troubled places in the country — and twice the national average, according to census data.

Many of Tunica’s residents remain in dire shape. The public high school has a 57 percent graduation rate, compared with 79 percent nationally. One in four people don’t have bank accounts, one of the highest rates in the country. The average life span in Tunica, at 67 for men and 73 for women, remains shorter than nearly anywhere else in the United States — or El Salvador, for that matter.

THE WASHINGTON POST

Critics say casino money was used for things like a wedding facility, top, at the expense of the poor. “Who got rich?” said Michael Thompson, above, who now runs the county.

“The plantation owners.”

“If I get sick and it’s 11 p.m. at night, I have to drive 45 miles” to get medicine, said Larry Braziel, a 15-year member of the Tunica school board and a slot machine technician at Bally’s Tunica casino. “It’s absurd.”

For many residents in Tunica, the initial boom opened a path toward a job. The casinos initially over-hired, and Tunica, for a matter of months, was so awash in jobs that its unemployment rate fell to 4 percent. But the jobless rate didn’t stay low long enough to further pull down the poverty rate. For those laid off, there were few places to turn. The jobless rate averaged 12.3 percent last year.

One of Tunica’s most controversial moves came at the beginning of the boom, when the new casinos hugging the Mississippi River rapidly started to generate millions of dollars.

Just as quickly, the county moved to slash property taxes to the lowest level of any county in the state, which county officials said was an overture to businesses and investors.

Murphree, who ran the county from 1994 until 2005, said the property tax cut was a boon to everyone: “Everybody got tax relief. Landowners, everybody who owned a house.”

But it disproportionately benefited Tunica’s wealthy, particularly as some landowners leased their tracts to the casinos in lucrative long-term deals. Tax records show 76 percent of the county’s property tax dollars comes from 100 property-owning entities and individuals among 3,200 who own land in the county.

Most U.S. counties depend on taxes to fund basic services. But in this case, the casino money was used as a replacement — helping to subsidize the giant property tax cut. If taxes were kept at their 1993 levels, the county would have had an extra $100 million.

“Who got rich?” said Michael Thompson, who now runs the county. “The plantation owners.”

Other uses of the money were well-intentioned, residents and officials say, but did not pan out.

A big chunk of the gambling revenue, about 12 percent, was devoted to the public school system — where it led to virtually no improvement. A 1997 state report chided the district for “wasteful” and “imprudent” spending, such as renovations for buildings and “large” raises for maintenance and transportation workers, that failed to improve the academic setting.

The tourist attractions — the golf course, the museums, the wedding hall — were built as part of a plan to turn the county into a place where middle-class Americans would flock for days at a time. But in this case, with the downturn in visitors, those taxpayer-subsidized sites have become a modest drain on the county purses.

“Everything was done with good intentions,” said Cedric Burnett, a longtime member of the county board and president of a local funeral home. “The intention was to increase the patronage and get people to stay longer. Now, did it work? No, it did not.”

Other officials say the county has indeed made critical strides.

SUNDAY, JULY 19, 2015

15

COVER STORY “We tend to forget how far we’ve come,” said Webster Franklin, president and chief executive of the Tunica Convention and Visitors Bureau. “In 1990, you couldn’t buy shoes in Tunica. There weren’t safe roads to travel on.”

In 2011, as the casino money withered, activists canvassed black neighborhoods, telling voters that two decades of money had been squandered, too little used for anything of value to them.

“We had people coming out to the polls who hadn’t voted for years,” said Joe Eddie Hawkins, a black political activist.

The 2011 elections flipped Tunica’s fiveperson board of supervisors from having two black members to being entirely black.

One of the newly elected board members called up Thompson, then a young auditor in Jackson, Miss. With casino revenue dwindling, the county needed to quickly cut its own expenses, something it is still struggling to do.

“We are literally living check to check,” Thompson, 37, said. “Like a poor family.”

E

ngle-Harris was traveling to her godson’s basketball game when she got a call from Mardis Jones, the county housing coordinator. Engle-Harris was hoping for good news after submitting her application and making a plea for assistance.

Already, Jones and other Tunica officials had visited her house, examining the sloped kitchen shelves, the bedroom doors that wouldn’t close, the wood wedged under the toilet to keep it in place. They had watched how Engle-Harris and her mentally disabled brother, who also lived there, hopscotched across the firm parts of the floor, fearful that one wrong step would tear the plywood like a piece of Kleenex. “Not livable,” Jones had concluded, later telling others. “An immediate need. . . . Messed up.”

But here, Jones had only an apology.

“We have a huge waiting list,” he recalled telling Engle-Harris, “and the board doesn’t want me to move you ahead of the others. . . .

“You’re looking at a wait of about five years to get assistance. . . .

“It’s not my call. The money is shorting up. ...

“I wish I could do more.”

Five years? Engle-Harris gulped and tried to imagine what might happen to a sinking house over five years. She spent the night by herself almost frozen with anxiety. She barely slept.

She forced down a few bites of dinner at 1 a.m.

Days passed before she could bring herself to tell relatives and friends that she wouldn’t be able to receive the renovations. She bought fewer groceries and cut down to two meals per day. She researched selling her Volkswagen Beetle. She watched Joel Osteen sermons to stay positive, rewinding the parts that she liked three and four times over. She tried to swallow her hip pain and began looking for part-time work — something lighter than the teaching job she’d been forced to leave.

“It’s enough watching this house collapse,” she said. “I don’t want to feel like a failure.”

KLMNO WEEKLY

It helped little learning that others across Tunica were enduring the same wait. The county hadn’t renovated a single home since June 2014, given the budget uncertainty, and Jones still had 97 other people ahead of EngleHarris on a housing list that was only growing.

S

everal weeks after absorbing the news that her situation wouldn’t improve anytime soon, Engle-Harris decided to walk down the street and visit a neighbor who, in this part of town, passed for a success story.

Many of the homes in Engle-Harris’s neighborhood, known locally as the Old Sub, looked just as bad as her own. But as Engle-Harris shuffled down Coldwater Street and turned onto Sears Avenue, she came across something different — the newest county-built home in the neighborhood. In this case, it was a singlewide trailer on a muddy lot.

Engle-Harris knocked.

“Hi,” she said when a friend opened the door.

“Do you mind if I, uh, just look around? I’m trying to get my own home done.”

Engle-Harris took a few steps from the doorway but didn’t sit down. There was no room.

Eight people — four generations — lived inside.

Engle-Harris stayed for about 10 minutes.

A home like this, she figured, was the bestcase scenario for the last decades of her life.

“That might be what happens to me,” she said. “A new trailer, right back on top of the mud.”

For now, all she could do was retrace what had gone wrong. On a frigid evening in early March, she slipped into a room in the local courthouse where Thompson, the head of the county, promised information.

“Gaming, Greed & Government,” Thompson had written on a whiteboard at the front of the courtroom. “The proliferation of gaming in Tunica County + The False Promises of Economic Development.”

Over the next 90 minutes, as the wind howled and rain pelted the windows, he detailed years of government decisions, all the money that flowed in. He touched lightly on the spending mistakes that followed.

Thompson hoped his speech wouldn’t be a downer, and ended with a bit of rah-rah about the county’s “new opportunity,” the ability to define the next 10 to 15 years with more sensible spending. But Engle-Harris, sitting by herself in the third row, dropped her head. Nearly every resident in the courtroom had questions and grievances — about the fire department; about sheriff’s department funding; about medical clinic salaries — and her housing concerns were just one set on a too-long list. At the event, she never raised her hand to speak.

Engle-Harris made it home just before the snow started and put together a salad with Doritos and hot dog pieces inside. As she ate, she watched the wind snap at the paper bags she had crumpled up to plug holes in the wall.

When she woke up the next morning, ribbons of cold air were coming in. A few of the paper bags were gone. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

BOTANY

Putting the mettle in the petal BY

T ODD C . F RANKEL

W

ill Radler was still just an amateur rose breeder — a basement hobbyist, really — when he walked out of his home in Milwaukee carrying that fateful baby rose in a soil-stuffed cup.

He didn’t realize it then, back in 1989, but he held in his hands a flower with such remarkable qualities that it would grow to be the bestselling garden rose in the country. His creation is credited with reversing the sagging fortunes of the difficult garden queen. Radler’s rose is so hardy and requires so little care that it can be planted in places once unimaginable — road medians, mall parking lots, ignored gardens.

It’s a good bet that any dense bloom of roses in a surprising spot — and roses are at peak bloom right now — can be traced back to Radler’s flower.

“Some things are just too good to be true, but this was an exception,” said Craig Reiland of the American Rose Society, which has stood as the flower’s governing body for more than a century.

Radler’s rose is called the Knock Out. It changed the entire rose industry by emphasizing lowmaintenance. It still dominates the market. And it made him a very wealthy man. But his story is not widely known outside the small world of fellow rosarians.

Now, at 72, he continues to invent new rose varieties. But he has faced a backlash, as some believe Knock Out’s success has come at the expense of classic roses, as well as criticism — perhaps none more infuriating to Radler than the allegation that his rose has no smell.

And this cuts to the heart of the doubt about what he created.

After all, what kind of rose is this?

The rose’s reputation for being fussy is part of its charm, traditionalists argue. Roses require constant pruning, watering, chemical spraying. Even in mild winters, they need to be covered just so. The reward for all that hard work is a stunning flower

JACK ORTON FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

A basement botanist helped revive the rose with his hardy, low-maintenance Knock Out breed with lush petals and distinct aroma. This is what makes a rose a rose — what poet Rainer Rilke called “oh pure contradiction.”

But over the years, fewer people have wanted to expend the effort.

Other flowers demanded less.

This was clear to Radler even as a young boy in the 1950s, when he stumbled on his passion for roses while thumbing through the Jackson & Perkins rose catalogue at his grandparents’ house. He noticed his grandpa had never bothered to plant roses. At 9, Radler persuaded his parents to allow him to plant a rose bush. And he quickly saw that all the other rose fans were old. Roses were a fading passion even then, increasingly restricted to the flower shop.

Radler believed the problem was the rose had been overbred for beauty. The modern rose had transformed from just five petals and once-a-year blooms to dozens of petals — hundreds even — and multiple blooms. But this tinkering also made the flower fragile, like a sickly award-winning dog.

Radler wanted to make roses easier.

“Fixing roses was one of my first goals,” he recalled.

Others had dreamed of it before. Plenty of new rose breeds have hit the market over the years promising to be disease-resistant or easy-care. But the hype never lived up to performance.

“The plant is supposed to work for you, not the other way around,” said Ping Lim, a rose breeder in San Diego who has known Radler for decades. “The rose had to change. That’s the only future it had.”

After college, Radler went to work for Milwaukee’s county parks department, where he ran the botanical gardens and immersed himself in the rose world.

In 1974, he started breeding roses in his basement. It was easy. He just played the part of a bee, spreading pollen between parent plants to achieve the desired mix of traits.

But he had to be patient, too.

Success or failure revealed itself

Will Radler, 72, defends the aroma of his Knock Out rose: “The problem is everybody insists that there’s only one fragrance in a rose.”

only in the summer, after he moved seedlings from his basement lab to his backyard garden and waited to see what happened.

It took 15 years before he carried out a rose with a white inventory tag plunged into the soil reading “89-20.1.” A few weeks later, a nextdoor neighbor, accustomed to seeing an assortment of failing roses in Radler’s backyard, pointed to one stunning bloom.

“You know,” Radler recalled her saying, “if you could produce more roses like that one, you’d probably be onto something.”

The rose was special, a dense bush full of pinkish-red blooms.

No need to prune. Dead flowers just fell off. No need to spray. The rose appeared immune to diseases such as black spot mildew. And Radler’s roses just kept popping out all summer long.

His first shot at the big time came when a wholesale nursery agreed to give his rose a trial run.

Wholesalers clone specimens for several years to see how they perform. Only the best are ever sold to the public.

Star Roses and Plants, outside Philadelphia, worked with Radler’s rose for eight years. Chief executive Steve Hutton said Radler had turned traditional rose breeding on its head by targeting disease resistance before appearance.

“That was his genius,” Hutton said.

Star Roses started selling Radler’s plant in 2000. They gave it the name Knock Out. They filed a patent, which became useful for fending off the many imitators.

And it was honored with a prestigious All-American Rose Selection.

But Radler had no clue if the Knock Out would sell. He was warned that new rose sales typically peaked in the first year, like a blockbuster movie on opening weekend. He would earn a royalty on each rose plant sold.

His royalty check that first year was $60,000.

The next check was for significantly more than that. And so was every annual check that followed.

This was unprecedented. Sales of

SUNDAY, JULY 19, 2015

17

WORKPLACE Knock Out have flattened out only in the past year, Radler said, as the breed fell to No. 2 among rose plants. But the top spot still belongs Radler, thanks to his Double Knock Out — an easy-care rose with more petals. He has four more varieties of Knock Out on the market. More than 90 million of Radler’s roses have been sold, Hutton said.

Knock Out roses are the topseller at box stores like Home Depot and Lowe’s, according to those chains, and smaller garden centers like Merrifield in northern Virginia.

“It’s truly changed the industry,” said David Yost, who works in Merrifield’s plant clinic.

Yost said it’s clear consumers prefer easy-care roses — either Knock Out or other brands — and that has made the thousands of other named rose varieties harder, if not impossible, to find. While Knock Out has been good for the rose market overall, he said, not all roses have benefited.

“Nobody wants what our parents had — the hybrid teas, the classic roses of that day,” Yost said.

That leads to one major complaint about the Knock Out. “Not everyone accepts it as being a rose,” said Reiland of the American Rose Society.

He thinks it qualifies, even if it lacks the classic long-stemmed elegance. Reiland said Knock Out has other attributes.

The biggest knock against the Knock Out is the lack of smell.

Aroma is a favored rose trait.

Breeders aim for it. Some gardeners are upset to find it missing.

This is the criticism that upsets Radler the most.

“It is fragrant,” he said. “The problem is everybody insists that there’s only one fragrance in a rose. But there are many smells.”

To him, the Knock Out smells delicate, fruity and sweet.

Radler now has a small staff to help him breed roses. He’s bounding with ideas. Recently, he was inspired by a brilliant example of an orange-red rose with white spots during a trip to France.

“There’s no reason we can’t have spotted roses,” he said.

So he might work on that. He talked about breeding roses with mahogany-colored leaves, Knock Out hybrid tea roses, orange Knock Outs, purple ones, too.

“Can you imagine?” he asked.

“Why can’t we have that?” n

KLMNO WEEKLY

Your bad boss might be making you sad, lazy and fat BY

A NA S WANSON

B

ad bosses can add to your stress, diminish your creativity, and even threaten your health.

One head chef had a bad habit of throwing knives around the kitchen, in the direction of people that made him angry. Another woman’s boss told her co-worker she couldn’t take a personal day to bring her dog to the emergency vet “because dogs are replaceable.” Yet another boss was caught shaving time off of his employee’s time cards and banking it into his own for a bigger bonus.

These are just some of the stories from a Reddit thread about horrible bosses in which employees share their stories of angry, disrespectful and generally incompetent bosses.

These poor employees aren’t alone. A huge number of people have had a bad boss at one point in their lives. Various polls of workers have shown that between 13 and 36 percent of U.S. workers report having had a dysfunctional manager, and 98 percent have reported experiencing uncivil behavior at work.

Of course, there are as many ways for bosses to be horrible as there are horrible bosses. There are the minor slights — dismissive behavior, passive aggressive e-mails, or privileging another worker’s accomplishments over your own. Then there are the more serious kinds of abuse.

But even the little slights can add up. And these behaviors are not just unpleasant for employees. Research suggests they are actually bad for worker health.

Experiencing rudeness at work, and even replaying the event in your head later, elevates levels of hormones called glucocorticoids, Christine Porath, an associate professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, recently argued in an opinion piece for the New York Times. That can lead to

disparate health issues, including increased appetite and obesity.

That’s right: In addition to making you unhappy, your rude boss may be making you fat.

Stress contributes to a range of other diseases, including cardiovascular problems, ulcers, even the common cold. A study published in the journal PLoS One in 2012 found that women with high job strain were 38 percent more likely to experience a cardiovascular event over a decade than women with low job strain.

ISTOCKPHOTO

Often, bosses may be adopting these attitudes unintentionally or unconsciously. Power hierarchies affect us in mysterious ways. People are more likely to be curt, dismissive or angry with those who sit below them on the workplace hierarchy than those who rank above them, and they may not even realize they are doing it.

Porath says we’re far more sensitive to slights to our own ego: “We ride a wave of pride or get swallowed in a sea of embarrassment based on brief interactions that signal respect or disrespect.

Individuals feel valued and powerful when respected. Civility lifts people. Incivility holds people down. It makes people feel small.”

While people are focused on how much others respect them, they don’t often pay as much attention to the effect of their attitudes on others. In surveys of hundreds of people in organizations carried out by Porath, more than half said they behaved uncivilly because they were over-

loaded. More than 40 percent said they didn’t have the time to be nice.

Sometimes rudeness is more calculated, however. Porath’s research suggests that many people believe that having a tough or curt attitude helps them to project authority.

Unfortunately for these people and their underlings, flexing one’s muscles at work doesn’t do that much to demonstrate authority. Instead, it appears to undermine employee performance.

It leads to lost work hours and productivity, as workers put less effort into their jobs, feel less committed to the company, and suffer from stress or health problems that prevent them from working effectively.

So what can be done about dysfunctional bosses? Whether you are a boss or an employee, start by being nice at work. If you are in a position of authority or want to get there someday, this will help, rather than hurt, your leadership potential.

If you have a terrible boss, your options may limited. But research from Ohio State University published in Personnel Psychology suggests workers who stand up for themselves when they are treated badly at work ultimately feel better about their jobs. They found that employees who stayed quiet while a boss ridiculed, intimidated or belittled them ended up with lower job satisfaction and commitment and more distress.

Lynn Taylor, a workplace expert and consultant, proposes using the same kind of techniques that parents use on unruly toddlers to manage dysfunctional bosses.

She suggests a practice she calls “managing up”: taking a step back, trying to understand the motivation behind your boss’ behavior, and then taking a collaborative approach to fixing it. Even if you aren’t being managed down, maybe you can make some progress by managing your boss. n

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BOOKS

A Russian spy risked all for the CIA N ON-FICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

J OSEPH K ANON

L THE BILLION DOLLAR SPY A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal

By David E. Hoffman Doubleday.

312 pp. $28.95

et’s cut right to the chase: “The Billion Dollar Spy” is one of the best spy stories to come out of the Cold War and all the more riveting, and finally dismaying, for being true. It hits the sweet spot between pageturning thriller and solidly researched history (even the footnotes are informative) and then becomes something more, a shrewd character study of spies and the spies who run them, the mixed motives, the risks, the almost inevitable bad end.

The spy was Adolf Tolkachev, a middle-aged engineer at the Scientific Research Institute for Radio Engineering (NIIR) with a specialty in radar systems. Tolkachev was so seriously disaffected with the Communist Party of the 1970s that he looked for a way to undermine the regime. He found it in the secret weapons research papers that crossed his desk every day. A first attempt to contact the Americans to offer his services — by dropping a note through the window of an embassy car at a gas station — met with no response.

Four more attempts followed, again without result. The CIA’s Moscow station, wary of a KGB trap and under strict orders from Langley to halt personal intel operations (a total “stand-down”) refused to take the bait. Finally a reference to a “look-down, shootdown” radar system, a crucial piece of intel, and yet another letter persuaded the CIA to take the risk, and CKSPHERE (Tolkachev’s code name) was born.

The first clandestine meeting was on New Year’s Day in 1979.

Twenty more meetings would follow over the next six years, none of them detected by the KGB (the preparation and execution of these meetings are at the exciting heart of the book), and they provided the CIA with information so valuable that its worth (in research saved, weapons programs redirected, etc.) was estimated to be in the billions. At enormous personal

KATHY KRANTZ FIERAMOSCA

A painting of Adolf Tolkachev, a Russian engineer turned U.S. spy, hangs at CIA headquarters.

risk, Tolkachev photographed reams of secret documents — at one memorable exchange, he handed over 179 rolls of 35 mm film covering 6,400 pages of documents — and even managed to smuggle out blueprints and circuit boards. He was, by any measure, Moscow station’s most important agent. And then he was betrayed.

All this would make a good story at any time, but one of the special pleasures here is that we are back in the pre-digital era. We are instead in the heady, familiar world of espionage thrillers: deaddrop sites, surveillance-detection runs, miniature cameras, suicide pills, park-bench meetings, agents jumping out of cars just as they round the corner. But Hoffman never loses sight of the fact that what may be fun for the reader was deadly serious to the participants.

Few writers have better creden-

tials to write this story than Hoffman. A former Moscow bureau chief for The Washington Post (now a contributing editor) and the author of “The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race,” for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, he knows Moscow well and does a first-rate job of putting the events in historical context. “The Billion Dollar Spy” may often read like a thriller, but Hoffman never tries to punch up the material with novelistic touches to make it more dramatic.

In this he has the great advantage of Tolkachev’s own voice, speaking to us through his ops letters — quarreling with the CIA over money, worrying that he’ll be caught, demanding a cyanide capsule, asking for Western records for his teenage son. It’s an authentic and oddly touching voice as he tries to navigate his own contra-

dictory impulses: He loves Russia, yet is betraying it; he knows he will probably be caught, yet refuses to consider exfiltration.

Hoffman catches all this without italicizing any of it, just as he gives us the day-to-day feel of Moscow station, the office politics, the frustrations. But it’s really at the end, with Tolkachev’s fate, that he achieves a novelist’s sensibility. I wouldn’t dream of ruining Hoffman’s story by telling you what happens except to say that Hoffman handles it beautifully and, like the best Cold War novelists, shows us that in the secret world, people are unpredictable and often behave badly, and that one can never underestimate what Graham Greene called the human factor. This is a terrific book. n Kanon’s most recent espionage novel is “Leaving Berlin.”

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

A literary history of an absurd ritual

Bringing space age back to vivid life

N ON-FICTION

F ICTION

A

l

REVIEWED BY

M ICHAEL D IRDA

duel is inherently stupid, being largely a form of ritualized murder or suicide. Perhaps chance will favor one opponent over another, a foot might slip, a gun misfire.

But, in general, the better swordsman or more practiced shot will triumph every time. Honor may be served, but justice only coincidentally, and one man will almost certainly be dead, usually for no good reason at all.

As John Leigh reminds us in “Touché,” this has been one of the arguments against dueling at least since Louis XIV outlawed the practice. And yet the romance of swords at sunset or pistols at dawn remains as powerful as ever. There lingers, even in our mercantile age, an admiration for the aristocratic ethos, the punctilio, of the duel.

After all, unlike feuds or plain murder for revenge, a traditional affair of honor always involves social equals — there is no glory in killing a peasant and considerable shame in being killed by one.

As we know from countless historical novels, movies and costume dramas, the steps toward a duel are highly codified, starting with a real or imagined insult to a lady or one’s personal honor.

When the two adversaries finally meet on the field of honor, they will be elegantly and spotlessly dressed, their weapons of the highest quality and their comportment toward each other one of restrained and delicate courtesy. A witty sally or quip is never amiss as a demonstration of one’s style and self-command. After the fatal thrust or shot, the “winner” will cast aside his weapon and hurriedly bend to hear the dying man’s final words, sometimes of forgiveness. Duelists, as Leigh observes, “tend to face each other as opponents, not enemies.”

As the subtitle of “Touché” indicates, Leigh’s main interest lies in the presentation of the duel in plays, novels and short stories, beginning with Corneille’s neartragedy “Le Cid” and ending with

“The Radetzky March,” Joseph Roth’s novel about the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

There is even a brief consideration of the American cowboy version of the duel, the showdown at high noon on a dusty street.

While Leigh probes and theorizes to a fare-thee-well, he does convey a good deal of pure information. Did you know that “stickler” was another name for the second, whose chief responsibility, after all, was to make sure that all the proprieties were strictly observed?

During the early 19th century, the duel fell out of literary favor because it lacked intensity and spontaneity: Romantic poets and novelists preferred honest, impassioned murder to coolly calculated encounters. Later 19th-century literature, however, reveals an “embourgeoisment” of the duel, as it became a means of gaining social status and cachet. More modern writers have often imbued the face-to-face encounter with a psychological or Freudian twist, viewing it as a combat “with a doppelganger or with oneself.” One part of the self slays another.

Throughout “Touché,” Leigh shows himself a master of the neatly turned observation.

“Charm,” he writes, “is a sort of refined insincerity.” Though dueling might look harebrained and utterly irrational, “gentlemen were not particularly interested in the promptings and pleas of reason. That is an essentially bourgeois scruple, rather like spelling correctly or counting one’s money.” In fact, a duelist “fights not for gain from his adversary but to declare who or what he is.”

Sometimes, though, Leigh’s thickly textured prose can grow almost, but not quite, impenetrable in that casual, inbred way so common to academics.

Fortunately, such academese is relatively rare, though no one should mistake “Touché” for anything but a scholarly book. It is, though, an excellent one. n

T TOUCHÉ The Duel in Literature

By John Leigh Harvard Univ. 334 pp. $35

THE LAST PILOT

By Benjamin Johncock Picador. 304 pp. $26

l

REVIEWED BY

R ON C HARLES

he recent disastrous launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket offered a fiery reminder that space remains a distant, final frontier.

Who could have guessed our progress toward the stars would be so slow and problematic? In the 1960s, life in outer space was imminent. But decades later, that great leap for mankind feels like our last small step.

This melancholy nostalgia drew me into orbit around Benjamin Johncock’s debut novel, “The Last Pilot.” Although he’s a young writer in England, Johncock re-creates the early days of the U.S. space program like someone who lived through them. His story opens in 1947 when a hot-shot Air Corps captain named Jim Harrison is on his way to becoming the fastest man in the world — or another bloody smear on the Mojave Desert. He’s flying the X-1: basically a rocket launched from the belly of an airborne B-29 bomber, which is fuel-injected craziness, but Jim and his buddies aren’t fools. They relax each night at a bar decorated with photos of their dead colleagues.

Flying through these pages, you’ll recall that dynamic era when a mix of physical science and political anxiety propelled the United States to unprecedented speeds. “Someone’s gonna do it eventually,” a pilot’s wife says.

“Better that it’s us.”

When President John F. Kennedy commits America to “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth,” Johncock reminds us that the challenges of that audacious project were not merely technical.

With the evolution of NASA and a new breed of heroes called “astronauts” comes the rapid rise of modern marketing and image control. Brave test pilots who had worked largely in secret are suddenly expected to play the role of national celebrities with all the lucrative perks and strict constraints that entails.

But if these guys have the right stuff, they also have personal lives that burn as dangerously, and that tension makes “The Last Pilot” hypnotic. Johncock is interested in the physics of emotion, the unpredictable interplay of a husband and wife who love each other but have few ways to articulate their desires and fears.

Jim is a lot more comfortable soaring along at Mach 1 than he is sitting stock still in his living room with his wife, Grace. And why not?

In the clear blue yonder, he’s up against just a few deadly variables, but back on Earth, all is murkiness. And that’s the true heart of “The Last Pilot.” Jim and Grace are mulling along in quiet despair over their inability to have children when they suddenly learn that Grace is pregnant. What they can’t imagine, though, is how quickly their exhilaration can turn to grief, the kind of boundless sorrow that makes once-loving parents toxic to each other.

That family crisis would crash in a fireball of sentimentality were it not for Johncock’s extraordinary discipline. Not only has he stripped his narrative down to sleek, aerodynamic paragraphs, but he tells much of this story in clipped dialogue that only suggests the pain swelling beneath the lines.

In the end, it’s the atmosphere that keeps a historical novel aloft, and Johncock’s greatest accomplishment here may be his fidelity to the era. He captures the way international politics played out across the sky and cast a shadow over private lives. Jim’s wife has no words to express how miserable she is playacting the role of an astro-wife for Life magazine, and Jim has no way to express the grief that’s driving him mad.

In the end, he discovers that what’s most treacherous isn’t reaching for the stars, but for someone you love. n Charles is the editor of The Washington Post’s Book World.

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

The North also distorts the Civil War’s history HUGH HOWARD is the author of “Houses of Civil War America.”

With astonishing speed — and a surprising new consensus — the status of the Confederate battle flag has been altered. While a reconsideration of that symbol’s original meaning is long overdue, there is a countervailing risk that the righteous satisfaction in some quarters at lowering the flag may blind us to another large misunderstanding of the past.

The conversation in recent days has been illuminating, as many politicians from the South try to navigate a historic landscape blurred by generations of distortions. With the abruptness of cataract surgery, “Lost Cause” interpretations of a genteel Southern past have fallen away. The denials that, in the Confederacy, the impetus for war was slavery have long rung false; the minutes of the secession conventions held in Southern states make that explicit (as one Mississippi advocate put it in 1861, “slavery was ordained by God and sanctioned by humanity”). Acknowledging that the Confederate flag symbolized the fight to extend human bondage can at last put to rest an enduring falsehood in our national memory.

As important as this corrective may be, we will do our historical memory a disservice if we fail to recall how citizens of the Union regarded Abraham Lincoln’s War, slavery and even African Americans. To a surprising extent, the way the North remembers the Civil War is also deeply flawed and misleading.

Recall that when Lincoln took office, slavery had the official sanction of the U.S. government.

Like it or not, slavery was a part of the economic history of the North as well as the South. Much of the nation’s cotton, its largest export, was taken north of the Mason-Dixon Line to be processed; for that matter, many of the South’s most successful planters were Yankees who adopted with alacrity the practice of slavery on their way

to wealth.

In the antebellum years, there was nothing resembling an antislavery consensus in the North.

America’s greatest philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, hesitated for years to decry what he called “the habit of oppression.” When he finally did so from the podium in Concord Town Hall, he was called a fanatic and worse. The word “abolition” made his neighbors angry. The idea rang radical even in Massachusetts, where many regarded those who espoused such views as dangerous.

It’s simply wrong-headed to presume that average, mid-19thcentury farmers and factory workers in the North harbored abolitionist sympathies. They didn’t.

I was taught growing up in Yankee Massachusetts that the North went to war to end slavery, but since then I have come to understand that I was misinformed. A case in point is the story of the well-known primitive painter Robert

JOHN BAZEMORE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

On July 9, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley signs into law a bill that allows the removal of the Confederate flag from state house grounds.

Peckham. He had served as a deacon in the same Congregational church that I attended as a child in central Massachusetts. But archival research reveals that, in 1850, when Deacon Peckham espoused abolitionist sentiments, the church fathers excommunicated him, declaring one of their own unwelcome because they thought his ideas too extreme. Little Westminster represented a quiet majority opinion in the region.

Even Lincoln’s racial thinking evolved in a slow and ambiguous manner. Until the very end of his life, the hero of the age resisted the notion that the black and white races were equal. In his famous 1858 debates — and elsewhere — he repeatedly rejected the idea of permitting black men to vote, serve as jurors, hold office or intermarry with whites. “There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality.”

That meant that, at its outset, the war for Lincoln was explicitly about union — until it became expedient to make it about emancipation. The Emancipation Proclamation was primarily intended to hobble the

Confederacy’s war effort, which relied upon slaves for provisioning and other support.

Even among those who recognized that human bondage must end, few thought blacks were equal to whites. In the South, where 95 percent of the nation’s African Americans resided, slavery had been a fact of life for generations, fixing the black man’s inferiority in the minds of most whites. In the North, where less than 1 percent of the population was black, relatively few whites interacted with men or women of color; there, anyone of African descent remained very much other.

The past is no more a fixed destination than the future is, and we need to question constantly the history we’ve been handed. One encounters such proper names as Reconstruction, Jim Crow, Selma and, now, Clementa Pinckney. But even as our outrage simmers at what made possible the allegedly murderous ignorance of Dylann Roof, we would do well to consider that, aside from the color of some of the players’ skins, there is little that is black and white about our terrible Civil War and the enduring legacy with which we must still wrestle. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Jews have power, responsibility ABRAHAM H. FOXMAN is national director of the Anti-Defamation League.

At a time of the greatest resurgence of anti-Semitism since World War II, it is becoming increasingly difficult for many in the Jewish community to maintain a sense of balance and reasonableness. Exactly because the resurgence is taking place on the very continent where the murder of 6 million transpired, and because there are real current and future threats to Jews, a certain hysteria has surfaced.

Let’s step back a bit. The great tragedy of the Jewish people in the 1930s and 1940s was not only that a murderous party committed to the destruction of the Jewish people took over Germany and eventually most of Europe. It was also the fact that at that most perilous of times, Jews were powerless. They had no army, they had no significant political influence and they had no place to go.

Indeed, the history of antiSemitism in Europe for 2,000 years, culminating in the great disaster of the Holocaust, was all about phantasmagoric fantasies about Jews. Blood-libel charges; scapegoating for the Black Plague; accusations of attempts to control society and the world — none of these assaults against the Jewish people bore any relationship to reality.

The old joke about the Jew who preferred the Nazi newspapers to

the legitimate ones, because all the Nazis talked about were how powerful Jews were, spoke volumes. Jews never experienced a day of real power.

Thereafter came the main lesson for Jews from the Holocaust: We can’t afford to be powerless ever again.

And so things have changed.

First, there is a Jewish state. It has a strong military that proves every day the wisdom of not being powerless. There would be no Israel today without the power of the Israel Defense Forces. There also would be no possibility of peace with the Arab world without the IDF. As was proved with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, only the realization that Israel cannot be destroyed opens the possibility of peace.

There is also the legitimate exercise of power by American Jews, noticeably limited in the

1930s, together with allies across the United States, which has helped safeguard the well-being of Israel and Jews around the world for decades.

The lessons have been learned.

Even as the world becomes more dangerous for Jews, forces are working to mitigate those threats.

Still, sometimes Israelis and Jews act and speak as if we live in that old terrible era when the fantasists prevailed, accusing the Jews of having overwhelming and poisonous power.

As noted, real anti-Semites are out there — those who seek the destruction of the Jewish state, those who blame Israel and Jews for everything that is wrong in the world, those who employ terrorism against Jews and Israel.

As my 50-year tenure at the Anti-Defamation League draws to a close next week, it is troubling to see that Jews are victims once again. We must stand strong and expose the current form of antiSemitism, which, in its own way, is potentially just as dangerous as the old form. But unlike in the past, we are not solely victims. We are players. And with that role comes a need for responsibility.

With it comes a need to make real distinctions. With it comes a need to look at one’s own role and the impact it has.

Leon Wieseltier, writing

recently in the Atlantic, put it well: “Even in a time of resurgent anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism cannot explain everything. . . .

Israel’s fate is not entirely out of its hands.”

What share of what Israel does justifies criticism, and what share does not, are subject to interpretation and consideration.

But part of the discussion must always be: What can Israel do, what does it need to do better, how can its actions have an impact, not on the haters who will always be there but on the many non-anti-Semites who are troubled by some of its policies?

The temptation to reject such thinking as blaming the victim should be resisted. We are not living in an age of fantasists, though plenty of fantasists are still around. We are proud that Jews have a modicum of power, and we should act accordingly.

The rejection of this approach undermines the ability to deal with the real anti-Semitism that exists.

And it prevents what is needed both in the community and in Israel: a serious conversation about not only how to combat our enemies but also what we need to do to make things better and to weaken the fertile environment in which the enemies of Israel plant their poisonous seeds. n

SUNDAY, JULY 19, 2015

22

OPINIONS

BY HORSEY FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES

A good deal, but will Iran behave?

DAVID IGNATIUS writes a twice-a-week foreign affairs column for washingtonpost.com.

As the Iran nuclear talks neared the endgame, some observers worried that President Obama and Secretary of State John F. Kerry, in their eagerness for a deal, would give away the store with last-minute concessions.

Those fears turned out to be misplaced, notwithstanding Tuesday’s howls of protest from Israeli and GOP critics. The agreement is a wellcrafted pact that maintains the framework reached in Lausanne, Switzerland, in April. Rather than softening the Lausanne terms, the final language firms up some squishy items. It also adds important new restrictions on Iran’s ability to develop the exotic triggering mechanisms needed to build a nuclear bomb.

The problem isn’t the agreement but Iran itself. Its behavior remains defiantly belligerent, even as it signs an accord pledging to be peaceful. Its operatives subvert neighboring regimes, even as their front companies are about to be removed from the sanctions lists.

The agreement welcomes Iran to the community of nations, even though its leader proclaims that Iran is a revolutionary cause.

Obama argues that dealing with a menacing Iran will be easier if the nuclear issue is off the table for the next 10 years. He’s probably right, but the Iran problem won’t vanish with this accord. Iranian

behavior in the region becomes the core issue. Having played the dealmaker, Obama must now press Iran to become a more responsible neighbor.

The big bet Obama is making is that Iran is more likely to evolve if it’s open to the world — and to the winds of change — than if it remains closed and isolated. There is historical evidence to support this view, including the demise of the Soviet Union and the evolution of modern China. But those countries also offer a warning that diplomatic agreements can be a prelude to cold peace and even outright conflict.

A deal with Iran has been Obama’s overriding foreignpolicy goal since Inauguration Day, when he declared his desire to engage adversaries on a basis of “mutual interest and mutual respect.” He has paid a heavy cost

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY MARGULIES

to protect his Iran peacemaking, sidestepping confrontation with Iranian proxies in Syria and Russia in Ukraine, in part because he saw the Iran deal as a higher priority. Obama explained his logic Tuesday morning: “Put simply, no deal means a greater chance of more war in the Middle East.” Historians will have to judge whether he has gained more than he lost.

The Iranian regional threat was at the heart of the eleventh-hour debate over whether to lift a U.N. embargo on sales of arms and missile technology to Tehran. This issue was finessed with an agreement to maintain the armssale ban for up to five years and the missile limits for up to eight years.

That wasn’t the capitulation some had feared. And it allows for review of Iranian behavior.

The final agreement put in writing the framework that Kerry had negotiated this spring. The Iranians agreed to limit the number of centrifuges in Natanz to 5,060 IR-1 models, which are relatively inefficient. They agreed to cap their enrichment and stockpile of uranium at relatively low levels. The text and the technical annexes support Obama’s claim that the agreement will prevent Iran from building a bomb for at least the next decade.

The danger, argues Israeli

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is that after 10 years, Iran will have “a sure path to nuclear weapons.” Iran pledged in the agreement that its nuclear aspirations are perpetually peaceful. But even if you assume (prudently) that the Iranians are lying, the Obama administration makes a good case that it will be easier with the agreement than without it to detect and stop an eventual Iranian breakout.

Heading into the final days of talks, the crucial issue was verification. Obama claimed this week that International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors would have access “where necessary, when necessary.” That’s not as strong a commitment as “anywhere, anytime,” and the formula for the IAEA’s “managed access” is complicated. What gives it teeth is that neither Russia, China nor Iran can block inspections. The United States and its European partners can prevail, if there is a dispute.

In the wake of the agreement, Netanyahu called Tuesday “one of the darkest days in world history.”

Republican politicians made similar strident attacks, but the critics appeared to be outliers. The pact has the support of most major nations. Netanyahu and his GOP allies are indignant about the deal, but they are taking on the world. n

SUNDAY, JULY 19, 2015

23

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

We can’t let the trolls win BY

E LLEN P AO

I

have just endured one of the largest trolling attacks in history. And I have just been blessed with the most astonishing human responses to that attack.

What happened to me while head of the popular online forum Reddit for the past eight months is important to consider as we confront the ways in which the Internet is evolving. Here’s why: The Internet started as a bastion for free expression. It encouraged broad engagement and a diversity of ideas. Over time, however, that openness has enabled the harassment of people for their views, experiences, appearances or demographic backgrounds. Balancing free expression with privacy and the protection of participants has always been a challenge for open-content platforms on the Internet. But that balancing act is getting harder. The trolls are winning.

Fully 40 percent of online users have experienced bullying, harassment and intimidation, according to Pew Research. Some 70 percent of users between ages 18 and 24 say they’ve been the target of harassers. Not surprisingly, women and minorities have it worst. We were naive in our initial expectations for the Internet, an early Internet pioneer told me recently. We focused on the huge opportunity for positive interaction and information sharing. We did not understand how people could use it to harm others.

The foundations of the Internet were laid on free expression, but the founders just did not understand how effective their creation would be for the coordination and amplification of harassing behavior. Or that the users who were the biggest bullies would be rewarded with attention for their behavior. Or that young people would come to see this bullying as the norm — as something to emulate in an effort to one-up each other. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which was founded to help protect Internet civil liberties, concluded this year: “The sad irony is that online harassers misuse the fundamental strength of the Internet as a powerful communication medium to magnify and coordinate their actions and effectively silence and intimidate others.”

Reddit is the Internet, and it exhibits all the good, the bad and the ugly of the Internet.

It has been fighting this harassment in the trenches. In February, we committed to removing revenge porn from our site, and others followed our lead. In May, the company banned harassment of individuals from the site. Last month, we took down sections of

ROBERT GALBRAITH/REUTERS

Ellen Pao was acting chief executive of Reddit, a discussion forum and news site that has been surrounded by controversy recently.

the site that drew repeat harassers. Then, after making these policy changes to prevent and ban harassment, I, along with several colleagues, was targeted with harassing messages, attempts to post my private information online and death threats. These were attempts to demean, shame and scare us into silence.

Undeterred, we took steps to prevent bad behavior in an incremental and thoughtful fashion. We doubled the size of our community-management team. We brought in two experienced managers to improve our operations, training and overall leadership. We added to our engineering team. We hired a product manager to help develop tools to help our volunteer moderators.

This isn’t an easy problem to solve. To understand the challenges facing today’s Internet content platforms, layer onto that origi-

nal balancing act a desire to grow audience and generate revenue. A large portion of the Internet audience enjoys edgy content and the behavior of the more extreme users; it wants to see the bad with the good, so it becomes harder to get rid of the ugly. But to attract more mainstream audiences and bring in the big-budget advertisers, you must hide or remove the ugly.

Expecting Internet platforms to eliminate hate and harassment is likely to disappoint.

As the number of users climbs, community management becomes ever more difficult. If mistakes are made 0.01 percent of the time, that could mean tens of thousands of mistakes. And for a community looking for clear, evenly applied rules, mistakes are frustrating.

They lead to a lack of trust. Turning to automation to enforce standards leads to a lack of human contact and understanding. No one has figured out the best place to draw the line between bad and ugly — or whether that line can support a viable business model.

So it’s left to all of us to figure it out, to call out abuse when we see it. As the trolls on Reddit grew louder and more harassing in recent weeks, another group of users became more vocal. First a few sent positive messages. Then a few more. Soon, I was receiving hundreds of messages a day, and at one point thousands. These messages were thoughtful, well-written and heartfelt, in stark contrast to the trolling messages, which were usually made up of little more than four-letter words.

Many shared their own stories of harassment and thanked us for our stance.

The writers of these messages often said they could not imagine the hate I was experiencing. Most apologized for the trolls’ behavior. And some apologized for standing on the sidelines. “I didn’t do anything, and that is why I am sorry,” one user wrote. “I stayed indifferent. I didn’t attack nor defend. I am sorry for my inaction. You are a human. And no one needs to be treated like you were.” Some apologized for their own trollish behavior and promised they had reformed.

As the threats became really violent, people ended their messages with “stay safe.”

Eventually, users started responding on Reddit itself, using accurate information and supportive messages to fight back against the trolls.

In the battle for the Internet, the power of humanity to overcome hate gives me hope.

I’m rooting for the humans over the trolls. I know we can win. n Ellen Pao resigned this month from her position as interim chief executive of Reddit.

SUNDAY, JULY 19, 2015

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G R E A T W I N E. G R E A T F O O D. G R E A T F U N. It’s the largest gathering of wineries in the region, and the only professionally-judged wine event dedicated to wines produced in Chelan, Douglas, Grant and Okanogan counties. And this year it’s bigger than ever—more food, wine, beers, ciders, distilleries and eateries.

Saturday, August 22

6pm to 9pm

Town Toyota Center, Wenatchee

Tickets $45 each • A limited number of VIP tickets available for $65 each Presented by

Available online at wenwineandfood.com Interested in having a booth at this event? E-mail us at info@wenwineandfood.com Callie Klein & Frank Verebi Financial Representatives