The Washington Post National Weekly - July 29, 2018

SUNDAY, JULY 29, 2018

.

IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY JUDGMENT DAYS

In a small Alabama town, an evangelical congregation reckons with God, President Trump and the meaning of morality PAGE 10 Politics Cohen’s feelings of betrayal 4

Nation NASA’s screwy issues 6

5 Myths Pizza 23

SUNDAY, JULY 29, 2018

2

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. 8TH ANNUAL

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 25 6pm to 9pm Town Toyota Center, Wenatchee Tickets $45 each • A limited number of VIP tickets available for $75 each Available online at wenatcheewineandfood.com Presented by Foothills Magazine

Presenting Sponsor

oothills

WENATCHEE ❆ LEAVENWORTH ❆ CHELAN AND ALL OF NORTH CENTRAL WASHINGTON

Sponsored by

Banner Bank • Spokane Industries • Port of Douglas County • Haglund’s Trophies • Country Financial Washington Trust Bank • Visconti’s Italian Restaurant • Stifel Investment Services • Great Northwest Wine Wenatchee Valley Museum & Cultural Center • Town Toyota Center • Wenatchee Valley Chamber of Commerce • Moss-Adams, LLP

SUNDAY, JULY 29, 2018

3

KLMNO WEEKLY

THE FIX

Don’t declare victory just yet BY

A ARON B LAKE

F

or the second time in two weeks, President Trump emerged from a high-profile meeting with European allies and claimed victory. This time, on Wednesday, it was hailing alleged concessions from the European Union to avert the escalating trade war Trump launched.

“This was a very big day for free and fair trade — a very big day indeed,” Trump intoned alongside European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.

But claiming victory is one thing; demonstrating it is another. And Trump has shown more of a knack for the former than the latter.

Despite Trump’s “very big day for free trade” declaration, the details thus far are thin and vague. The E.U. will buy more soybeans and liquefied natural gas, and existing tariffs on steel and aluminum will be reevaluated. The rest, it seems, is to be determined — part of “a dialogue” Trump proudly announced and predicted would be a great success. “We’re starting the negotiation right now, but we know where it’s going,” Trump said, making clear this is hardly set in stone.

It’s obvious why Trump would want to shift the narrative; just the day before, on Tuesday, he was forced to give farmers hurt by the retaliatory tariffs in the trade war a $12 billion bailout.

But it all sounds a little like Trump’s dubious victory declaration after a NATO summit in Brussels earlier this month. Before exiting the summit, Trump called a news conference and claimed that NATO allies had given in to his demand that they increase their spending on the common defense. “They have substantially upped their commitment, and now we’re very happy and have a very, very

KLMNO WEEKLY

JIM LO SCALZO/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK

President Trump and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. They agreed on Wednesday to work to avoid further tariffs.

powerful, very, very strong NATO,” he said.

To this day, there’s no concrete reason to believe anything has changed. A communique at the end of NATO described the goal as it had been — 2 percent of each country’s GDP by 2024 — and French President Emmanuel Macron openly disputed that any new agreement had been reached. “The communique is clear,” Macron said. “It reaffirms a commitment to 2 percent in 2024. That is all.”

Even in announcing the supposed breakthrough, Trump didn’t lay out which countries agreed to what — “Some are at 2 percent, others have agreed definitely to go to 2

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. © 2018 The Washington Post / Year 4, No. 42

percent, and some are going back to get the approval, and which they will get to go to 2 percent,” Trump said — and the White House hasn’t substantiated his claim.

From a political standpoint, the strategy makes sense. Diplomacy is complicated and extremely difficult for your average American to understand, as is trade. Trump has also shown he’s not particularly worried about the media and experts parsing his comments and casting doubt on his victories, as long as he can sell them to a base that has stood by Trump through thick and thin and almost always seen his exploits in the best possible light.

If your only goal is to appeal to voters who already mistrust what the media and experts are telling them and you have little regard for specifics, it becomes easier to manufacture crises and then claim you have used them to obtain concessions. As long as the E.U. imports more soybeans, Trump has something specific he can point to as a deliverable from his trade war strategy. And people who want to believe Trump will believe he just stuck it to the E.U. and bent it to his will.

It’s also worth noting that often the belligerent actors on the world stage get what they want — because other countries are wary of poking the bear. Trump has certainly made himself into a bear, feuding with allies and cozying up to strongmen. But even if you can win a series of small victories that way, you only need to fall short once for the “madman strategy” to seriously backfire.

That hasn’t happened yet, which means Trump can keep plausibly claiming victories — no matter how thinly constructed or tentative they are. And that appears to be what he’ll keep doing. n ©The Washington Post

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

4 6 8 10 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Congregants follow along with a projection of a Bible verse during a sermon at the First Baptist Church in Luverne, Ala. Photo by MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON of The Washington Post

SUNDAY, JULY 29, 2018

4

KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS

SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES

The ‘punching bag’ swings back Michael Cohen’s release of recorded exchange reveals his sense of betrayal by Trump

BY P HILIP R UCKER, C AROL D . L EONNIG, T OM H AMBURGER AND A SHLEY P ARKER

F

or the past decade, Michael Cohen worked as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer. He was an eager supplicant, executing the wishes of his celebrity boss and forever seeking his attaboy affection. He said he would take a bullet for Trump, and, even after the president passed him over for a White House job, Cohen still professed his eternal loyalty.

But in Trump’s world, eternity has limits.

By releasing audio of his covertly recorded conversation with Trump about purchasing the rights to a Playboy centerfold’s story of an extramarital affair, Cohen made a decisive break from his longtime client. The move punctuates the steady deterioration of a relationship between Cohen and Trump and raises concerns in the White House that the former could spill secrets about the latter to the FBI. In the nearly four months since FBI agents raided his office, home and hotel room, Cohen has felt wounded and abandoned by Trump, waiting for calls or even a signal of support that never came.

Cohen got frustrated when Trump started talking about him in the past tense, panicked last month when he thought the president no longer cared about his plight, and became furious when Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani contradicted some of his accounts, according to his associates.

In Cohen’s gravest hour, as one associate described it, Trump was “leaving him out in the wilderness.”

The result is open warfare between attorney and former client.

Cohen has chosen to morph from Trump’s pugnacious defender to a truth-teller without regard for any possible political or legal ramifications for the president, according

Michael Cohen released audio from 2016 of a talk between him and President Trump discussing paying for a story about an alleged affair, after months of Trump and his advisers claiming ignorance.

to Lanny Davis, one of Cohen’s attorneys.

“He had to hit a reset button,” Davis said in an interview. “He had to say he respected the FBI. He had to say he believed the intelligence agencies that Russia meddled in the election. He had to describe the Trump Tower meeting as extremely poor judgment at best.

And, ultimately, he said, ‘I’m not going to be a punching bag anymore,’ which he had been when he said, ‘I’ll take a bullet.’”

Cohen’s actions appear to be driven more by his outrage over the president’s indifference and feelings of betrayal — coupled with the personal and financial

SUNDAY, JULY 29, 2018

5

POLITICS weight of the criminal case being assembled by federal prosecutors — than by a legal strategy to help his case.

Tuesday’s public release of the Trump-Cohen audio came as a surprise to prosecutors handling the Cohen case in the Southern District of New York, according to people familiar with the matter.

Current and former law enforcement officials questioned why Cohen — someone seen as angling for a plea deal — would choose to make potential evidence public.

That kind of maneuver generally angers investigators and can make it harder to cut a deal, these officials said.

As part of their inquiry into campaign finance issues involving Cohen, federal investigators have recently expressed interest in what Cohen’s interactions with the Trump campaign were, including his role in handling the accusations of sexual impropriety from various women. They also are trying to discern if anyone other than Cohen had prior knowledge about two such women, Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, before they were named in news inquiries and reports.

In their search warrant, federal investigators asked Cohen to turn over any communications the two men or campaign aides had about a 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape that captured Trump boasting about grabbing women’s body parts, according to a person familiar with the investigation.

Inside the White House, Trump raged about the release of his and Cohen’s September 2016 conversation about financing the deal with McDougal, a former Playboy model, to sell the rights to her story of an alleged 10-month affair with Trump to American Media Inc., the owner of the National Enquirer, which never published her account.

The president is angry that his personal attorney was recording him without his knowledge, though he had known before this week that the audio file existed, according to people familiar with his thinking.

“What kind of lawyer would tape a client?” Trump tweeted Wednesday morning. “So sad!”

The government has seized more than 100 recordings that Cohen made of his talks with people discussing matters that could relate to Trump and his businesses

JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS

and with Trump himself talking, according to two people familiar with the recordings. Cohen appeared to make some recordings with an iPhone — without telling anyone he was taping them.

A significant portion of the recordings is Cohen surreptitiously recording reporters who met with or questioned Cohen about Trump during the campaign and after Trump’s election, the people said.

Trump’s voice is on several of the recordings, but only in snippets — typically when he is returning a call from Cohen or asking Cohen on a voice-mail message to call him back, the people said. The only recording in which Trump and Cohen have a substantive conversation is the one that Davis released Tuesday, according to these people.

“Michael Cohen had the habit of using his phone to record conversations instead of taking notes,” Davis said. “He never intended to make use of the recordings and certainly didn’t intend to be deceptive.”

Trump’s advisers are privately debating whether they need to seek a ruling from the court overseeing these recordings on Cohen’s indiscriminate release of material or whether they should release tapes that they describe as unflattering to Cohen, according to two Trump allies.

Trump has been asking outside advisers about Cohen’s business interests and work outside Trump Tower. The president views Cohen

as a turncoat who profited off his association with Trump, associates said. One of them described Trump’s attitude as: “Who is this guy to betray me? He would be nobody were it not for his relationship with me.”

Within Trump’s political orbit, the uncertainty about what other damaging information Cohen may possess — and if he plans to weaponize it against the president, as now seems possible if not likely — has allies worried.

Some Trump loyalists believe Cohen betrayed the president by hiring Davis, a fiercely partisan Democrat who for decades has been a friend and adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Early Wednesday, Trump aides and allies exchanged grousing text messages about the Cohen-Davis relationship, while hosts of “Fox and Friends,” the pro-Trump morning show on Fox News Channel, voiced sharp criticisms of Cohen on their broadcast.

“We all think he’s being used by Lanny, who has a vendetta,” said former Trump adviser Sam Nunberg, who worked with Cohen for years.

Davis said Cohen feels isolated and is “suffering” and “sees himself as alone against the president of the United States, Rudy Giuliani and the whole administration.”

Cohen’s feud with Trump could make him an unlikely hero of the resistance movement. Davis recalled walking through New York’s Pennsylvania Station on

Donald Trump and Michael Cohen attend a campaign event in Ohio in 2016. Cohen, who once said he would “take a bullet” for his longtime client, felt abandoned after April’s FBI raid, his associates said.

KLMNO WEEKLY

Wednesday following his interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America” and people slapped him on the back and said, “Please tell Michael Cohen, ‘Thank you for telling the truth.’ All of a sudden, millions of people have invested their hopes in Michael Cohen.”

Some have argued Cohen has been seeking a back-channel commitment from Trump that he would pardon him if he faced criminal charges. But Davis has said in media interviews that his client is not seeking a pardon, and Giuliani told The Washington Post on Tuesday night that discussing a pardon would be “extremely inappropriate at this point.”

During his decade in Trump’s employ — first as a lawyer for the Trump Organization and then as his personal attorney — Cohen professed and displayed his fealty.

This is in part because of the nature of his work for Trump, which was not of the typical legal counselor. Cohen described his approach as akin to that of Ray Donovan, the fictional fixer in the Showtime series of that name who makes the problems of Hollywood stars disappear.

But the respect and allegiance was not always mutual, according to Tim O’Brien, author of the biography “TrumpNation.”

“He always treated Michael like a lap dog, as somebody who would perform tasks for him, but not someone he considered a peer or ever really treated with professional respect,” O’Brien said.

Cohen’s loyalty to Trump began to fray in recent months as he felt neglected by his longtime patron.

Last week, Cohen invited the Rev. Al Sharpton, a civil rights advocate who has been at loggerheads with Trump, to meet for breakfast at the Regency Hotel, where Cohen has been staying.

Cohen chose a table in the middle of the see-and-be-seen restaurant, Sharpton recalled.

“He’s totally turned on him,” Sharpton said. “It was clear to me in our conversation that Michael felt betrayed. He kept saying, ‘I’m going to do what’s right for my country.’ He clearly wanted me to know he was not Team Trump anymore.”

Sharpton added, “He was hurt, and the hurt has turned into bitterness. He said, ‘Look at what I’m going through. Why me? Nobody is helping me.’” n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, JULY 29, 2018

6

KLMNO WEEKLY

NATION

NASA’s space telescope is grounded

BY S ARAH K APLAN AND J OEL A CHENBACH

N

ASA’s James Webb Space Telescope was supposed to be a million miles from Earth by now. But its launch is still years and billions of dollars away, and mission success depends on many delicate things going exactly right. The telescope unfortunately has some screws loose.

And washers. And nuts.

Technicians discovered that rogue screws fell off during a test this spring. This was among several forehead-smacking errors and design flaws that have put off until March 2021 the launch of the telescope, which has so far cost taxpayers about $7.4 billion and now has an estimated price tag of $9.7 billion.

The travails of the Webb will be the focus of two days of testimony, starting Wednesday, before the House Science Committee.

Among those appearing and certain to face difficult questions will be NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and Wes Bush, the chief executive of the primary contractor, Northrop Grumman.

The Webb’s problems have rattled many powerful constituencies. NASA is embarrassed and dismayed by the human errors that have snarled its biggest robotic science project, which was identified by the astronomy community back in 2000 as its top priority.

The U.S. aerospace industry, which is dealing with a wave of retirements, needs to prove to national leaders that it remains as competent as when it put people on the moon. The same companies that build civilian space telescopes also build spy satellites.

Earlier this year, a classified Defense Department satellite codenamed Zuma was lost after it failed to separate from a rocket booster. That satellite was built by Northrop Grumman.

An independent review board report this summer declared that the Webb is potentially vulnerable to 344 different “single-point-failures” — an extraordinary number

ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES

Screwy errors put newest eye on the stars nearly 15 years and billions of dollars behind for any mission. If a single metal strut fails, or a single cable gets snagged, “we have a ten-billiondollar paperweight sitting out there,” said astrophysicist Grant Tremblay of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Unlike the Hubble Space Telescope, the Webb cannot be repaired in space. It will be placed more than four times farther from Earth than the moon.

Many young scientists have been counting on the Webb for research essential to advancing their careers. But they also understand that it has to be done right.

NASA is reviewing its science programs, Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s top science official, told The Washington Post.

“How prevalent are human errors?” Zurbuchen said. “How many more mistakes are there?”

Thomas Young, a former NASA official who chaired the review board, is adamant that the project

should go forward, but with greater care: “There’s got to be an allout effort to try to find any additional embedded problems.”

Northrop Grumman, one of the U.S. government’s largest contractors, has expressed confidence that it can present NASA with an operational telescope.

“Mission success is the cornerstone of everything we do. Getting it right is the most important thing,” said Scott Willoughby, program manager for the Webb telescope at Northrop Grumman.

The Webb is designed to see the oldest light in the universe. It can also detect the atmospheres of planets beyond our own solar system and look for the chemical signatures of life, such as an abundance of oxygen.

In doing this, the Webb will probe two of the most fundamental questions: Where did we come from? And are we alone?

The telescope’s 6.5-meter-wide, segmented mirror needs to be

Engineers and technicians assemble part of NASA’s long overdue James Webb Space Telescope in 2016 at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

kept cold so that it can observe infrared light. It needs to be kept in the shade by a sun shield, roughly the size of a tennis court, that must unfurl in space.

Many of the Webb’s components had to be invented from scratch — the vast segmented main mirror, the origami-like sun shield, the cryocooler that keeps the ultrasensitive instruments just a few degrees above absolute zero, the array of thousands of microshutters, each thinner than the width of a human hair, that will open and close to allow light from targeted objects to reach the telescope’s sensors.

The telescope and its instruments sailed through testing at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and then at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, before being flown to Northrop Grumman in Redondo Beach. That’s where the telescope will be mated with the sun shield and the subsystems that provide propulsion, electricity and other functions, and are collectively known as the spacecraft bus.

In April, Northrop Grumman put the sun shield through a shake test, simulating vibrations twice as intense as expected during launch. When the test was over, technicians counted 20 screws loose out of 1,000 of them that are needed to batten down a thin material covering the sun shield.

These screws, half the width of a dime, are designed to fit into a locking nut. But the end of the screws could potentially scratch or tear the sun shield covering.

Somewhere in the process, technicians had decided to add a washer to keep the screws from protruding so far. They did not realize this could impede the locking function, and some screws came up a thread short.

In another error, the wrong solvent was used in cleaning thrusters. And the wrong kind of wiring led to excessive voltage. Those three errors — the screws, the solvent, the wiring — set the project back 11/2 years and about $600 million, the review board concluded.

The Webb traces its origins to

SUNDAY, JULY 29, 2018

7

NATION 1993, when a panel of astronomers proposed that NASA build an infrared space telescope with a mirror four meters (about 13 feet) in diameter, at an initial estimated price tag of $500 million. But then-NASA Administrator Dan Goldin pushed for something more audacious.

“Why do you ask for such a modest thing? Why not go after six or seven meters?” Goldin said in a speech to astronomers in San Antonio in 1996.

NASA settled on the 6.5 meters at an estimated price tag of $4 billion. The launch date slipped from 2007 to 2011, and then to 2013.

“At every meeting the goal posts were shifting,” said planetary astronomer Heidi Hammel, who plans to use the Webb for her research. “You could see the costs weren’t being handled properly.”

The telescope’s costs began to cut into funding for other NASA astronomy projects. An article in the journal Nature dubbed the Webb “the telescope that ate astronomy.” The Webb program has cost more than a half-billion dollars every year since 2011.

In 2010 an independent review chaired by John Casani, a veteran project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said that “lack of effective oversight” by NASA “resulted in a project that was simply not executable.”

The following summer, the House Appropriations Committee recommended canceling the mission entirely.

“That’s when we had to take a cold hard look and ask ourselves, is this worth going to the mat for scientifically?” Hammel said.

“And the answer is ‘yeah.’ It was worth it.”

The Webb had powerful political support from then-Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.). The launch date was set for 2018, then reset several times to the 2021 goal.

Congress must now reauthorize the Webb, which is on the verge of breaching an $8 billion cost cap imposed in 2011. The current estimate of $9.7 billion includes the future costs of operations and data analysis. So far, there is no sign that lawmakers could try to pull the plug on the telescope.

“This is a mission at the very edge of what’s possible,” NASA’s Zurbuchen said. n ©The Washington Post

KLMNO WEEKLY

As driverless car crashes mount, fears of riding grow BY

A SHLEY H ALSEY III

A

mericans have been shaken by crashes of driverless cars and their semiautonomous counterparts, two recent surveys show, and consumer groups are pushing back against what they say is a flawed effort in Congress to regulate the vehicles.

They have insisted that the Senate put regulatory teeth into a bill they think will be tacked onto a must-pass reauthorization bill to fund the Federal Aviation Administration. A coalition of consumer and safety groups stepped in this week to oppose the bill, suggesting it be sent back to committee to add stricter regulations for the emerging technology.

Two public opinion surveys released this past week underscored the growing trepidation over the advent of driverless cars. A Brookings Institution online survey found that 61 percent of Americans said they were not inclined to ride in self-driving cars. A poll done by the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety found that 69 percent of those surveyed said they’re concerned about sharing the road with autonomous cars.

In addition to the survey responses, concerns over driverless vehicles have echoed in other places: the infrastructure think tank HNTB found in a poll last month that 70 percent of people expect autonomous vehicles to arrive within the next 15 years — but 59 percent said they would be no safer than cars with human drivers.

These findings come despite the often-cited figure that 94 percent of car crashes are caused by human error and the fact that most traffic fatalities in 2016 were caused by three factors that fully autonomous cars might eliminate: distracted driving, drunken driving and speeding.

Automakers and technology companies are painfully aware that a crash of a driverless car receives extraordinary media attention, even if the autonomous

DAVID PAUL MORRIS/BLOOMBERG NEWS

A General Motors Cruise autonomous test vehicle is parked at a charging station in San Francisco on July 2.

vehicle is not at fault. When a truck backed into a self-driving bus that was stuck in traffic in Las Vegas in November, a headline said, “Las Vegas’ self-driving bus crashes in first hour of service.”

A spokesman for the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation said it remains uncertain as to whether what is known as the AV Start Act will be appended to the FAA reauthorization bill next week.

The Commerce Committee approved the bill by a voice vote last year, but it has yet to receive a vote on the Senate floor. That led Thune to consider attaching it to the must-pass FAA reauthorization bill.

The automakers and tech companies developing driverless cars feared that premature regulatory requirements might inhibit their testing of the vehicles, but Congress felt a need to step in as more test cars populate highways.

The bipartisan bill — heavily amended by both parties — allows NHTSA to grant some manufacturers exemptions from federal safety standards. It also clarifies a fine point born from the fact that traditionally, states have licensed drivers and vehicles, while the federal government has been respon-

sible for automotive safety standards and recalls. In a world where there would be no “drivers” of what are called level 3 to level 5 vehicles, the bill says federal regulators would govern most aspects of driving.

A Waymo test vehicle with a human at the wheel crashed in Tempe, Ariz., in May when another motorist swerved into it. A second Waymo vehicle that was not in autonomous mode was in a fivecar crash last month in nearby Mesa. When Tesla’s vehicles in driver-assist mode have crashed, the technology has been confused with fully autonomous cars.

Among the requirements the consumer advocacy groups want added to the bill and stipulated by federal regulations are full disclosure of crashes to NHTSA and the use of event-data recorders like those found in commercial aircraft. They also want requirements for testing of what each vehicle’s computer can “see,” a mandate that makers of fully autonomous cars could not remove steering wheels or brake pedals without federal approval, and permission for states to regulate driverless cars until federal laws are passed to preempt them. n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, JULY 29, 2018

8

KLMNO WEEKLY

WORLD

In India, a class kids won’t stress over V IDHI D OSHI in New Delhi BY

A

fter the summer break, Delhi’s children returned to school this month and found a new class added to their schedules: happiness.

It wasn’t a welcome-back joke. In a country where top universities demand average test scores above 98 percent and where cheating on high school final exams is organized by a “mafia” that includes teachers and school officials, the Delhi government’s initiative marks a shift of emphasis from student performance to well-being.

“We have given best-of-the-best talent to the world,” Manish Sisodia, Delhi’s education minister, told a stadium full of Delhi teachers attending the launch of the happiness curriculum. “We have given best-of-the-best professionals to industry. We have been successful so far. But have we been able to deliver best-of-the-best human beings to society, to the nation?”

Sisodia’s happiness classes represent a radical experiment in a country known for its rigid, bookish education system, which has helped cement a new middle class over the past three decades but is also criticized for encouraging rote learning and triggering high stress levels. Many blame it for a rash of student suicides.

The son of a schoolteacher, the minister is known for his unorthodox policies, including promoting public over private education. His Aam Aadmi Party — founded in the aftermath of a grass-roots anticorruption movement in 2011 — has ramped up spending on Delhi’s government schools. Education accounts for 26 percent of the city’s 2018 budget, allowing educators to push a raft of new ideas, such as special classes for children who are falling behind and parentteacher meetings.

The changes have paid off — Delhi’s public schools have outperformed private schools on standardized exams in recent years, although one expert said that the overall numbers are skewed because private school students tend to choose more-difficult subjects.

MANSI MIDHA FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

A nation obsessed with test scores experiments with ‘happiness’ courses in school curriculums The happiness classes, Sisodia said, are part of that larger effort.

Under the program, 100,000 Delhi students spend the first half-hour of each day without opening a book, learning instead through inspirational stories and activities, as well as meditation exercises.

Children appeared enthusiastic when schools reopened this month . “We should work happily,” said 11-year-old Aayush Jha, a seventh-grader fresh out of his first happiness class at the Government Co-Ed Senior Secondary School in Chilla Village, in east Delhi. “When you work sadly, your work will not be good.”

Math teacher Sonu Gupta told his class of eighth-graders about what physicist Stephen Hawking had achieved despite his neurodegenerative disease. Upstairs, Santosh Bhatnagar, who teaches Sanskrit, told a class of seventh-graders to close their eyes and imagine doing something that made them happy.

The students asked questions and nodded along. “I learned that you should learn to have faith in yourself and that those who try never fail,” said Dipanshu Kumar, a 12-year-old in Gupta’s class.

Some teachers, though, remain unconvinced. For one thing, they say, the public schools are too crowded for a curriculum based so heavily on classroom interaction.

“If we have 80 students in our class, how can we keep track of every kid in just 35 minutes?” said Bharti Dabas, who teaches English in a government school.

Others doubt that the happiness classes can change the culturally entrenched emphasis on exams and memorization. Geeta Gandhi Kingdon, chair of education, economics and international development at University College London, who also teaches at a private school in Lucknow, India, said that there haven’t been any studies to assess their workability.

A class of 59 students at a public senior secondary school in Delhi take part in a happiness class that includes a mix of yoga, music and ethics.

“Anecdotally, I know in some schools they are just another boxticking exercise,” she said. “Teachers have not really bought into it.”

Sisodia’s initiative comes after nearly three decades of rapid industrialization in India. To meet the demand for skilled labor in the country’s profitable new industries, successive governments churned out high school and university graduates — but allowed standards to fall. Some states made exams easier and marked them leniently so students could boast of high grades to universities. In 2009, a previous national government introduced a no-fail policy through the Right to Education Act, which led to classrooms full of teenagers advancing through school without being able to read or write.

Now many, including Sisodia, are asking whether the focus on employability has stifled creativity and stymied social progress.

“If a person is going through our education system for 18 years of his life and is becoming an engineer or a civil servant, but is still throwing litter on the ground or engaging in corruption, then can we really say that the education system is working?” he asked one recent morning at his home.

Sisodia’s enthusiasm for happiness classes is inspired by India’s tiny, cheerier next-door neighbor, Bhutan, which in the early 1970s pioneered a new index — “gross national happiness” — to measure its development, as an alternative to the widely used gross domestic product indicator.

In 2009, Bhutan introduced a “happiness-infused” curriculum, which caught the attention of policymakers and government ministers at a time when the world was reeling from the financial crisis and reexamining the values of modern capitalism, said Alejandro Adler, director of international education at the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center.

Since then, at least 12 countries, including Peru and Mexico, have experimented with similar classes in schools. n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, JULY 29, 2018

9

WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

How Europe’s migrant tide turned C HICO H ARLAN in Rome BY

M

igration patterns in the central Mediterranean have hit a chaotic point of flux, with fewer migrants making it to Europe.

Until recently, the primary path taken to Europe looked something like this: Traffickers launched migrants from the Libyan coast.

When the flimsy boats ran into trouble — and they inevitably did — the migrants were typically rescued by humanitarian groups or

by European Union or Italian patrol boats. Then, with scant debate, they were taken to Italy. The route had plenty of dangers — the central Mediterranean has long been the deadliest area on the planet for migrants. And sometimes the journey was thwarted by Libya’s coast guard. But the vast majority who started from Libya made it to Europe. Between 2015 and 2017, according to United Nations data analyzed by The Washington Post, about 95 percent of migrants taking the so-called central Mediterranean route ended up on this continent’s shores.

Last month, however, the success rate was 45 percent — the lowest of any month in at least four years. A large proportion of migrants were intercepted and returned to North Africa. But deaths have spiked. According to the International Organization for Migration, 564 people died in June — or more than 7 percent of those who attempted the crossing. That is the highest percentage in any month since at least 2015. For the year, 3.4 percent have died attempting the journey, compared with 2.1 percent last year.

What’s behind the recent shifts?

It’s become harder to evade the Libyan coast guard Many migrants don’t make it because they don’t make it past the fleet of Libyan patrol vessels. The coast guard, rebuilt with E.U. and Italian funding, has become the most important player in the Mediterranean. Though the unit has been patrolling its coastal waters for more than a year and a half, data suggests it is becoming far

MAHMUD TURKIA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Libya’s coast guard is more active, Italy is more resistant, and fewer rescue ships are on patrol more proficient at its job: intercepting migrants, placing them in detention on Libyan shores and keeping them from Europe.

In 2017, the coast guard managed to catch about 1 in 9 migrants attempting the journey. This year, it is intercepting almost 2 in 5. In June, it intercepted 47 percent.

Libya’s cooperation is a key reason migration has fallen precipitously from its peak in 2015, a year when more than a million reached Europe by sea. So far this year, the number of sea arrivals is at 52,000.

TOP: Migrants rescued by the Libyan coast guard are returned to Tripoli on June 21.

Italy has refused to be the default destination Despite Europe’s willingness to outsource patrols, Libya doesn’t meet international maritime standards for safe ports. And so other vessels — humanitarian, commercial or from the Italian coast guard — that pick up migrants in distress are obligated to take them elsewhere. Usually, that has been Italy.

But since a populist government came to power two months ago, Italy has resisted. Interior Minister Matteo Salvini — leader of the far-right League party — announced in early June that he was closing ports to humanitarian rescue ships. He has temporarily held up European and Italian coast guard vessels, as well.

In several instances, Italy has forced ad hoc negotiations among European countries over where to send rescued migrants.

Salvini recently suggested that Libya should be recategorized as a safe port — a change that would, in theory, allow European boats to return migrants to Libya.

Meanwhile, data suggests that a new pathway to Europe — in the western Mediterranean, not the central — is widening. It’s unclear if the shift is a direct response by traffickers or migrants to the chaos. But last month, Spain for the first time became the busiest European arrival spot for migrants coming by sea.

Fewer humanitarian rescue boats are patrolling Experts aren’t certain why there have been a greater number of deaths. There weren’t any mega-accidents in June.

One partial explanation could be that there are far fewer humanitarian rescue boats patrolling the area, after a spate of nongovernmental organizations stopped or paused their work, either for legal reasons or because of safety concerns after tense run-ins with Libyan patrollers. Only one NGO, Barcelonabased Proactiva Open Arms, has been operating in recent weeks.

When Proactiva set off on its latest mission, Salvini said that the crew would only see Italy “in a postcard.”

“It’s not easy to say” why the death rate has increased, said Federico Fossi, with the U.N. refugee agency’s Rome office. “Now there are very few NGOs. That has a big impact. There is a limited capacity in the Mediterranean.”

He added, “It is a very rapidly changing environment. It’s quite chaotic. The Libyan coast guard is not yet ready to be the only actor that is out there.” n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, JULY 29, 2018

10

Congregants leave the First Baptist Church in Luverne, Ala., after a Sunday service.

COVER STORY

The Seventh Commandment A town reconciles the Bible’s moral teachings with its support for President Trump STEPHANIE MCCRUMMEN in Luverne, Ala. BY

MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

SUNDAY, JULY 29, 2018

12

KLMNO WEEKLY

COVER STORY

C

lay Crum opened his Bible to Exodus Chapter 20 and read Verse 14 one more time.

“Thou shalt not commit adultery,” it said.

He prayed about what he was going to do. He was the pastor of First Baptist Church in the town of Luverne, Ala., which meant he was the moral leader of a congregation that overwhelmingly supported a president who was an alleged adulterer. For the past six weeks, Crum had been preaching a series of sermons on the Ten Commandments, and now it was time for number seven.

It was summer, and all over the Bible Belt, support for President Trump was rising among voters who had traditionally proclaimed the importance of Christian character in leaders and warned of the slippery slope of moral compromise. In Crenshaw County, where Luverne is located, Trump had won 72 percent of the vote. Recent national polls showed the president’s approval among white evangelical Christians at a high of 77 percent.

One survey indicated that his support among Southern Baptists was even higher, surpassing 80 percent, and these were the people arriving on Sunday morning to hear what their pastor had to say.

By 10:30 a.m., the street alongside First Baptist was full of slantparked cars, and the 80 percenters were walking across the green lawn in the sun, up the stairs, past the four freshly painted white columns and into the church.

“Good to see you this morning,” Crum said, shaking hands as the regulars took their usual places in the wooden pews, and soon, he walked up to the pulpit and opened his King James.

“Today we’re going to be looking at the Seventh Commandment,” Crum began. “Exodus 20:14, the Seventh Commandment, simply says, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’ ” The people settled in. There was the sound of hard candy unwrapping and thin pages of Bibles turning.

T

he presidency of Donald Trump has created unavoidable moral dilemmas not just for the members of First Baptist in Luverne but for a distinct subset of Christians who are overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly evangelical and more uniformly pro-Trump than any other

MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

Clay Crum, the church’s pastor, delivers a sermon.

He felt called to create a weekly series based on each of the Ten Commandments.

part of the American electorate.

In poll after poll, they have said that Trump has kept his promises to appoint conservative Supreme Court justices, fight for religious liberty, adopt pro-life policies and deliver on other issues that are high priorities for them.

At the same time, many have acknowledged the awkwardness of being both self-proclaimed followers of Jesus and the No. 1 champions of a president whose character has been defined not just by alleged infidelity but accusations of sexual harassment, advancing conspiracy theories popular with white supremacists, using language that swaths of Americans find racist, routinely spreading falsehoods, and an array of casual cruelties and immoderate behaviors that amount to a roll call of the seven deadly sins.

The predicament has led to all kinds of reactions within the evangelical community, from a gathering of pastors in Illinois described as a “call to self-reflection,” to prayer meetings with Trump in Washington, to hours of cable news reckoning in which Southern Baptists have taken the lead.

The megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress has declared that Trump is “on the right side of God” and that “evangelicals know they are not compromising their beliefs in order to support this great president.”

Franklin Graham, son of the evangelist Billy Graham, said the only explanation for Trump being in the White House was that “God put him there.”

A few leaders have publicly dis-

sented from such views, aware of the Southern Baptist history of whiffing on the big moral questions of the day — such as during the civil rights era, when most pastors either defended segregation or remained silent. The president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s ethics commission, Russell Moore, asked whether Christians were “really ready to trade unity with our black and brown brothers and sisters for this angry politician?” One prominent black pastor, Lawrence Ware, left the denomination altogether, writing that the widespread reluctance to criticize Trump on racial issues revealed a “deep commitment to white supremacy.” The new president of the Southern Baptist Convention, J.D. Greear, said church culture had “grown too comfortable with power and the dangers that power brings.”

But all those discussions were taking place far from the rank and file. The Southern Baptists who filled the pews every Sunday were making their own moral calculations about Trump in the privacy of a thousand church sanctuaries in cities and towns such as Luverne, population 2,700, an hour south of the state capital of Montgomery.

It was a place where it was hard to drive a mile in any direction without passing some church or sign about the wages of sin, where conversations about politics happened in nodding circles before Sunday school or at the Chicken Shack after, and few people paid attention to some national Southern Baptist leader.

What mattered in Luverne was the redbrick church with the tall white steeple that hovered over the tidy green lawns and gardens of town. First Baptist was situated along Luverne’s main street, next to the post office and across from the county courthouse, a civic position that had always conferred on its pastors a moral authority now vested in Clay Crum.

“A fine Christian man,” was how the mayor referred to him.

“He just makes everybody feel like he loves ’em,” said a member of First Baptist.

And the members of First Baptist loved their pastor back. They had hired him in July 2015, a month after Trump began campaigning for president and courting evangelicals by declaring that Christianity is “under siege” and “the Bible is the best.” A church committee had sifted through dozens of résumés from Florida and Missouri and as far away as Michigan, and out of all of them they had picked Crum, a former truck driver from right down the road in Georgiana.

“As Southern Baptists in this small town, we want our leader to believe like we do,” said Terry Drew, who had chaired the search committee, and three years later, Crum was meeting their highest expectations of what a good Southern Baptist pastor should be.

He kept up with the prayer list.

He did all his visits, the nursing homes and the shut-ins. He wore a lapel pin in the shape of two tiny baby feet as a reminder of what he saw as the pure evil of abortion. And when Sunday morning came, he delivered his sermons straight out of an open Bible, no notes, and it wasn’t unusual for him to cry.

“He is just really sincere,” said Jewell Killough, who had been a member of First Baptist for four decades, and as Crum stood at the front of the congregation now and looked out, hers was one of the faces looking back.

S

he always sat in the center row, fifth pew from the front, right in line with the pulpit. Jewell Killough was 82, and as Crum had gone through the first six commandments Sunday after Sunday, she had not yet heard anything to dissuade her from believing that Trump was being used by God to save America.

“Oh, I feel like the Lord heard our prayers and gave us a second chance before the end times,” she

SUNDAY, JULY 29, 2018

13

COVER STORY had said a few days before, when she was working at the food pantry of the Alabama Crenshaw Baptist Association.

It was a low-brick house where the Baptists kept stacks of pamphlets about abstaining from premarital sex, alcohol, smoking and other behaviors they felt corrupted Christian character, which was not something Jewell worried about with Trump.

“I think they are trying to frame him,” she said, referring to the unflattering stories about the president.

By “they,” she meant liberals and others she believed were not only trying to undermine Trump’s agenda, but God’s agenda for America, which she believed was engaged in a great spiritual contest between good and evil, God and Satan, the saved and the unsaved, for whom God had prepared two places.

There was Heaven: “Most say it’s gonna be 15,000 miles wide and that high,” Jewell said. “We don’t know whether when it comes down how far it will come, if it’s gonna come all the way or if there will be stairs. We don’t know that. But it’s gonna be suitable to each person. You know that old song, ‘Lord, build me a cabin in the corner of Gloryland?’ See, that’s not right. It’s not gonna be you have a cabin over here and I have one over there. It’s gonna be suitable to each person. So, whatever makes me happy. I like birds. So outside my window, there will be birds.”

And there was Hell: “Each person is gonna be on an islandlike place, and fire all around it. And they’re gonna be in complete darkness, and over time, your eyes will go. And worms’ll eat on you. It’s a terrible place, the way the Bible describes it.”

It was a binary world, not just for Jewell Killough but for everyone sitting inside the sanctuary of First Baptist Church, who prayed all the time about how to navigate it.

There were Brett and Misty Green, who sat a few rows behind Jewell, and said that besides reading the Bible or listening to Pastor Crum, prayer was the only way to sort out what was godly and what was satanic.

“Satan is the master magician,” said Misty, 32, a federal court worker.

“The father of lies,” said Brett, 33, a land surveyor, who was sitting with his wife and his Bible one evening in the church’s fellowship hall, a large beige room with accor-

MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

dion partitions that separated the men’s and ladies’ Sunday school classes.

“That’s why we have the Holy Spirit,” Brett said, explaining it was “like a gut feeling” that told him what to do in morally confusing situations, which had included the election, when the spirit had told him to vote for Trump, even though something the president allegedly said since then had given Brett pause. It was when Trump was discussing immigration, and reportedly asked, “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries coming here?”

“Jesus Christ was born in Nazareth, and Nazareth was a shithole at that time,” Brett said. “Someone might say, ‘How could anything good come out of a place like that?’

Well, Jesus came out of a place like that.”

Other things bothered Misty.

Crum had preached a few Sundays before about the Third Commandment — “Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain” — but as Misty saw it, Trump belittled God and all of God’s creation when he called people names like “loser” and “stupid.”

“A lot of his actions I don’t agree with,” Misty said. “But we are not to judge.”

What a good Christian was supposed to do was pray for God to work on Trump, who was after all pro-life, and pro-Israel, and pro-all the positions they felt a Christian nation should be taking. And if they were somehow wrong about Trump, said Misty, “in the end it

doesn’t really matter.”

“A true Christian doesn’t have to worry about that,” said Brett, explaining what any good Southern Baptist heard at church every Sunday, which was that Jesus had died on the cross to wash away their sins, defeat death and provide them with eternal life in heaven.

“I think about it all the time, what it’s gonna be like,” she said.

“I know we’ll have new bodies,” said Brett. “We’ll be like Christ, it says.”

There was Jack Jones, who sat behind the pulpit in the choir, and was chairman of the deacons, the church leaders who tried to set a Christian example by mowing lawns for the homebound, building front door ramps for the elderly and maintaining standards in their own ranks.

“We stick strictly to the Bible that a divorced man is not able to be a deacon,” said Jack, who said it was uncomfortable being such a Bible stickler and supporting a president alleged to have committed adultery with a porn star.

“It’s difficult, that’s for sure,” he said, sitting with his wife in the church basement.

The way he and Linda had come to think of it, Trump was no worse than a long list of other American presidents from the Founding Fathers on.

“George Washington had a mistress,” Linda said. “Thomas Jefferson did, too. Roosevelt had a mistress with him when he died. Eisenhower. Kennedy.”

“None of ’em are lily white,”

Signs with religious and political themes are common sights on back roads near Luverne. In this case, a Trump supporter makes a reference to defeated presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

KLMNO WEEKLY

said Jack.

What was important was not the character of the president but his positions, they said, and one mattered more than all the others.

“Abortion,” said Linda, whose eyes teared up when she talked about it.

Trump was against it. It didn’t matter that two decades ago he had declared himself to be “very prochoice.” He was now saying “every life totally matters,” appointing antiabortion judges and adopting so many antiabortion policies that one group called him “the most pro-life president in history.”

It was the one political issue on which First Baptist had taken a stand, a sin one member described as “straight from the pits of Hell,” and which Crum had called out when he preached on “Thou shalt not kill” the Sunday before, reminding the congregation about the meaning of his tiny lapel pin.

“It’s the size of a baby’s feet at 10 weeks,” he had said.

There was Terry Drew, who sat in the seventh pew on the left side, who knew and agreed with Trump’s position, and knew that supporting him involved a blatant moral compromise.

“I hate it,” he said. “My wife and I talk about it all the time. We rationalize the immoral things away. We don’t like it, but we look at the alternative and think it could be worse than this.”

The only way to understand how a Christian like him could support a man who boasted about grabbing women’s crotches, Terry said, was to understand how he felt about the person Trump was still constantly bringing up in his speeches and who loomed large in Terry’s thoughts: Hillary Clinton, whom Terry saw as “sinister” and “evil” and “I’d say, of Satan.”

“She hates me,” Terry said, sitting in Crum’s office one day. “She has contempt for people like me, and Clay, and people who love God and believe in the Second Amendment.

I think if she had her way it would be a dangerous country for the likes of me.”

As he saw it, there was the issue of Trump’s character, and there was the issue of Terry’s own extinction, and the choice was clear.

“He’s going to stick to me,” Terry said.

So many members of First Baptist saw it that way.

There was Jan Carter, who sat in the 10th pew center, who said that

SUNDAY, JULY 29, 2018

14

KLMNO WEEKLY

COVER STORY

supporting Trump was the only moral thing to do.

“You can say righteously I do not support him because of his moral character but you are washing your hands of what is happening in this country,” she said, explaining that in her view America was slipping toward “a civil war on our shores.”

There was her friend Suzette, who sat in the fifth pew on the right side, and who said Trump might be abrasive “but we need abrasive right now.”

And there was Sheila Butler, who sat on the sixth pew on the right side, who said “we’re moving toward the annihilation of Christians.”

She was 67, a Sunday school teacher who said this was the only way to understand how Christians like her supported Trump.

“Obama was acting at the behest of the Islamic nation,” she began one afternoon when she was getting her nails done with her friend Linda. She was referring to allegations that President Barack Obama is a Muslim, not a Christian — allegations that are false. “He carried a Koran and it was not for literary purposes. If you look at it, the number of Christians is decreasing, the number of Muslims has grown. We allowed them to come in.”

“Obama woke a sleeping nation,” said Linda.

“He woke a sleeping Christian nation,” Sheila corrected.

Linda nodded. It wasn’t just Muslims that posed a threat, she said, but all kinds of immigrants coming into the country.

“Unpapered people,” Sheila said, adding that she had seen them in the county emergency room and they got treated before her. “And then the Americans are not served.”

Love thy neighbor, she said, meant “love thy American neighbor.”

Welcome the stranger, she said, meant the “legal immigrant stranger.”

“The Bible says, ‘If you do this to the least of these, you do it to me,’ ” Sheila said, quoting Jesus. “But the least of these are Americans, not the ones crossing the border.”

To her, this was a moral threat far greater than any character flaw Trump might have, as was what she called “the racial divide,” which she believed was getting worse. The evidence was all the black people protesting about the police, and all the talk about the legacy of slavery,

PHOTOS BY MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

TOP: Jewell Killough helps run the Alabama Crenshaw Baptist Association’s food pantry. “Oh, I feel like the Lord heard our prayers and gave us a second chance before the end times,” she said of Trump.

ABOVE: Sheila Butler teaches a Sunday school class at the church. “I believe God put him there,” she said of the president. “He put a sinner in there.”

which Sheila never believed was as bad as people said it was. “Slaves were valued,” she said. “They got housing. They got fed. They got medical care.”

She was suspicious of what she saw as the constant agitation of blacks against whites, the taking down of Confederate memorials and the raising of others, such as the new memorial to the victims of lynching, just up the highway in Montgomery.

“I think they are promoting violence,” Sheila said, thinking about the 800 weathered, steel monoliths hanging from a roof to evoke the lynchings, one for each American county where the violence was carried out, including Crenshaw County, where a man named Jesse Thornton was lynched in 1940 in downtown Luverne.

“How do you think a young black man would feel looking at that?”

Linda asked. “Wouldn’t you feel a sickness in your stomach?”

“I think it would only make you have more violent feelings — feelings of revenge,” Sheila said.

It reminded her of a time when she was a girl in Montgomery, when the now-famous civil rights march from Selma was heading to town and her parents, fearing violence, had sent her to the country to stay

with relatives.

“It’s almost like we’re going to live that Rosa Parks time again,” she said, referring to the civil rights activist. “It was just a scary time, having lived through it.”

She thought an all-out race war was now in the realm of possibility.

And that was where she had feared things were heading, right up until election night, when she and Linda and everyone they knew were praying for God to save them. And God sent them Donald Trump.

“I believe God put him there,” Sheila said. “He put a sinner in there.”

God was using Trump just like he had used the Apostle Paul, she said.

“Paul had murdered Christians, and he went on to minister to many, many people,” Sheila said. “I think he’s being molded by God for the role. I think he’s the right man for the right time. It’s about the survival of the Christian nation.”

“We are in mortal danger,” Linda said.

“We are in a religious war,” Sheila said.

Linda nodded.

“We may have to fight and die for our faith,” Sheila said. “I hope it doesn’t come to that, but if it does, we will.”

She rubbed her sore knee, which was caked with an analgesic.

“In heaven, I won’t have any pain,” Sheila said.

“No tears,” said Linda.

“I think it’ll be beautiful — I love plants, and I think it’ll be like walking in a beautiful garden,” said Sheila.

“Have you ever been out at night and looked at the stars?” said Linda.

“That’s the floor of heaven, and heaven is going to be so much more beautiful than the floor.”

“I’m going to be in my kitchen,” Sheila said, imagining heaven would have one. “I think it’s going to be beautiful to see all the appliances.”

It was hard to know what a good Christian should do in the meantime, Sheila said, and that was why Clay Crum was so important. He had been inspiring her with sermons all summer, including the Sunday before Memorial Day, when he had everybody stand up and not only pledge allegiance to the American flag but to the Christian flag and the Bible.

“I see Clay as my leader,” Sheila said. “Clay just knows what we need on any given day.”

H

e had gotten through “Thou shalt not kill” the Sunday before. It was not easy. There were veterans in the congregation.

Crum had to explain how God could command people not to kill in one part of the Bible, yet demand a massacre in another.

“God does not want you to kill on your terms, he wants you to kill on his terms,” he had concluded in his sermon. “So let’s promote Jesus in life. Let’s not kill. Unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

Now he sat in his office, where there was a metal cross on the wall and three Bibles on his desk and prayed about what the Lord wanted him to say.

“Thou shalt not commit adultery,” he read again.

“How can I get people to see the whole picture?” he asked himself.

What was the whole picture?

There had been a time before he became a pastor when Crum saw things differently. He saw the pastor of his childhood church stealing money, and as he got older, he saw deacons having affairs, Christians behaving in hateful ways and finally he came to see it all as a big sham.

“I thought it was very hypocritical,” he said. “That they pretend.

That it’s all a show.”

He gave up on church. He started drinking some and went a little wild, dabbling in world religions and having his own thoughts about the meaning of life until one day when he was listening to Christian radio on a truck haul. He remembered the preacher talking about salvation and suddenly feeling unsure of his own.

“So I just prayed to the Lord while I was driving,” he said. “I want to be sure.”

The next Sunday, he began attending a Southern Baptist church near Luverne, where he was asked one Wednesday night to step in for the absent pastor and deliver a prayer.

He had just gotten off work. His back hurt. His feet hurt. He was exhausted and as he began to pray, something came over him. He started crying and begging God to forgive him for his rebellion, and by the end of it, Clay Crum had found a new profession. He felt God was telling him to go into the ministry, and 10 years later, here he was, the pastor of First Baptist church who had gotten to where he could discern the voice of God all the time.

“It’s not an audible voice,” Crum said. “We all have a million thoughts

SUNDAY, JULY 29, 2018

15

COVER STORY

MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

that come in our head every day. You got to know which are from God.” He was sure that it had been the voice of God that told him to preach on the Ten Commandments. It would be a series on “the seriousness of morality,” Crum decided, because to him, the biggest problem in society was that “people do not want to own the wrong they do.”

“They want to excuse their actions by explaining them away,” he said. “They want to talk generally: ‘I know I’m a sinner.’ Well, what is the sin?”

And it was the same voice of God that had led Crum to vote the same way most of his congregation had voted in one of the most morally confusing elections of his lifetime.

“A crossroads time,” Crum called it.

He did not feel great about voting for Trump, who had called the holy communion wafer “my little cracker,” who had said his “favorite book” was the Bible, that his favorite biblical teaching was “an eye for an eye,” and who had courted evangelical Christians by saying, “I love them.

They love me.”

“It’s a hard thing to reconcile,” Crum said. “I really do struggle with it.”

He knew what the Bible had to say about Trump’s behavior.

“You’re committing adultery, that’s sinful. You’re being sexually abusive to women, that’s wrong.

Any of those things. You can go on and on,” Crum said. “All those things are immoral.”

He thought about whether Trump could do anything that might require the moral leader of Luverne to abandon his support, or criticize the president publicly.

“There are times when Christians have to stand up,” said Crum.

The dilemma was that Trump was an immoral person doing what Crum considered to be moral things. The conservative judges.

The antiabortion policies. And something else even more important to a small Southern Baptist congregation worried about their own annihilation.

“It encouraged them that we do still have some political power in this country,” said Crum.

When he prayed about it, that was what the voice of God had told him. The voice reminded Crum that God always had a hand in elections.

The voice told him that God used all kinds of people to do his will.

“Nebuchadnezzar,” Crum said,

citing the pagan king of Babylon who was advised by godly men to tear down an old corrupt order.

“Even sometimes bad leaders are used by God.” He had wondered at times about the idea that God had chosen Trump, and the opposite, the possibility that God had nothing to do with Trump at all. He wondered about it again now, his Bible bookmarked to the 14th verse of Exodus Chapter 20 for the sermon.

“It’s a hard thing to reconcile,” he said. “I think ultimately God allowed him to become president for reasons we don’t fully know yet.”

S

unday came, and the followers of Donald Trump took their usual seats in the sanctuary.

“Hey, sugarfoot,” Sheila Butler said to one of her Sunday school ladies.

“Morning,” Crum said, welcoming the regulars.

They settled into the seafoamgreen cushions along the wooden pews, some of which also had back cushions to make them more comfortable. They opened old Bibles bookmarked with birthday cards and photos of grandchildren, and after they all sang “I was sinking

The Chicken Shack has been open for 50 years in Luverne. It’s especially crowded after Sunday services.

KLMNO WEEKLY

deeper into sin, far from the peaceful shore,” Crum walked up to the podium to deliver the sermon God had told him to deliver.

“What is adultery?” Crum began.

Jewell Killough was listening.

“Adultery, simply stated, is a breach of commitment,” Crum said.

“When one person turns their back on a commitment that they made and seeks out something else to fulfill themselves.”

He talked about the dangers of temporary satisfaction, of looking at “anything unclean,” and in the choir behind him, Jack Jones nodded. He talked about other kinds of adultery, such as “hardheartedness” and avoiding personal responsibility.

“See, we don’t want to look at ourselves,” Crum said. “We don’t want to say, ‘I’m part of the problem.’ ” Someone in the congregation coughed. Someone unwrapped a caramel candy.

“The purpose of the commandment is so we can see the sin, so we can repent of the sin and then fully experience the complete grace of God,” he said. “But only when we admit it. Only when we repent of it. And only when we return to him by faith.”

He was at the end of his sermon. If he was going to say anything about Trump, or presidents, or politicians, or how having a Christian character was important for the leader of the United States, now was the time. His Bible was open. He was preaching without notes.

He looked out at all the faces of people who felt threatened and despised in a changing America, who thought Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were sent by Satan to destroy them, and that Donald Trump was sent by God to protect them, and who could always count on Clay Crum to remind them of what they all believed to be the true meaning of Jesus Christ — that he died to forgive all of their sins, to save them from death and secure their salvation in a place that was 15,000 miles wide, full of gardens, appliances, and a floor of stars.

Not now, he decided. Not yet. He closed his Bible. He had one last thing to say to them before the sermon was over.

“Let us pray.”

“Amen,” someone in the congregation said. n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, JULY 29, 2018

16

KLMNO WEEKLY

PETS

A border collie’s $500,000 mansion D ANIELLE P AQUETTE in Beijing

BY

A

n abandoned warehouse once stood where Sylar’s new mansion sprawls.

Over the past year, builders have transformed the twoacre lot into his “paradise,” a sign informs guests at the wooden gates. Beyond them lie a spa, a trampoline, an indoor pool, two murals of Sylar’s face and a party room with chalkboard walls, where someone has scrawled: “I love you.”

Sylar paused at the tender message on a recent afternoon. Then he lifted his leg and urinated.

This is what half a million dollars can buy a border collie in Beijing. It’s also a symbol of love, economic progress and the Internet’s unique power to make you famous — sometimes overnight.

“Before I had Sylar, I had nothing to live for,” said owner Zhou Tianxiao, 31, scratching his dog’s ears. “He gave me a purpose.”

Five decades after Chairman Mao’s Red Guards were known to kill pet dogs — a “bourgeois” accessory the communist leader sought to quash during his purge of Western values — China’s youths are increasingly lavishing money on animals.

The Chinese are projected to spend the equivalent of $7 billion on furry friends by 2022, a surge from $2.6 billion last year, according to the German market research firm Euromonitor.

Theories abound as to why affluent Chinese seem so devoted to their pets; poorer folks in urban centers tend to be priced out, because licensing dogs can cost hundreds of dollars. But analysts tie some of the fervor to the country’s rigid “one-child” policy, in effect from 1979 until early 2016.

Marriage rates and birthrates have fallen in recent years as a generation without siblings, saddled with extra family pressure to shine, has pursued more education and often refused to settle down, said Cheng Li, a China scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

YAN CONG FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

For China’s only-child generation, pets can give companionship, purpose and even Internet fame “They have a sense of independence,” Li said, “but they still want a companion.”

Zhou, an only child himself, used to feel lonely.

Four years ago, the lanky Beijing native was unemployed and living downtown with his grandmother. He had dropped out of school at 15 and spent most of his time playing video games at Internet cafes.

He feared he would drift that way forever, staring at screens, then hitting the pillow. Log on.

Sleep. Repeat.

Then, one day, a friend urged him to check out some puppies for sale. What happened next Zhou described as magical. He locked eyes with a black-andwhite bundle of fluff. The puppy’s tail wagged with a joy Zhou yearned to feel.

“It was love at first sight,” he recalled.

He named the puppy Sylar after a character in one of his

favorite American television shows, “Heroes.”

He watched YouTube videos of dog trainers in the United States, studying their techniques late into the nights. He taught Sylar to high-five, play dead, walk like a human and leap on tables. One command sent the dog between Zhou’s legs, a paw on each foot, so they could stroll together.

Zhou used his phone to shoot footage of Sylar’s tricks, set to Lady Gaga songs, and posted it to Meipai, a Chinese video site.

Somehow, people found the clips. One share spawned 10 more, which multiplied to 1,000, which swelled into millions of views.

Sylar soon had nearly 800,000 followers on social media. Fans across China wrote to him, drew pictures of him and asked to meet.

Zhou had unwittingly stepped into a cultural obsession.

Chinese social media is crawl-

Zhou Tianxiao, 31, instructs his border collie, Sylar, to jump into the pool in his mansion in Beijing.

ing with celebrity animals: An American Eskimo dog named Niuniu and a Scottish fold cat called Duanwu each has more followers than Kanye West.

Amy Huilin Tsang, a sociologist who studies Chinese class identity, says the pet fixation may have something to do with selfexpression.

“The dog can be a fashion statement,” she said. “Or the newest status symbol.”

For members of China’s onechild generation, analysts say, nothing is too good for their animals.

“They’ve been incredibly mollycoddled their whole lives,” said Andrew Atkinson, a dog and cat market researcher in Shanghai, “and they’re transferring it onto their pets.”

The spotlight on Sylar encouraged Zhou to open a dog food and toy store on Taobao, the Chinese e-commerce giant that allows users to peddle goods online.

By 2017, he had enough cash to start a new life.

He thanked his pet with a tattoo of Sylar’s name in red bubble letters on his left forearm.

The body art alone didn’t feel adequate, so Zhou wondered: What does a dog really want?

Space. Much more space.

Zhou found the old warehouse in Shunyi, an upscale Beijing suburb, and designed the renovation himself. His girlfriend, Liu Wei, 37, helps him run the place and manage a staff of 10, who live next door.

Before Sylar, Zhou “was lazy and spent most of his waking hours playing video games,” Liu said. “He’s now enterprising and conscientious.”

They opened Sylar’s mansion to the public in May. Dogs can take a “medicinal bath” in the spa for 175 yuan (about $26) or a “soothing oil” massage for 400.

Canine visitors are welcome to stay the night in air-conditioned rooms with giant pillows and personal backyards. And humans can join their pets in the pool, as long as they don’t mind the floating clumps of black collie fur. n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, JULY 29, 2018

17

HISTORY

KLMNO WEEKLY

Amelia Earhart’s final, chilling pleas BY

C LEVE R . W OOTSON J R.

A

melia Earhart waded into the Pacific Ocean and climbed into her downed Lockheed Electra.

She started the engine, turned on the two-way radio and sent out a plea for help, one more desperate than previous messages.

The high tide was getting higher, she had realized. Soon it would suck the plane into deeper water, cutting Earhart off from civilization — and any chance of rescue.

Across the world, a 15-year-old girl listening to the radio in St. Petersburg, Fla., transcribed some of the desperate phrases she heard: “waters high,” “water’s knee deep — let me out” and “help us quick.”

A housewife in Toronto heard a shorter message, but it was no less dire: “We have taken in water . . . we can’t hold on much longer.”

That harrowing scene, the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) believes, was probably one of the final moments of Earhart’s life.

The group put forth the theory in a paper that analyzes radio distress calls heard in the days after Earhart disappeared.

In the summer of 1937, she had sought to become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe. Instead, TIGHAR’s theory holds, she ended up marooned on a desert island, radioing for help.

Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, could only call for help when the tide was so low it wouldn’t flood the engine, TIGHAR theorized. That limited their pleas for help to a few hours each night.

It wasn’t enough, TIGHAR director Ric Gillespie told The Washington Post, and the pair died as castaways.

But those radio messages form a historical record — evidence that Gillespie says runs counter to the U.S. Navy’s official conclusion that Earhart and Noonan died shortly after crashing into the Pacific Ocean.

“These active versus silent periods and the fact that the message changes on July 5 and starts being

ALBERT BRESNIK/THE PARAGON AGENCY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Researchers believe she made several attempts to reach help — and her messages got through worried about water and then is consistently worried about water after that — there’s a story there,” Gillespie said.

Some of Earhart’s final messages were heard by members of the military and others looking for Earhart, Gillespie said. Others caught the attention of people who just happened to be listening to their radios.

Almost all of those messages were discounted by the U.S. Navy, which concluded that Earhart’s plane went down somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, then sank to the seabed.

Gillespie has been trying to debunk that finding for three decades. He believes that Earhart spent her final days on then-uninhabited Gardner Island.

On July 2, 1937, just after Earhart’s plane disappeared, the U.S. Navy put out an “all ships, all stations” bulletin, TIGHAR wrote.

Authorities asked anyone with a radio and a trained ear to listen in

to the frequencies she had been using on her trip, 3105 and 6210 kilohertz.

It was not an easy task. The Electra’s radio was designed to communicate only within a few hundred miles. The Pacific Ocean is much bigger.

The searchers listening to Earhart’s frequencies heard a carrier wave, which indicated that someone was speaking, but most heard nothing more than that. Others heard what they interpreted to be a crude attempt at Morse code.

But thanks to the scientific principle of harmonics, TIGHAR says, others heard much more. In addition to the primary frequencies, “the transmitter also put out ‘harmonics (multiples)’ of those wavelengths,” the paper says.

“High harmonic frequencies ‘skip’ off the ionosphere and can carry great distances, but clear reception is unpredictable.”

That means Earhart’s cries for help were heard by people who

Aviator Amelia Earhart and her Electra plane on May 20, 1937. The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery believes Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were stranded on a desert island in their final days.

just happened to be listening to their radios at the right time.

According to TIGHAR’s paper: Scattered across North America, each listener was astonished to suddenly hear Amelia Earhart pleading for help. They alerted family members, local authorities or local newspapers. Although few in number, the harmonic receptions provide an important glimpse into the desperate scene that played out on the reef at Gardner Island.

The tide probably forced Earhart and Noonan to hold to a schedule. Seek shelter, shade and food during the sweltering day, then venture out to the craft at low tide, to try the radio again.

Back in the United States, people heard tidbits that pointed at trouble.

On July 3, for example, Nina Paxton, an Ashland, Ky., woman, said she heard Earhart say “KHAQQ calling,” and say she was “on or near little island at a point near” … “then she said something about a storm and that the wind was blowing.”

What happened to Earhart after that has vexed the world for nearly 81 years, and TIGHAR is not the only group to try to explain the mystery.

Mike Campbell, a retired journalist who wrote “Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last,” insists along with others that Earhart and Noonan were captured in the Marshall Islands by the Japanese, who thought they were American spies, and died in Japanese custody after being tortured.

Elgen Long, a Navy combat veteran and an expert on Earhart’s disappearance, wrote a book saying her plane crashed into the Pacific and sank.

Gillespie said he believes that evidence supporting his Gardner Island theory is adding up. He believes that bones found on Gardner island in 1940 belonged to Earhart, but were misidentified and discarded. And he believes that Amelia Earhart died marooned on an island after her plane was sucked into the Pacific Ocean. n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, JULY 29, 2018

18

KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

A lost colony, an impossible mystery N ONFICTION

T THE SECRET TOKEN Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke

By Andrew Lawler Doubleday. 426 pp. $29.95

l

REVIEWED BY

G REGORY S . S CHNEIDER

he lost colony of Roanoke Island will always be one of the weirdest episodes in American history. It has managed to stay in the news, off and on, for 431 years: the case of 100-plus English settlers vanishing in the woods and marshes of coastal North Carolina.

Things were off-kilter from the beginning. Sir Walter Raleigh had bankrolled a settlement for the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. But when the ship containing some 115 settlers arrived in the New World in July 1587, the captain and pilot mysteriously dumped them at Roanoke Island instead.

The man Raleigh chose to lead the colony, John White, was an artist, not an explorer. He brought his pregnant daughter Eleanor and her husband. A few weeks after landing, Eleanor gave birth to the first English baby born in America, Virginia Dare.

At which point White sailed all the way back to England to ask for more supplies.

He didn’t return for three years.

By then, the settlers were gone.

There were intriguing clues to their whereabouts carved on a tree and a post, including the name of a nearby native village. But rather than check that out, White sailed again for England.

And the colony has been lost ever since.

It’s human nature to wonder what happened to those men, women and children. But it seems that every effort to solve the mystery has spun out strange tendrils of its own.

Andrew Lawler warns in his new book, “The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke,” that Lost Colony fever is a kind of madness. Happily, that doesn’t stop him from plunging into the wild terrain of theories and conflicting evidence where so many others have disappeared. Lawler manages to do this in a clear-eyed way, conscious of whether he, too, is getting lost.

NICHOLAS LUCCKETTI/FIRST COLONY FOUNDATION/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Archaeologists excavate Site X in Bertie County, N.C., a possible home of some Lost Colony members.

One of the strengths of the first section of the book is its depiction of the civilizations that had already been clashing for generations when Raleigh sent out his settlers. Not only were the sophisticated nations of native peoples disrupted by European colonization, but the Spanish had explored and settled along the East Coast for decades before the English arrived.

One of Lawler’s most fascinating points is that the English pirate Sir Francis Drake may have left a large group of formerly enslaved workers on the Carolina coast in the year before the Lost Colony. Drake had captured the Africans and native South Americans during a raid on the Spanish port of Cartagena. If he left them at Roanoke, as some accounts suggest, they would “form a mysterious other lost colony,” Lawler writes.

Lawler also does a good job conveying the strangeness of a central figure of the Lost Colony mystery: the wayward governor,

John White. After describing White’s return to find the colony abandoned and no sign of his daughter or granddaughter, Lawler puts his finger on something that by now has been nagging at the reader. “The record White left behind has a hallucinatory quality unlike almost anything in early American literature,” Lawler writes. “Bonfires ignite as if by ghosts. There are footprints in the sands of a silent forest. . . . There is an otherworldly detachment to his tale.”

So, what does it all mean? That’s part two of the book, where Lawler tries to mop up the historical mess with centuries of theories about what really happened. He roams from John Smith’s sighting of white children among the Indians, to the mid-20th-century craze for messages supposedly left on stones by Eleanor Dare.

It’s frustrating stuff. Every idea that seems to have merit — complete with secret details discovered on ancient maps — either evaporates or remains unre-

solved. There have been intriguing recent developments, but we won’t spoil some of the book’s juicy tidbits.

Though he presents himself as a skeptical arbiter who will hold any charlatans accountable, Lawler falls into the habit of ending chapters with suggestive cliffhangers.

It works, for a while, but gets distracting.

The third section of the book aims for a cultural reckoning with the legacy of the Lost Colony. The heavier tone — who knew that Virginia Dare was once a symbol for white supremacists? — is a bit of a comedown after the crazy fun of the conspiracy theories.

But the themes of mingled races, of cultures clashing to create something new, are surprisingly fresh and powerful. The issues raised by the Lost Colony are still playing out. n Schneider wrote this review for The Washington Post. He covers Virginia from the newsroom’s Richmond bureau.

SUNDAY, JULY 29, 2018

19

BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Trickster history: Deception as art

Exploring death, violence in Nevada

N ONFICTION

F ICTION

J

l

REVIEWED BY

M ICHAEL D IRDA

ust to be clear: “The Secret History of Magic” isn’t a book about shamanism, pagan sorcery, the occult tradition or Wicca. If you’re interested in those aspects of magic, you should visit the anthropology and New Age sections of your local library or favorite bookstore.

Peter Lamont and Jim Steinmeyer focus on “the deceptive art,” in other words, conjuring, stage illusions, card tricks, mindreading and all those seemingly impossible feats — from pulling a rabbit out of a hat to sawing a woman in half — that make us ask ourselves, “Now, how did they do that?”

In essence, “The Secret History of Magic” surveys what one might call show-business wizardry from the Renaissance to the 20th century. Throughout this period, magicians would rely on dexterity of hand and misdirection, but also on the latest science and technology. Perhaps the most extensive analysis in the book re-examines 19th-century magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin’s celebrated visit to Algeria at the behest of the French government. Lamont and Steinmeyer reveal how much this episode, and much else in the magician’s memoirs, has been distorted and romanticized. Still, there’s no denying the simplicity and effectiveness of the Frenchman’s first “proof” of his unearthly powers before an audience of Algerian chieftains.

Robert-Houdin announced that he could render even the strongest warrior as weak as a little child. To prove this, he placed a small box on the stage and asked a volunteer to pick it up, which the man did with ease. But when the magician made a mysterious gesture and challenged the man to lift up the box again, it proved impossible to budge. You can probably guess the trick’s secret: The box contained a plate of steel and located just under the flooring was a powerful electromagnet that could be secretly turned off or

on. As all theatrical professionals know, presentation is everything.

The young magician Erich Weiss initially revered RobertHoudin so much that he paid homage to him through his own stage name: Houdini. However, the great escapist receives only a few pages here — there are many books about Houdini — and we learn instead more about other late Victorian and early modern masters such as Joseph Buatier de Kolta, Johann Hofzinser, Wiljalba Frikell, the Davenport brothers, John Nevil Maskelyne, who transformed London’s Egyptian Hall into the world’s most famous theater of magic and, not least, Maskelyne’s even more gifted partner David Devant.

In the course of their history, the co-authors share a number of memorably phrased observations about the ideals of stage magic.

For example, Robert-Houdin neatly declared that “the conjurer is an actor playing the part of a magician.” Advising against obvious dexterity, Erdnase recommends that a card magician “conceal, as far as possible, the possession of digital ability.” The contemporary artist Banksy adds yet a third maxim: “Become good at cheating, and you never need to become good at anything else.”

As Steinmeyer and Lamont themselves reiterate: In magic “there is always more going on than we think.” Audiences naturally suspect the use of trapdoors, mirrors and wires, but this doesn’t matter so long as the spectators fail to grasp, as they are watching, what is happening.

Though a bit repetitive and diffuse, this fine book is as much a philosophical apologia as it is a history. The magician stands before us and elicits “a particular kind of wonder.” For a few blissful moments, we can actually “experience the impossible without believing that it is real.” n Dirda reviews books for The Washington Post.

F THE SECRET HISTORY OF MAGIC The True Story of the Deceptive Art

By Peter Lamont and Jim Steinmeyer Tarcher/Perigee.

357 pp. $28

NEVADA DAYS

By Bernardo Atxaga Graywolf Press.

352 pp. $16

l

REVIEWED BY

M ATT G ALLAGHER

or author Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Reno, Nev., was a city of new dreams and sprawling physical wonder, memorialized in his novel “The City of Trembling Leaves.”

Vladimir Nabokov found it less compelling, describing it as “a dreary town.” The Reno of my youth contained plenty of both portrayals. It’s a place of spiritual dissonance and contradictions, at once a high-desert casino town and an aspirant city of culture.

Celebrated Basque author Bernardo Atxaga’s genre-blurring “Nevada Days” neither loves nor scorns Reno so much as mulls it over slowly, deliberately. It’s a book of meditations that blends together travelogues and memories from Basque country with a dark exploration of fading American empire. What’s hard fact?

What’s creative liberty? Atxaga’s such an engaging witness, it doesn’t matter.

Atxaga’s narrator is something of a wandering soul, which serves him well as he and his family arrive in Reno in 2007 so he can write and teach at the university.

He finds “a city of white lights, in which the Silver Legacy, Harrah’s and the other casinos rose like cathedrals.” Once he shakes the jet lag, Atxaga accrues a collection of guides to help him through this strange land.

A retired professor named Bob introduces him to the surrounding high desert. An IT tech named Dennis serves as Atxaga’s cultural interpreter, helping him discern which helicopters in the sky belong to the police and which are medical. Then there’s Atxaga’s wife and two daughters, who share in the journey.

The most pervasive theme in “Nevada Days” may well be “Et in Arcadia ego: violence and death.”

Atxaga finds it everywhere, from the obituaries of fallen soldiers to a gift of dried rattlesnake skin he’s not quite sure what to make of. His interest in our passive acceptance of endless foreign

war, bloody myths and social class divide is only occasionally betrayed by muted horror.

Atxaga attends a funeral for a Basque shepherd and lapsed Catholic and finds a community he understands. He also attends a funeral for a soldier killed overseas and finds something else. I found refreshing Atxaga’s bemusement toward military ceremony. It’s honest. It’s thoughtful. It’s what our country desperately needs in this era of starspangled pomp and fake patriots.

The most significant event of Atxaga’s time in Reno occurs a block from his sleepy campus home. On Jan. 20, 2008, 19-year old Brianna Denison was abducted from a friend’s couch. Her body was found weeks later, the identity of her rapist and murderer a mystery.

Through it all, Atxaga watches mass dread take hold. “We were trapped beneath a taut membrane, which captured and amplified every sound, every movement. . . . I was aware of a kind of vibration.” The veneer of the detached visitor crumbles as he considers his young daughters and how easily a predator could reach their bedroom windows.

He and his wife discuss the possibility of returning home early but decide to remain. The dread remains, too. “The vibration affected the whole city now.”

By the time Denison’s murderer is arrested, the Atxagas have returned to Basque country — the same journey Laxalt made decades back in “Sweet Promised Land.” “Nevada Days” serves as an inverse retelling of that western classic, and through the precision of Atxaga’s language and the truths about Nevada and America he brings forth, it certainly meets the standard set by its predecessor. n Gallagher is the author of the novel “Youngblood” and the memoir “Kaboom.” This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, JULY 29, 2018

20

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Disney fires James Gunn, and the trolls win again MARGARET SULLIVAN is the media columnist for The Washington Post.

Let’s say this up front. Writer­director James Gunn wrote some appalling things on Twitter years ago. ¶ His jokes about rape and sex with children not only cross the decen­ cy line, they continue to run for another couple of miles at full speed. ¶ It’s not hard to understand why Disney — with its vast, rich empire resting on a foundation of wholesome­ ness and family friendliness — cut him loose, despite his monumental success at the helm of Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies. (The first two grossed $1.6 billion; the third was due to start production this fall.)

The casual observer might be inclined to say good riddance to a guy who could respond to the hashtag #unromanticmovies with the suggestion: “Three Men and a Baby They Had Sex With” or come up with this tweet: “The best thing about being raped is when you’re done being raped and it’s like ‘whew this feels great, not being raped!’ ” I can’t defend those writings and don’t want to.

Neither can Gunn, 51, who for years has regretted them and reasonably makes the case that he has grown into a person who recognizes how atrocious they were, even if part of a comedic tradition that relies on shock and provocation.

“My words of nearly a decade ago were, at the time, totally failed and unfortunate efforts to be provocative,” Gunn said in a statement recently about tweets mostly from 2008 to 2011.

“I have regretted them for many years since — not just because they were stupid, not at all funny, wildly insensitive, and certainly not provocative like I had hoped, but also because they don’t reflect the person I am today or have been for some time.”

But Disney executives should

have known what they were getting with Gunn, who was a different kind of filmmaker a decade ago, directing the comedy-horror picture “Slither”and a Web-series spoof called “James Gunn’s PG Porn.”

What caused the firing had very little to do with Gunn’s background and everything to do with the way the far-right dirt-diggers — “cyber nazis,” as they’re known — are able to use the Internet with the express purpose of ruining people’s lives.

Everything about it shouts “bad faith.”

“All of the outrage is completely feigned to weaponize outrage,” said Andrew Todd, who writes about gaming and film for the website BirthMoviesDeath.com.

He told me that he sees a clear link between Gunn’s firing and the 2014 controversy known as Gamergate in which online mobs viciously attacked female video game designers.

It is, he said, a clearly established pattern that has its own playbooks involving digging up old material, taking it out of context, contacting the victim’s employer and often using right-wing media and politicians to reach the end

DANIEL LEAL-OLIVAS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Disney fired "Guardians of the Galaxy" director James Gunn after years-old tweets joking about rape and sex with children surfaced.

goal: career destruction.

In the case of Gunn, for example, Breitbart News and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) were along for the ride, with Cruz featured in a “news” headline calling for the director’s criminal prosecution. And at the center of things was the detestable Mike Cernovich, whose photo should flash every time the words “far-right troll” are used.

Let’s recall that some members of this crowd were behind the infamous Pizzagate episode, which resulted in a Washington restaurant, Comet Ping Pong, being targeted by a gunman looking for the location of Hillary Clinton’s supposed child-sex ring.

Much of the news media and most of polite society have little understanding of how these bad-faith attacks work.

What is dug up is too often taken at face value, without crucial context about how tweets and other forms of expression are being turned into bludgeons in a cynical war against liberal values and individuals.

The question arises, then: What should Disney have done, given the outrage that was being fanned into a raging fire?

Plenty. Disney could have decided to back its creative talent, even censure him in some way, and explain just what was happening.

Corporate honchos could have said how reprehensible they found the tweets to be and made the point that artistic people experiment and grow in their development.

Onlookers are quick to compare this case to that of Roseanne Barr being fired for her racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett. It’s a flawed comparison: That wasn’t a decade old but from the present moment, showing that Barr — far from evolving — was the same old racist she always was.

And some are quick to compare the Gunn situation to the firings and demotions of the #MeToo movement. Again: The comparison doesn’t hold up well.

Gunn made disgusting jokes on the Internet. He didn’t harass people or use his power to demand sexual favors.

In short, you can’t defend James Gunn’s tweets, and it’s hard to defend him.

But in an era of escalating bad-faith attacks, it’s much worse to reward the mob with a scalp. n

SUNDAY, JULY 29, 2018

21

OPINIONS

BY CLAYTOONZ.COM

When reckless states look for help MITCH DANIELS is a Washington Post contributing columnist, president of Purdue University and a former governor of Indiana.

In 1787, when the Constitutional Convention and an infant republic “hung by a thread,” two imaginative New Englanders solved the problem and saved the day. Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth, both representing Connecticut, proposed a bicameral legislature made up of one house representing population and the other giving each state an equal voice. The “Connecticut Compromise” — designed as a safeguard against the domination of smaller states by the more populous neighbors — entered history as perhaps the most crucial of all the bargains that enabled a new nation to be welded together.

But Connecticut, which today, along with a number of other states, faces a seemingly insurmountable budgetary crisis, may end up regretting the statesmanship of its illustrious forebears. Sherman and Ellsworth’s two-members-perstate system stands as a bulwark to prevent reckless states — Connecticut included — from raiding their more responsible brethren. Let’s thank them for their innovation.

Over the past few years, several of today’s 50 states have descended into unmanageable public indebtedness. In Illinois, vendors wait months to be paid by a state government that is $30 billion in debt and one notch above junk bond status. And in terms of per capita state debt, Connecticut ranks among the

worst in the nation, with unfunded liabilities amounting to $22,700 per citizen.

Each profligate state is facing its own budgetary perdition for different reasons, but most share common factors. The explosion of Medicaid spending, even before Obamacare, has devoured state funds just as it and its entitlement cousins, Medicare and Social Security, have done at the federal level.

In parallel, public pensions of sometimes grotesque levels guarantee that the fiscal strangulation will soon get much worse. In California, some retired lifeguards are receiving more than $90,000 per year. A retired university president in Oregon received $76,000 per month — and no, that’s not a typo. They are the reason for some of the

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY DANA SUMMERS

nation’s worst budget crises.

California’s pension shortfall, $250 billion under the rosiest of assumptions, is more likely close to $1 trillion.

More and more desperate tax increases haven’t cured the problem; it’s possible that they are making it worse. When a state pursues boneheaded policies long enough, people and businesses get up and leave, taking tax dollars with them. GE leaves Connecticut, General Mills exits Illinois, Chevron and Waste Management flee California.

Sooner or later, we can anticipate pleas for nationalization of these impossible obligations. Get ready for the siren sounds of sophistry, in arguments for subsidy of the poor by the prudent.

In fact, this balloon was already floated once, during the recent recession. In 2009, California politicians called for a “dynamic partnership” with the federal government. Money from other states, they said, would be an “investment” and certainly not a bailout. They didn’t succeed directly, although they walked away with $8 billion of federally borrowed “stimulus” money. Such a heist will be harder to justify in the absence of a national economic emergency.

In the blizzard of euphemisms,

one can expect a clever argument might appear, likening the bailout to another compromise of the founding period: the assumption of state debts by the new federal government. But that won’t wash. Those were debts incurred in a battle for survival common to all 13 colonies, not an attempt to socialize away the consequences of individual states’ multi-decade spending sprees.

Sometime in the next few years, we are likely to go through our own version of the recent euro-zone drama with Connecticut in the role of Greece and maybe a larger, “too big to fail” partner such as Illinois as Italy. Adding up the number of federal legislators from the 15 or 20 fiscally weakest states, one can count something close to half the votes in the House.

The Senate — thanks to Ellsworth and Sherman — will be our theft insurance. These statesmen could never have imagined governments as sprawling and expensive as those even today’s more cautious states operate. But had they foreseen that their beloved state would be among the worst offenders, one of those most likely to try to fob off its self-inflicted problems on its counterparts, I think they would only have felt better about their handiwork. n

SUNDAY, JULY 29, 2018

22

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

BY PHIL HANDS FOR THE WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL

Big Dairy, stop crying over milk MOLLY ROBERTS is an editor, writer and producer for The Washington Post’s Opinions section.

Got milk? The answer isn’t so simple anymore.

Big Dairy has had it up to here with these alternative beverages masquerading as milk, and now the Food and Drug Administration plans to start forcing plant-based products that co-opt the language of lactation to abandon the act. That’s right: The official definition of milk involves “lacteal secretion,” and, as the head of the FDA said last week, “an almond doesn’t lactate.”

As it turns out, this isn’t entirely fair to almonds. Labeling botanical liquids “milks” is more than a newfangled marketing maneuver that must speedily be put out to pasture. Francis Bacon noticed in 1626 that “there be plants, that have a Milk in them when they are Cut,” and Encyclopaedia Britannica acceded a century and a half later that “the emulsive liquors of vegetables may be called vegetable milks.”

Besides, the FDA has official definitions, or “standards of identity,” for plenty of products that it neglects to enforce. What matters more, it seems, is how we shop. “Cow-nterfeits,” as the milk lobby likes to call them, aren’t really fooling anyone — not almond milk or soy milk or cashew milk or oat milk or rice milk or hemp milk or pea milk or “Super Rebbl Herbs Turmeric

Golden Milk Elixir.” Shoppers know that the products provide the creaminess that comes with dairy while leaving out the lactose. Peanut butter is much the same. We know it is not butter.

The FDA knows it. But the term became lodged in our lexicon, and “peanut paste” wouldn’t have set shoppers salivating. So the agency created a carveout.

Milk, in other words, is what man makes of it, and if Americans decide to stop associating the name so closely with cows and start associating it with its texture and uses, that’s up to them. Who cares?

Well, everyone. The dairy industry cares because the cash cow it once was has stopped producing so prolifically. Prices are plunging, lactose intolerance rates are rising along with animal rights initiatives and the “health halo” that once hovered over the

BY JOEL PETT FOR THE LEXINGTON HERALD-LEADER

beverage has lost its luster. Milk is good for you, it turns out, but it’s not that good. And other options, including those pesky pretenders, are good for you too, especially when they’re fortified with additional nutrients.

The nut-milk industry cares, too, for all it claims to have no interest in “imitating” milk.

That’s because “nut drink” doesn’t ring so delicious — and worse than that, it rings unnatural.

And Americans care. The dairy industry and its allies have spent the past century convincing them that the beverage was the best way to make sure children grow big and strong. The mythos around milk and motherhood probably made that job even easier.

So when World War I ended, and all that dairy our leaders had squeezed out of farmers to nourish soldiers overseas had no one to drink it, the government poured the excess into our schools — where it has stayed, thanks to federal subsidies for serving it.

Dairy got its own group on the dietary pyramid, and federal guidelines were released recommending three servings of dairy a day.

Thanks to all that, milk isn’t associated only with motherhood anymore. It’s associated with Americanness, too. The dairy industry, then, is right that the

nut-milkers trade on their reputation. It’s just that their reputation is as pasteurized as their product.

Studies show that milk doesn’t guard against fractures, and even that it may cause certain types of cancer. Loads of fruits and vegetables contain the same nutrients as a tall glass of the white stuff. But no one was going to call bull. The dairy industry was pulling in big bucks and giving them right back to the campaigns of the politicians who helped protect it. It still does.

Today, dairy farmers funnel money into a fund that, with U.S. Agriculture Department oversight, supports campaigns like the “Got Milk?” ads that saved the product from a souring citizenry — and defined ’90s childhood as closely as Nickelodeon.

We’ll probably always want to buy something called “milk.” But the product’s identity, “standard” or not, has shifted all the same, and now the dairy industry wants to wrest back the narrative. We may think of milk as American, but there’s also something American about allowing the people to determine what qualifies as “milk.” Milk as we once knew it may finally have fallen off its pedestal, and if it has, there’s no use crying over it. n

SUNDAY, JULY 29, 2018

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Pizza BY

C AROL H ELSTOSKY

Versions of pizza have existed for centuries. First popular among the working classes of Naples in the 18th century, pizza remained a local dish until after World War II, when it exploded in popularity around the world. As a food of the poor, pizza had few chroniclers until very recently, which means there is no archive of pizza history, filled with details about important firsts or crucial developments.

So there’s little agreement and significant mythology surrounding this beloved food, which we seem to like talking about almost as much as we like eating.

MYTH NO. 1 Returning soldiers made pizza popular in the United States.

While it’s possible that soldiers ate pizza in Italy during World War II, and some may have sought it out upon their return to the United States, it’s unlikely that this accounted for its increasing popularity. Pizza was in short supply in Italy during the war; soldiers there encountered brutal poverty and food shortages thanks to fascist misrule. Americans, including soldiers, probably sampled pizza in Italy in the years after the war, but what they ate bore little resemblance to the varieties of pizza made in the United States in the 1950s.

MYTH NO. 2 Pizza is available everywhere because of Italian immigrants.

Between 1870 and 1970, more than 26 million Italians left Italy in search of work. Almost any attempt to explain the spread of pizza credits these immigrants with introducing the food to their new countries.

Between 1950 and 1980, pizza became a global favorite because of a variety of factors — not solely because of Italian migrants.

Pizzerias required minimal investment and had low overhead costs, making them attractive options for immigrant

entrepreneurs from many countries. Changes in technology also enabled the dramatic transformation of pizza preparation and delivery: Steel ovens with rotating shelves, preshredded cheese, pre-cut delivery boxes, and a rising car culture all facilitated the delivery industry, bringing pizza to more consumers.

MYTH NO. 3 Pizza chains have ruined pizza.

Pizza devotees have long fretted that outlets like Domino’s and Pizza Hut have ruined the creative spirit of pizza-making as they extend their global reach, and that their pizza is terrible.

Yet the history of pizza consumption tells a different story. Pizza embodies “glocalization,” the practice of conducting business according to both local and global standards.

When Domino’s expanded east, executives found that their cracker-thin Midwestern crust did not appeal to Northeastern consumers, who preferred a chewier, thicker crust. Both chains readily adapted to local tastes and changed their recipes, a practice they continued as they expanded globally.

It’s hard to make the case that chains are replacing independent pizzerias. In fact, the presence of franchise pizza prompts consumers to try local

JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES

Pizza follows “glocalization” — adopting global and local standards — which means using toppings and recipes that match regional tastes.

fare, as Donna R. Gabaccia noted in her book “We Are What We Eat.” MYTH NO. 4 The pizza margherita was invented for Italian royalty.

Legend holds that King Umberto I and Queen Margherita visited Naples in 1889. After they grew tired of French cuisine, Raffaele Esposito of Pizzeria Brandi was summoned to prepare a variety of pizzas for the bored queen.

Her favorite: the pizza alla mozzarella, known thereafter as the pizza margherita. Pizzeria Brandi proudly displayed the thank-you note, signed by Galli Camillo, head of the table of the royal household, dated June 1889.

But historians dispute the authenticity of the note and cast doubt on this encounter between Italian royalty and a pizzamaker.

Pizza historian Antonio Mattozzi calls Esposito’s claim that he invented the margherita a “halftruth” at best, attributing the supposed event to Esposito’s “keen sense of marketing.”

MYTH NO. 5 Everyone loves pizza.

The numerous websites and books dedicated to pizza attest to our enduring respect and love for the dish and its history But it is likely that all of us can remember at least one awful pie we ate when we were desperately hungry or nothing else was available. Some of us hanker for artisanal pizza, made with fresh local ingredients, but many of us are more familiar with “junk food” pizza: the squares served in school cafeterias, frozen pizza stuck in the oven on weeknights, and cheap pies delivered to our dorm rooms. Junk food pizza has more in common with the pizza of 19th-century Naples, inexpensive and filling food for the poor. Do we really love pizza, or — like the working poor of southern Italy two centuries ago — do we eat it because it’s available and affordable? n Helstosky is the chair of the history department at the University of Denver.

She is the author of “Pizza: A Global History” and “Garlic and Oil: Food and Politics in Italy.”

SUNDAY, JULY 29, 2018

24

Wenatchee Valley’s

Premier Cannabis store

Largest Selection Selection •• Largest Friendly and and knowledgeable knowledgeable •• Friendly budtenders budtenders Daily Specials Specials •• Daily Loyalty Program Program •• Loyalty Online ordering ordering •• Online Now Accepting Accepting Debit/Credit Debit/Credit Cards Cards •• Now

Recreational & Medical Marijuana Premium Cannabis Cannabis -- First First Class Class Service Service Premium

Open Daily Daily Open a.m.-8 p.m. p.m.

88 a.m.-8 1510 N. N. Wenatchee Wenatchee Avenue Avenue 1510

www.TheJointLLC.com www.TheJointLLC.com 509-667-9999 509-667-9999 Thisproduct producthas hasintoxicating intoxicatingeffects effectsand andmay maybebehabit habitforming. forming.Marijuana Marijuanacan canimpair impairconcentration, concentration,coordination, coordination,and andjudgment. judgment.Do Donot notoperate operateaavehicle vehicleorormachinery machineryunder underthe the This influence uenceofofthis thisdrug.” drug.”(c)(c)“There “Theremay maybebehealth healthrisks risksassociated associatedwith withconsumption consumptionofofthis thisproduct. product.For Foruse useonly onlybybyadults adultstwenty-one twenty-oneand andolder. older.Keep Keepout outofofthe thereach reachofofchildren.” children.” infl