The Washington Post National Weekly - July 30, 2017 by The Wenatchee World

SUNDAY, JULY 30, 2017

. IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY

Disabled and disdained A rural town is divided between those who work and those who don’t. PAGE 12

Politics Trump’s fluid LGBT views 4

Nation Bombs ashore in N.C. 9

5 Myths The Foreign Service 23

SUNDAY, JULY 30, 2017

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THE FIX

Where your pride goes to die A ARON B LAKE

Trump, coming from the business world. But now that he’s president, all of this is taking place with the entire world watching. In each etting close to President Trump, it and every one of these situations, his aides seems, means checking your pride at and supporters are seeing their own personal the door and taking some very public brands and integrity attacked and underabuse. mined in very public ways. Sessions’s whole Trump’s first big-name supporters in 2016 political legacy is at risk of coming to an unwere Chris Christie and Jeff Sessions. He ceremonious end. Scaramucci just acspent the bulk of the rest of the camcused Priebus of a “felony,” in so many paign embarrassing Christie before firwords. And it’s difficult to argue ing him as head of the Trump transiSpicer’s six months as White House tion effort. And now he’s spent the bulk press secretary haven’t done irreparable of the last week haranguing Sessions, damage to his reputation for honesty. his own attorney general, apparently in The appeal of working in the adminhopes Sessions will resign. istration is clear: You are helping to The two men who agreed to become run the show for the leader of the free Trump’s top White House advisers have world, you get a big profile, and waitalso found themselves in the wooding on the other side of those doors is shed. Trump publicly questioned Steusually a big payday. The question phen K. Bannon’s importance to his Trump’s aides have to be asking themcampaign back in April. And Thursday, selves is: At what cost? And you can bet Reince Priebus was subjected to an apfuture potential chiefs of staff and atparently Trump-sanctioned series of attorneys general and press secretaries tacks from new White House commuwho could be next in line for public nications director Anthony Scaramucci abuse are asking themselves that same on live TV. Later, Scaramucci was requestion. vealed to have attacked both Priebus JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST It’s been said many times before that and Bannon in very vulgar terms. loyalty is a one-way street with Trump, Then there were all the times Trump White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus is just one of the contradicted his own aides, the time victims of personal attacks within the Trump administration. and it’s 100 percent true. But this is more than that. Those who have served his White House dismissed past staffTrump at the highest levels have almost uniPriebus and Bannon were reported by the ers as “hangers-on,” and the time he seemed versally come in for ritual humiliation and New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza. Sanders’s response to revel in Sean Spicer’s misery because embarrassment, often in pretty personal on Fox News? “I think sometimes we have a Spicer got “great ratings.” terms. lot of passion — not just passion for the presI don’t doubt there is some strategy here. If it was just about getting fired, that ident and the agenda, but sometimes when Plenty of White House reporters have noted would be one thing. Trump almost seems to you have the best people from around the competition between aides is what Trump revel in degrading his aides; it’s all a reality country coming in with a variety of backlikes, and rebukes from the chief executive TV show to him. We’ll see how long the congrounds, very different perspectives, you may are how Trump keeps his aides humble and testants want to play the game. n not agree on everything.” ensures loyalty. You can see why this might appeal to To her credit, incoming White House press © The Washington Post

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secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was pretty blunt about it on Thursday afternoon, saying Trump “likes that type competition and encourages it.” So he encourages aides accusing other aides of crimes on national TV. Got it. “With that competition, you usually get the best results,” Sanders reasoned. Hours later, Scaramucci’s vulgar comments about

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. © 2017 The Washington Post / Year 3, No. 42

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

4 8 10 12 17 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Tyler McGlothlin, 19, hugs his mother, Sheila McGlothlin, who is stressed about her finances. She receives $500 a month in disability benefits and is supporting Tyler and his wife. Photograph by LINDA DAVIDSON, The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Trump’s LGBT views have been fluid BY R OBERT S AMUELS AND J ENNA J OHNSON

or decades leading up to President Trump’s Wednesday tweets announcing a ban on transgender people in the military, the businessman-turned-politician has approached the LGBT community on nonideological terms. Trump’s relationships with LGBT people, and his evolving positions on issues, have been transactional, according to people who have interacted with him, focused largely on how the community might affect his interests in the moment. Only a year ago, candidate Trump presented himself as a social liberal seeking to move the Republican Party left on gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights. He vowed that he would do more than Democrat Hillary Clinton to protect LGBT people. He defended the rights of Caitlyn Jenner, the country’s most wellknown transgender advocate, to use whichever bathroom she wanted in Trump Tower. And he added “Q” to his discussion of the “LGBTQ community” in his Republican National Convention speech to show he was in the know. “People are people to me, and everyone should be protected,” he told The Washington Post in a May 2016 interview. But circumstances have been changing since Trump entered the White House. Although Trump’s staff has met with LGBT advocates and he has hired several New Yorkers who have supported LGBT rights in the past, his administration has taken positions more in tune with the president’s social conservative base. It has quietly rolled back protections for transgender schoolchildren, removed information about LGBT rights from the White House website and declined to recognize LGBT Pride Month in June. Trump’s tweets on Wednesday delivered yet another victory to the political right — including many House Republicans whose support he needs for his policy

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

agenda — while surprising many Republican LGBT activists who had hoped that he would end the culture war within the party. Those familiar with Trump say his stances aren’t contradictory but rather illustrate the consistency of his instincts to shape his views depending on the moment. “I don’t believe Donald Trump has a personal animus toward LGBT individuals,” said Gregory T. Angelo, president of the Log Cabin Republicans, which represents gay conservatives and allies. “This smacks of politics, pure and simple.” Angelo, who once labeled Trump the “most pro-LGBT Republican nominee in history,” said there seems to be a political calculation that reigniting the transgender rights debate will help galvanize conservative voters in the 2018 elections and expand GOP majorities in Congress. A more conservative Congress would al-

low Trump to achieve more legislative victories, such as his coveted border wall with Mexico or erasing President Barack Obama’s healthcare overhaul. “If you think you’re going to repeal and replace Obamacare by using LGBT soldiers as a political football, you’ve got another thing coming,” Angelo said. The White House on Wednesday sought to portray Trump’s announcement as a narrow policy matter and not a reflection of the president’s personal views toward the transgender community. When asked whether this means the president will also reconsider allowing transgender individuals to serve in his administration, Trump spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said no, adding that the ban was a “decision based on what was best for the military and military cohesion.” She denied that the decision

President Trump’s views on LGBT issues have been focused largely on how the community might affect his interests in the moment, according to people who have interacted with him.

was politically motivated. Trump has long demonstrated a laissez-faire attitude toward sexual orientation. In the 1980s, when the major players in the Manhattan real estate world were scoffing at the talkative newbie from Queens, Trump found a mentor in attorney Roy Cohn, who helped Trump perfect the art of the counterattack. It was well known among the New York elite, but not discussed, that Cohn was a closeted gay man — which never seemed to bother Trump. Trump provided early donations for AIDS research, giving profits from Wollman Rink, the Manhattan ice rink he renovated, to the Gay Men’s Health Crisis organization. In 1992, Trump Taj Mahal also hosted a “Clash of the Legends” event featuring basketball players Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Julius Erving in which a por-

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POLITICS tion of the proceeds went to AIDS research, according to Newsday reports at the time. At the Trump Organization, he hired and promoted Abraham Wallach, who recalled Trump shrugging off the news that he was gay. Trump invited Wallach and his partner, David, to fly down with him to spend weekends at Mar-aLago, his private club in Palm Beach, Fla., which is believed to be the first club on the island to accept gay couples. “He’ll do a deal irrespective of their sexual preference or a political issue,” said Wallach, who was executive vice president for acquisitions at Trump’s company. “It mattered if he could benefit from your talent. That was true with me, and that was true with Roy Cohn.” The first time Trump explored a bid for the presidency, in 1999, he presented one of the most liberal policy platforms regarding the LGBT community at the time. Trump proposed not only repealing the ban on gays and lesbians serving openly in the military, but he also said that gays and lesbians should be a protected class under the Civil Rights Act. Trump recommended that samesex civil unions receive the same benefits and protections as those in traditional marriages. His positions at the time also made political sense. He was preparing to do battle with conservative firebrand Pat Buchanan for the Reform Party nomination, and Trump was angling to distinguish himself as an inclusive person who didn’t speak ill of minorities and gay people. As a businessman operating in areas dominated by liberal politics — New York real estate and, as the star of “The Apprentice,” the entertainment industry — Trump demonstrated a live-and-let-live attitude in his personal interactions with LGBT people. After completing a 2005 boardroom scene for “The Apprentice,” Trump told the show’s first openly gay competitor that he saw advantages in hiring gays in his business. “I love having gay people work for me; they are the most trustworthy people, especially around women,” Clay Lee recalled Trump saying to him. Trump’s logic, according to Lee: With so many women around his modeling agency, the businessman worried about straight employees harassing them. “I can’t afford to have

Those familiar with President Trump say his stances on LGBT issues aren’t contradictory but rather illustrate the consistency of his instincts to shape his views depending on the moment. that liability,” Trump added, according to Lee. Lee said he came out to Trump during filming. Trump seemed welcoming. “I like steak. Someone else likes spaghetti,” Trump remarked, according to Lee. “That’s why we have menus in restaurants.” But Trump’s approach changed as he cultivated his conservative credentials. In 2011, Trump told the Des Moines Register that “as of this moment,” he did not believe that same-sex couples in civil unions should receive benefits equal to those of heterosexual marriages. Trump added that his “attitude was not fully formed” on the issue, even though it once was, an equivocation that echoed similarly hedged statements from politicians in both parties at the time. Those who knew Trump challenged him about this waffling. On a radio segment with Howard Stern in 2013, before Stern got Trump to criticize Kim Kardashian’s appearance, the shock jock confronted Trump on whether his positions on gay rights were for political gain. “If I was alone with you, and you and I were just having a drink, I don’t think you care about samesex marriage,” Stern said. “I think you’re all for it. I know you.” “It’s never been an argument discussed with me very much,” Trump said. “People know it’s not my thing, one way or the other.” As LGBT rights organizations

concentrated on promoting the legalization of same-sex marriage, and many politicians began to embrace the idea, Trump was moving in the other direction. George Takei, a gay rights advocate best known for originating the character Sulu on the first “Star Trek” series and as a former “Apprentice” contestant, said he tried over lunch one day in 2012 to quiz Trump about his position against same-sex marriage. Takei got nowhere. But Trump mentioned how he attended the wedding of a Broadway producer and told his host, “You gays do everything beautifully.” “He just kept saying, ‘I just believe in traditional marriage,’ ’’ Takei recalled. “I don’t think he had much depth on the issue.” Meanwhile, gay conservatives were increasingly looking to Trump as an ally as he became more interested in politics. As a leader in the party, Trump has sent mixed signals. While the nation debated last spring which bathrooms transgender individuals should use, Trump said that visitors to Trump Tower could pick for themselves — and then, hours later, he said that as a policy matter it is best left to states to decide. Trump also said that he opposed same-sex marriage — only to say after the election that he’s “fine” with it and considers it an issue that has been “settled in the Supreme Court.”

After a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando in June 2016, Trump strongly denounced violence against LGBT individuals and promised to protect them from terrorists more than Clinton would. He presented his advocacy for the community as a defense against radical Islam, an unusual position that managed to mix rhetoric embraced by conservatives and liberals. “As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology,” he said during his GOP convention speech. A person familiar with Trump’s preparations, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said he ad-libbed the addition of the “Q,” which has become popular parlance referring to those who question their gender identity or sexual orientation. But Trump’s selection of Mike Pence as his running mate showed that Trump was not neglecting his conservative base. As Indiana governor, Pence had advocated that families use conversion therapy to turn their gay children straight. Since his inauguration, several LGBT advocates have given Trump plaudits for some of his work — including extending the ban on discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation in the federal government and asserting violence against gays as a reason to ban travelers from six majorityMuslim countries. Joseph Murray, a Mississippi lawyer and owner of the Facebook page LGBTrump, supported the president’s stance on the military. “While I have great respect for trans people, the military is not a place for social engineering,” Murray said. “A trans person struggle, while very real, should not turn it into an experiment in which the military serves as a petri dish.” Others saw Trump’s announcement as a sign that his past assurances were not worth counting on. Jenner, who visited the White House only a few months ago to talk about transgender rights with Trump aides, made her feelings clear in a tweet shortly after the president’s announcement. “There are 15,000 patriotic transgender Americans in the US military fighting for all of us. What happened to your promise to fight for them?” n © The Washington Post

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Caitlyn Jenner, who has visited the White House to talk about transgender rights, was critical of President Trump’s decision to bar transgender people from the military.

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POLITICS

Pushing away from Trump for 2018 D AVID W EIGEL Omaha BY

t was a humid Saturday, 473 days before the next election, and Jack Mowat was walking door to door to support his congressman. “I’m with the Congressional Leadership Fund,” Mowat, 17, told a voter in workout gear. “Do you support Congressman Don Bacon?” The answer was yes. “Awesome,” said Mowat, updating his phone app. “And what would you say is your most important issue?” The answer: Bacon was a “military guy.” That was all Mowat needed to hear. As one of dozens of volunteers for the Congressional Leadership Fund, the deep-pocketed super PAC backed by House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), he was on a months-long mission to knock on doors and tell voters that their congressman was doing what they sent him to do. In Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, where Bacon narrowly won last year, the goal was to build up the Republican before Democrats had a chance to try to tear him down. The CLF’s multimillion-dollar campaign, unfolding this year in 20 targeted districts and expanding next year to 30, is an ambitious bet that the Republican House majority can be spared from any midterm backlash over President Trump. If the tactic works, each endangered Republican will be reintroduced to voters as a postpartisan who delivers on their key issues; each Democratic challenger will be framed as a vote for Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D- Calif.) to snatch back the speaker’s gavel while empowering an anti-Trump “resistance” that wants only to wreck the country. In an interview at the CLF’s Washington, D.C., office, where the targeted districts are scrawled on the wall across from his desk, the PAC’s executive director, Corry Bliss, said the strategy was the culmination of what he had learned in a run of winning campaigns. Veterans of Bacon’s 2016

RYAN HENRIKSEN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Deep-pocketed super PAC sets sights on winning 30 battlefield districts by reframing candidates campaign were running the CLF effort in Omaha; they had scoured local high schools for volunteers who would work free to help their congressmen, gaining political experience while no other campaigns were underway. “We don’t care about the national narrative,” Bliss said. “You can’t control the national narrative. You can control the narrative in 30 districts.” The CLF spent more than $10 million to rescue Republicans in four special elections this year, investing early in opposition research and get-out-the-vote campaigns. In Georgia’s 6th District, Republicans won fewer than 98,000 total votes in an April 18 jungle primary. Over the nineweek runoff campaign, the CLF complemented its TV ads with get-out-the-vote money; on June 20, Rep. Karen Handel (R-Ga.) won 134,799 votes, beating Democrat Jon Ossoff. In the CLF office, the race is commemorated with a banner that waved outside the final candidate debate: “San

Francisco Loves Ossoff.” For 2018, the strategy is to do more of the same, framing races as a choice between local heroes and “resistance”-obsessed Democrats, on a hoped-for $100 million budget. “Donors get really excited about this,” Bliss said. “For the cost of one TV ad buy, you knock on tens of thousands of doors. We do a microdata survey in every district, and our goal is to come out of it in the 60,000-to-80,000-voter range. If we can switch 20,000 votes in the district, that’s the difference between winning or losing.” The ads and materials being distributed by the group make no mention of the president or which party currently runs Congress. A door hanger for Rep. David Valadao (R-Calif.), whose district voted heavily for Hillary Clinton last year, tells the story of how his family built a successful dairy farm and how he wants to “fix our broken immigration system.” A door hanger for Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.), who represents a swing

Volunteers with the Congressional Leadership Fund super PAC make calls this month in their Omaha office to gather residents’ opinions of Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.).

seat in Upstate New York, calls him an “independent voice” who’s “working to combat the heroin and opioid crisis” and ensure “clean, safe drinking water.” In Omaha, most of the campaign for Bacon was built around his long military service, especially his years commanding the district’s Offutt Air Force Base. “We have a list of 41,000 people who say: That’s my issue,” Bliss said. But the effort to portray Bacon as Offutt’s savior had already raised eyebrows. The door-knocking campaign had been complemented by a digital ad campaign that thanked Bacon for fighting to “keep Offutt Air Force Base open.” When the Omaha World-Herald pointed out that there was no serious effort to close the base, Bliss explained that Bacon offered a “stark contrast to Democrats’ opposition, led by Nancy Pelosi, to strengthen our military.” Veterans of the 2010 and 2014 Democratic routs were skeptical that Republicans could divorce themselves from Trump. Jesse Ferguson, who joined the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee during the 2010 cycle, watched dozens of Democrats in the South and Midwest run on local issues and get dragged under by an anti-Obama wave. “Candidates can sometimes be successful creating their own brand and demonstrating to voters their independence, but political parties can’t separate themselves from their political leaders,” Ferguson said. “For most people voting in 2018, the election will be a referendum on President Trump and whether Republicans in Congress have done their job to be a check and balance. Spoiler alert: They haven’t.” At the CLF’s western Omaha campaign office, about 20 volunteers were making calls using the CLF’s script, which focused on how “Congressman Bacon knows what it takes to protect our country.” Mowat sat down to make calls, and his fellow volunteers kept reading the script, which did not mention the president at all. n © The Washington Post

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POLITICS ANALYSIS

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GOP allies rally around Sessions BY

P AUL K ANE

en. John Cornyn counts Attorney General Jeff Sessions as one of his best friends in Washington and their wives are even closer, making the couples regular double-date partners. “We occasionally get together to break bread,” the Senate majority whip said Wednesday. One of those double-dates came recently enough that Cornyn (R-Tex,) and Sessions could not avoid the elephant in the room: President Trump’s public taunting of his attorney general, in a manner that suggests he would like Sessions to resign. “We didn’t talk in any great detail about this, but obviously it’s in the news,” Cornyn said, reiterating his strong support for Sessions to remain in office. Cornyn is not alone in rallying to the defense of Sessions, who, despite sometimes waging lonely battles as one of the chamber’s most staunch conservatives, still has many friends among Senate Republicans. Most have issued statements of support, while several are making private calls to reassure Sessions that they support him. But the tension over Trump’s treatment of Sessions goes beyond defending a friend. Unlike any other controversial move that Trump has pondered in his six months as president, Senate Republicans are sending preemptive signals that firing the attorney general or pressuring him into resigning would be a terrible move. Some have spoken to high-level White House officials delivering the warning that it would look as if Trump was making the move solely to shut down an investigation into his campaign and White House, now overseen by special counsel Robert Mueller III, while also making clear they agree with Sessions’ decision to recuse himself from the Russia probe. Replacing Sessions will be difficult, and the idea of Trump making a recess appointment during the planned four-week break over August is foolhardy. Democrats can indefinitely stall a resolution to fully adjourn the Senate, having already forced brief minute-long sessions during even shorter breaks to prevent Trump from having the authority to make temporary appointments while the Senate is on break. Democrats may have vehemently opposed his nomination, but they have no intention of allowing Trump to fire Sessions and appoint a new attorney general with a recess appointment, and frankly, Republicans do not sound as if they want to give Trump that power either. Beyond concerns over the controversy firing the attorney general would bring, Senate

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Republicans say, Trump’s behavior is unseemly toward someone they still respect, given that Sessions went out on a limb for the firsttime candidate in becoming the first senator to endorse Trump during the campaign. “I think Sessions deserves to be treated much more fairly. I mean, Jeff was there when no other senator was,” said Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (Utah), the longest-serving Republican. Hatch spoke to Sessions on Thursday to declare his support, a message he conveyed to White House officials, and Hatch was trying to set up a call directly to Trump to deliver that same message. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) made clear in a brief interview Wednesday that his support for Sessions has gone up the chain of command. Asked if he told Trump of his support for Sessions, McConnell smiled. “I’ve conveyed that to the public and to others,” McConnell said. The support for Sessions runs deep across the party. Jim DeMint, a conservative renegade who often clashed with McConnell, praised the attorney general on a visit Wednesday to the Capitol. “One of the best guys I ever worked with,” the former South Carolina senator said. “I hope he and the president can work it out.” The question, however, is how Senate Republicans will respond if Trump does force their friend out of the Justice Department — a move that might be followed by firing Mueller, setting off another crisis at least as big as the ouster of James B. Comey as the FBI director in May.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, shown leaving the White House on Wednesday, still has many friends in the Senate, and most of them have issued statements of support for him to remain in his current role.

Would there be any ramification beyond just expressing dismay? That remains to be seen, but some are warning that the fallout would be devastating to the rest of Trump’s agenda. “I think Jeff Sessions is doing a good job, and I think it would be incredibly disruptive and make it more difficult for the president to accomplish his agenda,” Cornyn told CNN early Wednesday. By lunchtime, Cornyn declined to say what the ramifications would be, instead focusing on the attorney general’s decision to recuse himself from the case. Sessions had served as an adviser to the Trump campaign, a highprofile surrogate who would travel with him and often introduce him at rallies. He also got caught up in his own controversy by failing to fully reveal during his confirmation process all of his contacts with Russian officials. That made it a by-the-book call to recuse, delegating the investigation to Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who then appointed Mueller shortly after he was involved in the Comey firing — which is now its own piece of the Mueller probe. “I can’t imagine any future nominee would have decided the recusal issue any differently from Jeff Sessions,” Cornyn said. Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan,.), who was elected along with Sessions in 1996, became visibly angry when discussing Trump’s treatment of his former colleague. “It’s very difficult, it’s disconcerting, it’s inexplicable,” Roberts said. “I don’t know why you have to tweet with regards to your feelings about people in your own Cabinet.” One fallout from Trump’s treatment of Sessions could be to guarantee that no Senate Republican will again be willing to give up a seat to accept a job with Trump. “There are some well-qualified individuals, who otherwise would be inclined to serve, who might be discouraged from doing so given the rift that he has had with one of his most loyal supporters,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), a moderate who has become friends with Sessions as part of the 1996 class. After Comey got fired, Sessions led the recruiting effort to get Cornyn the nomination to run the FBI. Their wives talked about the idea and Cornyn warmed to it, before other Republicans sent signals that he would be too political of a choice to run the independent investigative body. Now, their double dates take on a different tone when talking about working for Trump. “He’s doing fine,” Cornyn said of Sessions. “He did the right thing and I think he has the confidence that he did the right thing.” n

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NATION

Baltimore police throw open the door BY

S TEVE H ENDRIX

aj. Sheree Briscoe stood at the front of her police station like an armed hostess at a housewarming party. “Welcome, welcome,” she said holding the door for a group of women coming up the stairs of Baltimore’s Western District police station, past the new burbling fountain and the outdoor phonecharging stations, over the Thurgood Marshall quote carved into the pristine cement. “Here comes Miss Pearl. Oh my gosh, you brought your mama with you? I’m so glad you’re here.” The women were arriving for a community meeting, one of the first since workers completed a $4.5 million renovation — largely privately funded — meant not only to update the 1950s-era building, but also to transform the city’s most beleaguered police station from fearsome to friendly. “It’s a blessing to be able to welcome people back to the Western District,” said Briscoe, the station’s commander, as she directed residents to a former courtroom converted into a hightech community collaboration room. “We want everyone to feel comfortable coming here.” Devastated by riots in 2015 after the death of a suspect in police custody, Baltimore is grappling with a record-setting spike in homicides — 199 so far this year — and a massive overhaul of the department under a Justice Department consent decree. Amid the relentless violence and internal turmoil, Baltimore is joining a growing list of cities betting that a better police station can lead to better policing. From Brooklyn to Los Angeles, cities are folding the ideals of community policing into station blueprints, hoping their design can help close the growing divide between the people who work in the buildings and those who live around them. “We’ve been hearing from chiefs and mayors all over the country,” said Leigh Christy, an architect at Perkins and Will, who

KATE PATTERSON FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

As city’s homicide rate climbs, a troubled precinct hopes its remodeled station improves relations has worked on station renovations in Los Angeles. The West Baltimore outpost that reopened this month features a public garden, free WiFi and — a rarity in this neighborhood — a pair of public restrooms. For their part, police have a stateof-the-art fitness center and spacious locker rooms, along with a lactation room and a place to launder uniforms. “It really doesn’t even feel like a police station,” said one of the meeting attendees. But outside the station, where the city is reeling from one of the country’s highest homicide rates, it was easy to find skeptics. “All the things going in West Baltimore, and they decided what they really needed to do was make the police feel more comfortable?” asked Ray Kelly, a longtime Sandtown activist. “It’s going to take a lot more than a pretty building to make people around here want to go talk to the police.” For years, the Western District

station has squatted in the middle of a troubled city’s most violent precinct. With blacked-out windows and high walls, the station had hardened into a symbol of police isolation. After the 2015 riots , even starker barriers went up between the cops and the community. Jersey walls and fences blocked access to the station. The community council meetings that had been regularly held at the station were moved to a nearby church. Now police are hoping that a brighter, more open building will bring dubious neighbors back in. The balance between access and safety is one police departments across the country are trying to strike. In Chicago, the architectural firm led by MacArthur “genius” grant recipient Jeanne Gang has championed the concept of the “polis station,” a mixed-use facility of gyms, housing and green space for use by officers and residents alike. Few cities are as far along as

Maj. Sheree Briscoe welcomes Baltimore residents to the newly renovated Western District police station for a community meeting on July 20. The Western District is one of the city’s most violent neighborhoods and was the site of riots in 2015.

Los Angeles, where the 1992 Rodney King riots eventually led to a $600 million bond measure devoted to rehabbing — and rethinking — police stations. The chief imperative was busting the fortress-forms that had dominated public safety architecture in the city since the 1950s, particularly in the violence- and scandalplagued Rampart Division, west of downtown Los Angeles. L.A. officials sought to convert a bunker that was a effectively a no-go zone for many residents into a welcoming entity. Foreshadowing the choices Baltimore designers would make years later, designers replaced walls and barriers with lawns and landscaping and filled the interior with light. “In the old Rampart station, the only public space was about 300 square feet right in front of the desk,” said Los Angeles Police Chief Charles Beck, who was captain of the Rampart Division at the time of the redesign. “The new one has about an acre of lawn that is used by the public every day. You’d see people sitting on blankets there right now.” Whether the changes actually improve relations or lower crime is a hard question, even for supporters of the approach. “Is there a statistic that says opening up the front entrance produces a 10 percent reduction in crime?” Christy asked. “No. Some of this is hard to measure.” In Baltimore, activists say they are less concerned with research than with ongoing violence. Elder Harris, a neighborhood pastor, remembers when the station was opened in 1958. He said he was glad to hear about the free WiFi and happy the officers had better working conditions. But he would rather see money spent on the neighborhood’s dire need for addiction treatment. “This is window dressing.” Kelly, too, said the station was far down on his list of priorities. But he expressed confidence in Briscoe. “If this helps her do her job, fine,” Kelly said. “But I don’t see it.” n ©The Washington Post

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NATION

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Bombs are washing ashore in N.C. BY

T HOMAS G IBBONS- N EFF

he sudden appearance of two large, rusty and barnacle-encrusted World War II-era munitions on the beaches of Cape Hatteras, N.C., this summer have puzzled the area’s park rangers and local historians. “We haven’t had these in the past,” said Boone Vandzura, the chief ranger of Cape Hatteras National Seashore, a 70-mile stretch of sand and surf that spans from Bodie Island to the tiny hamlet of Ocracoke. Vandzura said he believed it had been more than a decade since an unexploded munition appeared on the Cape’s shores. But within a week this month, Vandzura received reports of two aging pieces of ordnance. The first — identified by the Navy as a World War II-era bomb — was called in on July 14, while the second, an M38A practice bomb, also from World War II, was found 12 miles south of the first find on July 18. In both instances, a Navy bomb disposal team from Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile Unit 2, drove down from Norfolk, Va., and got rid of the munitions. The two bombs on Hatteras make up the entirety of the team’s calls for unexploded munitions this year, said Lt. Kristi Fontenot, a spokeswoman for the unit. The detachment covers all of North Carolina and Virginia and averages about five calls a year, she said. Joseph Schwarzer, director of the North Carolina Maritime Museum at Cape Hatteras, said he couldn’t recall munitions appearing on shore since he started his tenure in 1995, let alone two within a week, nor could Dan Couch, a lifelong resident of Hatteras and historian who could only remember a local named Nacie Peele who had an unexploded shell on his porch and stories of shrimpers bringing up ordnance in their nets. “It’s not surprising though,” Schwarzer said. Cape Hatteras, a piece of land that juts out into an important shipping lane, has been witness to a litany of historic

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Munitions are from World War II era, when ordnance was dumped or dropped in the area events that have littered the surrounding seabed with tens of thousands of pounds of weapons, including Civil War cannonballs, German torpedoes and practice bombs leftover from World War II. “If anything is surprising it’s that they only found two,” Schwarzer said. The question, he said, is what “natural phenomenon” brought them to the shore. Peter Traykovski, a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Woods Hole, Mass., said that a team of researchers working with the U.S. Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program, is trying to figure that out. “It’s about the economics of a response,” he said. “If we find that they are highly mobile then a larger, more expensive cleanup effort is required, and if the munitions are spreading everywhere it becomes a much bigger problem.” The coastal areas of the United States, including Hawaii and Alaska, are home to tens of millions of pounds of dumped muni-

tions, said Niall Slowey, a professor at Texas A&M University who has more than a decade researching the topic. That number includes 30,000 tons of chemical agents like mustard, that were dumped after the World Wars. Though the number seems huge, that’s just what was recorded, Slowey said. He added that an unknown amount of ordnance was disposed of or dropped during training and wartime and never documented. That, plus the roughly 5,000 former military installations in the United States, 400 of which could have potentially contaminated areas, make the scope of the problem daunting. Additionally, it is unclear what the environmental impact will be, if any, once large quantities of the weapons start to degrade and break apart. Within the last two decades the Pentagon has started to devote more resources to the issue. The Army Corps of Engineers has a number of ongoing projects as part of the “military munitions response program,”

Above is one of the two munitions found within one week this month on Cape Hatteras National Seashore in North Carolina.

which spans from Martha’s Vineyard to Pearl Harbor. Traykovski and his colleagues’ five-year study has used dummy munitions, acoustic trackers and special buoys to understand the type of sea conditions that make the old shells move. Cape Hatteras, Traykovski said, with its shallow sand shoals and often violent waves, could be a place where bigger munitions might move around significantly in shallow water. “If old munitions are going to show up anywhere, they are going to show up there,” Traykovski said, referring to the newly formed Shelly Island off Cape Hatteras where one of the munitions was found this month, “as it has the perfect catcher‘s mitt geometry, to catch objects migrating from both the north and west.” Stanley Riggs, a research professor at East Carolina University and a coastal and marine geologist said North Carolina’s Outer Banks is one of the most dynamic coastlines in the world, with an abundance of debris on the seafloor that migrates with the currents and weather. “It used to be our trash bin,” Riggs said. “And the Cape Hatteras area is one of the highest energy and most active shorelines along the Atlantic margin with a lot of past maritime war activity.” Shells from the 1861 bombardment of Hatteras Inlet still come to the surface when boats dredge the ferry channel there, says Schwarzer. During World War II, more than 60 merchant ships were sunk by German submarines off the Hatteras coast in the first six months of 1942, littering the bottom with supplies, depth charges and U.S. bombs targeting enemy ships. The Outer Banks and its coastal waters were also once home to World War II aerial target ranges that are still littered with old bombs. “It’s a geological process here. Things get uncovered, sometimes it’s fossils, sometimes it’s parts of shipwrecks and sometimes it’s munitions,” Schwarzer said. n © The Washington Post

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WORLD

Britain’s lynx may soon pounce again G RIFF W ITTE Kielder, Britain BY

ielder Forest offers some of the wildest landscapes in all of Britain, a “Lordof-the-Rings”-esque tableau of squishy green moss and soaring dark spruce where ospreys rule the skies and badgers, otters and adders skitter through the brambles below. But it’s not wild enough for Paul O’Donoghue. “Too tame,” he scoffed. Imagine, the conservationist suggested, a 60-pound cat — its ears tufted, its fur dappled — slinking through the undergrowth, sharpening its knifelike claws on the nearest tree and occasionally darting out to plunge its teeth into the throat of an unsuspecting deer. “How exciting would that be?” he asked, leaving the unstated answer to hang in the lonely stillness of the summer woods. For 1,300 years, such scenes have been absent from this island, ever since the ancestors of the modern British hunted every last lynx. But now, the wildcat could be poised for a comeback. Within months, Eurasian lynx could be roaming this land once more thanks to a plan, spearheaded by O’Donoghue, that would mark perhaps the most audacious species reintroduction experiment in the nation’s history. Like the return of the wolves to Yellowstone, success would offer a potent symbol, amid fears of an unstoppable mass extinction of species worldwide, that the tide can still be turned. “This project offers a glimmer of hope, and it signals a huge change in our country. We’re starting to repopulate Britain with true native species,” said O’Donoghue, a 38-year-old PhD in conservation genetics whose sunburned face and unruly dark beard give him a feral look that jibes with his love of all things wild. “The lynx could become ambassadors of British conservation.” But to others in this undulating stretch of expansive green fields, ancient stone walls and lush coniferous forests along the Scottish-

ARTERRA/UIG VIA GETTY IMAGES

Conservationist hopes this once-extinct wildcat will be back roaming Kielder Forest within months English border, the symbolism counts for little. For farmers, the lynx represents little more than a pesky varmint that will feast on the animal that sustains much of the local economy: sheep. “When I first heard about it, I thought, ‘This must be the craziest idea anyone’s ever had,’ ” said Dennis Salt, a silver-haired 61-year-old who owns a 550-acre sheep farm abutting Kielder, the forest into which the lynx would be released. And nothing he’s learned in the two years since the proposal was introduced has changed his mind. Scientists may insist that the forest-dwelling lynx are poorly suited to prey on sheep in an open field. But Salt said he doesn’t buy it. “Sheep are extremely slow,” he said. “If a lynx has the option of going after a lamb or a deer, it will go for the easy meal. There’s no two ways about it.” The issue has sparked passionate debate in this rural community, torn between the lure of restoring a vital element of the British countryside as it existed long be-

fore sheep held sway, and the fear that doing so could jeopardize livelihoods. The question could soon come to a head. Just this month, O’Donoghue’s group, the Lynx UK Trust , submitted an application to Natural England, the government body that regulates species reintroductions, to release six Eurasian lynx into Kielder Forest. A decision could come within the next several months. If the proposal is approved, four female and two male lynx would be rounded up in Sweden — where a wild population thrives — and flown to Britain. Fitted with GPS collars, their movements would be monitored for the next five years, during which time the population could naturally grow. “We want them to breed,” O’Donoghue said. “Those babies will be proper British lynx — not lynx with a Swedish accent.” It’s been more than a millennium since the world has known a proper British lynx. The animal was once prevalent from the

Eurasian lynx thrive on the continent, but Britain’s were hunted to extinction in the Middle Ages. A bid to reintroduce the species to the isle has gone before the state.

northernmost tip of Scotland to the southern coast of England, but relentless hunting by chilly medieval Britons seeking to envelop themselves in the warmth of a lynx pelt doomed the species. O’Donoghue has worked on conservation efforts around the world, from the Amazon to Africa to Alaska. But bringing back the lynx in his home country has been his passion project; he dreams of the day when Kielder is known as the “Kingdom of the Lynx.” If the plan goes ahead, it would be the highest-profile species reintroduction to date for a country that, because of its island status, has more control than most over which animals take up residence. Britain is also a country with more ground to make up than most. The crowded island that is home to modern-day England, Scotland and Wales has lost much of its original biodiversity, with teeming forests that once dominated the landscape having long ago been converted into cities, towns or grazing lands. It’s only in recent decades that Britain has begun to reverse a biodiversity decline that was centuries in the making. Bustards were gone for 185 years, and beavers had disappeared for 400. Now they both thrive. Species of cranes, kites and eagles have been brought back from the brink. Some even advocate the return of wolves and bears, though not any time soon. At the Anglers Arms — the only pub in the small and tidy village of Kielder, which the forest encircles — proprietor Michael Brown displays a life-size cutout of the lynx to show customers that the animals aren’t quite as big and scary as some may fear. “At first, people thought, ‘Oh, lion- or tiger-type things. They’ll be coming into the garden and killing the kids,’ ” said Brown, a 44-year-old British army veteran. Brown said opinion has grown more favorable as residents have debated, at times heatedly, the pros and cons. He’s an enthusiastic backer, believing the lynx can offer a badly needed boon to tourism. n © The Washington Post

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WORLD

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In China, the live-stream dream E MILY R AUHALA Shenyang, China BY

u Li is ready for his close-up. Hair: poofed. Face: powdered. Any minute now, he will be live on camera, raking in the cash. From a studio in the northern city of Shenyang, Yu, who goes by Brother Li, spends hours a day broadcasting on YY, a social network. When he cracks a joke (which is often) or gives a shout-out (ditto), fans send him “virtual gifts,” which represent real money. His show is a mix of chitchat, music and humor, all steeped in “dongbei,” or “northeast,” culture. He also founded and runs a talent agency, Wudi Media, to train and promote wannabe online stars. On the other side of the screen are people brushing their teeth or getting through the last minutes of a long shift. Some are aspiring celebrities hoping to parlay their voice, looks or facility with tawdry jokes into online fame. For a cut of their earnings, Yu will help them out. To the tens of thousands who tune in to Yu’s show each night, his life is the stuff of legend, the very embodiment of President Xi Jinping’s favorite slogan: the Chinese dream. Although live-streaming is popular in many places, including the United States, China’s broadcasting boom, like much here, is bigger. About half of China’s 700 million Internet users have tried livestreaming apps — that’s more than the U.S. population. In the United States, social media influencers make money off ads and endorsements. Some Chinese stars do, too, but most of the money comes directly from fans in the form of gifts — sort of like a virtual tip jar. China’s live-stream market was worth at least $3 billion in 2016, up 180 percent year over year, according to iResearch. The sector will soon generate more money than the Chinese movie business, analysts predict. The pace of change tracks explosive growth in the country’s tech space, part of a government push to shift from manufacturing and resource extraction to a service economy powered, in part, by the Web.

GILLES SABRIZ FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Would-be stars spend long hours seeking fans and funds in a $3 billion social media market While U.S. firms such as Facebook and Google remain blocked in China, local companies are thriving. YY started as a gaming portal but has grown into a social communication platform that is a leader in live-streaming. As a Rust Belt kid who built a digital firm backed by Big Tech, Yu could not be more on message. But his experience also shows the limits of the state’s tech-utopian plans. China’s new economy, it turns out, looks a lot like the old one. Same face, new filter. Watching Yu’s nightly broadcasts, what’s most striking is not the streaming speed, but how status quo things feel, from the sidelining of women, to the push and pull between censors and creators, to the difficulty of spreading the benefits beyond the few. Yu comes from a hardscrabble stretch of the North China plain, the region once known as Manchuria. By 16, he was hustling for mechanic gigs in a small city. When he wasn’t fixing trucks, he visited Internet cafes. That’s all there was to do.

While playing video games, he started experimenting with a vocal style known as “hanmai,” or “microphone shouting.” When streaming started to take off, he developed his own show. In 2014, he founded Wudi. Between his show and the business, he now often brings in more than $100,000 a month, he said. To keep the agency growing, he needs a constant supply of rookies, so Yu is all about proteges. Spend a day with him and you’ll meet a halfdozen. Each, in turn, has proteges of their own, forming a protege pyramid of sorts. The lure of fast, easy money brings out the odd and extreme: a woman known as Gourmet Sister Feng made her name by eating goldfish and glass, among other things. Aspiring stars ask surgeons to give them an “online star face”— high forehead, round eyes, long nose, thin jaw — and use creams to keep their skin a cadaverous shade of white. Yu is often asked to weigh in on plastic surgery. “It is normal to want

Zheng Tianqi, 28, sings for a live stream in Gongzhuling, China. About half of China’s 700 million Internet users have tried livestreaming apps — more than the population of the United States.

to be beautiful,” he said. “As long as you don’t do big surgeries, Botox, injections, fillers and skin whitening are fine.” With looks playing a big role, China’s censors try to draw a line between sexy and sexually suggestive. Last year, amid a crackdown on live content, they banned the “seductive” eating of bananas. Some live-streamers worry that changing rules will make it tough to make money, but the real problem, it seems, is the pay structure. For every $1,000 in virtual gifts you earn, you might see a few hundred dollars, streamers said, with YY taking 50 percent and your agency taking an additional 20 to 30 percent. The lifestyle can be grueling. Lu Mingming, a 25-year-old rookie, spends four hours a day alone in a studio packed with plush toys. The hardest part of her new job, she said, was mustering the energy to appear cute and happy. “They want to see you singing from the heart,” she said. While they broadcast, messages from viewers flash across the screen in real time. Some comments are encouraging, others are not. Fans tend to want the same old songs again and again, Lu said. When the show ends, most streamers spend time alone, exhausted from being “on” for so long, they said. They work out, rest and play on their phones. Then, they do it again. Several said it was tough to come up with fresh material when they spent most of their waking hours inside, alone. Even Yu, sitting in a home heavy on chandeliers, living the livestream dream, was skeptical. When he started streaming, it was the Wild West of China’s Internet. He felt free to say what he wanted, he had fun. Now he has a reputation and a business at stake, and the censors are paying attention. In recent months, Chinese authorities have shut down entire platforms and individual accounts. “In the past, even though I didn’t have money, I could do whatever I wanted. Now, I have to watch every word I say,” he said. n © The Washington Post

COVER STORY

Tyler McGlothlin, 19, holds a sign seeking donations in Richlands, Va.

A si gn o f di v i d ed t ime s BY TERRENCE MCCOY in Grundy, Va.

ive days earlier, his mother had spent the last of her disability check on bologna, cheese, bread and Pepsi. Two days earlier, he had gone outside and looked at the train tracks that wind between the coal mines and said, “I don’t know how I’m going to get out of this.” One day earlier, the family dog had collapsed from an unknown illness, and, without money for a veterinarian, he had watched her die on the porch. And now it was Monday morning, and Tyler McGlothlin, 19, had a plan. “About time to go,” said his mother, Sheila McGlothlin, 57, stamping out a cigarette. “I’m ready,” Tyler said, walking across a small, decaying house wedged against a mountain and strewn with dirty dishes, soda cans and ashtrays. They went outside, stepping past bottles of vodka his father had discarded before disappearing into another jail cell, and climbed a dirt path toward a housemate’s car. He knew his plan was not a good one. But what choice did he have? He had looked inside the refrigerator that morning, and the math didn’t add up. Five people were living in the house, none of whom worked. It would be 17 days before his mother received another disability check and more food stamps. And the refrigerator contained only seven eggs, two pieces of bologna, 24 slices of Kraft American cheese, some sliced ham and one pork chop. It had to be done. Tyler would hold a sign on the side of the road and beg for money. He would go to a town 30 miles down the road and stand at one of the region’s busiest intersections, where he prayed no one would recognize him, to plead for help from people whose lives seemed so far removed from his own. To Tyler, the collapse of the coal industry had left two kinds of people in these mountains. There are those who work. And there are those

LINDA DAVIDSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

There are those who work. And there are those who don’t: the unemployed, the disabled, the addicted, and the people who, like Tyler’s family, belonged to all three groups.

who don’t: the unemployed, the disabled, the addicted, and the people who, like his family, belonged to all three groups. Those who work rarely mix with those who don’t, except in brief encounters at the grocery store, at the schools or, for Tyler, along the side of the road, where he knew he was likely to encounter acts of generosity as well as outbursts of resentment. As he walked toward the car and got inside, he had so many hopes in his head. He hoped he would get enough money to feed his family. He hoped the police wouldn’t arrest him. But most of all, he hoped he wouldn’t run into a man named David Hess. It was Hess who had surfaced the subterranean tensions between those who work and

those who don’t in this depopulating and remote stretch of Virginia. In a moment that continues to resonate here, in the counties of Tazewell, where one in six working-age residents collect federal disability benefits, and Buchanan, where more than one in four do, Hess had confronted the McGlothlins late last year for panhandling, then issued a mocking social media post that soon had everyone talking and taking sides. Were the McGlothlins pitiable or contemptible? Was Hess cruel or simply unafraid to say what others thought? The morning of the first confrontation, in November, Hess, a man with a crew cut and hands scarred from years of work, slept until noon. His moving company had done a big job the day before, and when he awoke, he noticed he was nearly out of dog food, so he left his house, a brick ranch atop a steep hill. After collecting the dog food from a grocery store, he saw Tyler’s father, Dale McGlothlin, a former coal miner living on disability, holding a sign along the side of the road. “Need donations to help to feed my family,” it said. Hess pulled over. He offered him food, then told him he could do him one better: Would he like a job? McGlothlin, whose arms had been damaged in the coal mines and who hadn’t worked in more than a decade, declined the offer, and Hess drove off, outraged. Living at the center of an opioid crisis, and in the aftermath of a decades-long surge in the nation’s disability rolls, Hess had long perceived a resistance to work. He had seen it when he couldn’t find anyone to hire who could pass a drug test and had a driver’s license. Or when someone complained they couldn’t find work, and he knew fast-food restaurants were hiring. continues on next page

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COVER STORY this time closer to his house, and yelled at him to stay away. Another time, Hess called the cops on Tyler and a friend of his. “I grew up in one of the roughest households ever,” Hess said. “If I can come out of what I came out of, why can’t everyone else? . . . I would work anywhere. I would shovel s--- or flip burgers. . . . Hard work is what pulled me out of poverty.” And then came Monday morning, and Hess, after another night of work, was again resting at home, unaware that the McGlothlins were, at that moment, taking a serpentine road through the mountains, about to arrive at the intersection down below.

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Or when he saw someone claiming a disability despite having what he thought was a mild condition. He would come away thinking he worked 60 hours a week — despite a thyroid condition, despite two bankruptcies, despite the depressed local economy — not because he felt like it but because that was who he was. And now here was another person who didn’t want to work — he wanted a handout, a concept that so angered Hess that his Facebook profile picture was an outstretched palm with a large red strike across it. He drove home. He emerged a while later with his own sign and returned to the intersection. There, Hess stood beside McGlothlin, who he said had told him he could make more money panhandling than working, and raised the sheet of cardboard. “I offered him a job,” the sign said. “And he refused.” He posted a picture of it on Facebook. “Many of you know I am very pro work,” he wrote, recounting what he had done. “I made up my own sign and joined him. PLEASE SHARE.” Dozens did. Then hundreds. Then, to Hess’s surprise, the incident quickly spread to thousands of Facebook pages across the region, exposing frictions that have become common in scores of communities reshaped by the historic rise in the number of participants in federal disability programs. A Washington Post analysis of government statistics found 102 counties, where, at minimum, about one in six workingage residents receive either Supplemental Security Income, a program for the disabled poor, or Social Security Disability Insurance for disabled workers. These are places — primarily white, rural and working-class — where oncedominant industries have collapsed or modernized and the number of people who are jobless or receiving public-assistance benefits has soared. “There is a critical divide in the minds of low-income whites, between people who work, even if they struggle, and what has historically been called ‘white trash,’ ” said Lisa Pruitt, a professor at the University of California at Davis who researches rural poverty and grew up in Newton County, Ark., which has one of the nation’s highest disability rates. “The worst thing you can do in rural America among low-income whites is not work.” There’s a mentality, she said, that “only lazy white trash” accept what’s derided as “handouts.” “Were you morally upstanding or were you not?” was a question Jennifer Sherman, the author of “Those Who Work, Those Who Don’t: Poverty, Morality, and Family in Rural America,” came to associate with the idea of work and public benefits while living in a remote California community where the timber industry had capsized. “Could you make some claim to work and having a work ethic or could you not? It was your claim to moral capital and your identity.” Nearly two-thirds of rural Americans say it’s more common for irresponsible people to receive government help they don’t deserve than for needy people to go without assistance,

PHOTOS BY LINDA DAVIDSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

compared with 48 percent of city residents, according to a recent Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll. Rural Americans are also more apt to say poverty is the result of laziness. And as Hess’s post continued to spread throughout the region, some commenters were beginning to conclude that this, too, was what ailed the panhandler. “He is a lazy bum,” one woman wrote. “Im sorry if he can stand there outside and hold a sign he could work in some capacity..I have cancer and I’m ill but I work yet.” “Why don’t his wife get off her butt and get a job?” another woman said. “I’M JUST TIRED OF BEING RIPPED OFF BY PEOPLE!” another person said. Meanwhile, the panhandler’s son, Tyler, began sending messages to Hess, and the conversation quickly became vitriolic. “He is a 58 year old man that is disabled,” Tyler wrote. “He worked 30 years in the coal mines which is a whole lot [harder than] what your lazy a-- is doing.” “I work,” Hess told Tyler. “You bums should try it too.” He added in another message: “I am not a dead beat I do not get any disability.” More confrontations followed. Hess later found Tyler’s father begging on the same road,

Top, Tyler and his wife, Morgan McGlothlin, play video games most of the day and night. Above, Tyler looks at a Facebook post showing his father, Dale McGlothlin, begging for money while David Hess holds a sign saying, “I offered him a job. And he refused.”

Tyler sat in the back seat beside his mother. As the car, driven by a housemate, banked along a curve, he put his arm around her and lit a cigarette. “I’m trying to stay away from jail,” he said. “I reckon you are,” said Sheila, who planned to visit a doctor while he begged. “You better not. You’re all I got left.” “You’re all I got left,” he answered. He could hardly remember a period in his life when it seemed he had more. He never knew the good times his parents would sometimes recall, when the coal mines were open, and his father was getting work all over Buchanan County. He knew only what happened after. The mining accident in 2001 that nearly killed his father, then the anxiety and depression that led to disability benefits. His father’s addiction to prescription pills, taken to dull the pain from the mines, and, later, the drug charges and incarceration in 2005. Tyler asking Sheila, also on disability because of depression and anxiety, also addicted to pain pills, to quit drugs. And her saying she would, but only if he’d promise to finish college, find a job somewhere else and take her away from here. The car went past the McDonald’s where Tyler had worked until he was fired for missing a shift during a snowstorm. Tyler used to feel certain that he would keep his promise to Sheila. He had avoided the traps that had ensnared so many others around him. He hadn’t gotten a girl pregnant. He hadn’t used drugs, like his brother, now incarcerated as well. He had graduated high school, something neither of his parents had done, then married his girlfriend, Morgan, who was 17. And after securing financial aid and buying a car with money saved from work, he started welding classes at a community college nearly an hour’s drive away. In the mornings, he would take his father to a corner to beg, head off to class, and in the afternoons, they’d return home together. But then came the confrontations with Hess, his father’s second incarceration in March for selling hydrocodone and clonazepam, and a car crash that took away his driver’s license and totaled his car. Without transportation, he decided to drop out of school and stay home with his mother, wife and other housemates. Sheila had wanted something more for Tyler, something other than what she felt most days: shame. She knew how she must look, in her

SUNDAY, JULY 30, 2017

COVER STORY pajamas and mismatched socks, to people who work. She knew what they must say about her disability: It’s only anxiety, only depression. Why couldn’t she work? Why did she buy soda and cigarettes when they needed food? How could she afford the Internet and cable TV bills on a $500 monthly disability check? She would sometimes consider how she would answer. She would say that cigarettes and soda make hard days a little easier. That television is just about her only connection to a world that hasn’t seemed to want her anymore. But it’s simpler to say nothing at all, so she rarely leaves the house now. “Once you get a name, you always got a name,” she had said the day before to a relative who also draws disability. “You can never disappear.” “The only way something dies on you around here is if the people dies out,” the relative had said. “I worked in the coal mines, and my nephews won’t even give me the damn time of day. Act like I’m going to steal something off them all the time because I ain’t got much.” “Yeah,” Sheila had said, nodding. “Yeah.” “That’s the shame,” he said. “Coal miners is what made this United States what it is.” Sheila gave Tyler a long look. He was studying the paint stains on his jeans and boots. They were left over from some community service he had done a few days before as punishment for stealing two items worth less than $200 at a Walmart, one of which was some ear buds, and returning one for money. “I was supposed to go work off my fines today,” he said. “You know I’d rather have you do that than do what you’re doing now,” she said. “If I was making money doing it, I wouldn’t care,” he said. “But you go work for nothing.” There was a silence. “So which hill are you going to?” Sheila asked. “The top of the hill,” he said of the location outside Hess’s house. “You’ll get run off. I wish you’d go on out there,” she said of another location. “It ain’t got no money out there,” he said. They were quiet as the car approached the Clinch Valley Medical Center, the largest hospital in the region. Sheila slowly got out of the car and started for the entrance. She turned back. “I love you,” she told him. “I love you, too,” he said, giving her a quick hug. “I’ll call you as soon as I get out.” “All right,” he said. “I’ll go hold a sign.” He couldn’t bring himself to call it what it was. It was never begging. When his father went to jail, and he told Tyler what to do if he became desperate enough, and the family didn’t have enough to eat, he didn’t tell him to beg or bum. Bums knock on car windows and accost people in the streets, and the family didn’t do that. He told his son to hold a sign, so that’s what Tyler called it. And now, standing in a parking lot beneath Hess’s house, he looked down at 11 signs in the

POLL

Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll

RURAL AMERICANS MORE LIKELY TO SAY POOR LACK EFFORT, IRRESPONSIBLE PEOPLE GET GOVERNMENT HELP Q: Which is generally more often to blame if people are poor: Lack of effort on their own part or difficult circumstances beyond their control? 10

URBAN SUBURB. RURAL 37% 42% 49%

Lack of effort on their own part

Difficult circumstances beyond their control

46%

54% 56%

Q: Which of these two situations do you think happens more often in America today -- needy people going without government help, or irresponsible people getting government help they don't deserve? 10

Needy people going without government help

RURAL 32%

SUBURBAN 40%

Irresponsible people getting government help they don’t deserve

URBAN 47%

48%

55%

64%

Note: No opinion not shown Source: Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll April 13-May 17, 2017, error margin +/- 3.5 percentage points among 1,070 rural Americans, +/- 7 points among 303 urban Americans and +/- 6.5 percentage points among 307 suburban Americans.

trunk of the car, most of which his father had made, trying to decide which would be best. “Need help to feed my family,” said one that was too big and floppy for such a windy day. “Need Donations to help with my wife’s surgery,” said another of an operation that had recently removed four inches of Sheila’s intestines. “God bless you!” said another. Tyler lifted one more that said, “Layed off need donations to feed my family.” He knew it wasn’t exactly truthful. Had he been laid off from McDonald’s, or fired? But he also wanted people to know he would work — wanted to work, even — so he chose that one, hopeful it would bring donations and maybe a job offer. He got back in the car, parked outside a store selling auto parts, gripping the sign. He glanced up at Hess’s house, wondering whether anyone was home. “Them are his two Jaguars,” he said. “That brick house is his.” “Now, look,” said housemate Nick Owens, 27, behind the wheel. “If he’s on that hill right there. If he comes down . . . ” “If he comes down, I’ll just leave. I don’t want him to get in my head or anything.” “Right,” Owens said. “If you see his vehicle come up or anything, just holler at me, if you can. Honk your horn or

KLMNO WEEKLY

something,” Tyler said and got out of the car. Sidestepping traffic, he reached the center of the intersection, where cars were waiting at a traffic light. He held the sign out before him, and, not wanting to make eye contact with anyone, kept his head down. He didn’t see one driver staring at him. He didn’t see another talk to his passenger, who looked at Tyler and quickly turned away. He glanced up only when a man stopped and gave him four singles. And again when a blond woman in a blue Ford Focus slowed in front of him. She rolled down her window. He stepped toward her car. She stuck out her head to say something. “Why don’t you go get a job!” she said. “Go cut some grass!” Then she was gone, and he was alone, thinking she was wrong — he had tried to find jobs, after all — but also thinking she was right. Why couldn’t he get a job? Was he to blame? Maybe people were right when they told him tattoos would turn off employers. He also could have walked through the snow that day McDonald’s had fired him — it was less than a mile from his house — but he hadn’t done that, either. And when his father told him to hold a sign, he could have refused, but he hadn’t. A man in a truck rolled down his window. He handed Tyler a roll of dimes worth $5. “It’s all I got right now,” the man said. “I appreciate it,” Tyler said. “God bless you.” Some days he could make $100 in three hours, and other days he would make less than the gas money it took to get here. It all depended on how long he was able to stand at the intersection before he was chased off by Hess or asked to leave by a county deputy, one of whom had just stopped on the other side of the intersection and was motioning at Tyler to approach him. “We get so many complaints,” said the deputy, Brian Triplett. “Just don’t stand on the state property.” “I’m just trying to make,” Tyler began, then started again. “I applied for jobs, dude, and don’t hear nothing back. My mom only gets $500 in Social Security disability.” And it was his mother he thought of after the deputy had left, and he was walking back toward the car, which took him to a grocery store, which had a phone near the managers’ desk that made free calls. Standing at the phone, he punched in Sheila’s number. “Hi,” he said into it. He told her he had made less than $10. “I stood up there for 15 minutes, and I got ran off.” He would have enough to buy only bologna, bread and cheese. “David Hess, I didn’t even see him anywhere.” All around him — in the checkout line, in the store’s office, in the aisles helping customers — were those who worked. “I don’t know what to do.” And here he was, someone who didn’t. “What should I do?” © The Washington Post

SUNDAY, JULY 30, 2017

KLMNO WEEKLY

LIFESTYLE

Money really can buy happiness

ISTOCK

J ENNA G ALLEGOS

f you were given $40 on the condition that you had to spend it on something that would make you really happy, what would you do with the money? Some people might go shopping, others would treat themselves to dinner or a movie, a few might even donate to a cause. But what about using that $40 to “buy” yourself more free time? According to a study published this past week in the journal PNAS, people who buy time by paying someone to complete household tasks are more satisfied with life. And it’s not just wealthy people. Across a range of incomes, careers and countries, timesaving purchases were correlated with less time-related stress and more positive feelings. Yet the researchers’ surveys showed that very few individuals think to spend money in this way. Ashley Whillans, a social psychologist and the study’s lead author, says she is “totally obsessed” with people’s decisions of whether to place more value in time or money. She says we weigh the two all the time: “Do I take the toll bridge, which will save me time

but cost me money? Where should I live? If I live far from work I’ll save money, but it will take me more time to commute.” Whillans and her colleagues at Harvard University collaborated with researchers at the University of British Columbia and two institutes in the Netherlands to conduct seven surveys of more than 6,000 respondents in four countries. The surveys asked people whether they regularly pay someone else to complete unpleasant daily tasks and rated their satisfaction with life. Across all surveys, life satisfaction was typically higher for people who regularly spend money to save time. This was true regardless of household income, hours worked per week, marital status and number of children living at home (though one limitation of the study was that very few people on the extreme low end of the income spectrum were surveyed). Even after controlling for total disposable income by comparing the amount participants spend on necessary purchases such as groceries, unnecessary purchases and life experiences, working adults in the United States reported higher life satisfaction if they regularly

At least it can if you spend it on freeing up more of your time, a study finds

paid to outsource household tasks such as cooking, shopping and general maintenance. Ryan Howell, a psychologist who was not involved with the study, called this consistency across demographics “robust” and “impressive.” Howell’s research at San Francisco State University also focuses on spending and happiness, and he also has found that the amount of money people have is not as important as how they spend it. To directly test whether timesaving purchases can boost happiness, the scientists in the latest research recruited 60 working adults in Vancouver and gave them $40 on each of two consecutive weekends. They were told to spend the money on a material purchase one weekend and a timesaving service another weekend (in varying order). Compared with the days when they bought stuff, most participants reported that their timesaving purchases were accompanied by an increased positive effect, a decreased negative effect and less time stress. And it didn’t matter how exceptional, useful or posh their material purchase was. Despite this, when researchers

asked another group of 98 working adults in Vancouver how they would spend $40, only 2 percent mentioned buying themselves more time. And in the earlier surveys in the Netherlands, even among millionaires, less than half reported regularly spending money to outsource disliked tasks. Sanford DeVoe, who was not involved with the study, called this a “really stunning finding.” DeVoe, a professor at UCLA, studies the psychological effects of placing a monetary value on time. He was struck by the fact that even people who can clearly afford to don’t outsource excess work. This adds to a growing body of evidence showing that “people don’t spend their money to yield the greatest happiness,” he said. Most adults feel they are short on time, and many cite the same as a reason for anxiety, insomnia and even obesity. So why are we so reluctant to consider investing in time capital? “People are notoriously bad at making decisions that will make them happier,” Whillans said. She suspects the abstract nature of time may be to blame. “We always think we’re going to have more time tomorrow than we do right

SUNDAY, JULY 30, 2017

BUSINESS now,” she said, so we’re hesitant to trade money, which is concrete and measurable, for time, which is much more uncertain. DeVoe agrees. When you pay someone to clean your house or mow your lawn, “you know exactly how much money you’re losing,” he said. “The happiness you’ll gain is harder to put a value on.” Another potential reason, according to Whillans: “Busyness is perceived as a status symbol.” It’s not uncommon for people to forgo their paid vacation even while burnout is a huge problem, she said. If companies offered workers incentives that saved time, such as toll passes or vouchers for household services, she predicts the economy might improve because burnout would decrease. On the other hand, buying time might not actually reduce busyness. That spare time could easily be filled by longer work hours or checking emails. Washing machines and microwaves were both invented to save time, and yet they haven’t made people any less busy. And people who spend too much money to outsource tasks could find themselves more stressed if they start feeling incapable of managing their own lives, the researchers noted. If you look at the many scientific studies on how to buy happiness, you find evidence supporting several other ways. Buying material goods, especially those that match our personality, can satisfy our need for establishing or expressing our identity. Spending money on others “pro-socially” — through charitable giving or to improve relationships with people we care about — fulfills our desire for human connections. And investing in experiences has been repeatedly shown to increase happiness. Especially beneficial are experiences that help us develop new skills or apply our talents in novel ways and make us feel more confident, Howell said. There’s no magic answer for how to stretch our dollars to achieve maximum happiness, but for many people, spending money to save time and improve wellbeing isn’t even on their radar. DeVoe hopes this research will give people a more concrete understanding of the abstract value of investing in free time. And giving ourselves a bit more time may make us a lot happier. n ©The Washington Post

KLMNO WEEKLY

Millennials like CEOs who are also activists BY

J ENA M C G REGOR

mericans, on the whole, aren’t so sure how they feel about chief executives speaking up about social issues such as climate change or President Trump’s travel ban. Some like the idea, especially if they agree with the CEO, making them more likely to buy products from a company with which they agree. Others wish CEOs would just be quiet, believing they should stick to running their businesses rather than wading in to political chatter. But there’s one group of consumers that is far more likely than others to believe corporate leaders have a responsibility to speak up on societal matters — and it will come as little surprise. It’s millennials. A new report from the global public relations firm Weber Shandwick and KRC Research surveyed Americans on how they feel about “CEO activism” — when corporate officials make public statements on social issues. In recent years, more and more chief executives have been speaking up, urging the White House to remain in the Paris climate accord, criticizing regulations that limit gay rights, defending journalism amid accusations of “fake news” or criticizing dysfunction in Washington. As Apple CEO Tim Cook said last year: “For a company that’s all about empowering people through our products, and being a collection of people whose goal in life is to change the world for the better — it doesn’t sit right with me that you have that kind of focus, but you’re not making sure your carbon footprint isn’t poisoning the place. Or that you’re not evangelizing moving human rights forward.” Millennials are the one group that sees this trend in a significantly positive way. In the survey, 56 percent of millennials said CEOs and other business leaders need to engage on hotly debated current issues more today than in

the past, compared with just 36 percent of Gen Xers and 35 percent of baby boomers. Forty-seven percent of millennials said CEOs have a responsibility to speak up on social issues that are important to society, compared with just 28 percent of Americans in older generations. And millennials were the only generation in the survey in which the percentage of those who said they view CEOs more favorably for taking public positions actually expanded since last year, rather than declined.

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Apple chief executive Tim Cook, seen at a White House meeting in June, says he feels obligated to speak out on important issues.

Combine those numbers with the neutral responses — young survey takers who said they weren’t sure, don’t know or that it doesn’t make a difference to them whether the CEO takes an activist stance — and the edge clearly seems to be with taking the bet and wading in. Leslie Gaines-Ross, chief reputation strategist for Weber Shandwick, said that “if you’re really looking to recruit the next generation, you need to know they’re expecting you to speak up on some of these issues.” The survey showed that millennial consumers aren’t just opining about how they feel about CEO activists. It’s likely to drive their behavior. According to the survey, more millennials this year said the public views of CEOs were more likely to drive them to make pur-

chases, an answer that declined among older generations this year. Similarly, the percentage of millennials who said they would increase their loyalty to their employer if they knew their CEOs’ views far outstripped that of other generations: 44 percent of millennials said it would, compared with just 16 percent of Gen Xers and 18 percent of baby boomers. “To me, that is an incredible finding,” Gaines-Ross said. “There’s a perception that millennials are eager to move from job to job, and if there is some sort of ‘stickiness’ that [CEOs] can create, that’s another factor to consider.” Aaron Chatterji, a professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, said one reason for millennials’ positive response to CEO activism is that it’s well established that they, in particular, value authenticity as consumers. CEOs have been so vocal on state bills that limit gay rights, he said, in part because after expanding benefits for LGBT employees for years now, they realize consumers will ask, “How can you say we’re a great place to work, but not speak up for those issues outside your walls?” Social media is another reason. For companies, Chatterji said, social media is like “this microphone that’s always on. If you’re not speaking about the issue of the day and other businesses, it’s conspicuous.” While it’s not really surprising that younger consumers are more interested in social issues, and make purchases in accordance with their beliefs, Gaines-Ross said the outsized millennial consumer demographic and the general uptick in activism in a polarized society mean it’s something corporate leaders will need to consider in their public communications. “This whole activism shift is real,” she said. “We’re seeing it from everywhere, and we’re just going to continue to see it. It’s part of the great divide.” n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, JULY 30, 2017

KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

Senator tells Americans: Grow up N ONFICTION

REVIEWED BY

M AURA C ASEY

B THE VANISHING AMERICAN ADULT Our Coming-of-Age Crisis — and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance By Ben Sasse St. Martin’s. 306 pp. $27.99

en Sasse is a brave man. In his new book, “The Vanishing American Adult,” the Republican senator from Nebraska makes it clear that he has had enough of our nonsense and we had all better shape up. Sasse rips into an increasingly hedonistic, shallow and pleasureseeking American culture that is producing a generation of ignorant, passive young adults who don’t read, have no grasp of American civics, don’t embrace work and don’t know how to do much of anything because their meek helicopter parents have both applauded and waited on the little darlings for far too long, to their detriment and to the peril of our shared future. “We are living in an America of perpetual adolescence,” Sasse writes. “Our kids simply don’t know what an adult is anymore — or how to become one. Many don’t see a reason even to try. Perhaps more problematic, the older generations have forgotten that we need to plan to teach them. It’s our fault more than it is theirs.” Sasse sprinkles the book with occasional disclaimers that however much he may be criticizing, if not lambasting, millennials, his true wrath is reserved for the parents rather than their slothful progeny. But I don’t buy it. Sasse offers occasional stories from his tenure as president of Midland University in Fremont, Neb., and seems eager to point out that the millennial generation has a reputation for being “needy, undisciplined, coddled, presumptuous.” After two decades of having their lives micromanaged and choreographed for “playdates, dance practices, extra tutoring for standardized tests and college entrance exams, music lessons, martial arts, select soccer and travel baseball, track meets, swim meets, art classes, language enrichment and all the rest, it should come as no surprise that the kids have only the vaguest idea of how to make decisions for

PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) says the nation is in “perpetual adolescence.”

themselves. All that many of them have ever had to do by age 18 is to be dressed and in the car at the appointed hour.” But America is a country where nearly 1 in 3 children live in poverty and presumably millions more are part of families who never had the money or the access for help with college entrance exams, and whose “language enrichment” occurs in bilingual households. With this statement and others like it (“Almost all of us live within walking or short driving distance of a supermarket with two dozen brands of bread, twenty-six kinds of ham, thirty-one kinds of mustard, more than forty varieties of mayonnaise, and lettuce from multiple continents” ), Sasse gives the impression that his book is intended as a warning siren only for those with incomes in the top 20 percent. It shouldn’t be. Sasse, with a doctorate in history and a background more varied than many others in the Senate, is too smart not to perceive the plight of the working poor or, to cite an example entirely absent

from these pages, the challenges faced by a high school junior who is already working 20 hours a week to help his mother pay the rent. While the book ignores that demographic, Sasse’s overarching point is a good one. “They [teenagers] need direction about how to acquire the habits essential for navigating adulthood and experiences that introduce and instill those habits.” We need young people who read, and read well; who are grounded in civics and history; who understand hard work and engage in it; who are self-reliant; who are not captive to rampant consumerism; and who are influenced by people other than, and far older than, their peers. We need, in short, to prepare our children for adulthood. His vision for how to accomplish those goals makes up the text and bulleted lists at the end of most chapters. Many suggestions are unarguable. Despite the thousands of hours children spend in school, many of life’s most worthy and deepest educational lessons occur far beyond the schoolhouse

walls, and we adults should help young people seek out such lessons. Our view of “public” should be separate from the mere governmental and should include a recognition of shared, common and very public problems, such as helping our kids become increasingly responsible. Sasse points to his 14-year-old daughter Corrie’s formative time working on a ranch as Exhibit A for his belief (and, I would think, that of most parents) that manual labor is important for all teens to experience. Consuming less, knowing the difference between needs and wants, and reducing reliance on the Internet and anything with glowing screens are all important lessons not just to impart to the young, but for adults to model. Chapter 8 contains suggestions for what should constitute a basic list of 60 “life-changing” books to have at home. The choices are something we can all argue about, but there is little debate that a house with books — whether the volumes are owned or borrowed from a public library — offers any child a built-in advantage. Sasse reaches into his doctorate and intellectual background to bolster his arguments and his solutions, quoting widely from Alexis de Tocqueville, the English author Dorothy Sayers, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, Edward Gibbon, and even the 300 B.C. philosopher Zeno of Citium and many others to make his points. Though Sasse holds a day job as a U.S. senator, he avoids policy prescriptions of any kind, preferring to challenge parents and sidestep partisanship. Yet, at the very same time, he admits the obvious: There is a place for broad debate and creating a framework in government for many of these issues. Perhaps that will be Sasse’s next book. n Casey, a former editorial writer for the New York Times, wrote this review for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, JULY 30, 2017

BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Devastating, funny look at indecision

A bicyclist’s view of climate change

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

REVIEWED BY

J AMIE F ISHER

eike Wang’s “Chemistry” is the most assured novel about indecisiveness you’ll ever read. Consider its opening lines: “The boy asks the girl a question. It is a question of marriage. Ask me again tomorrow, she says, and he says, That’s not how this works.” The boy is Eric; the girl, our narrator, goes unnamed. Both are graduate students in chemistry: He has just graduated; she has one year left. They have been together for four years, and their relationship has reached the point where whenever she invites friends over for dinner, they assume she will announce her engagement. But when Eric really does propose, she hovers, uncertain and unnerved. Eric is cheerful, capable, from small-town Maryland. (The narrator wonders “why he left a place where every ice-cream shop is called a creamery to work seventyhour weeks in lab.”) Their relationship is bashful and enormously endearing. He compliments her vials. When he gets the job offer he’s been hoping for, he puts a doily on her head and dances her around the kitchen. So why won’t she say yes? The title “Chemistry” also, of course, alludes to love. But in Chinese the word for “chemistry” translates to “the study of change.” The novel is equally about the narrator’s slow selftransformation and her relationship with Eric. Both have arrived at a catalytic moment: “the indecision each reaction faces before committing to its path.” Her best friend is a successful doctor, her lab mate miraculously efficient, and the narrator finds it difficult not to compare their careers with her own, which seems to have stalled. “Chemistry” is narrated in a continual present tense, which, in conjunction with Wang’s marvelous sense of timing and short, spare sections, can make the novel feel like a stand-up routine. (Com-

pare “the boy asks the girl a question” to a classic setup like “a horse walks into a bar.”) Personal crises are interrupted, to great effect, with deadpan observations about crystal structures and the beaching patterns of whales. The spacing arrives like beats for applause. But the present tense also suggests the extent to which the past is, for this narrator, an ongoing anxiety. It’s hard for her not to contrast her immigrant parents’ phenomenal will unfavorably against her own. After all, her father made it from the backwaters of rural China to graduate school and America. The narrator explains, “Such progress he’s made in one generation that to progress beyond him, I feel as if I must leave America and colonize the moon.” Her parents expect nothing less. When she’s growing up, her father instructs, “Tell me the time in arc second per second or don’t tell me at all.” When she confesses to her mother that she’s leaving graduate school, her mother screams, “You are nothing to me without that degree.” “Think small,” the narrator counsels herself, “think doable, think of something that might impress no one but will still let you graduate and find a job.” But she can’t think, she doesn’t know what she wants, and if she can’t decide, she may lose everything: Eric, her career, her self-worth. Despite its humor, “Chemistry” is an emotionally devastating novel about being young today and working to the point of incapacity without knowing what you should really be doing and when you can stop. I finished the book and, after wiping myself off the floor, turned back to an early passage when the narrator asks her dog, “What do you want from me? You must want something.” It doesn’t. n Fisher, a freelance writer and ChineseEnglish translator, wrote this review for The Washington Post.

C CHEMISTRY By Weike Wang Knopf. 211 pp. $24.95

A HOLE IN THE WIND A Climate Scientist’s Bicycle Journey Across the United States By David Goodrich Pegasus. 249 pp. $27.95

REVIEWED BY

A LLAN F ALLOW

limate scientist David Goodrich was riding his fully loaded Trek 520 touring bike along a desolate stretch of Wyoming’s Highway 287 when a storm boiled up from the west, catching him out in the open. “I was rapidly folded up in darkness, gusting winds, and lightning flashes,” he writes in his memoir “A Hole in the Wind,” a detail-rich chronicle of the half-dozen epic bike rides he has undertaken since 2000, including a 2011 crosscountry trip. “There was nothing to do but ball up low on the side of the road, away from the metal bike, and get drenched. I comforted myself that the steel roadside reflectors were a little higher than me.” Though Goodrich makes no allegorical hay of the incident, it perfectly crystallizes his larger message: We live at the mercy of the elements — a dependency that should motivate us to combat climate change. After a post-college stint as a roughneck on a Gulf Coast drilling rig, Goodrich settled down to a scientific career, working for both the U.N. Global Climate Observing System in Geneva and at the headquarters of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In the early 1990s, he began commuting to work by bike, a daily round trip of 26 miles. On his retirement in 2011, he logically received not a gold watch but a Gore-Tex jacket. By then, writes Goodrich, “the notion of combining what I did in the mornings and evenings with what I’d learned in my day job [had become] entrancing.” A few weeks later, he was two-wheeling from Cape Henlopen, Del., to Waldport, Ore. — a 4,208-mile odyssey that would allow him to witness “what changes in the climate system looked like on the ground.” All sorts of empirical evidence can be gathered from the seat of a bike, it turns out, especially if the observer has passed this way before. Ascending 10,276-foot-high

Cameron Pass in northwestern Colorado, Goodrich searches the hillsides in vain for the green carpet he recalls from the 1970s: Thanks to the tree-toppling mountain pine beetle, “the forests of Cameron Pass were gone. As my breath came back from the climb, there was a slow realization of what had happened. I could remember hiking in the Colorado high country 40 years ago, rock and snow and pine up to the tree line. It was our playground, a place to test ourselves, a place to listen to the quiet. Now it was a ghost forest.” Believing that climate is “not really that complicated, and that I could explain it if given the chance,” Goodrich broaches the topic with just about everyone he meets along the way. As in this exchange with a volunteer at Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge on the Delaware coast, however, getting people to accept the evidence before their eyes is an uphill battle: “Are you seeing sea level rise?” Goodrich asks. “I don’t know about that,” comes the answer, “but the bay has certainly moved in. . . . . What’s killing us is the flood insurance. Getting harder and harder to stay.” Despite delivering 17 presentations on climate change in eight states, he wakens only slowly to the fact that “in many places climate is a controversial topic.” So how do you avoid boring readers when narrating a lengthy bike trip with a lofty purpose? You can leaven your text with the occasional harrowing run-in — a pack of vicious dogs in Missouri, say, or railroad tracks that toss you over the handlebars in Kansas — but ultimately you must convince readers that they could tag along and enjoy your company. Goodrich does just that. n Fallow, a freelance writer and book editor in Alexandria, Va., wrote this review for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, JULY 30, 2017

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Health-care debate must balance logic, kindness ROBERT J. SAMUELSON writes a weekly column on economics for The Washington Post.

If we learned anything from the bitter debate over the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) — which seems doubtful — it is that we cannot discuss health care in a way that is at once compassionate and rational. This is a significant failure, because providing and financing health care have become, over the past halfcentury, the principal activity of the federal government. If you go back to 1962, the earliest year with such data, federal health spending totaled $2.3 billion, which was 2.1 percent of the $107 billion budget. In 2016, the comparable figures were $1.2 trillion in health spending, which was 31 percent of the $3.85 trillion budget. To put this in perspective, federal health spending last year was twice defense spending ($593 billion) and exceeded Social Security outlays ($916 billion) by a comfortable margin. The total will grow, because 76 million baby boomers are retiring, and as everyone knows, older people have much higher medical costs than younger people. In 2014, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, people 65 and older had average annual health costs of $10,494, about three times the $3,287 of people 35 to 44. Medicare and Medicaid, nonexistent in 1962, will bear the brunt of higher spending. At a gut level, we know why health care defies logical discussion. We personalize it. We assume that what’s good for us as individuals is also good for society. Unfortunately, this is not always true. What we want as individuals (unlimited care) may not be good for the larger society (overspending on health care). Our goals are mutually inconsistent. We think that everyone should be covered by insurance for needed care; health care is a right. Doctors and patients should make medical choices, not meddlesome insurance companies or government bureaucrats; they

might deny coverage as unneeded or unproven. Finally, soaring health spending should not squeeze wages or divert spending from important government programs. The trouble is that, in practice, we can’t meet all these worthy goals. If everyone is covered for everything, spending will skyrocket. Controlling costs inevitably requires someone to say no. The inconsistencies are obvious and would exist even if we had a single-payer system. The ACA debate should have been about reaching a better balance among these competing goals — and explaining the contradictions to the public. It wasn’t. The ACA’s backers focused on how many Americans would lose coverage under various Republican proposals — more than 20 million, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated. The ACA’s entire gain in coverage would be wiped out, and then some. From 2013 to 2015, the number of insured Americans rose by 13 million,

ZACH GIBSON/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Demonstrators oppose the American Health Care Act bill last month. Our health-care goals are mutually inconsistent, the author writes.

estimates Kaiser. But the ACA’s advocates don’t say much about stopping high insurance costs from eroding wage gains or strangling other government programs. Meanwhile, congressional Republicans and the Trump White House proposed huge cuts in health spending — $1 trillion over 10 years for the ACA’s repeal alone — while implausibly suggesting that hardly anyone would be hurt or inconvenienced. There was no coherent strategy to reconcile better care with lower costs. Democrats kept arguing that the health cuts were intended to pay for big tax cuts that would go mainly to the rich and upper middle class. Sounds right. Still, there’s no moral high ground. Some Democrats have wrongly accused Obamacare opponents of murder. This is over-the-top rhetoric that discourages honest debate. It’s also inconsistent with research. Kaiser reviewed 108 studies of the ACA’s impact and found that, though beneficiaries used more health care, the “effects on health outcomes” are unclear. We are left with a system in which medical costs are highly concentrated with the sickest patients. (The top 5 percent account for half of all medical spending.) This creates a massive

resource transfer, through insurance and taxes, from the young and middle-aged to the elderly. (Half of all health spending goes to those 55 and older, who represent just over one-quarter of the population). And yet, we govern this massive health-care sector — representing roughly a third of federal spending and nearly a fifth of the entire economy — only haphazardly, because it responds to a baffling mixture of moral, economic and political imperatives. It will certainly strike future historians as curious that we tied our national fate to spending that is backwardlooking, caring for people in their declining years, instead of spending that prepares us for the future. We need a better allocation of burdens: higher eligibility ages for Social Security and Medicare; lower subsidies for affluent recipients; tougher restrictions on spending. But this future is impossible without a shift in public opinion that legitimizes imposing limits on health spending. We didn’t get that with the eight-year Obamacare debate. The compassionate impulse overwhelmed the rational instinct. The result is that health care is controlling us more than we are controlling it. n

SUNDAY, JULY 30, 2017

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Repeating Obama’s errors in Syria JOSH ROGIN is a Global Opinions columnist for The Washington Post.

Trump administration officials consistently point back to the Obama administration’s failed Syria policy to justify their approach, which includes teaming up with Russia, accepting the continued rule of Bashar al-Assad and abandoning many of the rebels America supported for years. But although the Trump team inherited a terrible hand in Syria, the way it is playing it repeats the same fundamental mistakes made by President Barack Obama — and it will probably have the same negative results for the Syrian conflict, as well as for American interests. Recently at the Aspen Security Forum, CIA Director Mike Pompeo laid out U.S. interests in Syria. He said the United States has two principal enemies there: the Islamic State and Iran. In addition to stopping Iran from establishing a zone of control that spans the region, the U.S. goal is “providing the conditions to have a more stable Middle East to keep America safe.” President Trump has no choice but to work with Russia in Syria because Obama and thenSecretary of State John Kerry “invited” Putin into Syria in 2013 to work on a chemical weapons deal, according to Pompeo. But there’s still no real evidence that Russia wants to fight terrorism there, he said. “We don’t have the same set of interests” in Syria as Russia, said

Pompeo. What are the Russian goals in Syria? “They love a warmwater naval port and they love to stick it to America.” Pompeo is right, but he’s not in charge of U.S. Syria policy. That portfolio belongs to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who made completely contradictory remarks in Hamburg this month, right after he and Trump met with Putin to arrange a cease-fire in Syria’s southwest. “Russia has the same, I think, interests that we do in having Syria become a stable place, a unified place,” Tillerson said. Tillerson’s top Middle East official, acting assistant secretary Stuart Jones, also spoke in Aspen and said the United States has effectively outsourced security in Syria to the Russians by having them police the cease-fire.

“This is a real test of the Russians’ ability to lead this process,” he said. “The solution is to put this on the Russians and, if that fails, it’s a problem.” If that sounds familiar, it should. That’s almost the same formulation Kerry used when he was negotiating Syrian cease-fires with Russia in late 2015 and early 2016. Over and over, Kerry said Russia’s willingness to be a constructive partner in Syria must be tested. Over and over, Russia proudly failed that test by helping the Assad regime expand its control and continue its atrocities against civilians. To be sure, Obama and Kerry made many mistakes. The U.S. effort to train and equip Syrian rebels was poorly executed and may have spurred the Russian military intervention in 2015. The Obama administration deprioritized the push to remove Assad after that and began working on cease-fires with Russia because that offered the best hope of stopping the slaughter. Many argue that Trump has no choice but to continue that policy. As Jordan’s ambassador to Washington, Dina Kawar, said in Aspen, “What is the alternative?” Perhaps there is none. But the Trump administration ought not to repeat Kerry’s chief mistake,

which was to negotiate with Russia without leverage. That’s why Trump’s reported decision to cut off the CIA program to train and equip some Syrian rebel groups fighting Assad is so shortsighted. Trump is giving up what little leverage he has for nothing in return. Trump also must not repeat the Obama administration’s second mistake, which was to allow Assad and Iran to expand their areas of control. Jones said that the regime and its partners are using the cease-fire in southwest Syria to free up resources to advance in southeast Syria, where the fight for the strategic region around Deir al-Zour is underway. The Trump administration seems fine with allowing Iran and Assad to take over another large part of Syria. But the Sunni Arabs who live there will not be. Lastly, Trump should increase support to local Sunni Arab communities, if not with weapons than with support for local governance, education and basic services. Empowering local leaders is a prerequisite for any kind of long-term stability, and it will be crucial if and when a political process emerges. Rather than simply blaming Obama and Kerry for the mess, this administration should learn the lessons of that failure. n

SUNDAY, JULY 30, 2017

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

BY STANTIS FOR THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE

Tear down barriers to fight cancer JONATHAN HIRSCH AND TOM MIKKELSEN Hirsch is the co-founder of Syapse, a precision oncology company, and the chair of the GBM Agile Data Committee. Mikkelsen, the co-founder of the Hermelin Brain Tumor Center at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, is the director of the Ontario Brain Institute and a member of GBM Agile.This was written for The Washington Post.

On Tuesday afternoon, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), still recuperating from brain surgery, returned to Washington, D.C., for a critical vote toward efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. This dramatic moment underscores the mettle that McCain’s friends and foes noted when the diagnosis of his brain tumor was revealed. Surely a man who could survive unfathomable hardships in a POW camp had what it takes to beat cancer. Unfortunately, McCain is facing long odds. Glioblastoma (GBM), the kind of tumor he has, is an aggressive and deadly cancer. Only 50 percent survive more than a year from diagnosis, and only 5 percent survive five years or more. Thanks to efforts such as the Cancer Genome Atlas, funded by the National Cancer Institute, the scientific community knows more about GBM than just about any other cancer. We have created massive databases of molecular information about GBM patients, allowing us to map the cancer’s genomic profile. On top of that, because of the rapid adoption of precision oncology, hospitals and cancer centers are gathering a wealth of real-world data about GBM patients, including how molecular data is tied to treatments and outcomes. Yet this information remains

siloed, with clinical information cordoned off in one system and the molecular information in another. For us to get closer to a treatment for McCain and the thousands of patients that will come after him, physicians and researchers need to be able to easily share data. We need to tear down the wall between the data so that we can radically reduce the lag between insights and treatment. And for that to happen, those in the lab and at patients’ bedsides need McCain’s colleagues in government to step up and act right now to remove obstacles to data sharing. There are two main challenges when it comes to working on a cure for GBM. First, GBM is rare: There are only about 12,000 cases a year in the United States. Compared to a more common cancer such as lung cancer, with 220,000 cases in the United States

BY MARGULIES

alone, there are just too few GBM cases to study. Second, GBM is complex and adaptable: It is not clear what drives GBM to occur, grow and aggressively resist treatments that have worked in so many other cancers. To make matters worse, GBM is lethal even when it does not metastasize outside of the central nervous system. With too few cases and an everchanging foe, advances in treating GBM will come not from a traditional clinical trial but from the aggregation of data — including genomic, clinical, treatment, imaging and outcomes data — from real-life care across the country and beyond. Recognizing this, a group of oncologists, neuroscientists, other researchers and patient advocates from around the world started GBM Agile, an effort to share the data and knowledge about GBM and how to treat it. We know that gathering this realworld data and giving researchers and doctors access to it is the key to progress in treating GBM. Yet here in the United States, there are needless regulatory barriers to making this happen. Of course, protecting patient data and privacy is an important concern in health care, and for the past two decades that has been governed by the Health Insurance

Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. Yet HIPAA never anticipated the modern advances in research and data. The law is not clear as to what kind of data-sharing is permitted in routine clinical study. With this ambiguity, we have found time and again that hospital system attorneys counsel their doctors not to share aggregated data or risk a huge fine. The Department of Health and Human Services can easily clarify these rules so that aggregated deidentified patient data — including patients’ molecular, imaging, treatment and outcomes information — can be shared between health-care providers. HHS should also emphasize that molecular data about a patient’s tumor is part of the patient record, just like any other test result. Thus it cannot be subject to “data blocking” by health-care organizations such as testing labs, who may want to hoard the information for themselves. Realistically, these changes most likely would not produce a result that can help McCain. But if the administration wants to honor his fight with GBM, it should remove these barriers to data-sharing and allow physicians across the world to have the data they need to make progress against this killer. n

SUNDAY, JULY 30, 2017

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

The Foreign Service BY

L EON W EINTRAUB

Members of the U.S. Foreign Service, the professional diplomats who represent the U.S. government and help Americans abroad, have long been the target of jibes from lawmakers, pundits and the public. But it’s worth taking a closer look at the people who make up the Foreign Service and the work they do abroad. MYTH NO. 1 Foreign Service officers live large. Working dinners and receptions have always been parts of a Foreign Service workweek. But today’s diplomats enter the job with the expectation that they will frequently serve in hardship posts and war zones. Out of 170 countries with authorized Foreign Service posts, officers serving in 27 of them (almost 16 percent) are eligible to receive “danger pay” because of active hostilities, civil conflict, high levels of criminal violence or the real possibility of targeted kidnappings, often aimed at U.S. diplomats. Since 1950, eight U.S. ambassadors have died in the line of duty overseas. Six were killed by militants and two in plane crashes. The most recent example was Ambassador Chris Stevens in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012, and let’s not forget communications specialist Sean Smith, who died with Stevens, and public affairs officer Anne Smedinghoff, who was killed in Afghanistan in 2013. And recall the 52 Foreign Service officers and other embassy workers held in Tehran for 444 days from 1979 to 1981. MYTH NO. 2 Foreign Service officers are white, male elites. These days, Foreign Service officers look more like America. They come from rural and smalltown as well as urban areas, and from state and small private colleges as well as the Ivy League. But while the Foreign Service has changed, when it comes to gender and racial diversity,

there’s still work to be done. Almost half a century ago, in 1970, less than 5 percent of Foreign Service officers, and only 1 percent of senior-level officers, were women. By 2003, women were one-third of the officer corps and 25 percent of those at senior levels. The latest State Department report lists women as 40 percent of the “FS Generalist” corps (accounting for most diplomats) and one-third of the Senior Foreign Service. Likewise, the share of black career officers is still disappointingly small but growing from prior decades: It reached 6 percent in 2005 and by this spring was not any higher. That’s better than the mere two dozen black officers at work in 1968, but with clear and needed room for improvement. MYTH NO. 3 Foreign Service officers advance their own agendas. Like military officers, Foreign Service officers have commissions from the president and take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution. We serve the president elected by the people of the United States, as well as the officials appointed and confirmed to help formulate and execute our country’s foreign policy and international relations. We also, however, are responsible for advising the secretary of state or the president when we believe differently than they do, especially when it comes to advancing the nation’s best interests. After 266 Foreign Service officers resigned in 1968 over the Vietnam War, the State Department in 1971 established a

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION

The State Department’s second Foreign Service class. While officers used to come mostly from the upper classes, that isn’t as true today.

formal “Dissent Channel” to be used for transmitting recommendations that disagree with official policy. Such messages might say that some of our “friends” are politically corrupt, bleeding their countries dry through bribery or payoffs, or telling us what we want to hear about political democracy while jailing those seeking a modicum of political space. This is not disloyalty but frank and very helpful advice from on-theground observers. MYTH NO. 4 Face-to-face diplomacy isn’t necessary anymore. Social networking is useful as a diplomatic tool, but only as a complement to the work of faceto-face contacts with key audiences and decision-makers. There comes a point in human relations (particularly when dealing with another society and culture) when you must engage face to face, in the local language, to develop the trust and committed relationships that we need to discuss serious international issues (including, as an extreme example, military and/or diplomatic support).

MYTH NO. 5 Diplomacy can’t achieve much without the military. Then-Defense Secretary Bob Gates told a think tank in 2008 that diplomacy and development should lead U.S. efforts abroad, and he warned against a “creeping militarization” of U.S. foreign policy. The Foreign Service is typically our first contact in our relations with other states and other peoples. Experts inside and outside government know that it is cheaper and more effective to allow our diplomats to deal with crisis situations before they explode, rather than after. But it is difficult to claim success for the civil war that has been averted, for the mass rapes that have not occurred or for the state that has not failed. We all know, however, how easy (if regrettable) it is to claim success for the combatants killed, the enemy strongholds taken and the number of prisoners captured. n Weintraub is a retired Foreign Service officer who served at U.S. embassies in Colombia, Ecuador, Israel, Nigeria and elsewhere. This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, JULY 30, 2017

GREAT WINE. GREAT FOOD. GREAT FUN.

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 26, 2017

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 or at the door Presented by Foothills Magazine

oothills

Interested in having a booth at this event? E-mail us at info@wenatcheewineandfood.com

WENATCHEE ❆ LEAVENWORTH ❆ CHELAN AND ALL OF NORTH CENTRAL WASHINGTON