The Washington Post National Weekly - August 2, 2015

Worst Week Rep. Chaka Fattah 3

Politics The power of Puerto Rico 4

Authors A primer on a rhymer 17

Wonkblog Cecil isn’t the only one 23

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WORST WEEK IN WASHINGTON

Rep. Chaka Fattah

by Chris Cillizza

R

ep. Chaka Fattah joined an ignominious — but surprisingly large — club this past week: members of Congress indicted while in office.

Fattah, a Democrat who has represented West Philadelphia in the House since 1995, was charged by the Justice Department with 29 counts of racketeering related to his unsuccessful campaign for Philadelphia mayor in 2007. (He came in a distant fourth.)

At the center of the indictment is a $1 million loan that Fattah allegedly sought and received secretly from a businessman during that campaign. The feds say the congressman used federal grant money to pay back that loan. That, you may not be surprised to learn, would be illegal.

Fattah, as he has done over the years that this investigation has been underway, denied any wrongdoing and insisted that he was happy with news of the indictment.

“It’s been an eight­year matter, and we’ve moved from an investigation to an actual allegation,” a smiling Fattah told reporters Wednesday on Capitol Hill. “I think I’ll stand by my original position, which was: As an elected official I’ve never been involved in any illegal activity or misappropriation of funds.” He also noted, “It’s not even disputed that programs that I’ve initiated have helped at least 25 million people.” Undisputed! Twenty­five million people!

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MATT ROURKE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Fattah stepped down as the ranking Democrat on an Appropriations subcommittee in the wake of the indictment but insisted that he planned to run for reelection in Pennsylvania’s 2nd Congressional District in 2016.

Given how strongly Democratic his district is — President Obama won it with 90 percent of the vote in 2012 — Fattah might win no matter what happens in court. But that wouldn’t change the fact that he is now one of the more than two dozen members of Congress to be indicted while in office since 1980.

Chaka Fattah, for ensuring your place in the history books, you had the worst week in Washington. Congrats, or something. n

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2015 The Washington Post / Year 1, No. 42

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY MEDIA BOOKS OPINION WONKBLOG

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Across the nation, deaths from heroin overdoses nearly quadrupled in the decade ending in 2013, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Washington Post illustration.

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POLITICS

The Puerto Rican influence M ARY J ORDAN Kissimmee, Fla .

BY

P

uerto Rico’s economic crisis meant Jeffrey Rondon, 25, struggled to find even part-time work, so he recently joined the growing exodus from his Caribbean island to Florida. Now he holds a full-time restaurant job and something that could upend the 2016 presidential election — the right to vote in Florida, the biggest of all swing states.

“It’s important to vote and be heard — it’s a privilege,” said Rondon, who is one of thousands of Puerto Ricans who have moved to Florida in the past year.

As U.S. citizens, Puerto Ricans are relatively easy to register to vote, and they are attracting unprecedented attention because they could change the political calculus in a state that President Obama won by the thinnest of margins in 2012: 50 percent to 49.1 percent.

“It’s a potential game changer for the state,” said Mark Hugo Lopez, director of Hispanic Research at the Pew Research Center. “It’s the biggest movement of people out of Puerto Rico since the great migration of the 1950s.”

Puerto Rican voters tend to lean Democratic, but a great number of the newcomers do not identify with any party, making them appealing targets for politicians and recruiters on both sides. Like those living in other U.S. territories, people in Puerto Rico cannot vote for president in the U.S. general election.

Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who is leading the large number of Republican presidential candidates in Florida polls, recently made a high-profile visit to Puerto Rico. Last Monday, he addressed three separate gatherings in Orlando, and among those he met were many Puerto Ricans.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, the leading Democratic presidential candidate, has visited the island in the past and polled very well with Puerto Ricans when she ran for president in 2008.

“I think you are going to see a

PHOTOS BY CHARLES OMMANNEY/THE WASHINGTON POST

Those leaving to seek work also get a vote — many in pivotal Florida hyper-focus in Florida, the likes of which we have never seen. I do think Puerto Ricans can change the political landscape,” said Cristóbal Alex, president of the Democraticbacked Latino Victory Project.

Jennifer Sevilla Korn, who works on Hispanic outreach as the Republican National Committee’s deputy political director of strategic initiatives, said that the GOP has been watching the shifting demographics of Florida and that the Puerto Rican vote “is definitely rising in importance.”

“It’s been growing for years,” she said, adding that in 2016, “you have to get a good portion of Puerto Rican votes to win Florida.”

Korn said Republicans are building community relationships, opening offices in heavily

Hispanic neighborhoods, going door to door and showing up at Latino events of every size, “from 30 to 30,000 people” and setting up GOP booths.

“I see the vote as up for grabs,” she said.

Puerto Rico, a U.S. commonwealth, has been struggling with $72 billion in debt and soaring unemployment. The Pew Research Center calculates that the island’s population dropped by 11,000 people a year in the 1990s, but between 2010 and 2013, the loss accelerated to 48,000 a year.

This year, with economic problems growing, the number leaving for the mainland is even higher.

Florida — particularly the area around Orlando in central Florida — has become the hottest destina-

Jeamy Ramirez, left, and Maria Fiallo canvass a neighborhood in Kissimmee, Fla., in search of people who are not registered to vote.

tion for Puerto Ricans. Disney World and the many jobs associated with the tourist industry around it offer entry-level jobs.

Puerto Rican professionals and entrepreneurs also are relocating to Florida, which they see as a welcoming place where it is ever easier to find a shop with a Puerto Rican flag, food and music.

In addition, a growing number of Puerto Ricans from New York, Chicago and elsewhere on the mainland are moving to central Florida, or, as many call it, “Little Puerto Rico.”

“The weather is better here than New York!” said Larry Rivera, the New York-born manager of Kissimmee’s Melao Bakery, which features Puerto Rican sweets and offerings such as mofongo, a fried

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POLITICS plantain dish with garlic.

Rivera said everyone is talking about all the newcomers. He sees the influx in the lines of Puerto Ricans at Melao that sometimes stretch out the door.

“I see all the new faces, and I see that when people are applying for jobs, their last address was the island,” he said.

Rondon, who moved to Florida in October to find work, was recently hired at Melao. Jobs were so hard to come by in Bayamon, on the north side of the island, that Rondon said he could earn only $150 a week with part-time work at Home Depot. So he, his brother and his mother relocated to Florida, and he now works 40 hours a week or more and earns three times what he did.

His dream, he said, is to own a home in Florida, and he is excited about voting in the U.S. presidential election for the first time. He says he has a “good feeling about Hillary Clinton,” but the candidate he has heard the most about is Donald Trump, so, he says, “I need to learn more.”

Puerto Rico’s party system is different from the U.S. system.

Though there is no generalelection presidential vote, there are Republican and Democratic presidential primaries on the island, and delegates are sent to the national conventions.

Some Puerto Ricans blame politicians for wrecking the island’s economy and say they are in no hurry to have anything to do with politics. But big efforts are underway to engage the newcomers.

“I’m telling them if you don’t vote, you don’t count — it’s like you don’t exist,” said Jeamy Ramirez, 37, who works for Mi Familia Vota, a national nonprofit group that registers Latinos. She said her group has signed up about 3,000 new voters in central Florida since March, a great number of whom were Puerto Rican and did not register with either party.

One of the newcomers Ramirez registered is Yarinneth Castro, 26, who arrived two months ago. The college student, who hopes to be a court psychologist, said she will be listening for a candidate who addresses her two big issues: better health-care coverage and help for Puerto Rico.

“I am interested in the person, not the party,” she said.

In a state famous for razor-thin margins of electoral victory, the

Top, Jeffrey Rondon takes orders at Melao Bakery in Kissimmee. Rondon came to Florida from Puerto Rico less than a year ago because of the poor job market on the island.

He plans to vote in the presidential election — something he could not do in Puerto Rico because the island has no electoral votes. Above, Mairy Reyes of Mi Familia Vota takes information from a Kissimmee man — a Brooklyn transplant — who wanted to register to vote.

influx of thousands of people is mobilizing many activists.

“Everyone remembers that George W. Bush won Florida by 537 votes in 2000. You are talking about 1,000 families coming here a month. It’s stunning,” said Anthony Suarez, president of the Puerto Rican Bar Association in Florida. He has helped organize a bipartisan forum that he calls “Political Salsa” to engage new-

comers on the issues.

Mark Oxner, chairman of the Osceola County Republican Party, said, “We’re telling them what the Republican Party stands for and that a lot of their values align with the Republican Party,” especially on social issues such as opposition to abortion. He added, “We need to reach out to the Puerto Rican base and tell them we believe in the same things.”

$72 billion

Puerto Rico, a U.S. commonwealth, has been struggling with $72 billion in debt.

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State Sen. Darren Soto, a Democrat, is running to be Florida’s first Puerto Rican in Congress. He is seeking the 9th District seat vacated by Alan Grayson, a Democrat who is running for the U.S. Senate. Many Democrats hope that Soto’s candidacy in central Florida will energize Puerto Rican turnout in the presidential year.

The Puerto Rican vote “helped Barack Obama win Florida twice,” Soto said, and now, “because of the higher influx, it will be a bigger factor.”

Puerto Rican elected officials from New York and Chicago plan to come down early next year to hold political rallies. In 2014, caravans of cars where organized to get the vote out — as many as 70 cars bearing Puerto Rican flags blaring through a neighborhood — and there will be bigger efforts in 2016.

Soto said those coming from Puerto Rico can register to vote fairly easily — they simply have to prove residency, as people do when they get a driver’s license, by showing utility bills or rental leases. “It’s no different than a person moving here from New York,” he said.

Soraya Marquez, the state coordinator for Mi Familia Vota, said her team goes to supermarkets, housing complexes and festivals — anywhere people gather — to ask people whether they want to register. After finding out whether a person is a U.S. citizen, they usually use a Florida driver’s license or identification card to get the person’s details and help them sign up.

The group hands the voter applications over to the state supervisor of elections. If that office approves the application, it mails the person a voting card, usually within two weeks. Marquez said Mi Familia Vota aims to register 10,000 people in central Florida this year and 20,000 more next year.

Many other groups are helping people register, too.

Vivian Rodriguez, chairman of the Democratic Hispanic Caucus of Florida, said registering to vote is key, but that’s just the beginning.

“Nobody anticipated this large migration, but it is changing politics,” she said. “It’s a good opportunity for us. But we have a lot of work to do.” n

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POLITICS

To win the right, Huckabee courts left P HILIP R UCKER Manning, S.C. BY

M

ike Huckabee journeyed to this rural hamlet recently to preach. Huckabee is white, a former Arkansas governor and Baptist minister, yet here he was standing at the pulpit of a predominantly black church delivering a sermon about the nation’s race problem.

“Folks, I’m going to be honest with you — we don’t have a skin problem in this country; we have a sin problem in this country,” Huckabee said.

“All right! All right!” congregants responded. There were shouts of “Amen!” A woman in the second pew banged a tambourine.

“I hear all the time, ‘We need to have a conversation in this country about race,’ ” Huckabee continued.

“If we have all the conversations in theworld,we’renotgoingtochange anything. It’s not a conversation we need; it is a conversion we need, to be reconciled with God.” This was an unusual message at an unusual campaign stop for a Republican presidential candidate, but it is part of Huckabee’s strategy. In a sprawling field of 16 contenders for the GOP nomination, each candidate is trying to find a niche — and Huckabee, who polls in the second tier, believes he may find one with black voters.

Here in South Carolina, which holds one of the earliest presidential nominating contests, as well as in a string of other Southern states whoseprimariesquicklyfollow,the primaries are open — meaning any voter, regardless of party affiliation, can vote in the Republican contest.

The strategy requires a careful balance for a candidate such as Huckabee, who has also been courting white evangelicals and has drawn attention at times for sharp attacks on President Obama. Earlier last week, for instance, Huckabee claimed that the Iran nuclear deal would “take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven,” promoting ridicule from Obama, who said Huckabee’s comments reflected a pattern of rhetoric from GOP candidates “that would be considered

CHARLES OMMANNEY/THE WASHINGTON POST

GOP candidate goes into churches hoping to lure African Americans ridiculous, if it wasn’t so sad.”

And Huckabee risks angering some Republicans if they see him as inviting Democrats to meddle in the GOP nomination battle.

But Huckabee believes he can rely on his Christian faith to make a special connection with some African American voters, drawing on biblical values. He did so with some success in Arkansas, where exit polls from his 1998 gubernatorial race show he won a 48 percent share of the black vote, which is unusually large for a Republican.

There were signs in Manning that Huckabee, at a minimum, will find a friendly audience. After the former governor led a prayer for Tricia Bouttry, a black congregant who is battling breast cancer, she said, “I didn’t know anything about him, but his speech was so uplifting and his prayer was so heartfelt I cried.

“I’m a Democrat, but he would have my vote,” said Bouttry, 51, a mental health worker. “I want somebody who’s spiritual in the White House — a pastor that

knows the Word as president.”

Other Republican candidates have been making overtures to black voters, too. Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) has given speeches at historically black colleges like Howard University and has campaigned in urban centers like Detroit. Earlier in July, former Texas governor Rick Perry gave a widely praised speech on race in which he said too many blacks have been left behind by the economic recovery.

Despite their outreach, however, Republicans have had difficulty trying to appeal to black voters.

GOP candidates, including Huckabee, were criticized for their slow and timid response to calls to remove the Confederate flag after the Charleston, S.C., church massacre in June — though most ultimately supported Gov. Nikki Haley’s successful push to do so.

Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton has been highlighting issues she hopes will drive a wedge between Republicans and African Americans, such as efforts by GOP governors and

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee attends the Faith and Freedom Sunday service at the Rock Hill Missionary Baptist Church on July 19 in Manning, S.C.

lawmakers to limit voting rights.

Huckabee is devoting considerable time to making connections with black congregations.

When he attends a service, he said, he offers more than the quick wave hello and “God talk” that many churchgoers might hear from a typical visiting politician.

He sits through two-hour services — bowing his head in prayer, tapping his feet to gospel music and cheering on praise dancers — and delivers 30-minute sermons, as he did here on a recent Sunday at Rock Hill Missionary Baptist Church and plans to do again at other black churches.

“People in African American churches are not to be taken for fools,” Huckabee said in an interview. “They’re not immune to having people hustle them. And so if a person thinks they can just show up at the churches around election time and sing a hymn with them — no, that’s so phony.”

At Rock Hill Missionary, Huckabee talked about growing up “dirt poor” during integration in Hope,

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POLITICS Ark., also the birthplace of former president Bill Clinton and a town Huckabee described as half white, half black. He said he learned as a child never to judge other people.

Huckabee recalled in the interview that “it would’ve been real easy for me to say, ‘I’m not as good as those kids. They live in better houses, they have nicer clothes, they get to go to camp, they have nice cars, they have air conditioning in their homes, they have carpet on their floors.’ But my parents always said, ‘Son, nobody’s better than you . . . and you’re not any better than anybody else.’”

In his mid-20s, Huckabee became pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church in Pine Bluff, Ark. Immanuel had been a white church, Huckabee said, until he met a black teenager — “a young man of Christ” — who asked to join. Huckabee let him in.

“Folks were so mad at me. I had death threats,” Huckabee recalled in his sermon. “I said, ‘I will not represent a church that will not welcome everyone.’ ” Huckabee said one of his finest moments as governor came in 1997, on the steps of Little Rock Central High School, where he and Bill Clinton marked the 40th anniversary of the Little Rock Nine by symbolically opening the school doors to the nine black students who in 1957 had been forcibly denied entry to the all-white school.

Huckabee preached in Manning at the invitation of Pastor Leon Winn, an active Republican who last year ran unsuccessfully against Rep. James E. Clyburn (D).

After acknowledging Huckabee in the front pew, Winn said from the pulpit, “I don’t know if you know, this is a black church with a black preacher.” That drew warm laughter from the congregation, which on this day included a few dozen white Republican activists who had come to see Huckabee.

When the service concluded, Nathaniel Pugh, 55, a black man who works as a heavy equipment operator, greeted Huckabee and posed for a picture with him.

“I’m a Democrat, but I might cross the line to vote for him,” Pugh said afterward.

“We can talk till we’re blue in the face,” he said, “but until our hearts get right, there still will be racism.

For Governor Huckabee to come into our little town and talk about this, that’s huge. He got my attention.” n

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In first GOP debate, Trump will be center of attention

BY D AN B ALZ AND R OBERT C OSTA

T

his week’s Republican presidential debate in Cleveland marks not only the inaugural formal gathering of the expansive GOP field but the start of a new and unpredictable chapter in an already raucous 2016 race.

Under the bright studio lights on the shores of Lake Erie on Thursday, ambitions will be showcased, positions staked and Donald Trump, who has consumed the summer’s headlines, will finally be confronted, face to face, by rivals.

“There is more downside than upside for most candidates, and the first goal is to try not to selfdestruct,” said former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who ran for the GOP nomination in 2012.

“You don’t want to get in a situation where you knock yourself out,” Gingrich said. “The candidates ought to figure out what their message is for the American people rather than worrying too much about the back and forth with others.”

But the presence of Trump, who has in recent days attacked former Florida governor Jeb Bush, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and former Texas governor Rick Perry, makes calculations more difficult.

Every candidate will have a strategy for making a memorable impression. “Every candidate has to have a Trump strategy” as well, said an experienced GOP operative.

“A multi-candidate debate can be hard,” Sen. Rob Portman (ROhio). “Spending time with policy books is part of it, but so is carefully considering what the dynamic is going to be.”

Figuring out how to handle Trump is a constant question, especially with regard to his demeanor. Will he be combative and disregard rules, or will he go from being “P.T. Barnum to Reaganesque,” as one campaign adviser wondered. In recent days, Trump has cast the others as the hunters and himself as the hunted, telling

reporters last weekend in Iowa, “From what I’ve heard, every one of ’em is going to come at me. . . .

For two hours, I’m going to be, like, in the lion’s den, right?”

At the same time, Trump sought to lower expectations for his performance. “I’m hearing everyone say I’m going to be good at the debates,” he said. “I don’t know I’m going to be good. I’ve never done it before. Politicians do it every night.”

Trump adviser Chuck Laudner said his client plans no special

CHARLIE NEIBERGALL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Donald Trump, who leads in the polls, will receive plenty of attention at Thursday’s debate.

prep sessions. “It’s low key, absolutely low stress,” he said. “This isn’t 50 consultants locked in a war room, with a fake podium and cardboard cutouts of the other candidates, playing the game of Risk. . . . He’s going to get his views across and do so in a way that’s not programmed.”

Ed Rollins, who was campaign manager for Ronald Reagan in 1984 and later advised Ross Perot in 1992, met with Trump advisers in early June in New York as they were seeking advice about how to navigate the GOP contest.

Rollins said that, based on his Perot experience, “Someone like Trump doesn’t want guidance. . . .

They don’t want to be prepped.”

Rollins said the advantage of such candidates is that they are generally fearless and willing to battle.

“The problem,” he added, “is that the message can get lost.”

The main targets of the GOP candidates will be President Obama and Democratic frontrunner Hillary Rodham Clinton.

That’s in part because many of those watching will be assessing who looks most capable of winning in November 2016.

To make the most of their limited time, candidates need both a message and a moment, said Brett O’Donnell, the former director of debates at Liberty University who is working with Sen. Lindsey O. Graham of South Carolina.

“You have to make sure your message cuts through,” he said, “but at the same time you have to make sure you have a moment in the debate where you basically capture the attention of the audience and the press.”

Under the rules set out by Fox News, which is co-sponsoring, only the top 10 candidates, based on a collection of national polls, will be invited to participate in the two-hour, prime-time event. CNN has set similar rules for the second debate in September.

“Our role is to better control the process, not manage the candidates,” said Sean Spicer, chief strategist at the RNC. “After going through those 20 debates in 2012, our goal all along has been to add order,disciplineandpredictability.”

Those on the bubble have been working to boost their poll numbers before Tuesday’s cutoff.

Going into the weekend, the top eight candidates, based on the Real Clear Politics average of recent polls, included Trump, Bush, Walker, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.).

Tightly bunched after those eight were Ohio Gov. John Kasich, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Perry. Those in clear danger of not being in the debate are former senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, businesswoman Carly Fiorina, Graham and former New York governor George Pataki. n

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NATION

A death further divides Texas county T OM R OWLEY Hempstead, Tex. BY

E

lton Mathis never expected to be famous when he was elected Waller County district attorney nine years ago, working 15 miles from the town where he was born. The last two weeks changed all that.

Now Mathis can be seen on televisions across the nation, and his name will forever be linked to Sandra Bland, the black woman who drove here from Illinois for a job interview and wound up dead in the Waller County jail.

Bland’s death last month is shining a national spotlight on a small corner of Texas that was already facing an uncomfortable struggle to come to terms with a history of racism. Lynchings were once rampant in Waller and as recently as 2004, Mathis’s predecessor was arguing that students at historically black Prairie View A&M did not have the right to vote.

Mathis casts himself in the vanguard of efforts to change the place, even as he battles charges of racism himself and his staff endures death threats. “The county’s in growing pains,” Mathis, 39, said.

“You have a newer generation that sees things different than possibly our grandparents did. . . . We’re trying to get rid of a lot of those vestiges of the Old South that are negative.”

Above all, Mathis said, that means resolving questions about Bland, who was found dead in a jail cell July 13, three days after a Texas state trooper pulled her over for failing to signal a lane change then jailed her on charges of assault. Officials have said Bland committed suicide but her friends have questioned that finding, saying she was delighted by the prospect of working at the university where she graduated in 2009.

To Bland’s friends, her arrest was a classic case of “driving while black” and her death further proof that talk of a more progressive Waller County is just that — talk.

“The difference between now and then is then white people didn’t hide or deny what they did,” said Holice Cook, 37, an old friend.

STEVE GONZALES/HOUSTON CHRONICLE VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

Residents, still coming to terms with a history of racism, get another jolt from Sandra Bland case “In this county, they’ve been hanging and killing Negroes since the Civil War.” That past is available for all to see in a display cabinet at Prairie View A&M, where a caption below a grainy black-and-white photo explains that the college sits on the site of a former plantation.

The land was purchased in 1878 to educate “colored youth,” while elsewhere in the county African Americans were still being treated distinctly differently. Between 1877 and 1950, Waller was among the Texas counties with the highest number of lynchings, according to the Equal Justice Initiative.

More recently, in 2004, Oliver Kitzman, then the county’s district attorney, claimed Prairie View students were not automatically eligible to vote locally. He denied any suggestion of racism but eventually apologized for actions he said were “understandably perceived” by some students as “threatening.” Ultimately, a

court order cleared the way for students to register.

While Mathis insists that all evidence points to Bland taking her own life, he said he “understood” why “some of the bad things” about the county’s past might lead people to suspect otherwise. So Bland’s death is being investigated as if it were a homicide, he said, and race is being considered as a potential motive.

Mathis has criticized Brian Encinia, the trooper who arrested Bland. A video shot by a dashboard camera shows Encinia becoming confrontational when Bland refused to put out a cigarette, trying to pull her from her car and threatening to use his stun gun, saying, “I will light you up!”

Sheriff Glenn Smith, 56, holds a starkly different view of the traffic stop. He sides with Encinia, saying the trooper did a “fine job.”

“He was certainly legal, in his parameter there, and she needed to obey what he was requesting

Waller County District Attorney Elton Mathis starts a news conference Thursday in Hempstead, Tex., with a moment of silence for Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old woman who died while in police custody.

her to do,” Smith said, though he conceded that the trooper might have been “a little nicer” or tried to “de-escalate” the situation.

Both Smith and Mathis have faced direct charges of racism.

Bland’s friend LaVaughn Mosley has called on Smith to resign.

The primary claim against him dates to 2007, when Smith was Hempstead’s chief of police. A witness to an arrest claimed Smith pushed him and told him to “get out of my face” or go to jail, too.

“The guy construed obviously that I was a racist because he was a black man,” Smith said, adding that the city council decided it was “not the way the police chief should act.” The council suspended him for two weeks without pay and he attended anger management classes. A year later, when race relations “weren’t any better,” Smith said, he was fired.

Mathis sent a text last year to the Rev. Walter Pendleton, a black pastor who sought a breakdown of county prosecutions by race.

“My hounds ain’t even started yet dumb ass,” Mathis wrote.

“Keep talking. When I talk people will listen. Keep talking and I will sue your ass for slander. It works both ways. ‘Dr.’ Take your fake Dr. ass and jump off a high cliff.”

Mathis defended the text, claiming Pendleton had not made a neutral request for statistics but had argued he did not “prosecute white people,” which riled him.

Still, Mathis insisted that the county has made progress. Hempstead now has its third black mayor, and Mathis has set up a hate crimes task force.

“Have I seen racism here? Of course I have,” Mathis said.

Changing such habits takes time, Mathis said, adding that he can do little to speed the process.

So he presses forward on the Bland case, set on proving that her death, while tragic, bears no connection to Waller’s darkest days.

And if investigators conclude Waller County was somehow responsible for Bland’s death?

“That would be a huge setback,” Mathis said. “For everyone that lives here — and the progress I feel the community has made.” n

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Alaska’s scorched summer C HRIS M OONEY Fairbanks, Alaska BY

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undreds of wildfires are continually whipping across this state this summer, leaving in their wake millions of acres of charred trees and blackened earth.

The staggering 2015 wildfire season may soon be the state’s worst ever, with almost 5 million acres already burned — an area larger than Connecticut. The pace of the burn moderated in recent days, but scientists say the fires are just the latest indicator of a climatic transformation that is remaking this state — its forests, its coasts, its glaciers, and perhaps most of all, the frozen ground beneath — more than any other in America.

Alaska has already warmed by more than 3 degrees Fahrenheit in the past half-century, much more than the continental United States. The consequences have included an annual loss of 75 billion metric tons of ice from its iconic glaciers — including those covering the slopes of Denali, the highest peak in North America — and the destabilization of permafrost, the frozen ground that underlies 80 percent of the state and whose thaw can undermine buildings, roads and infrastructure.

Also pummeled are the state’s Arctic coastlines, which are facing intense erosion as seas rise and declining sea ice exposes shores and barrier islands to punishing waves. The situation has grown so bad that some native communities, including tiny Kivalina, Alaska, sitting on a barrier island along the Chukchi Sea, may now have to be relocated, given the dangerous loss of land to the sea.

Earlier snowmelt transforms the state further. In 2015, the starting place of the Iditarod sled dog race had to be relocated north, to Fairbanks, because there wasn’t enough snow in some places.

But arguably the most dramatic change — threatening to transform the state’s 126 million acres of forests and, perhaps, worsen climate change in the process — is occurring with the state’s wildfires.

Alaska’s forests make up 17 per-

cent of the U.S. total, and while they’ve always burned, they may be entering a major combustive period. The blazes are so intense and extensive they could transform an entire ecosystem, even as the fires hasten the thawing of permafrost — which contains vast quantities of ancient carbon, ready to be emitted to the air.

“The more severe the fire, the deeper that it burns through the organic layer, the higher the chance it will go through this complete conversion,” says Ted Schuur, an ecologist at Northern Arizona University who spends summers in Fairbanks. “What happens in the summer of 2015 has the potential to change the whole trajectory of [the burned area] for the next 100 years or more.”

The nearly 5 million acres burned in Alaska so far this year dwarfs all burning across all states in the Lower 48. Three of Alaska’s top five wildfire seasons have occurred since the year 2004, with 16 million acres burned between them (2004, 2005 and 2015).

Indeed, the 2015 fire season is a poster child for how strongly climatic factors influence wildfire dangers — it’s one in which most fires have been caused by lightning, rather than people. The whole sys-

tem was simply ready to burn.

In May, Alaska experienced its hottest temperatures in 91 years of record-keeping, 7.1 degrees Fahrenheit above average. As a result, seasonal snowmelt was well ahead of schedule, allowing the ground to dry out sooner.

In late June, 152 fires were lighted in a single weekend, mostly by lightning strikes. Since then, the number of acres burned has leapt forward by sometimes as much as 300,000 a day. The current record year, 2004, saw 6.59 million acres burned, but 2015 is ahead of its pace — although thanks to recent rainfall, the pace of burn has slowed.

This year is part of a trend that should continue as Alaska gets warmer and drier, says Scott Rupp, a professor of forestry at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.

“What we’ve been seeing in the last two decades is an increase in the extent of area burned from year to year and a fairly substantial increase in the frequency of these very large fire years,” Rupp says.

The result, in 2015, has been an influx of out-of-state firefighters who have had to get a crash course on the state’s unique fire ecosystem: highly flammable black spruce forests in which a thick ground layer of mosses, lichens

A state already affected by climate change has seen almost 5 million acres burned by wildfires

and other organic materials, which firefighters call “duff,” can nourish fires and keep them smoldering even in damp conditions.

“A day or two after the precipitation . . . the fire will stand up and burn, just like it hasn’t even rained,” said Chad Martin, a “helitack” crew member from Rifle, Colo., stationed at the fire north of Fairbanks known as the Aggie Creek Fire.

Alaska has brought in a small army of firefighters and staff from Canada and the Lower 48 states to supplement 2,000 firefighters based here. The expected cost — a bill split between Alaska and federal agencies — is forecast to be $100 million, an unhappy wakeup call to a state that reduced staff at the McGrath, Alaska, fire outpost this year as a result of budget constraints. The state faces a massive $3.5 billion deficit, largely because of declining oil prices.

Aside from the financial burden, there are other concerns, including risks to residents’ health and the state’s tourism industry.

More troubling to climate scientists, the fires could contribute to a worsening of climate change.

Intense wildfires burn not only trees — sending the carbon they contain into the atmosphere — but also deep into the duff layer, sending up still more carbon. Sometimes, fires burn all the way down to the mineral soil. When that happens, the frozen ground loses its insulation, even as the scorched earth then absorbs more heat from Alaska’s steady summer sun — and permafrost can thaw, sometimes so much that the ground sinks and becomes bumpy and hilly as it loses solid ice mass.

“Everything’s connected,” says Bob Bolton, a hydrologist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.

“The climate, the permafrost, the water, the fires. You can’t look at one without looking at the other.

Changes in one changes everything else. It’s a really, really sensitive system.”

“What’s happening here really is affecting everyone in the world,” says Nancy Fresco, a researcher at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. n

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Olympic hopes penalized by politics K ARLA A DAM London BY

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n July, British Prime Minister David Cameron invited England’s women’s soccer team to Downing Street to congratulate them on their roaring success at the World Cup. Mingling in the premier’s leafy back garden, several of the players, with their bronze medals twinkling in the sunshine, told Cameron they hoped they would be playing in next summer’s Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.

Those Olympic dreams had gotten a big boost in Canada after the squad returned home to their soccer-crazy nation with a medal — a rare achievement for England in international competitions.

The Lionesses, as they are known, lost a semifinal match against Japan after scoring a gut-wrenching goal in their own net, but their overall performance and thirdplace finish should have been enough to secure Great Britain a spot in the Rio Games.

And yet, it now seems that political squabbling among the four nations that make up the United Kingdom — England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland — will probably snuff out the women’s hopes.

At the heart of the debate over whether Britain will field any soccer teams at the Olympics are questions about British identity, and which of Britons’ multiple identities gets priority.

The four constituent nations of the United Kingdom compete as individual teams in tournaments such as the World Cup and the European Championships. But in the Olympics, the athletes must compete under the single banner of “Team GB.” FIFA, the world governing body of soccer, said that Britain would need to submit a bid for the Olympics with the support of all four of the national soccer associations, but Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are against the idea. They think it would damage their prospects of retaining nation status within FIFA, and their ability to compete as individual nations in

JASON FRANSON/CANADIAN PRESS VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

Squabbling among United Kingdom nations may snuff out chances for Britain’s World Cup team other international tournaments.

“We want to maintain our position as an independent football nation, and we believe that playing in a tournament as Team GB could undermine our position long term,” Ian Gwyn Hughes, a spokesman for the Football Association of Wales, said in an e-mail.

The wrangling comes amid growing waves of nationalism within the union and especially in Scotland, which came within 10 percentage points of leaving the United Kingdom in a referendum last year.

“To start appearing on a team that’s called ‘Great Britain’ I suspect would seem for many nationalists in Scotland to be an admission of something they are trying hard not to admit,” said Tony Travers, a political expert at the London School of Economics.

The sporting rivalry among Britain’s nations can be intense, particularly between England and Scotland, where the neighborly antagonism predates the upsurge

in nationalism. Andy Murray, the Scottish-born tennis player, once famously said he was cheering for “anyone but England” in an international competition — a common sentiment in Scotland.

Earlier this year, the Football Association, the soccer organizing body in England, proposed sending a team to the Olympics, but after failing to get backing from the other nations, the idea was discarded in March.

For some players, it was devastating news. “Being Welsh and maybe having an opportunity to represent Great Britain at an Olympics would’ve been a dream.

Now that’s taken away,” tweeted Welsh player Natasha Harding.

The landscape was different in 2012, when Team GB fielded men’s and women’s soccer teams at the Olympics in London — the first timesincethe1960GamesinRome.

To some soccer fans, the decision not to come together for Rio smacks of sourness by the nonEnglish nations whose soccer

England players celebrate after a goal against Germany in the thirdplace match of the FIFA Women’s World Cup tournament on July 4. The players may not be able to compete in the Summer Olympics.

teams have a lesser track record at international tournaments.

But others say that there is a sense of arrogance on the side of the English, and that it was widely assumed that the decision to field a team in London was a one-time occurrence because the competition was on home turf.

“There was never any plan to have a permanent British team and we made that very clear, as did the Welsh and Northern Irish,” Stewart Regan, chief executive of the Scottish Football Association, told the BBC. England has claims to inventing the game of soccer, and on the men’s side, it is wildly popular, with England’s Premier League one of the most popular in the world. But the sport is still developing for the women, and some fans say it’s disappointing that the women won’t get the sort of megawatt exposure a platform like the Olympics can offer.

Colin Moynihan, former chairman of the British Olympic Association, recently took up the issue in the House of Lords, where he is a member. He has said that four years ago he received assurances from FIFA that the status of the home nations would not be under threat if they entered a Team GB in the London Games.

When asked whether it had given similar assurances over the Rio Games, FIFA said in an e-mail: “We have no further comment.”

As it stands, it seems unlikely that the women will be joining other British Olympians in Rio. “We feel the boat has sailed on this one,” said Miriam Wilkens, a spokeswoman for the British Olympic Association, noting that various deadlines have passed.

But she said they were hopeful that something could be worked out for the 2020 Games in Tokyo.

When it was explained to Cameron at the garden reception that it wasn’t clear that any of the women he was congratulating would be competing at the next Summer Games, according to British news agency Press Association, he said: “That’s frustrating. Disagreement between the home nations? Can we fix this?” n

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Latvia’s turn toward gay rights M ICHAEL B IRNBAUM Riga, Latvia BY

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he first time this tiny Baltic nation held a gay pride march, the minuscule crowd was pelted with rotten eggs and bottles under the copper-green spires of Riga’s medieval old city. The participants — all 40 — fled to safety in a church.

That was a decade ago. This year’s parade drew thousands from across Europe, and the eggthrowers stayed at home.

Eastern Europe, long a stronghold of virulent homophobia, is reexamining attitudes toward gays and lesbians, and the debate has become a new battleground in the conflict between Russia and the West. The Kremlin has seized the opening, warning its former satellite states that if they align with decadent Europe, moral collapse will soon follow.

Russia’s arguments have taken hold in Ukraine, Georgia and other countries outside the European Union’s high walls, where pro-Western leaders have resisted European demands for tolerance of gays and lesbians. A gay pride march in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, in June ended in fistfights and controversy. Gay rights organizers in Georgia called off public events after a 2013 march in Tbilisi was beset by Orthodox priests wielding stools and stinging nettles.

But in Latvia, which long ago made a firm choice to steer away from its old Kremlin overlords, tolerance of gays and lesbians has increased markedly in the 11 years since it joined the European Union. When the foreign minister, Edgars Rinkevics, came out as gay last fall, he predicted “mega-hysteria” — but the reaction was barely a ripple.

“The E.U. has helped. Latvians want to fit in,” said Linda Freimane, a longtime Latvian gay rights activist who helped organize this year’s parade, which drew people spanning the width of the 28-nation European Union. “We want to be the good guys in school.”

The tug-of-war over gay rights has taken on special significance

OKSANA DZADAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Across Eastern Europe, the issue is a new front in the conflict between Russia and the West after a recent string of U.S. court cases upholding gay marriage.

In July 2005, hundreds of counterprotesters poured into Riga’s streets. The jeering crowds far outnumbered gay rights marchers, who were hemmed in by a cordon of police officers.

Latvia had joined the European Union a year earlier, and membership in the club had just started to remake the nation’s conservative attitudes. Citizens suddenly had the right to travel and work anywhere in Europe they pleased, and they flocked westward in droves, to countries tolerant of gays and lesbians.

Since that time, a new generation has come of age with little or no memory of the Soviet era, when homosexuality was outlawed. At this year’s parade, families carried a rainbow of balloons through Riga’s Art Nouveau quarter. Mothers pushing strollers walked alongside men carrying

banners promoting tolerance.

The week before, the U.S. Embassy hoisted the rainbow flag alongside the Stars and Stripes.

But challenges remain. Just days before this year’s parade, Latvia’s Parliament approved a law requiring “virtuous” education in the classroom that promotes traditional marriage and family structures. The measure was sponsored

by Latvia’s largest ethnic Russian party, but it was approved with support from conservative antiRussian nationalists.

In Ukraine and Georgia, the divisions have been far starker.

Wedged between Russia and the West, neither nation has taken decisive steps to be more welcoming toward their gay citizens.

Even many of the pro-European protesters who overthrew Ukraine’s Russian-friendly president consider gay rights to be radioactive. Before Ukraine signed a landmark E.U. pact, lead-

June’s gay pride parade in Riga, the Latvian capital, drew thousands from across Europe, a sharp contrast to the egg-pelting counterprotesters a decade ago.

ers won a reprieve from E.U. anti-discrimination demands, to the disappointment of the country’s gay rights advocates.

Russia has seized the opening, pushing hard to make itself the leader of the traditional values camp and warning both at home and abroad that Western values eat at family structures and society’s basic fabric.

The Russian anti-gay rhetoric has promoted the idea that gay marriage is a weapon aimed straight at the Kremlin.

“This issue is very tightly connected with anti-Western, antiAmerican ideas,” said Yury Gavrikov, a leading gay rights activist in St. Petersburg.

In Ukraine, a gay rights march that took place on the outskirts of Kiev in June was disrupted by far-right opponents who threw smoke bombs and scuffled with participants.

And in Georgia, opportunities for gay rights advocates seem even more dismal. The Georgian Orthodox Church — which has powerful historic ties to its Russian Orthodox counterparts — has come out swinging against any effort to promote tolerance of gays and lesbians. It succeeded in briefly tying up legislation required for E.U. visa liberalization, a popular pro-European measure, because Europe required that Georgia outlaw anti-gay discrimination. The black-clad priests who took a leading role in the violent anti-gay riot in 2013 wielded weapons against a handful of pro-tolerance protesters.

Many Latvians credit Europe for the shifting attitudes in their nation. Some hope the wave might roll into Ukraine and Georgia if those countries succeed in forging bonds with the West.

“It’s an incredible feeling. You can’t even express it in words,” said Kaspars Zalitis, a gay rights activist who participated in Latvia’s 2005 march and was a main organizer this year. “If nobody believed we are becoming an open, democratic society, this is proof of it. We are becoming a normal European country. It’s part of being in the E.U.” n

CHEAP FIX HEROIN’S RESURGENCE

NIKKI KAHN/THE WASHINGTON POST

‘And then he decided not to be’

THE MCCARTHY FAMILY

BY MARC FISHER IN FALMOUTH, MAINE

Everything finally seemed back on track. David was home for a short visit and looked happy, calm. He had a job, a girlfriend, a plan. His father, Kevin McCarthy, came home from work that Thursday and smiled to see his son take his dog, Kima, named for the drug­fighting detective on “The Wire,” out for a walk. ¶ When David came back, father and son settled in to watch their Patriots play the Jets on “Thursday Night Football.” David gave his father grief about the TV being too small: “Come on, Dad, get with the 21st century.” Near halftime, David got up and said he was going to watch part of the game at a friend’s place. ¶ When David returned an hour later, they watched the end together. The Patriots won, barely. Kevin went to work the next morning, and he returned home Friday afternoon at 4:30. It was to be David’s last night at home before he drove up to Sugarloaf Mountain to spend the winter at the family’s ski place, working in a restaurant. ¶ Kevin, who had moved his family to the Maine coast after finding the life of a high­powered Manhattan attorney too frazzling, and Nancy, David’s stepmother, had decided against taking David out to dinner — there would be too much temptation to drink. Why risk it with David on the good path? So Kevin had gone out, bought a steak and thrown it on the grill. ¶ Then he heard whining from upstairs. Kima, David’s black lab. ¶ “Dave? Dave!” the father yelled up. ¶. He went up, opened the door and saw David’s feet on the floor. His boy was cold. ¶ “It was pretty clear he was dead,” the father said.

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COVER STORY David was 29.

The needle was on the bed, next to him. The spoon was on the nightstand. A crystalline substance glistened in the spoon.

Kevin tried to revive his son, pumping, pushing, pleading. He called 911. The operator kept telling Kevin to calm down.

The next 20 hours were a blur of police sirens, ambulances, drug agents, police, friends and the rest of the family, now coming home for the worst possible reason.

All of that hell — even before a second son overdosed on heroin, the very next night.

They were kids who had it made, at least on paper. The McCarthys’ rambling farmhouse on U.S. 1, not a quarter-mile from the ocean, had a separate wing for the boys. They called it The Bunkhouse. They had cars, money and plenty of independence, like many teens in Falmouth, a town of 11,000, a place of privilege just across a short bridge from Portland, the state’s largest city.

It’s a place now ravaged by heroin — four overdoses, two of them fatal, in the past 10 months, in a town more accustomed to nothing of the kind. Maine is at the burning core of a nationwide heroin epidemic, the perverse outcome of a well-intentioned drive to save Americans from the last drug craze, a widespread hunger for heroin’s chemical cousin, prescription opiate pills such as Oxycontin.

Heroin — now cheap, plentiful and more potent than ever — is killing people at record rates. Across the nation, deaths from heroin overdoses nearly quadrupled in the decade ending in 2013, according to a new analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In Maine, deaths from heroin overdoses ballooned from seven in 2010 to 57 last year.

Two-thirds of the victims were, like David, adults in their 20s and 30s. In 2012, heroin accounted for 8 percent of the caseload for Maine’s Drug Crimes Task Force; last year, it jumped to 32 percent. In Portland, the number of addicts served by the needle exchange nearly doubled in just two years. Today in Maine, a single tablet of Oxycontin often costs $50; addicts can find a single-dose packet of heroin for as little as $10.

David and his friends, like their parents, always thought of heroin as an inner-city scourge, something for strung-out, dead-end junkies. An entirely different trajectory had been set for them.

David’s mother, Anne Ireland, an artist, took him down to New York a couple of times a year to see Broadway shows. Cute and friendly with his tousled hair and toothy smile, David was the youngest of her three boys; she wanted him to be a kid who liked to sit and read, like his brothers. But what had worked for her older boys didn’t seem to take with David.

“He was always different,” she said. “He had every opportunity. He had parents who loved him. He seemed to reject that for the love of his peers. He wanted so desperately to be cool and older.”

When David was starting at Falmouth High

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drugs remained their bond, but they had stepped up to something far more deadly.

NIKKI KAHN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Opposite page, top: David McCarthy’s black Lab, Kima, in the room where he died of a heroin overdose in October. Opposite, bottom: David, center, with father Kevin McCarthy and stepmother Nancy McCarthy.

Above: Anne Ireland, David’s mother.

School, his parents split up. Beginning in 10th grade, he lived with his father; his relationship with his mother frayed.

David and his friends started smoking marijuana in middle school. “We all shared this land of being a little different from the rest of the family, almost black sheep,” said John Palman, a longtime friend. “We were all the youngest siblings, with successful older sibs.”

In 10th grade, one of David’s stepbrothers, Michael, an avid snowboarder, suffered an injury and was prescribed codeine and then Oxycontin, an opiate painkiller. It was an at-will prescription; he could get more whenever he wanted. Michael — whose family asked that he be identified by his middle name — offered some pills to David and his friends.

Soon, David was buying Oxys from a guy in the grocery store parking lot.

“The driving force was to test the unknown,” said a high school friend of David’s who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was admitting to extensive drug use. “I thought I wasn’t in the lower socioeconomic group, so I’m not going to get hooked like people of that group.”

Oxys were no party drug. They were, the friend said, “a drug of isolation.”

But David and his friends had a group of their own, too — affluent kids such as David, and kids from the other Maine, the towns where mills once flourished, where too many people now have too few options. At a suburban school such as Falmouth’s, teens from both worlds came together. “You’re sitting next to the kid who’s in the country club and you’re not anywhere near that social strata,” Falmouth Police Chief Ed Tolan said.

David’s group coalesced around drugs, mostly marijuana and pills. A decade later,

THE DAY BEFORE DAVID’S FUNERAL, one of his high school friends, a woman with whom he had a romantic relationship that lasted more than a year, wrote about him on Facebook: “I think I lost the moon while I was counting the stars.… we ALWAYS found our [way] back to each other…. I will always love u and cherish what we had my first love. David McCarthy may angels lead u in.”

The woman who wrote that tribute was one of two high school friends who supplied David with heroin, according to McCarthy’s parents, friends and the police.

“We call her the angel of death,” Tolan said.

These were kids he’d watched grow up. The chief says he believes David’s old friend sold drugs to at least three of the town’s four overdose victims in the past year.

Two law enforcement individuals said the woman and another high school friend, a man who also grew up in Falmouth, supplied heroin to their old friends in Falmouth and Portland. The man sold the fatal heroin to David and, the next night, to his stepbrother, the individuals said.

The woman, who is not identified here because she has not been charged with a crime, was anguished by David’s death. “I’ve been here in my bed since last Saturday,” she wrote a week after the overdose. “It’s safe here and I can cry as much as I want and re-read letters” from David.

The woman, in a brief meeting at her apartment in a subsidized building in an artsy, gentrifying section of Portland, initially agreed to talk about David and drugs. But she never came through on that promise and later ignored requests for comment. Her grandmother, whose house she often visits, said the woman rarely responds to calls and mostly sleeps her days away.

In Falmouth and Portland, heroin is often sold by addicts operating out of their own homes. They drive south on Interstate 95 to depressed cities in Massachusetts, to Lowell, Lynn or Lawrence, where they connect with Dominican and Mexican gang members selling cheap heroin from Mexico, now the source of most heroin in the United States.

The dealers from Maine bring back just enough to sell to friends, using their narrow profit to satisfy their own cravings. Sometimes, gang members from Boston, New York or Pennsylvania drive north to Maine and set up in an addict’s apartment, selling for a day or two until the package is gone, paying their hosts with free or discounted heroin.

Then, a few days later, they get on the road and do it all over again.

STARTING IN HIGH SCHOOL, DAVID AND HIS FRIENDS would do Oxys in the car.

Grind up the pill, snort it, go back to the house, smoke pot, watch TV. Repeat.

The switch to heroin happened because continues on next page

“I didn’t know what to talk to David about . . . .

I knew nothing about his life, really.

I just worried about him.”

Anne Ireland, David’s mother

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COVER STORY Heroin and the brain: The making of an overdose

from previous page

“He’s going to die,” he told David’s friends. “I was saying it, but I wasn’t doing anything about it.”

John Palman, a longtime friend of David’s

their regular Oxy supplier had run short.

The guys snorted heroin, usually a couple of times a week, for years. Shooting up was something they saw in scary movies. But over time, they built up a dependence. They needed a fix just to get by, and they needed ever more to get high. They found themselves acting out of desperation — not breaking into strangers’ homes, but stealing from their parents.

Four years into his heroin habit, David, having seen his friends shoot up, tried to do it to himself. He couldn’t. “Dave had a serious aversion to needles,” said a friend whom David called to ask for help injecting the drug.

“One hundred percent of the people who come in here say they never thought they’d put a needle in their arm,” said Steve Danzig, a drug counselor who has worked with families in Falmouth, including the McCarthys. “But for somebody who’s been using, it’s not that big a step. Often, it’s curiosity: You see somebody shooting up and it’s clear he’s much higher than you are. And it’s often a financial decision, because you can get much bigger bang for the buck shooting it.”

After a decade of widespread over-prescription of opiates such as Oxycontin, Percocet and Vicodin, the federal government pressed pharmaceutical makers to reformulate pills to make them difficult to snort, and it required physicians to prescribe fewer of the habitforming pills. After Oxycontins were reformulated in 2010, street availability of the pills tightened; prices shot up.

“There can be no argument: Heroin has become much cheaper in the past two years because the crackdown on Oxys made it much harder to get pills on the street,” said Dan Perry, the assistant U.S. attorney in Maine who

is in charge of drug cases.

“It’s like a metastatic cultural cancer — we went from virtually no intravenous drug use three years ago to now rationing care in a raging, untreated epidemic,” said Mark Publicker, a physician who ran the Mercy Recovery Center, Maine’s largest outpatient drug detox program, until it shut down last month because neither private nor government insurance would pay enough to cover its costs.

FOUR YEARS AGO, HOOKED AND BROKE FROM SPENDING HIS RESTAURANT SALARY ON DRUGS, David called his mother and told her he had no place to live. He and his old high school girlfriend had broken up. Would Anne take him in? Mother and son hadn’t lived together for nearly a decade. She brought him home.

“It was so painful to see him, not because of drugs, but because he was so directionless,” Anne said. “I didn’t know what to talk to David about. He was into rap and didn’t read a lot of books. The TV was always on BET. I knew nothing about his life, really. I just worried about him, constantly.”

David wore his hoodie up when he was around his mother. He looked gaunt, worn.

“He was this spectral presence,” she said. She took his salary and put him on an allowance.

She thought he’d been spending his money on pot. He stole from her, nearly $1,000 that she’d hidden where she kept her best jewelry.

One day, she came downstairs to find a jar of yellow liquid on the kitchen counter. “He had pissed in a jar,” she said. “He just lost all sense of decorum, appropriateness. He didn’t care.”

She told him he could not live with her anymore. He sent her an angry e-mail laced with curse words.

Last year, about six months before David died, he called his friend John: He had shot up, and later awakened to find that an entire side of his body had gone numb. John arranged for David to be taken to a hospital, where he was told he had suffered a minor stroke.

Kevin had it out with his son. “I’m done — you lied to me, you’ve taken advantage of everything we’ve tried to do for you,” the father told his boy. And he cut him off — no more money, no more living in the family’s ski place.

John had long urged David to get help. “He’s going to die,” John told David’s friends. “I was saying it, but I wasn’t doing anything about it.”

David thought he could get off the drug by himself. He told friends that heroin wasn’t fun anymore and that he wanted to quit. He’d been through detox programs and short-term rehab, but they hadn’t worked. He had too much pride to ask his parents for the $30,000 he’d need for a long-term rehab stay. Somehow, his father said, he managed “to put together six or seven months of sobriety, doing it on his own.”

By last summer, his parents said, David seemed to have found his way forward. He looked better, clean-shaven. He was running six miles a day.

“He finally seemed like a man,” Anne said.

“So alert, so in the world. And then he decided not to be.”

THE MCCARTHYS HARDLY EVER TALKED ABOUT THE BOYS’ DRUG USE. When David was fired from a summer job on a neighbor’s lobster boat, the neighbor told Kevin, “Look, it’s not my place, but I think there’s something going on with drugs.”

“We just pretended they were going to be all right,” Kevin said. “They were sending signals saying ‘help’ all the time, and we didn’t act.”

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COVER STORY

Sources: Yasmin Hurd, professor of neuroscience and director of the Center for Addictive Disorders at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; National Institute on Drug Abuse

He found needles up at the ski house. He sometimes saw tracks on David’s arms.

“I thought I knew a lot of things, but I didn’t,” Kevin said. “You’re in a community and you want to protect your child, but you also want your child to succeed. It’s a problem a lot of people in my social sphere don’t want to acknowledge.”

Around town, there have been whispers about young people on heroin, but the topic is not something that people discuss openly.

“There’s a lot of families out here that would never, ever admit there’s a heroin problem,” said Tolan, the police chief.

Gary Palman, the father of David’s friend John, is a pain management doctor who spent two decades writing thousands of prescriptions for the same opiate pills that teens in town were abusing. “We flooded the streets with these medications,” he said. “It took us years to realize opiate medications can have profound abnormalities for society.”

Gary Palman said he felt so bad that he left his specialty and now practices anesthesiology. He wishes his former colleagues in pain management would recognize an obligation “to objectively see if a drug is working, and if it isn’t, to take it away.”

It remains easier to hide heroin’s impact in a place such as Falmouth than in a big city.

Young people lose jobs, drop out of college, get evicted from apartments, but “their parents help them out,” Tolan said.

“People we know always looked away when heroin was mentioned because it’s associated with the ghetto and the underclass,” David’s mother recalled. “In these affluent communities, achievement and success are paramount.”

THE NIGHT AFTER DAVID DIED, MI-

BONNIE BERKOWITZ/THE WASHINGTON POST

CHAEL SLEPT IN THAT SAME BED. In the morning, his mother knocked on the door, seeking help planning David’s funeral. No answer.

She stepped inside and saw her son lying rigid, his arms above his head. His breathing was labored, raspy. She screamed.

Kevin called 911, again. A physician who was training ambulance personnel nearby responded and administered Narcan, which reverses the effects of an overdose.

Police found a heroin packet in Michael’s room. He spent the rest of the day in intensive care, his survival in doubt. The family camped out in the hospital, making calls about David’s funeral while awaiting word of Michael’s fate.

On the morning after David died, Michael had asked a friend, “Wouldn’t it just be easier to die young and not have to see your loved ones die?”

That night, Michael had called his old high school friend and dealer, the same man David had been to see two nights earlier.

“Do you really want that stuff ?” the dealer asked. “It’s the same stuff that killed David.”

The stuff was heroin cut with fentanyl, an opiate that in its legal, prescription form is used to treat post-surgery pain. “People think they’re using heroin and it turns out to be fentanyl,” said Jamie Guerrette, the assistant attorney general in Maine who runs the state’s drug task force. “We’re making seizures where users and even sellers believe it’s heroin and it’s actually a mix that’s potentially 30 to 50 times more potent.”

Fentanyl was found in 11 of Maine’s 57 heroin overdose deaths last year, according to Marcella Sorg, an epidemiologist who is a consultant to the state on drug issues. In its powdery, synthetic, illegal form, fentanyl has

KLMNO WEEKLY

been showing up in overdoses around the country.

When addicts unwittingly ingest heroin laced with fentanyl, they consume a vastly more intense dose than they had anticipated.

Michael didn’t believe the heroin would hurt him because he never shot up; he thought snorting was somehow safer. He used it that night, by himself.

Three days after Michael got out of the hospital — one day after David’s funeral — Kevin and Nancy, two other relatives, and four of Michael’s friends surrounded him and read letters they’d written. Within a minute, Michael agreed to be taken to rehab. Danzig, the counselor, took the bag they’d packed and flew Michael to a Florida trauma center. He stayed in rehab for two months. At the end of the program, he asked to stay another month.

The intervention cost $5,000; the treatment, $25,000. Insurance covered none of it.

Six months later, so far, so good, his family says.

“I realize I’m grasping at straws,” Kevin said, “but we like to think David saved Michael’s life.”

DAVID’S PARENTS DECIDED THEY HAD TO TELL IT STRAIGHT. They owed him that.

They wrote his obituary, published in the local papers: “David Paul McCarthy, 29, died of a drug overdose on Friday, Oct. 17, 2014, losing a long-fought battle with drug addiction — a challenge faced by many families today.”

The dealers in the McCarthy case have not been arrested; investigations are ongoing.

Prosecutors and police say they are not eager to imprison addicts who sell drugs — they’d rather get those people into treatment and enlist their help in going after dealers who bring heroin into the state.

“If you work overdose deaths, then you’re not working the organization above that,” said Perry, the prosecutor. “Overdose deaths are a priority because of the magnitude, the impact of a death, and because they’ll lead us to the groups that are causing the devastation.

“This is not something we’re going to arrest our way out of. We need families to get the problem out of the shadows.”

On a fall day, 400 people packed Episcopal Church of St. Mary. A hundred more stood outside, although the service was not broadcast outside the building. They were people the McCarthys hadn’t expected to come. They were, David’s mother said, “people with secrets, secrets like ours.”

“These are the people I thought were so snooty,” Anne recalled. “I mean, after we got divorced, I overheard a woman say they didn’t want their daughter to go with David because we were divorced. But those same kind of people, after he died, came to my door with soup and just hugged me and said, ‘You were a good mother.’

“It was a huge outpouring of love and sympathy and people saying, ‘It was so brave and good of you to put that in the paper.’ ‘We’re so glad you called it what it is.’ ”n

“One hundred percent of the people who come in here say they never thought they’d put a needle in their arm.”

Steve Danzig, drug counselor

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MEDIA

As YouTube shines, so do its stars C ECILIA K ANG Anaheim, Calif.

BY

T

he top five YouTube stars have more subscribers than the population of Mexico. Followers of their channels are double the number of all U.S. cable television viewers.

And some video bloggers, or vloggers, are making as much money as Hollywood’s biggest stars.

That success is no accident. It is an outcome of corporate planning and the commercial interests that are now shaping the modern era of online video, executives and analysts say. Despite the shaky, homegrown feel of the productions, online video has evolved far from its freewheeling origins into a more carefully crafted launching pad for brand-wielding Internet stars.

In mid-July, an estimated 1,000 companies flooded the world’s largest online video conference here, up from just a few hundred last year. YouTube, which just marked its 10th year, now has 300,000 ad-supported channels compared to 10,000 three years ago, according to OpenSlate, a YouTube analytics firm.

And ad spending on digital video is expected to increase to $9.5 billion this year, up from $7.8 billion last year and $6 billion the year before, according to Terrance Kawaja, a partner at media venture capital firm LUMA Partners.

Top online celebrities still constantly churn new content on YouTube, as well as Snapchat, Instagram and Vine, cashing in on advertising dollars that are tied to video views. But with the quiet backing of production companies, many of these stars now have the clout to establish their brands beyond the digital world, signing deals with television and movie studios as well as merchandisers.

Smosh, for instance, which is one of YouTube’s most-watched channels, was discovered and promoted by former Disney executive Barry Blumberg. In 2006, Blumberg reached out to the duo behind the act, Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla, and asked if he could meet with Hecox’s father.

“I told them . . . if we did it right,

YOUTUBE

But getting a new channel noticed is becoming harder, even as viewer numbers keep climbing they would never have to work a regular job in their life,” said Blumberg, chief content officer for Defy Media productions.

At first, corporate sponsors, studios and others didn’t know what to make of the act, Blumberg said.

Nine years later, the duo has a team of about 50 editors, producers, writers, and assistants to help with a handful of YouTube channels that operate under the “Smosh” brand. The group attracts more than 35 million subscribers.

“People said you guys are theoretical millionaires because we had all these views but weren’t making money,” said Padilla, 27.

“When we teamed up with Defy. . . that’s when things really took off, and we went from two guys making videos to an actual brand.”

Fortune and fame has followed.

This summer they received their own statues at Madame Tussauds in San Francisco and “Smosh: The Movie” was released for download, produced by Defy Media and

Awesomeness TV, a joint venture of DreamWorks and Hearst.

Beauty guru Michelle Phan, 28, rocketed to stardom after posting videos in 2007 that instructed viewers how to put on makeup.

She still makes a nice annual salary selling ads against her channel — about $163,000, according to OpenSlate. But Phan said that her mail-order company, Ipsy, which sells beauty products, generates more than a $100 million in sales a year (the figure is hard to verify because her company is private).

Phan broke out when there was far less competition for eyeballs.

And while truly homegrown videos can still strike it big and captivate the Internet for a week or two, it has become difficult for such folks to hang onto their audience without help. There are now more than 6,000 channels for comedians, 76,000 for gaming, and 1,000 for pets, according to OpenSlate.

“The ocean is getting bigger, so to be a buoy of excellence in a big

The top YouTube celebrities, clockwise from top left, are: Smosh (Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox), Jenna Marbles (Jenna Mourey), HolaSoyGerman (Germán Alejandro Garmendia Aranis), Nigahiga (Ryan Higa) and PewDiePie (Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg).

sea of average makes it hard to get discovered,” said Max Polisar, a senior vice president for talent management firm BigFrame.

YouTube’s biggest star these days is an often shrieky Swedish video gamer known as PewDiePie who makes $4.7 million a year just from YouTube ads, according to OpenSlate. PewDiePie, whose real name is Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, drew twice as many views for a two-minute clip showing him singing with his pug dog than any of the NBA Finals games. Over his career, the 25-year-old has logged 9 billion total video views.

Such stars are being courted more aggressively by big corporate marketers as consumers shift away from television. Meanwhile, YouTube announced that the amount of time people spend on the site was up 60 percent during the first quarter.

That has prompted more companies to shift their ad dollars online. Some marketers, such as RedBull and Toyota, are even creating their own channels.

“If you are a brand marketer this has been a pivotal year. You’ve seen cable TV ratings fall double digits for the first time, which means your main conduit just fell off a cliff,” said Mike Henry, chief executive of OpenSlate, which provides YouTube data to Fortune 500 firms. “I haven’t had a single conversation with a brand that hasn’t shifted money into digital.”

But a commercialized online world doesn’t leave much room for grass-root efforts from ordinary YouTubers such as Kaitlyn Larson.

Larson, 15, launched her own channel in June and has so far garnered 300 subscribers. With turquoise rubber bands around her braces that match her turquoise top, Larson was standing alone in a hallway outside industry panels at VidCon and talking to another newbie YouTuber who had traveled from Hawaii.

“When YouTube started, it was more organic, like kids just posting after school. Now it’s young adults thatareproducingvideosinamuch more professional way,” Larson said. “That makes it hard for people starting out to get an audience.”n

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The man behind the Cat and Grinch BY

J ESSICA C ONTRERA

F

or all the stories Dr. Seuss has told you, have you ever heard his own? How a boy from Springfield, Mass., become the man whose work is the gold standard of children’s literature?

It started with alcohol.

In the spring of 1925, Theodor “Ted” Geisel was a senior at Dartmouth College. He spent his time in a fraternity and at the campus humor magazine, the Jack-OLantern. Geisel submitted dozens of cartoons to the publication and eventually became its editor.

That’s when he and his friends were caught sharing a pint of gin — in the middle of Prohibition.

They were in Geisel’s room. As punishment, he was kicked off the magazine.

But curiously, many drawings in his style still appeared in the next edition. They were signed with pseudonyms that an eagleeyed reader might recognize as oblique historical references — L. Burbank, Thos. Mott Osborne, D.G. Rossetti, L. Pasteur — but also, “Seuss.”

The “Dr.” part came later, followed by 44 children’s books. Now there is a 45th: “What Pet Should I Get?,” a never-before-seen manuscript that Geisel wrote and illustrated. Although he created the story sometime in the late 1950s or 1960s, it wasn’t discovered among his possessions until 2013.

Other manuscripts he wrote have published since his death in 1991, but none were illustrated by the author.

“This is the first found manuscript since his death that rings true,” said biographer Judith Morgan. “I think it would please him.”

Morgan is one of the few living people who truly knew the literary giant whose name every American recognizes. She and her husband Neil, both journalists, were neighbors and friends with the man they knew as Ted since the 1960s. After Geisel wrote his last book, “Oh the Places You’ll Go!,” he finally agreed to let the Morgans write his biography, “Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel.”

BURT STEEL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

His stories are good. His stories are fun.

But you may not have heard this other one.

In the hours they spent interviewing him, they came to realize that his penchant for privacy came from a deep-rooted perfectionism.

Geisel used to spend hours standing in his office with his hands in his back pockets, pacing in front of his work, trying to think of ways to make it better. He would come up with multiple endings for his sentences, choose one, then change his mind. Once during their interviews, Morgan brought up that the original manuscript of “The Cat in the Hat” introduced his most famous character as “a cat” instead of “the cat.”

“He threw his head back and looked puzzled and said, ‘Is that better? I don’t know! Is it better?’” she recalled. “The Cat in the Hat” was the book that launched him into children’s literature for good, said Philip Nel, author of “Dr.

Seuss: American Icon.” Previously, Geisel worked in advertising to support his writing habit.

The success and loveability of “The Cat in the Hat” or “The Grinch” overshadow much of Geisel’s other lesser-known works, like his two books for adults, a live-action musical film and an Academy Award-winning documentary. During World War II, he drew more than 400 cartoons for the leftist magazine PM. They look like black and white versions of his books, but with darker messages (and many with ugly stereotyped portrayals of the Japanese and other ethnicities that would be considered offensive today). He drew a giant Yetilike creature — labeled “Russia’s Winter” — crushing a puny Hitler under its weight. Trees that look like the ones in “Hop On Pop” are

Author and illustrator Theodor “Ted” Geisel, known as Dr. Seuss, reads from his book "Horton Hears a Who!" to 4-year-old Lucinda Bell at his home in La Jolla, Calif., in 1956.

gnawed down by a Nazi woodpecker as another bird in an Uncle Sam hat waits atop a tree nearby.

“After World War II, we see him bring those politics into his books,” Nel said. “‘Yertle the Turtle’ is Hitler. ‘The Sneeches’ is about opposition to anti-semitism. ‘Horton Hears a Who!’ is about how everyone must speak up. That’s a common theme in all of his activist books. Even the smallest, most insignificant person — children — have a role to play.”

“What Pet Should I Get?” is a book that prods childhood imaginations. When a brother and sister — familiar as the siblings from “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish” — visit a pet store, they find a myriad of the made-up creatures that made Dr. Seuss so iconic.

The illustrations were found by Geisel’s second wife and her secretary. They were in a box set aside after his death. And although they made a complete book, they were clearly unfinished: He hadn’t yet colored the pages or chosen the words from the multiple sentences he had laid out as options.

Random House’s Cathy Goldsmith was tasked with making the book whole. This might have been controversial had Goldsmith not worked so closely with Geisel for 11 years. Because “What Pet Should I Get?” was written half a century ago, it’s far from Geisel’s final words. But when Morgan and her husband were conducting their last interview with him, they asked if he had anything else to say to the children of America?

Geisel asked the journalists to let him think about it.

The next day, he handed them a piece of paper on which he wrote: “The best slogan I can think of to leave with the kids of the U.S.A. would be: We can. . . and we’ve got to. . . do better than this.”

Then he changed his mind, and crossed out “kids of the.”

“The best slogan I can think of to leave with the U.S.A. would be: We can. . . and we’ve got to. . . do better than this.” n

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BOOKS

RICHARD Nixon and the Chamber of Secrets

S

CROOKED

By Austin Grossman Mulholland. 355 pp. $26

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REVIEWED BY

R ON C HARLES

orry, Woodward and Bernstein. You were duped, along with the rest of us.

That so-called Watergate scandal was just a little play-acting to cover up the real story, a crucible of horror that would melt the face off any ordinary American.

Except, of course, for Richard Milhous Nixon.

Here, finally, our disgraced 37th presidentfillsinthose181/2 minutes, andmuchmore,torevealtheshocking truth about what he did, what dark forces he fought and what brave sacrifices he made to preserve the United States of America.

“It’s been twenty years since I was forced to stage my own death,” he writes from an undisclosed location. “I’ve lived to see myself become a laughingstock, a cartoon villain, the place in the august roll call of presidents where history pauses and snickers.”

You’ll do a bit of pausing and snickering yourself while reading Austin Grossman’s outlandish new novel, “Crooked,” which proves that we still have Nixon to kick around. A cantering hodgepodge of American history, black magic and political satire,

“Crooked” draws us into the whole operatic tragedy of Tricky Dick’s violently oscillating career. We follow him through his unlikely election to the House in 1946, his rabid commie-baiting, his triumphant presidency and his ignominious resignation in 1974. But those disasters you already know; now flush in crypto-biological weapons and Precambrian demons and you’ve got problems that only supernatural plumbers could solve: “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” Washington-style.

At the center of this ectoplasmic alt-history, Grossman’s Nixon is a liberal fantasy of the presidential boogeyman stewed in self-loathing, honest enough to admit to every shade of “manipulative nastiness,” but still spiteful enough to reject our pardon. And yet, in his scalding candor, he reaches toward a kind of honor as he confesses, “There has never been anything I can put my hand to without tainting it, no triumph so great or solemn that it doesn’t turn spoiled and ridiculous.

Because, sooner or later, the darkness always gets in.”

In Grossman’s zany retelling, that darkness is downright mon-

strous. Early in the novel, while trailing Alger Hiss along the streets of Washington, this intrepid Nixon stumbles upon a nest of Soviet spies and gets his first glimpse down the deep throat of a phantasmal creature from the underworld. Both superpowers, he learns, are trying to control occult forces by training men to do a lot more than just stare at goats.

Grossman, who’s also a videogame designer, tempts us with the possibilities of a 20th-century “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell,” but his dramatization of a cold war fought with “weaponized supernatural forces” is frustratingly uneven and hardly more insane than the real-life doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction. If only these revelations of dark wizardry surging through the veins of American military power were enlivened with more dazzling scenes of chthonic intrigue. For all the comic potential of this satire, “Crooked” has trouble competing with the actual Richard Nixon. While dropping in occult bits here and there, Grossman has somehow managed to make the Nixon administration less maniacal than it really was.

Only when it comes to Henry Kissinger does the novel really live up to its comic potential. Grossman portrays the secretary of state as “a thousand-year-old necromancer,” which may be the most plausible explanation yet for his Nobel Peace Prize.

If “Crooked” isn’t entirely sure what kind of novel it wants to be, at least Nixon is upfront about it.

Early on, he warns us: “This is a tale of espionage and betrayal and the dark secrets of a decades-long cold war. It is a story of otherworldly horror, of strange nameless forces that lie beneath the reality we know. In other words, it is the story of a marriage.”

Indeed, Pat Nixon is the truly tragic figure here. Dutiful and longsuffering, she recognizes what a “striving, gutless wonder she’d married,” but she can’t escape. “She looked,” Nixon notices, “like someone unutterably weary who had forgotten how to find her way into sleep and was trying to figure it out again.” And she holds a secret more terrifying than any occult revelation: She’s a Democrat. n Charles is the editor of Book World.

WEIYI (DAWN) CAI/THE WASHINGTON POST

F ICTION

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Breaking barriers of race and space

A folk hero amps up the rise of rock

N ON-FICTION

N ON-FICTION

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REVIEWED BY

J ULIANNE M ALVEAUX

n April 12, 1961, Russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in outer space. The timing was significant because the Russians had accomplished something the United States had not.

Indeed, they were far ahead of us in the space race.

AmonthafterGagarincircledthe Earth, President John F. Kennedy spoke to Congress about sending a mantothemoonandreturninghim safely to Earth “before the decade is out.” Houston was chosen as the site for the Manned Spacecraft Center, with the land donated by Rice University. But by charter, Rice did not admit African American students, which jeopardized the use of federal funds for the project. The university tried to amend its charter, but alumni sued to block this. Rice won and admitted Raymond Johnson to its graduate program in math; he became the institution’s first African American student.

The space program galvanized the nation, yet Jim Crow laws, ossified attitudes and basic racism stood as barriers to African American participation. Thus, while the space program helped create tens of thousands of jobs, African Americans had limited opportunities to obtain them. Some NASA leaders rationalized that they couldn’t find qualified people (have you heard that one before?), but it was indeed difficult to recruit well-educated African Americans to come to the segregated South, where even finding housing was a challenge. At the same time, few African Americans had degrees in engineering, chemistry or mathematics. None of the 468 electrical engineers working in Mississippi, for example, were African American. Most other states were not as bad, but the underrepresentation was still disturbing.

In “We Could Not Fail,” Richard Paul and Steven Moss weave civil rights history with space history, Southern history with African American history, and use the careers of 10 African American men

who “could not fail” as the foundation of their story. They are careful to point out (perhaps too often) that these men were not activists or marchers, but quiet revolutionaries who made as much progress by working in NASA offices as the astronauts did by going to space.

These men’s histories are both inspiring and tragic. Few were able to work to their full potential, and most did not get deserved promotions. Co-workers used crude racial slurs. The men were sometimes shunned by colleagues and certainly could not socialize with them in Texas. Many had a longer commute than their white counterparts, partly because nearby housing was segregated, although NASA sometimes intervened to encourage integrated housing. Paul and Moss discuss the men’s coping strategies, which ranged from using humor to simply ignoring racism.

Of the 10 men profiled, most worked behind the scenes, but Ed Dwight, the first astronaut trainee, became something of a celebrity among African Americans. He graced the covers of African American newspapers and magazines and encouraged young people to consider space careers. Dwight’s prominence reminds us how important it was for the black news media to cover stories ignored by the majority press.

This comprehensively researched book is replete with fascinating details about ways in which the civil rights movement influenced the space program. I would have liked to know more about the 10 pioneers, but “We Could Not Fail” is intended to focus more on the space program than on them individually.

This book is a detailed, scholarly work best digested a chapter at a time. As such, it makes an important contribution to African American history. n Malveaux is an economist and author. Her most recent book is “Surviving and Thriving: 365 Facts in Black Economic History.”

E WE COULD NOT FAIL The First African Americans in the Space Program

By Richard Paul and Steven Moss Univ. of Texas. 300 pp. $30

DYLAN GOES ELECTRIC! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties

by Elijah Wald Dey St. 354 pp. $26.99

l

REVIEWED BY

D AVID K IRBY

ver heard a band so loud that it snapped your head back and made you wonder if your ears were bleeding?

Thenyouknowhowtheaudienceat the 1965 Newport Folk Festival felt when Bob Dylan hung a Fender Stratocaster around his neck, plugged in, nodded to the five musicians backing him and pulverized the expectations of those who had come to hear him strum an acoustic guitar and puff on a harmonica.

That Newport festival audience contained so many warring allegiances and agendas that, till now, it has been impossible to say what really happened that night. Fans and journalists who hated Dylan’s new sound insisted that the audience was outraged, whereas those who wanted more Bobby — more amp, more volume, less hammered dulcimer and pennywhistle — pronounced the crowd ecstatic.

The popular version of the story is that when the first few bars of Dylan’s electrified music gushed out of the amplifiers, it horrified the crowd — especially Pete Seeger, “the gentle giant of the folk scene,” who tried to cut the sound cables with an axe. The real story is a lot better than that and all the more resonant for being recounted here by one of the best music journalists around. In “Dylan Goes Electric!” Elijah Wald carefully lays out the path to Newport, and his readers will itch with yearning as they wait to find out what really happened that night.

What really happened is made even murkier by the fact that the protagonist is Bob Dylan. He was only 24 years old in 1965, but he’d already been through his fair share of controversy. He actually began as a rocker, but Wald notes that “he was exploding with ideas and needed opportunities to try them out.”

Dylan had already moved away from traditional folk music to write and perform his own material, notably “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” songs that had become anthems of the antiwar and civil rights move-

ments. What next for the young performer? The audience at Newport was about to find out.

The backing musicians test their instruments as Dylan strums a few chords on that Stratocaster, then steps up to the mike and sings, “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.” As master of ceremonies Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul and Mary) fusses with the sound chords and amplifiers, the band members seem to go off in different directions; they had rehearsed with Dylan only once, and it had not gone well.

A passable version of “Like a Rolling Stone” follows, then “Phantom Engineer,” which was to be reshaped later and recorded as “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.” Halfway through the first verse, the song falls apart.

The audience screams and boos as Dylan unplugs and the musicians leave the stage. Peter Yarrow tries to placate them by calling out, “Bobby, could you do another song, please?,” and here is where the myth goes into high gear. Offstage, someone addresses Pete Seeger, saying “Leave that one alone, Pete.” At roughly the same time, Yarrow says, “He’s gonna get his axe.” It’s clear that the emcee is using musicians’ slang to explain that Dylan is going after another guitar, but the misunderstanding is on its way to becoming legend.

This brief account of that night omits a hundred juicy details that paint an unforgettable picture of a performer trying to change and give his audience something that theywant,eveniftheydon’tseemto know it yet. You’ll find those details and more in this splendid book. As told by Wald, the story of Dylan at Newport is not so much about music as it is about stories themselves, how they mesmerize even as they bumble along and don’t always end cleanly. The truth is often messy.

And usually that messiness makes for a better story. n Kirby is the author of “Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ’n’ Roll.”

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Coming Alzheimer’s crisis will decimate Medicare KATHLEEN PARKER writes on politics and culture. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2010.

Current quibbling over what Jeb Bush meant when he said it’s time to phase out and replace Medicare — as opposed to “attacking the seniors,” as one woman at a recent event bellowed out — will soon seem quaint against the realities of our future.

Never mind projections that the program will be able to finance only 86 percent of its obligations by 2030.

Or that by 2050, the number declines to 80 percent, according to a recently released Social Security and Medicare Boards of Trustees report.

These are relatively comforting numbers compared with new projections from the Alzheimer’s Association. By 2050, the group says, 13.8 million Americans may have Alzheimer’s disease, at a cost of $1.1 trillion per year, mostly to Medicare and Medicaid.

Today, by comparison, 5.3 million have the disease.

“Basically, it will bankrupt Medicare,” said Robert Egge, the Alzheimer’s Association’s chief public policy officer. I met with Egge and chief science officer Maria Carrillo during the association’s recent international conference in Washington.

The 2015 cost of care for Alzheimer’s and all other dementias is estimated at $226 billion, with 68 percent being paid by Medicare and Medicaid, Egge said.

This total includes only direct costs for the care of Alzheimer’s sufferers — there currently is no treatment — and doesn’t take into consideration unpaid care by families. Within the next 10 years, 19 states will see at least a 40 percent increase in the number of people affected.

Lest you feel overwhelmed by numbers — and demoralized by the reduction of human suffering to numerical values — suffice it to say that we are in a state of emergency. Yet, even with this

obvious urgency, relatively few resources have been dedicated to research for prevention and treatment compared with other chronic diseases. This, despite the fact that Alzheimer’s is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Current federal research funding is less than $600 million annually, while top scientists say they’ll need $2 billion a year to meet the association’s 2025 goal of prevention and effective treatment. There’s cause for some hope. Last month, bipartisan House and Senate subcommittees approved increasing funding to the National Institutes of Health for Alzheimer’s research by 50 percent and 60 percent, respectively.

If this funding becomes law — and the association’s goals are met — costs could be reduced by $220 billion over the first five years and $367 billion in 2050 alone, according to an association report. Sixty percent

ISTOCKPHOTO

of those savings would accrue to Medicare and Medicaid.

Among other scientific developments reported this week, researchers have isolated a “common ancestor” among all forms of dementia, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Lewy body.

“All are caused by misfolding proteins,” Carrillo explained to me. Two different “misfolded” proteins — amyloid beta and tau — are toxic to brain cells.

I am sad to report these proteins cannot be corrected with daily doses of a sturdy zinfandel. There is, however, a new drug that delivers a molecule scientists have created to “chaperone” these proteins so that they fold correctly.

Carrillo doesn’t want to overstate the value of this onetarget-one-molecule approach, though it is promising. She suggests that eventually we’ll treat Alzheimer’s with a “cocktail” that will be created based on an individual’s genetic makeup and other factors.

Other hope-inspiring developments include six

diagnostic tools that, in combination, can be useful in predicting Alzheimer’s. They include memory and thinking tests, as well as MRI scans that can measure the thickness of the brain’s right entorhinal cortex and the volume of the hippocampus, both of which are important to memory.

It is reassuring that both policymakers and scientists are committed to tackling these diseases. But women especially should be interested in the progress of dementia research.

For reasons unknown, women suffer Alzheimer’s at a higher rate — two-thirds of today’s sufferers are women. And women’s function declines twice as fast as men’s. This fall, the association will issue an international call for research on why this is so.

In the meantime, Congress should waste no time in correcting the travesty of toolittle funding for a devastating disease that demands our urgent attention. Otherwise, what to do about Medicare will be rendered irrelevant. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Love of learning is key to future VIVEK WADHWA is a fellow at Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University, director of research at Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke, and distinguished fellow at Singularity University.

Not long ago, schoolchildren chose what they wanted to be when they grew up, and later selected the best college they could gain admission to, spent years gaining proficiency in their fields, and joined a company that had a need for their skills. Careers lasted lifetimes.

Now, by my estimates, the half-life of a career is about 10 years. I expect that it will decrease, within a decade, to five years. Advancing technologies will cause so much disruption to almost every industry that entire professions will disappear. And then, in about 15 to 20 years from now, we will be facing a jobless future, in which most jobs are done by machines and the cost of basic necessities such as food, energy and health care is negligible — just as the costs of cellphone communications and information are today. We will be entering an era of abundance in which we no longer have to work to have our basic needs met. And we will gain the freedom to pursue creative endeavors and do the things that we really like.

I am not kidding. Change is happening so fast that our children may not even need to learn how to drive. By the late 2020s, self-driving cars will have proved to be so much safer than human-driven ones that we will be debating whether humans should be banned from public roads; and clean energies such as solar and wind will be able to provide for 100 percent of the

planet’s energy needs and cost a fraction of what fossil-fuel- and nuclear-based energy does today.

A question that parents often ask me is, given that these predictions are even remotely accurate, what careers should their children pursue — particularly whether it is best to steer them into science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, because it is these disciplines that are making the advances happen. The STEMhumanities dichotomy has been a traditional difficulty for parents, because English, psychology, history and arts majors have been at a financial disadvantage. But that is changing.

I tell them they should encourage their children to pursue their passions and to love learning. It doesn’t matter

whether they want to be artists, musicians, or plumbers; the key is for children to understand that education is a lifelong endeavor and to be ready to constantly reinvent themselves.

We will all need to be able to learn new skills, think critically, master new careers, and take advantage of the best opportunities that come our way.

Technology is now as important a skill as reading, writing, and mathematics.

Everyone needs to be able to use computers, search for information on the Internet, use word processors and spreadsheets, and download apps. These skills are now common and useful in every profession. People who master social media gain an advantage in sharing knowledge and connecting with others.

But this too is changing, as it becomes possible for anyone to write apps and snap together industrial-strength computer systems using powerful new software-development tools. For the foreseeable future, professions such as data science, software architecture and bioengineering will command premiums; but design and the soft sciences will gain increasing importance.

Steve Jobs built Apple by

focusing on design. He showed that, though good engineering is important, what matters the most is great design. You can teach artists how to use software and graphics tools, but it’s much harder to turn engineers into artists. An engineering degree is very valuable, but the sense of empathy that comes from music, arts, literature and psychology is a big advantage in design.

Education will always be a platform on which to build success, but it really doesn’t matter what you study. My advice to students is to complete a bachelor’s degree, at the least, in fields in which they have the most interest. Through college, they will gain valuable social skills and learn how to interact and work with others; to compromise; and to deal with rejection, failure, and change. Most importantly, they will learn what they don’t know and where to find new knowledge when they need it. And we can hope that they will develop a deep passion for learning.

All of this uncertainty and change can seem unsettling. As Peter Diamandis has said, “on the road to abundance there will be turbulence.” The light at the end of this tunnel, however, may be a world in which the pursuit of enlightenment is more cherished than the pursuit of money. n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 2, 2015

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OPINIONS

BY SHENEMAN FOR THE STAR-LEDGER

Jon Stewart’s progressive legacy KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL is editor and publisher of the Nation magazine and writes a weekly column for The Post.

When I appeared on “The Daily Show” in late 2002, host Jon Stewart wanted to know why conservatives seemed to have a more effective message than progressives. “Are they better at selling their ideas, or they just have better ideas?” he asked. Although I disputed his premise, the Bush administration and its allies clearly had marginalized progressive opposition to the impending war in Iraq, and Stewart still thought of himself as an impartial observer. “Join us in the center,” he said as the interview concluded. “That’s my movement.”

But it wouldn’t be long before Stewart, whose 16-year run on “The Daily Show” comes to an end this week, became one of the most important and influential voices on the progressive left — an improbable icon who cut through right-wing talking points with satire while making progressive ideas sound like common sense.

Stewart’s show provided valuable airtime to views that were often neglected, even denigrated, in mainstream media, and made them sound appealing. And by reviving political humor on a nightly basis, he helped turn on young (and old) people to politics and broaden the progressive base.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq was a turning point in Stewart’s career.

While most of the media cheered on the war and caricatured its opponents, Stewart transformed “The Daily Show” from simply

“fake news” into something far more significant: a place for dissent. As media critic David Folkenflik wrote in April 2003, “For those who like to see television take antiwar figures seriously — or at least somewhat seriously — there’s really been only one sure place to turn in recent weeks: Comedy Central’s ‘The Daily Show.’ ” Stewart mocked the media’s coverage of the invasion by, for example, replacing the triumphant soundtrack behind Fox News’s bombing footage with “tacky 1970s-style funk.” But he also found his voice and used it to push back against a dominant political and media establishment that gave little credence to progressive opposition to the war.

“It’s as though there’s only two positions you can have,” he

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY OHMAN FOR THE SACRAMENTO BEE

observed. “You’re either for the war or against the troops.”

As the years passed, Stewart continued to question the logic behind the Iraq war and, indeed, the entire “war on terror.”

Stewart’s contribution to the public debate was not limited to the realm of foreign policy. In April 2009, he hosted Elizabeth Warren, then a little-known Harvard Law School professor appointed by Congress to provide oversight of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). During the interview, Warren explained that “pulling the threads out of our regulatory fabric” had led to the financial crisis and made a clear argument for stricter regulations on big banks. “That was like financial chicken soup for me,” Stewart responded. “That actually put things in perspective and made a little sense.” As Warren rose in prominence and became a progressive stalwart in the Senate, her political career was fueled in part by regular appearances on “The Daily Show,” where she was a guest six times.

While Stewart elevated progressive voices and ideas, he also was a vocal and relentless media critic. As the coverage of politics grew more trivial, polarizing and less informative, Stewart pleaded for a better discourse, famously castigating

the hosts of CNN’s “Crossfire” for, in his words, “hurting America.”

And perhaps nobody on television did more than Stewart to define Fox News as the reliably partisan outlet that most people know it as today.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Stewart, however, is the vast influence he commanded from his perch on late-night cable. For a generation of Americans, Stewart provided a political education that helped shape their worldview. Indeed, as early as 2004, there was evidence that young people were increasingly getting their information from “The Daily Show” instead of more traditional sources.

“What’s important is doing something worthwhile,” Stewart said in 1998 before he took the reins at “The Daily Show.”

Judging him by that standard, Stewart’s tenure has been an astounding success. He made us laugh, yes, but he also encouraged us to think. He challenged the conventional wisdom and amplified dissent.

He was a small-d democrat in the truest sense of the word, always holding the powerful to account for putting the public interest behind their own. That’s his legacy — and nothing could be more worthwhile. n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 2, 2015

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KLMNO WEEKLY

WONKBLOG

The lion and the uproar BY

C HRISTOPHER I NGRAHAM

T

he Internet was in an uproar this past week over the killing of a well-known lion in Zimbabwe. Walter J. Palmer, a Minnesota dentist, allegedly baited Cecil the lion out of a national park by dragging a dead animal behind a car at night.

Palmer shot Cecil with a crossbow. The wounded lion escaped and wasn’t found by Palmer and his fellow hunters until 40 hours later, when they killed it with a rifle.

This would all be perfectly legal had the lion not been a resident of Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park, a protected area.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature estimates that trophy-hunting tourists legally kill some 600 lions each year.

Jane Smart, the global director of IUCN’s Biodiversity Conservation Group, said that the 600 figure is several years old and the actual number is probably a little bit higher. Given that there are only about 30,000 lions left in Africa, this represents an annual loss of roughly 2 percent of the total lion population to legal hunting, and a considerably larger share of the population of healthy adult male lions, which hunters typically prize.

American tourists — wealthy ones, given the high costs involved — account for the majority of lions killed for sport in Africa. A 2011 report by the International Fund for Animal Welfare found that between 1999 and 2008, Americans brought home lion “trophies” — heads, pelts and whatnot — representing 64 percent of all African lions killed for sport during that period. And that number is rising: “Of these trophies, the number imported into the U.S. in 2008 was larger than any other year in the decade studied and more than twice the number in 1999,” the report found.

The dwindling lion population cannot sustain hunting losses like this indefinitely, the IUCN found in its report. Last year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declined to list African lions as “endangered,” which would have banned the importation of recreational lion trophies to the United States. Instead they listed lions as “threatened,” which allows the domestic trade in lion trophies to continue.

Safari Club International, the hunting group Palmer belongs to, hailed that ruling as a victory for hunters. The club maintains an online record book where hunters can track kills of lions and other big game animals and compare their rankings with other hunters.

Safari International says there are records of over 2,000 lions killed in its online record book.

A November 2014 blog post highlights the top

Americans drive the lion hunt Trophy hunters legally kill at least 600 African lions each year. Exports of lion trophies to the United States account for 64 percent of lions killed.

Source: International Union for the Conservation of Nature, International Fund for Animal Welfare Lion icon by Robert Bjurshagen, The Noun Project

10 African lions killed, with photos of hunters posed next to their prizes. “The African lion is one of the most challenging and dangerous hunts,” the copy reads. “Virtually anyone who imagines an African Safari envisions the big maned lion charging the implacable hunter shouldering his European double rifle.”

In reality, lion hunting doesn’t appear to require much in the way of skill. Many huntertourists are guided by teams of locals and professionals. Adult lions are not particularly afraid of humans, making it relatively easy to get close to one. They spend the majority of their day sleeping.

Hunting groups like Safari Club International maintain that hunting lions helps conserve them. They promote the positive effects of hunting in African communities. They argue that “hunting plays a role in raising the value of the African lion and discourages poaching.”

WAPO.ST/WONKBLOG

IUCN’s Smart said that well-regulated trophy hunting can be a net benefit for lion populations.

“What is clear is that overall the trophy hunting must be carefully regulated, otherwise it casts the whole trophy hunting industry into ill-repute,” she said. “There is a payback for communities if we can do it in a regulated way.

However unpleasant people find this, this can be a good conservation technique.”

She stressed that habitat destruction and illegal poaching were even bigger threats to the lion population.

In a statement last week, Palmer expressed regret: “I had no idea that the lion I took was a known, local favorite, was collared and part of a study until the end of the hunt. . . . I deeply regret that my pursuit of an activity I love and practice responsibly and legally resulted in the taking of this lion,” he said. n

SUNDAY, AUGUST 2, 2015

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Where else can you visit 32 wineries in just 3 hours?

At the Wenatchee Wine & Food Festival, you'll have the opportunity to sample over 100 wines, plus beers, spirits, ciders, food and more.

It's the best ticket value in town.

Enjoy the largest gathering of wineries in the region under one roof-- take a look at the line-up: ERRANT CELLARS • EAGLE CREEK WINERY • JONES OF WASHINGTON • BEAUMONT CELLARS • GINKGO FOREST BRENDER CANYON VINEYARD • SILVARA VINEYARD • TUNNEL HILL WINERY • BENSON VINEYARDS SNOWGRASS WINERY • CRAYELLE CELLARS • LEGEND CELLARS • STEMILT CREEK WINERY • VIENTO RIDGE VIN DU LAC • MARTIN-SCOTT WINERY • CAVE B ESTATE WINERY • PLAIN CELLARS • GOOSE RIDGE ESTATE WINERY RYAN PATRICK VINEYARDS • MILBRANDT VINEYARDS • OKANOGAN ESTATE & VINEYARDS • KESTREL VINTNERS WINERY MALAGA SPRINGS WINERY • CHATEAU FAIRE LE PONT • TSILLAN CELLARS • WEDGE MOUNTAIN LOST RIVER WINERY • HORAN ESTATES WINERY • ESTHER BRICQUES WINERY • RIO VISTA WINES • VOILA WINERY

Saturday, August 22

6pm to 9pm

Town Toyota Center, Wenatchee

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

Available online at wenwineandfood.com

G R E A T W I N E. G R E A T F O O D. G R E A T F U N. Callie Klein & Frank Verebi Financial Representatives