The Washington Post National Weekly - August 26, 2018

SUNDAY, AUGUST 26, 2018

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THE UN-CELEBRITY PRESIDENT Jimmy Carter shuns riches and leads a modest life in his Georgia hometown PAGE 12

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THE FIX THE FIX

Trump seemsseems to beto losing alliesallies Trump be losing A MBER P HILLIPS

time. Of the five Trump associates ensnared in time. the five Trump legal troubles stemming fromOf the Russia probe, associates ensnared in legal troubles stemming only one — former Trump campaign boss Paul from the Russia probe, resident Trump appears this past week onea— former resident Trump appears this past week Manafort — has refusedonly to take plea deal.Trump And campaign boss Paul to have lost or to be dangerously close to Manafort — has refused to have lost or to be dangerously close to he arguably paid a hefty price for that. to take a plea deal. And losing the loyalty of four people he used hea decade arguablyin paid a hefty price for that. losing the loyalty of four people he used Manafort faces at least jail after to be able to count on pretty much Manafort faces at least a decade in jail after to be able to count on pretty much being convicted of tax and bank fraud . unconditionally. being convicted of tax and unconditionally.

An irony here is that Manafort can’t be bank fraud .

First, Trump’s longtime fixer and lawyer An ironyEven here is that Manafort can’t be First, Trump’s longtime fixer and lawyer described as a friend of Trump’s. though flipped on him in dramatic fashion: Michael described as a friend of Trump’s. Even though flipped on him in dramatic fashion: Michael he led Trump’s campaign for several crucial Cohen pleaded guilty Tuesday to breaking camhe led Trump’s campaign for several crucial Cohen pleaded guilty Tuesday to breaking cammonths in 2016, the two don’t have a longpaign finance laws and implicated the presimonths in 2016, the two don’t have a longpaign finance laws and implicated the presistanding relationship. And yet, through dent in his crimes. standing relationship.

And yet, through dent in his crimes.

Manafort, Trump is demonstrating that loyalty On Thursday, one of Trump’s oldest friends Manafort, Trump is demonstrating that loyalty On Thursday, one of Trump’s oldest friends to him is the ultimate harbinger of whether in media appeared ready to walk that same to him is the ultimate harbinger of whether in media appeared ready to walk that same you’re on his good side. path after numerous reports that David Pecker, good side. path after reports that David Pecker, Over the past fewyou’re days on hehishas praised president of the publisher of numerous the National Over the past few days he has praised president of the publisher of the National TONY DEJAK/ASSOCIATED PRESS Manafort as “brave” for refusing to “break” Enquirer, had been granted immunity to share TONY DEJAK/ASSOCIATED PRESS and Manafort as “brave” and for refusing to “break” Enquirer, had been granted immunity to share amid an independent federal investigation. with prosecutors what he knows about a hushAttorney General Jeff Sessions said in a amid an independent with prosecutors what he knows about a hushAttorney General Jeff Sessions said in a And now The Washington Post reports Trump federal investigation. money payment to a woman alleging an affair statement that the DOJ will not be “improperly And now The issuing Washington money payment to a woman alleging an affair statement that the DOJ will sought not be “improperly his lawyers’ advice about a Post reports Trump with Trump. It suggests Pecker has something influenced by political considerations.” sought his lawyers’ advice about issuing a with Trump.

It suggests Pecker has something influenced by political considerations.” pardon for Manafort. prosecutors very much want to know. pardon for Manafort. prosecutors very much want to know.

Of course, the always-overarching question en Sessions was one of Trump’s first high-proAnd on Friday, The Wall Street Journal broke Ofloyalties course, the always-overarching question en Sessions was one of Trump’s firstall high-proon Friday, The Wall Street Journal broke is what these dropped mean for file congressional endorsements and remained the news that longtime And Trump Organization is what all these dropped loyalties mean for file congressional endorsements and remained the news that longtime Trump Organization Trump. Legally, it might not mean much. It’s a close political ally during the campaign.

CFO Allen Weisselberg had been granted imTrump.

Legally, it might not mean much.

It’s a close political ally during the campaign.

CFO Allen Weisselberg had been granted imlikely a sitting president can’t be indicted.

The two couldn’t be described as friends munity in the Cohen probe. As Aaron Blake a sitting president can’t be indicted. be described asTrump friends munityPost, in the Cohen probe.

As Aaron BlakeTrumpThe Politically, mightlikely be making new friends anymore, because has two spentcouldn’t the better reported for The Washington Weisselberg Politically, Trump might be making new friends anymore, because Trump has spent the better reported for The Washington Post, Weisselberg to make up for the ones he’s lost. Two Republipart of his presidency attacking Sessions for has worked not only for the Trump Organizato make up for the ones part of his presidency attacking Sessions for has worked not only for the Trump Organizacan senators said Thursday that they would be he’s lost. Two Republirecusing himself from all things Russia. But tion but also for the Donald J. Trump Foundacan senators said Thursday that they would be recusing himself from all things Russia.

But tion but also for the Donald J. Trump Foundaopen to seeing Sessions leave the Justice DeSessions has largely resisted pushing back tion, and he handled personal stuff for Trump open to seeing Sessions leave the Justice DeSessions has largely resisted pushing back tion, and he handled personal stuff for Trump partment. Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles against those attacks.

— including tax returns. partment.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles against those attacks.

— including tax returns.

E. Grassley (R-Iowa) even told Bloomberg If Sessions was hoping the Trump storm The Weisselberg move came just one day E. Grassley (R-Iowa) even told Bloomberg If Sessions was hoping the Trump storm The Weisselberg move came just one day News that he would be amenable to holding would blow over, this seems to be the moment after Trump’s attorney general publicly anthatgeneral he would be amenable to holding to be thetomoment after Trump’s attorney general publicly put a new News attorney in the he realized that’sana lost would cause. blow over, this seemshearings nounced that he’s had enough of the president hearings to put a new he realized that’s a lost cause. nounced that he’s had enough of the president job, despite warning Trump as recently asattorney general in the Trump is a leader who demands loyalty attacking him. Attorney General Jeff Sessions job, despite Trump is a leader who demands attacking him.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions March that loyalty firing Sessions would warning mean heTrump as recently as without offering much in return. The seemingreleased a defiant statement — while he was on March that firing Sessions would mean he without offering much in return.

The seemingreleased a defiant statement — while he was on wouldn’t get to pick a new one anytime soon. ly paradoxical strategy helped get him to the his way to the White House — declaring the wouldn’t get to pick a new one anytime soon. ly paradoxical strategy helped get him to the his way to the White House — declaring the But for reasons that are still unfolding, presidency with an eclectic cadre cheering him agency he runs would not be “improperly influBut for reasons that are still unfolding, presidency with an eclectic cadre cheering him agency he runs would not be “improperly influTrump is at risk of losing the loyalty of key on. But just being president doesn’t seem to be enced by political considerations.”

Trump is at risk of losing the loyalty of key on.

But just being president doesn’t seem to be enced by political considerations.” people he once trusted. That has got to have enough anymore for some of Trump’s former Such words from an attorney general to the people he once trusted.

That has got to have enough anymore for some of Trump’s former Such words from an attorney general to the him wondering: Who’s next? n allies, not when multiple investigations are president would be remarkable regardless of him wondering: Who’s next? allies, not when multiple investigations are president would be remarkable regardless of n threatening his inner circle with serious jail the backstory. But they’re more surprising giv©The Washington Post threatening his inner circle with serious jail the backstory. But they’re more surprising giv©The Washington Post

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This publication was prepared by editors at The This publication was prepared Washington Post for printing and distribution by our by editors at The Washington PostAll forarticles printingand and distribution by our partner publications across the country. partner publications across the columns have previously appeared in The Post or on country. All articles and have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com andcolumns have been edited to fit this washingtonpost.com and have format. For questions or comments regarding content,been edited to fit this format. For questions or acomments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com.

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WEEKLY WEEKLY

ON THE COVER Jimmy and ON THE COVER Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter walk home Rosalynn followed by a Secret Service agentCarter walk home followed along West Church Street after by a Secret Service agent along West having dinner at a friend’s house in Church Street after having dinner at a friend’s house in Plains, Ga. Photo by MATT Plains, Ga. Photo by MATT MCCLAIN of The Washington Post MCCLAIN of The Washington Post

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

What the strongmen are forgetting JACKSON DIEHL is deputy editorial page editor for The Washington Post.

We have entered an era of power-hungry, reckless and delusional leaders. Yes, President Trump is one of them — but he is part of a global cast and probably not its most dangerous member.

This is an age when the puffed-up rulers of both large and middling powers, from China and Russia to Turkey and Saudi Arabia, rupture norms and seek to impose their diktat not only at home but abroad, too.

They carry out cyberattacks and pursue exiled dissidents in Western capitals. They launch costly and unwinnable wars. They are able to do all this in part because the power that used to restrain them, the United States, has retreated from global leadership.

Saudi Arabia once conducted a highly cautious foreign policy whose main aim was preserving its U.S. security shield. Now its callow crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, pursues one misbegotten adventure after the next. In the past couple of years, his regime has plunged into a war in Yemen, led a blockade of its neighbor and longtime ally Qatar, and kidnapped the Lebanese prime minister. This month, in response to justified criticism by Canada of his persecution of female activists, the crown prince imposed sanctions that included yanking thousands of Saudi students out of Canadian universities.

Yet Crown Prince Mohammed has arguably been outdone by Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan,

who, having replaced Turkey’s democracy with a virtual dictatorship, now seeks to dictate to the United States. Seeing that North Korea and Iran leveraged favors from Washington by imprisoning Americans on bogus pretexts, Erdogan adopted the same gambit — ignoring that Turkey, unlike those rogue states, has depended on Washington for its security for more than half a century. He demands that the Trump administration hand over an exiled cleric he blames, without substantiation, for fomenting a coup. Meanwhile he threatens to start a war with U.S. forces in Syria because of their support for Kurds fighting the Islamic State.

Other medium-size strongmen are watching to see if Mohammed

and Erdogan get away with their bluffs. One is Egypt’s Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, who also holds de facto American hostages while pocketing billions in U.S. military aid. Then there is North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, who since meeting Trump has brazenly continued building missiles and enriching uranium, apparently convinced that he can force U.S. recognition of his regime as a nuclear power.

The paragons of this crowd are China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Xi has effectively seized control of the South China Sea, while moving to silence critics not just in neighboring countries but across the West as well. Putin has invaded Georgia and Ukraine and murdered exiled dissidents, including in Britain.

Xi and Putin clearly calculated that the United States would not stop them, and that any subsequent punishment would be bearable. For the most part, they have been proved right — which is why Erdogan, Mohammed, Sissi and others were encouraged to imitate them.

It might be taken as good news that the reckless rulers are all paying some price for their behavior. Turkey’s currency has crashed and may soon take the rest of the economy with it.

Mohammed has driven away foreign investors while manifestly

failing to subdue any of his foreign enemies. Putin’s popularity at home has been sliding as Russians face the economic consequences of the Western sanctions prompted by his aggressions. Even Xi has begun to inspire grumbling in Beijing that his ambitions have led to a painful backlash, including U.S. tariffs.

Yet none of the autocrats has been deterred. Saudi planes are still bombing civilians in Yemen, while Putin’s operations to interfere in Western elections, including the upcoming U.S. midterms, continue apace.

Erdogan, too, remains defiant, with the help of a bailout from Qatar.

Consequently, it’s hard not to sympathize with Trump’s ongoing campaign to cow Erdogan with trade and other sanctions. Tariffs are a poor instrument, and Trump’s focus on one of the 20 imprisoned Americans, a Christian missionary, is distasteful. But Trump understands something that Erdogan and a few other leaders have evidently forgotten: The United States remains capable of imposing crippling punishment on regimes that want to challenge it. A bit more use of that leverage with this generation of unhinged rulers might save the world a good deal of future trouble. n

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OPINIONS

BY KAL FOR THE ECONOMIST

The Church’s fixation on power DAVID VON DREHLE is a Washington Post opinion columnist.

The crisis of the Catholic Church is not a matter for Catholics only.

Love it or hate it — or anywhere in between — this is one of the most important, influential institutions in world history, with boots on the ground in every corner of the world. Its good works are monumental. No agency, I suspect, has built more schools, colleges, universities, hospitals, orphanages and clinics. No patron has inspired and endowed more masterpieces of music, art, architecture and literature.

Its scandals and sins are monumental as well; no adequate accounting of the past millennium could be written without the Reformation, the Inquisition or the trial of Galileo. That’s why the voluminous report by the Pennsylvania grand jury on coverups of alleged sexual assaults by priests is so important.

Nothing in the report, not even the child pornography or the sadism, is new. Attentive Catholics and outside observers have been reading about clergy abuse and scofflaw bishops since the 1980s, when investigative reporter Jason Berry exposed the scandal of a serial molester in the diocese of Lafayette, La. Paul Hendrickson, then of The Post, detailed his own experience of sexual humiliation as a teenager while training to be a priest in his 1983 memoir “Seminary.” Journalist Carl

Cannon wrote presciently in 1987: “The church’s reluctance to address the problem is a time bomb waiting to detonate within American Catholicism.”

What the grand jury added was a sweeping documentation of the ubiquity of the abuse culture. The report could have made it clearer that in all six of the dioceses investigated, a majority of priests have carried out their ministries without offense. What is crystal clear, however, is that hiding credible accusations of sexual assault — even at the risk of enabling future rapes of other children — was routine business, year after year and decade after decade, for bishops in every corner of the state.

We already had a sense of this corrupted hierarchy. Some of the most prominent church leaders of the past two generations have

BY SEAN DELONAS

been exposed for their complicity in protecting offenders: Cardinal Bernard Law in Boston, Cardinal Roger Mahoney in Los Angeles, Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua of Philadelphia and his predecessor, Cardinal John Krol, and so on.

Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, former head of the archdiocese of Washington, recently resigned from the College of Cardinals after multiple accusations of abuse were lodged against him.

These were among the most powerful men in the church; what was known and done by them was known, and thus condoned, by their colleagues and superiors in Rome. As the scandal has spread around the world, a conclusion has become inescapable: This great church, so charitable in so many ways, has been morally blind.

I don’t mean the hundreds of millions of lay Catholics around the world. Their awareness of this problem has grown slowly but steadily from hushed whispers a half-century ago to a mighty roar of outrage in response to the Pennsylvania grand jury.

It is church leadership, from the popes all the way down, that hasn’t been able to tell right from wrong.

Yet how can this be, in an institution at least nominally dedicated to precisely that task? I think there are two interrelated reasons.

The first is an age-old problem.

Since its alliance with the Roman Emperor Constantine in the 4th century, the Catholic hierarchy has been tempted by power. It has cloaked itself in mystery to rule by edict rather than by example. At root, this scandal springs from idolatry: Bishops employ secrecy and deceit to promote the heresy that the priesthood is superior to the people in the pews. The words of John A. Hardon, a Jesuit priest, are as true now as when he wrote them 20 years ago: “Most of the chaos in the Catholic Church today is due to the pride of priests.”

The second is the church’s unfortunate negative obsession with sex — a problem it shares with many conservative Protestant congregations. To a broken world they offer a gospel of no-nos. The church exalts, from the Virgin Mary to the parish priest, the sexless life, as though the very engine of God’s creation were a sign of spiritual failure and source of shame.

The Galilean who preached “love your neighbor,” “suffer the children,” “judge not” and “the Kingdom of God is within you” would weep to read the grand jury’s report. The question for church leaders: Will their response continue to serve their own interests, or, at long last, serve His? n

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The dangerous fallacy of the perfect victim MONICA HESSE is a Washington Post columnist writing about gender and its impact on society.

Nearly a year into the national reckoning over sexual ha­ rassment, the New York Times threw a monkey wrench in­ to the dialogue with a bombshell report: Asia Argento, one of Harvey Weinstein’s earliest accusers, was herself accused of sexual misconduct. The Italian actress paid $380,000 to a young actor named Jimmy Bennett, who said she assault­ ed him in a California hotel room when he was 17, a year younger than the state’s age of consent. She has denied the accusations. She never had any sexual relationship with Bennett, she said, and paid him the money he had request­ ed to avoid “suffering any further intrusions” in her life.

Before, Argento was perceived as a victim. Now, she was — what was she, exactly? Our conversations about sexual misconduct are easier when the players have tidy labels: Victim.

Attacker. Innocent. Monster.

Over 24 hours, I watched pundits and advocates try to neaten this case up, with conclusions that might wrangle the story back into something more orderly.

If I was a 17­year­old boy, I would have been thrilled: A harmful conclusion, popular on Twitter.

This woman must be lying about Harvey Weinstein: A disingenuous conclusion, circulated by Weinstein’s attorney.

Do the claims about Asia Argento invalidate the Me Too movement? A straw-man question, which the Los Angeles Times posed then quickly dismantled.

Argento’s alleged actions need to be wrestled with — not because they “invalidate” the movement, but because they’re a part of it. #MeToo was never about what a handful of men did to a handful of women, after all, but about the poison we’re all choking on.

And sometimes the stories are

relentlessly, inconveniently messy.

The only conclusion that makes sense at this point is that it’s possible for two awful things to be true at once. As several cultural observers — #MeToo activist Tarana Burke, writer Mark Harris — have pointed out, it’s possible for someone to have a terrible thing done to them and also do a terrible thing. It’s possible to feel both pity toward someone and revulsion. In cases of rape or sexual assault, this might be more than theoretical: The reverberations of abuse can linger for years or be passed on to others like a sickness.

Argento says she was assaulted

by Weinstein in 1997, when she was 21. Her accuser said she assaulted him 16 years later. In legal documents, Bennett said Argento invited him to meet at a hotel, which is what she (and multiple other women) said Weinstein had done with her.

Bennett said she performed forcible oral sex on him, which is what she said Weinstein had done to her. Several of Weinstein’s accusers have said he dangled promises of movie roles as bribes to keep quiet. The same day Argento allegedly assaulted Bennett, she posted a photo of the

LOIC VENANCE/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Actress Asia Argento accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault. Now an actor is accusing her of assaulting him when he was 17.

two of them on Instagram: “Jimmy is going to be in my next movie and that is a fact, dig that jack.”

Later, as Bennett was driving home, legal documents said, he began to feel “confused, mortified and disgusted.” But he still continued to communicate with her in a way that seemed to indicate fondness, just as Argento maintained contact with Weinstein.

All this might add up to a cycle of abuse — a shattered woman’s gnarled, ruinous way of processing what had happened to her. Or it all might just be a nauseating coincidence. Or, if Argento is innocent, did Bennett invent a story specifically to pattern the story she had told about Weinstein?

Whatever the truth, the similarities wouldn’t cancel out the harm done. They just require us to grapple harder with how we think about victims and perpetrators.

In April, the Pulitzer-winning novelist Junot Díaz wrote a wrenching essay in the New Yorker about being raped as a child, an attack that left him emotionally battered. For a few weeks as this essay circulated, Díaz was heralded as a hero for baring his scars.

And then the story became complicated: Two women accused Díaz himself of harassment. They said that as an adult, he had used his status as a famous author to berate and forcibly kiss women — graduate students or young authors who feared speaking out could hurt their own careers.

Suddenly, Díaz wasn’t a hero but a villain. And some critics took the stance that acknowledging his old pain would negate his alleged victims new pain.

Really, what had happened was a whole never-ending saga of pain, a concept that Díaz himself seemed semi-aware of: The title of his New Yorker essay had been “The Legacy of Childhood Trauma.”

Let the stories be complicated.

Leave them messy.

Punish Argento, if the legal system requires it. Ask difficult questions regarding how to think about victims who are also abusers.

But let the stories be complicated, because that messiness isn’t a bad thing. It’s actually the only thing. It’s the only way to acknowledge there aren’t neat labels in these cases, only broken humans. n

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NATION

More jobs doesn’t equal fewer issues T ODD C . F RANKEL in Ames, Iowa BY

I

sabel Moctezuma was cooking again. Now, at least, she was doing it at home, making salmon for dinner in her small apartment. Her daughter, Mia, 8, sliced carrots next to her.

Moctezuma was just off the clock and still wearing her Texas Roadhouse work shirt, which on the back read, “I (heart) my job.” The slogan made her laugh.

Moctezuma, 39, worked this summer in the restaurant’s kitchen for $11.50 an hour — less than what she had made as a cook six years ago. The rest of the year she worked as a cook at Iowa State University, where the pay was a little better. But she had seen the “Help Wanted” signs all over town. She had heard how the local economy was soaring. And she had recently applied for a supervisor’s job. She wondered if this was her chance. It was only later, when dinner was over and with the dishes done and Mia watching TV, that she allowed herself to imagine what that might feel like.

“It would be nice to not have to worry so much,” she said.

Moctezuma lives in what might be the nation’s hottest job market — the metro area with the lowest unemployment rate, a hard-toimagine 1.5 percent.

“You’re hard-pressed to feel like things aren’t really robust here,” said Dan Culhane, president of the Ames Economic Development Commission. “Everyone who wants a job has one.”

The jobs are plentiful, but the widespread prosperity usually tied to ultra-low unemployment has failed to materialize here, especially for workers such as Moctezuma.

Wages have risen, but not much faster than in other places. At the same time, costs such as rent have continued to rise. And other measures of economic health have failed to improve.

The unemployment rate is often viewed as a barometer for how the country is doing — and the places with the lowest rates are usually described in breathless terms as boomtowns where work-

RACHEL MUMMEY FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Iowa town has nation’s lowest unemployment rate, but wages aren’t keeping up with costs ers are fawned and fought over.

But what is happening in Ames highlights an experience much of the nation appears soon to confront. The economy is growing faster and unemployment is falling, yet wages barely budge.

When they do, higher costs can wipe out their value. Indeed, the government reported in early August that Americans, on average, are making less money than they did at this point last year, after accounting for rising prices.

This helps explain why the expansion has felt so weak for so many — in Ames and nationwide — despite headline numbers that paint an enviable picture.

The Ames experience illustrates how it occurs. Some employers have turned to tactics other than raising wages to make hires. Some workers — particularly parents — struggle with employers’ increasing demands for weekend hours and just-in-time schedules. Some of the barriers to

better-paying jobs are old, such as Iowa’s shortage of affordable child care. Others are newer, such as state lawmakers last year weakening the bargaining power of unions. These all become a drag on wages, especially for low-income and middle-class workers.

“I believe that a rising tide lifts all boats,” said Rick Sanders, the Republican chairman of the board of supervisors for Story County, home to Ames. “But we haven’t seen that impact on lower-skill and blue-collar workers yet.”

David Swenson, an economist at Iowa State, said the wait has already defied conventional theory.

“When will wages rise? I don’t know why we keep waiting,” he said. “It’s been like waiting for Godot.”

Challenges of low unemployment The Ames metro area is a flourishing region of nearly 100,000 people built around a college town,

Isabel Moctezuma works as a cook at Iowa State University during the school year and in the kitchen at Texas Roadhouse during the summer to support herself and her daughter, Mia, 8.

just 40 miles north of Des Moines.

The Barilla pasta plant here is expanding. Tech firm Workiva is growing. A steady supply of jobs flow from Iowa State, the National Animal Disease Center and the Energy Department’s Ames Laboratory.

But the region’s No. 1 ranking in unemployment has created challenges. When a food processor visited Ames this summer to look at opening a huge new plant, Culhane had to reassure the company it could find enough workers at the right wage.

“We have to demonstrate that we can find a workforce from time to time,” said the head of the local development commission.

Local businesses have needed to be creative to find workers.

Story County Medical Center started allowing people to drop in unannounced for job interviews.

They called it “Walk-In Wednesdays.” The hospital also began offering sign-on bonuses and could add job referral bonuses.

But the hospital has mostly resisted raising wages.

John Crawford, owner of Alpha Copies, started rotating the location of the “Help Wanted” signs he posted outside his two stores so they didn’t blend in with all the other job postings.

But wage increases were also not yet part of the picture.

Amid Ames’s economic prosperity, signs of duress remain — and in some cases, they are getting worse. The share of schoolchildren qualifying for free and reduced-priced lunch in the Ames metro area has risen 35 percent since 2008, twice as fast as in Iowa overall. At the same time, local demand has not fallen off at the Food Bank of Iowa. In fact, the food bank plans to open five new pantries in the Ames area soon.

The booming economy hasn’t eased the strain felt by many families, said Jean Kresse, president of the United Way of Story County. A United Way report released in June found the percentage of households struggling to afford basic needs has grown — not fallen — since the recession. Kresse said the problem is driven by households

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NATION that earn enough to be above the poverty line yet still face low wages and rising expenses.

The average weekly wage in the Ames metro area grew a modest inflation-adjusted 7.4 percent from 2013 to 2017, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That was slightly faster than the state and nation. But income growth for families in the Ames area was slower by comparison.

And Ames is becoming a more expensive place to live. The median home listing price is up 9 percent in the last year to nearly $230,000, according to Zillow. The median rent for a two-bedroom home has risen 10 percent in a year to $930 a month, according to Housing and Urban Development data — and even higher within city limits, where residents compete with 36,000 Iowa State students.

Trimming expenses Moctezuma, a single mom, lives in a two-bedroom apartment where the hallway is decorated with Mia’s drawings and a painting of Jesus hangs on the wall across from the kitchen.

Her rent went up $50 a month two years ago. And $30 more last year.

“I got a nice letter this year saying they were going to increase it just $10,” she said.

She trims expenses to keep up.

She opens windows instead of turning on the wall air-conditioning unit. Eating out is a once-amonth trip to McDonald’s. She drives an old truck that her church helped her buy. Still, she holds on to her dream of one day owning a house with a small garden.

Earlier this year, she got excited when Ames asked for volunteers to care for small city gardens. She and Mia planted flowers such as red impatiens and yellow snapdragons in a plot in a local park.

They returned often to check on their flowers and pick weeds. One day, they noticed a small sign: “Flower Garden Adopted by Mia & Isabel Moctezuma.”

“I’m never going to have a garden of my own,” Moctezuma said, “so this is my chance.”

She loves Ames. She said it again and again. The schools are among the best in the state. Her church is here. Her auto mechanic understands when she needs to stretch out payments on a repair job. She gushes about the Ames

RACHEL MUMMEY FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Isabel Moctezuma, a single mom to Mia, has to keep trimming expenses. The rent on her two-bedroom apartment in Ames, Iowa, went up $50 per month two years ago and $30 per month last year.

Public Library. She and Mia visit at least once a week for books and the Internet.

She even left Ames once. Three years ago, Moctezuma moved to Chicago with her daughter in search of something better. But the city felt too big. Traffic was stifling.

And Chicago’s public libraries just made her miss the one in Ames.

She and Mia returned a few months later.

The Ames Public Library — a huge light-filled building in the heart of downtown — plays a central role in the city. In 2016, the library began offering free lunches for children three days a week during June and July. Demand was so strong that the next summer the free lunches expanded to five days a week and into August, too. This summer, the number of meals served a day has jumped by more than 10 percent.

“It surprises us every year,” said Sarah Bohlke, the library’s volunteer services coordinator.

The library is where Moctezuma conducted her summer job search. She logged on and saw more than 2,000 job openings.

She applied all over. Target. HyVee. Restaurants. Hotels. Some places wanted her to work weekends or nights.

“My friends said I was too picky,” Moctezuma recalled. “But what would I do with Mia?” The best offer came at Texas Roadhouse. It was only 30 hours a week. And the pay was low. Plus, it meant cooking again.

“But I shouldn’t complain,” she said.

Her main job was still at Iowa State as a dining hall cook, where she’d started six years ago on the night shift, sometimes asking her boss if she could bring Mia to work with her. Child care was always a worry. While her mom worked at the restaurant this summer, Mia attended a reducedfee day camp.

Moctezuma liked her Iowa State job and wanted to get on yearround. As a union member, she received regular raises, from 2 percent to almost 7 percent. She had good health insurance with no monthly premium. But that changed last year when Iowa’s Republican-controlled legislature passed a law gutting public-sector unions. Collective bargaining was severely restricted. Large pay raises ended. Union workers got a 1 percent pay hike this year. And Isabel’s health care now costs $80 a month.

Then, in May, she noticed a job posting for a dining hall supervisor. It was a year-round position.

No more hunting for summer jobs. No weekends, either. Her boss encouraged her to apply.

Moctezuma was nervous. The job paid about $35,000 a year.

She asked a church deacon for advice. John McCully, 83, was a retired Iowa State English professor. He had known Moctezuma for years and treated her like a favorite daughter. He had noticed how Ames had grown, filling with new houses and nice cars.

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“This isn’t helping those who are poor,” McCully said.

He told Moctezuma to be clear in her mind about her accomplishments — her experience cooking, the compliments she had received for how hard she worked, how well she got along with co-workers. She had even once had an offer from a local investor to help her open her own bakery and cafe. That was a couple of years ago. Moctezuma had turned down the offer, unsure if she could do it.

“You minimize everything you do,” McCully told her. “You can’t do that for this.”

She remembered little from her interview. It happened so fast.

Then one week passed with no word. Then another. McCully urged her to call: Ask them if they’d reached a decision. She didn’t want to.

“Sometimes you don’t want to know,” she said.

Dreaming of the future Recently, Moctezuma had the day off from work at Texas Roadhouse. She spent it volunteering at a local food kitchen, where — of course — she cooked meals. She liked it. Others had it worse than she did, she said. But the people she saw there, along with her own experiences, made it hard to understand the local TV news report detailing how Ames once again had the nation’s lowest unemployment rate.

Later that night, Moctezuma and Mia ate a home-cooked dinner of chicken and farro salad.

Now, Mia wanted to walk down to the neighborhood creek. She liked throwing rocks into the water.

Moctezuma still hadn’t called about the supervisor’s job at Iowa State. She worried that she had dreamed too big. She worried about having enough money and about whether she was working enough and how to be the best possible mother to Mia. She stopped walking. A house had caught her eye. It was modest.

It had gray wood trim and a bank of windows along the front. It had a small garden.

The economy was booming.

Signs for job openings were everywhere. Opportunity seemed to be all around her. She could see it happening for her, too. Maybe.

Maybe just not now.

“Someday,” she said. n ©The Washington Post

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COVER STORY

‘Just like a regular person’

J

immy Carter finishes his Saturday night dinner, salmon and broccoli casserole on a paper plate, flashes his famous toothy grin and calls playfully to his wife of 72 years, Rosalynn: “C’mon, kid.”

She laughs and takes his hand, and they walk carefully through a neighbor’s kitchen filled with 1976 campaign buttons, photos of world leaders and a couple of unopened cans of Billy Beer, then out the back door, where three Secret Service agents wait.

They do this just about every weekend in this tiny town where they were born — he almost 94 years ago, she almost 91. Dinner at their friend Jill Stuckey’s house, with plastic Solo cups of ice water and one glass each of bargain-brand chardonnay, then the half-mile walk home to the ranch house they built in 1961.

On this south Georgia summer evening, still close to 90 degrees, they dab their faces with a little plastic bottle of No Natz to repel the swirling clouds of tiny bugs.

Then they catch each other’s hands again and start walking, the for-

Jimmy Carter, 93, bypasses the wealth and perks that flow so freely to other former U.S. presidents.

B Y K EVIN S ULLIVAN AND M ARY J ORDAN in Plains, GA.

PHOTOS BY MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

The Carters, top, have dinner at their friend Jill Stuckey’s house, which they do just about every weekend. Above, Jimmy Carter enjoys his meal on a paper plate.

mer president in jeans and clunky black shoes, the former first lady using a walking stick for the first time.

The 39th president of the United States lives modestly, a sharp contrast to his successors, who have left the White House to embrace power of another kind: wealth.

Even those who didn’t start out rich, including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, have made tens of millions of dollars on the privatesector opportunities that flow so easily to ex-presidents.

When Carter left the White House after one tumultuous term, trounced by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election, he returned to Plains, a speck of peanut and cotton farmland that to this day has a poverty rate of nearly 40 percent.

The Democratic former president decided not to join corporate boards or give speeches for big money because, he says, he didn’t want to “capitalize financially on being in the White House.”

Presidential historian Michael Beschloss said that Gerald Ford, Carter’s predecessor and close friend, was the first to fully take

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COVER STORY

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MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

advantage of those high-paid post-presidential opportunities, but that “Carter did the opposite.”

Since Ford, other former presidents, and sometimes their spouses, routinely earn hundreds of thousands of dollars on speeches.

“I don’t see anything wrong with it; I don’t blame other people for doing it,” Carter says over dinner. “It just never had been my ambition to be rich.”

‘He doesn’t like big shots’ Carter was 56 when he returned to Plains from Washington. He says his peanut business, held in a blind trust during his presidency, was $1 million in debt, and he was forced to sell.

“We thought we were going to lose everything,” says Rosalynn, sitting beside him.

Carter decided that his income would come from writing, and he has written 33 books, about his life and career, his faith, Middle East peace, women’s rights, aging, fishing, woodworking, even a children’s book written with his daughter, Amy Carter, called “The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer.”

American flags and a Jimmy Carter sign adorn buildings on Main Street in Plains, Ga., Carter’s hometown.

“It just never had been my ambition to be rich.”

Jimmy Carter, 39th president of the United States

With book income and the $210,700 annual pension all former presidents receive, the Carters live comfortably. But his books have never fetched the massive sums commanded by more recent presidents.

Carter has been an ex-president for 37 years, longer than anyone else in history. His simple lifestyle is increasingly rare in this era of President Trump, a billionaire with gold-plated sinks in his private jet, Manhattan penthouse and Mar-a-Lago estate.

Carter is the only president in the modern era to return full-time to the home he lived in before he entered politics — a two-bedroom ranch house assessed at $167,000, less than the value of the armored Secret Service vehicles parked outside.

Ex-presidents often fly on private jets, sometimes lent by wealthy friends, but the Carters fly commercial. Stuckey says that on a recent flight from Atlanta to Los Angeles, Carter walked up and down the aisle greeting other passengers and taking selfies.

“He doesn’t like big shots, and

he doesn’t think he’s a big shot,” said Gerald Rafshoon, who was Carter’s White House communications director.

Carter costs U.S. taxpayers less than any other ex-president, according to the General Services Administration, with a total bill for him in the current fiscal year of $456,000, covering pensions, an office, staff and other expenses.

That’s less than half the $952,000 budgeted for George H.W. Bush; the three other living ex-presidents — Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama — cost taxpayers more than $1 million each per year.

Carter doesn’t even have federal retirement health benefits because he worked for the government for four years — less than the five years needed to qualify, according to the GSA. He says he receives health benefits through Emory University, where he has taught for 36 years.

The federal government pays for an office for each ex-president.

Carter’s, in the Carter Center in Atlanta, is the least expensive, at $115,000 this year. The Carters could have built a more elaborate

office with living quarters, but for years they slept on a pullout couch for a week each month. Recently, they had a Murphy bed installed.

Carter’s office costs a fraction of Obama’s, which is $536,000 a year. Clinton’s costs $518,000, George W. Bush’s is $497,000 and George H.W. Bush’s is $286,000, according to the GSA. “I am a great admirer of Harry Truman. He’s my favorite president, and I really try to emulate him,” says Carter, who writes his books in a converted garage in his house. “He set an example I thought was admirable.”

But although Truman retired to his hometown of Independence, Mo., Beschloss said that even he took up residence in an elegant house previously owned by his prosperous in-laws.

As Carter spreads a thick layer of butter on a slice of white bread, he is asked whether he thinks, especially with a man who boasts of being a billionaire in the White House, any future ex-president will ever live the way Carter does.

“I hope so,” he says. “But I don’t know.”

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COVER STORY

‘Good ol’ Southern gentleman’ Plains is a tiny circle of Georgia farmland, a mile in diameter, with its center at the train depot that served as Carter’s 1976 campaign headquarters. About 700 people live here, 150 miles due south of Atlanta, in a place that is a living museum to Carter.

The general store, once owned

by Carter’s Uncle Buddy, sells Carter memorabilia and scoops of peanut butter ice cream. Carter’s boyhood farm is preserved as it was in the 1930s, with no electricity or running water.

The Jimmy Carter National Historic Site is essentially the entire town, drawing nearly 70,000 visitors a year and $4 million into the county’s economy.

Carter has used his post-presidency to support human rights, global health programs and fair elections worldwide through his Carter Center, based in Atlanta.

He has helped renovate 4,300 homes in 14 countries for Habitat for Humanity, and with his own hammer and tool belt, he will be working on homes for lowincome people in Indiana later this month.

But it is Plains that defines him.

After dinner, the Carters step out of Stuckey’s driveway, with two Secret Service agents walking close behind.

Carter’s gait is a little unsteady these days, three years after a diagnosis of melanoma on his liver and brain. At a 2015 news conference to announce his illness, he seemed to be bidding a stoic farewell, saying he was “perfectly at ease with whatever comes.”

But now, after radiation, chemotherapy and immunotherapy, Carter says he is cancer-free.

In October, he will become the second president ever to reach 94; George H.W. Bush turned 94 in June. These days, Carter is sharp, funny and reflective.

The Carters walk every day — often down Church Street, the main drag through Plains, where they have been walking since the 1920s.

As they cross Walters Street, Carter sees a couple of teenagers on the sidewalk across the street.

“Hello,” says the former president, with the same big smile that adorns peanut Christmas ornaments in the general store.

“Hey,” says a girl in a jean skirt, greeting him with a cheerful wave.

The two 15-year-olds say people

PHOTOS BY MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

TOP: Visitors watch a video about Carter’s life in the theater at Plains High School.

ABOVE: Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter enjoy a Saturday night dinner at a neighbor’s house.

RIGHT: The former president arrives at Stuckey’s house for dinner wearing a casual shirt, jeans and a belt buckle with “JC” on it.

in Plains think of the Carters as neighbors and friends, just like anybody else.

“I grew up in church with him,” says Maya Wynn. “He’s a nice guy, just like a regular person.”

“He’s a good ol’ Southern gentleman,” says David Lane.

Carter says this place formed him, seeding his beliefs about racial equality. His farmhouse youth during the Great Depression made him unpretentious and frugal. His friends, maybe only half-joking, describe Carter as “tight as a tick.”

That no-frills sensibility, endearing since he left Washington, didn’t work as well in the White House. Many people thought Carter scrubbed some of the luster off the presidency by carrying his own suitcases onto Air Force One and refusing to have “Hail to the Chief” played.

Stuart E. Eizenstat, a Carter aide and biographer, said Carter’s edict eliminating drivers for top staff members backfired. It meant that top officials were driving instead of reading and working for an hour or two every day.

“He didn’t feel suited to the grandeur,” Eizenstat said. “Plains is really part of his DNA. He carried it into the White House, and he carried it out of the White House.”

Carter’s presidency — from 1977 to 1981 — is often remembered for long lines at gas stations and the Iran hostage crisis.

“I may have overemphasized the plight of the hostages when I was in my final year,” he says. “But I was so obsessed with them personally, and with their families, that I wanted to do anything to get them home safely, which I did.”

He said he regrets not doing more to unify the Democratic Party.

When Carter looks back at his presidency, he says he is most proud of “keeping the peace and supporting human rights,” the Camp David accords that brokered peace between Israel and Egypt, and his work to normalize relations with China. In 2002, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.

“I always told the truth,” he says.

Carter has been notably quiet about President Trump. But on this night, two years into Trump’s term, he’s not holding back.

“I think he’s a disaster,” Carter says. “In human rights and taking care of people and treating people equal.”

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COVER STORY “The worst is that he is not telling the truth, and that just hurts everything,” Rosalynn says.

Carter says his father taught him that truthfulness matters. He said that was reinforced at the U.S. Naval Academy, where he said students are expelled for telling even the smallest lie.

“I think there’s been an attitude of ignorance toward the truth by President Trump,” he says.

Carter says he thinks the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision has “changed our political system from a democracy to an oligarchy. Money is now preeminent. I mean, it’s just gone to hell now.”

He says he believes that the nation’s “ethical and moral values” are still intact and that Americans eventually will “return to what’s right and what’s wrong, and what’s decent and what’s indecent, and what’s truthful and what’s lies.”

But, he says, “I doubt if it happens in my lifetime.”

On Church Street, Carter points out the mayor’s house with his left hand while he holds Rosalynn’s with his right.

“My mother and father lived in that brick one,” he says, gesturing toward a small house across the street. “We use it as an office now.”

Every house has a story. Generations of them. Cracked birdbaths and rocking chairs on somebody’s great-grandmother’s porch. Carter knows them all.

“Mr. Oscar Williams lived here; his family was my competitor in the warehouse business.”

He points out the Plains United Methodist Church, where he spotted young Eleanor Rosalynn Smith one evening when he was home from the Naval Academy.

He asked her out. They went to a movie, and the next morning he told his mother he was going to marry Rosalynn.

“I didn’t know that for years,” she says with a smile.

They are asked if there is anything they want but don’t have.

“I can’t think of anything,” Carter says, turning to Rosalynn.

“And you?”

“No, I’m happy,” she says.

“We feel at home here,” Carter says. “And the folks in town, when we need it, they take care of us.”

‘A heart of service’ Every other Sunday morning, Carter teaches Sunday school at the Maranatha Baptist Church on the edge of town, and people line

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how humble he is,” Joanna says.

Carter holds the baby and beams for the camera.

“I like the name,” he says.

PHOTOS BY MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

up the night before to get a seat.

This Sunday morning happens to be his 800th lesson since he left the White House.

He walks in wearing a blazer too big through the shoulders, a striped shirt and a turquoise bolo tie. He asks where people have come from, and from the pews they call out at least 20 states, Canada, China, Denmark and Kenya.

He tells the congregation that he’s planning a trip to Montana to go fishing with his friend Ted Turner, and that he’s going to ride in an autogiro — a sort of minihelicopter — with his son Jack Carter.

“I’m still fairly active,” he says, and everyone laughs.

He talks about living a purposeful life, but also about finding enough time for rest and reflection. Then he and Rosalynn pose for photos with every person who wants one, including Steven and Joanna Raley, who came from Annandale, Va., with their 3month-old son, Jackson Carter Raley.

“We want our children to grow up with a heart of service like President Carter,” says Steven, who works on Navy submarines, as Carter once did.

“One of the reasons we named our son after President Carter is

TOP: Carter greets visitors before teaching Sunday School at Maranatha Baptist Church. ABOVE: An oversized peanut with a toothy grin, made in Indiana as a tribute to Carter, a former peanut farmer, sits outside the Plains MTD convenience store.

A modest life When they reach their property, the Carters turn right off the sidewalk and cut across the wide lawn toward their house.

Carter stops to point out a tall magnolia that was transplanted from a sprout taken from a tree that Andrew Jackson planted on the White House lawn.

They walk past a pond, which Carter helped dig and where he now works on his fly-fishing technique.

They point out a willow tree at the pond’s edge, on a gentle sloping lawn, where they will be buried in graves marked by simple stones.

They know their graves will draw tourists and boost the Plains economy.

Their one-story house sits behind a government-owned fence that once surrounded Richard Nixon’s house in Key Biscayne, Fla. The Carters already have deeded the property to the National Park Service, which will one day turn it into a museum.

Their house is dated, but homey and comfortable, with a rustic living room and a small kitchen. A cooler bearing the presidential seal sits on the floor in the kitchen — Carter says they use it for leftovers.

In a remodel not long ago, the couple knocked down a bedroom wall themselves. “By that time, we had worked with Habitat so much that it was just second nature,” Rosalynn says.

Rosalynn Carter practices tai chi and meditates in the mornings, while her husband writes in his study or swims in the pool. He also builds furniture and paints in the garage; the paint is still wet on a portrait of a cardinal that will be their Christmas card this year.

They watch Atlanta Braves games or “Law and Order.” Carter just finished reading “The Innovators” by Walter Isaacson. They have no chef and they cook for themselves, often together. They make their own yogurt.

On this summer morning, Rosalynn mixes pancake batter and sprinkles in blueberries grown on their land.

Carter cooks them on the griddle.

Then he does the dishes. n ©The Washington Post

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ENVIRONMENT

Too few ‘fire bombers’ as West burns J ENNIFER O LDHAM in Denver BY

T

he captain lined up his 747 airtanker with the Holy Fire incinerating California’s Cleveland National Forest and prepared to steer the retrofitted freighter straight into the jaws of hell. Following a tiny spotter plane silhouetted in a cockpit window against the smoky inferno, the pilot descended toward the trees and released 19,000 gallons of magenta retardant.

Dubbed the “Spirit of John Muir,” the jumbo jet has attained Hollywood-like celebrity on social media and television this summer. Between July 7 and Aug. 9, it flew 41 sorties over 10 massive blazes scorching the Pacific Coast.

Residents pleaded for it to be sent to save their homes.

“We’ve had phone calls from individuals on our line in California desperate to know what is going on and asking us, ‘Why isn’t the plane flying?’ ” said Roger Miller, a managing partner at Alterna Capital Partners, which counts Global SuperTanker Services among its aviation assets.

The “fire bomber” is among the scores of airtankers and helicopters attacking record-breaking wildfires in states across the West.

Yet demand for such resources far exceeds supply. In July, as the Ferguson Fire threatened the shuttered Yosemite Valley, incident commanders requested air support. A call came back that nothing was available.

The response reflected a complexity of issues that offer many Westerners little reassurance about the future, which in a warming climate seems certain to feature ever-longer and more intense wildfire seasons. The risk grows as people continue to move into heavily forested areas where millions of dead trees, victims of drought and beetle infestation, haven’t been culled in more than a generation.

The number of federally contracted airtankers is down 70 percent since 2000, with just 13 now working through exclusive-use

NOAH BERGER/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Demand for planes to fight wildfires far outstrips supply, even as effectiveness, cost is questioned agreements with the U.S. Forest Service. Helicopter support also has fallen significantly, with the agency unable to fill more than half the requests it received last year.

While states are beefing up their own aerial firefighting forces, they are also competing among themselves for the private aircraft available. “As demand outstrips supply, prices will go up, and those who can pay more or pay sooner will get the resource,” said Tony Kern, former national aviation officer for the Forest Service who now directs safety for World View Enterprises.

Beyond environmental concerns — chemicals in the retardant can harm plants and fish and foul waterways — there’s also the issue of how much air attacks help to extinguish flames.

Many fire managers agree that the tankers are most effective in an event’s initial stages, with helicopters doing their best work

when a blaze is transitioning into a bigger conflagration. But they disagree about how well these fleets help to curb infernos like California’s Carr Fire, which created a “fire tornado” with speeds of up to 143 miles per hour that ripped off roofs.

Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, a former federal wildland firefighter, is a critic. He says tankers increasingly are dropping retardant on steep, densely forested slopes in the heat of the afternoon, when it can drift and quickly be outpaced by the flames before ground crews arrive.

Questions about the nation’s airborne firefighting fleet, as well as whether to replace aging craft, have dogged the Forest Service over four presidential administrations. Then, in 2002, two planes literally fell apart in midair while battling flames. Five crew members were killed, and officials

In California, an airtanker drops retardant while battling the Ferguson Fire near Yosemite National Park on July 21.

grounded the rest of the nation’s fleet for safety inspections.

A blue-ribbon panel was convened. It recommended that the force be modernized and that the Federal Aviation Administration tighten oversight. But in the ensuing 16 years, the Forest Service and Congress have struggled to come up with the right combination of aircraft for intensifying fire seasons.

Four World War II-era airtankers, privately held but on exclusive-use government contracts, were retired permanently last year. Large helicopters operating under similar agreements now number 28, down from 34 two years ago.

The agency has made up the difference by retaining 11 airtankers and 47 large helicopters on call-when-needed contracts, spokeswoman Jennifer Jones said in an email. It also can mobilize seven military C-130s and additional tankers through an agreement with the state of Alaska.

In June, the Forest Service issued a request for proposals for large, next-generation airtankers that it would access through a variety of arrangements. When the new planes might become available is unclear.

This summer’s record-breaking wildfires have dramatically shown what’s at stake. Through Aug. 17, officials recorded 40,880 fires and more than 5.7 million acres burned — 21 percent more acreage than the 10-year average.

The national preparedness level remains at the highest-alert mark, indicating that most firefighters, engines, aircraft and other assets are working nonstop.

Like the federal government, states are signing more privately held airtankers and helicopters to call-when-needed contracts.

“It’s incumbent on Oregon to be able to fight our fires,” said Doug Grafe, chief of fire protection for its Department of Forestry. “To date, our aircraft have flown an absolutely staggering number of hours.”

The Oregon legislature allocated $5 million in 2013 in part to fund exclusive-use contracts for

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HEALTH 16 privately held aircraft. Those flew 831 hours through early August, compared with 1,500 hours in all of 2017. With the 2018 season only a third over, Grafe expects the final hours count will exceed last year’s total.

In 2014, following Colorado’s largest and most destructive fires in history, Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) signed a bipartisan bill that allocated $19.7 million to create the state’s first aerial firefighting force. Incident commanders can call on six wildland-fire aircraft, and the state recently signed a contract with Global SuperTanker.

Several of Colorado’s aircraft follow lightning storms to search out and track blazes. Doing so allows fire managers to deploy airtankers early on, when the area involved is still relatively small.

“Aircraft can get into places crews can’t, hopefully to get an initial stop on a fire to allow ground crews to get in there and put it out,” said Lynne Tolmachoff, a CalFire spokeswoman. The agency operates a fleet of about 50 planes, though that has not been enough this summer given the hundreds of thousands of acres burning statewide.

Aviation now accounts for about 25 percent of the U.S. Forest Service’s total suppression expenditures each year, and critics say it is wasting taxpayer money by turning to privately owned planes on the far more expensive callwhen-needed contracts.

Any significant lag in response can cost millions, according to a 2009 report by the U.S. Agriculture Department’s Office of Inspector General. About 150 fires escaped initial attack between 2004 and 2007, the analysis found, requiring the federal government to spend up to $450 million more than would have been needed if the blazes were contained early on.

With fire seasons in the West threatening to become yearround, many forestry experts say it’s time for Americans to reconsider how they fight back.

“How many catastrophes do we need to have?” said Steve Pyne, a fire historian and a professor at Arizona State University. “We are coming to look at fires like we do mass school shootings — no matter how many we have, we aren’t changing our behavior.” n ©The Washington Post

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Wipes, windows and water: How to stay healthy on flights BY

K ATE S ILVER

Q

uay Snyder flies more than 130 times a year on commercial flights. As an aerospace medicine specialist, pilot and instructor, he feels perfectly safe in the air.

But after each flight he’ll call his wife to say he has arrived safely. “I joke with my wife,” he says. “I give her a call and I say: ‘I’m starting the most dangerous part of my journey — I’m driving home.’ ” His point: Commercial airline travel is rarely dangerous. One person has died in the United States on a commercial airline in the past nine years, compared with nearly 40,000 a year who die in vehicle crashes. Snyder’s job, in the field of aviation medicine, is to help people stay healthy while flying. As president and chief executive of Aviation Medicine Advisory Service, based in Centennial, Colo., he assists pilots with health problems, advising them on how be to in top condition and on how to maintain their FAA medical certification. He also consults with professional pilot and aviation safety organizations on optimizing human performance. He shared this advice for travelers on how to make wellness a priority while flying: Separate fact from fiction when it comes to contagion.

Snyder is quick to point out that travelers are not more likely to get sick on an airplane than they are in other spaces. In fact, he says, they may be less likely to catch a virus.

That’s because air is exchanged more frequently on the plane than it is in typical offices and school buildings, and filters on airplanes remove about 99 percent of germs.

To catch a virus, he says, you need to be sitting pretty close to someone who is sick. “The risk is actually higher in the airport and even in the lines or the Jetway or the restaurants at the airport.”

Choose a window seat. Snyder opts for the inside seat, when possible. He says that’s because airplanes are designed so that the

THE WASHINGTON POST ILLUSTRATION/ISTOCK

air flow comes down from the top of the cabin and exits from vents on the floor by the window, so when you choose the window seat you benefit from that air flow.

Wipe down flat surfaces.

Germaphobes cringe at the idea of touching a tray table that’s been touched by countless passengers before them, and for good reason.

Snyder advises travelers to pack wipes (with at least 62% alcohol) and wipe down tray tables, arm rests and seat belt buckles.

Keep medications handy.

Your carry-on is the best place for toting any medications you might need during your trip. That way, even if your plane is delayed or your luggage is lost, you still have them close at hand. Snyder also suggests carrying a list of the medications you’re taking along; on long flights, you may want to carry notes about your medical history.

The information will be accessible to professionals should you become unable to communicate.

Get moving. Deep vein thrombosis can happen when a blood clot forms within a vein. While airplane travel itself doesn’t cause deep-vein thrombosis, sitting in one place for a long period of time can contribute to it. On long flights, he suggests walking up and down the aisle or doing small stretching exercises in your seat.

If you’re sick or recently underwent surgery, visit a travel medical professional before flying. A number of health problems can be exacerbated by altitude, including lung, heart and intestinal ailments.

Drink lots of liquids (except alcohol and coffee). Snyder says that the humidity level on an airplane is low, which is why travelers sometimes become dehydrated.

Counteract it by increasing water intake, and avoid drinking alcohol and caffeine, which are diuretics.

Use common sense. Before you travel, get a good night’s sleep.

Eat a healthy meal. Drink lots of water. Exercise. Manage stress. All of the tips that physicians — and moms — give year-round are also the kind of advice you should heed before hitting the skies.

Snyder also advises all travelers to wear their seat belts, listen to flight attendants during the safety briefing and read the safety card. He says that’s something he does whenever he flies. “I probably irritate people by pulling out the safety card every time,” he says. But just as he goes through a safety checklist when he’s in the pilot seat, he says he wants to make sure, as a passenger, he’s ready and able to do what he needs to do to stay safe. n ©The Washington Post

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WORLD

An old menace returns to high seas A NTHONY F AIOLA in Cedros, Trinidad and Tobago BY

I

n the flickers of sunlight off the cobalt blue of the Caribbean Sea, the vessel appeared as a cut on the horizon. It sailed closer. But the crew of the Asheena took no heed.

“We be lookin’ for our red fish as normal, thinkin’ they be fishin’, too,” said Jimmy Lalla, 36, part of the crew that had dropped lines in Trinidadian waters last April a few miles off the lawless Venezuelan coast.

The other vessel kept approaching. A short, sinewy man jumped on board, shouting in Spanish and waving a pistol.

“Then we knowin’,” Lalla said.

“They be pirates.”

Centuries after Blackbeard’s cannons fell silent and the Jolly Roger came down from rum ports across the Caribbean, the region is confronting a new and less romanticized era of pirates.

Political and economic crises are exploding from Venezuela to Nicaragua to Haiti, sparking anarchy and criminality. As the rule of law breaks down, certain spots in the Caribbean, experts say, are becoming more dangerous than they’ve been in years.

Often, observers say, the acts of villainy appear to be happening with the complicity or direct involvement of corrupt officials — particularly in the waters off collapsing Venezuela.

Comprehensive data on piracy is largely lacking for Latin America and the Caribbean. But a twoyear study by the nonprofit Oceans Beyond Piracy recorded 71 major incidents in the region in 2017 — including robberies of merchant vessels and attacks on yachts — up 163 percent from the previous year. The vast majority happened in Caribbean waters.

The incidents range from glorified muggings on the high seas to barbaric attacks worthy of 17thcentury pirates.

In April, for instance, masked men boarded four Guyanese fishing boats floating 30 miles off the coast of the South American nation. The crews, according to sur-

JAHI CHIKWENDIU/THE WASHINGTON POST

As Venezuela’s economy crumbles, more boats in the Caribbean are being terrorized by pirates vivors’ accounts, were doused with hot oil, hacked with machetes and thrown overboard, then their boats were stolen. Of the 20 victims, five survived; the rest died or were left unaccounted for.

David Granger, the president of Guyana, decried the attack as a “massacre.” Guyanese authorities have suggested that it could have been linked to gang violence in neighboring Suriname.

“They said they would take the boat and that everyone should jump overboard,” survivor Deonarine Goberdhan, 47, told Reuters. After being beaten and thrown in the sea, he said, “I tried to keep my head above water so I could get air. I drank a lot of salt water. I looked to the stars and moon. I just hoped and prayed.”

There have been reports of piracy over the past 18 months near Honduras, Nicaragua, Haiti and St. Lucia. But nowhere has the surge been more notable, analysts say, than off the coast of Ven-

ezuela.

An economic crisis in the South American country has sent inflation soaring toward 1 million percent, making food and medicine scarce. Malnutrition is spreading; disease is rampant; water and power grids are failing from a lack of trained staff and spare parts.

Police and military are abandoning their posts as their paychecks become nearly worthless. Under the socialist government of President Nicolás Maduro, repression and corruption have increased.

The conditions are compelling some Venezuelans to take desperate action.

One Venezuelan port official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to address official corruption, said that Venezuelan coast guard officers have been boarding anchored vessels and demanding money and food. He said commercial ships, in response, are increasingly anchoring farther off the coast, and turn-

A fisherman works off the coast of Trinidad in July.

Piracy has increased in the area, putting fishermen and sailors in danger of being robbed, kidnapped or killed.

ing off their motors and lights to avoid being seen at night.

It doesn’t always work.

In July, one vessel from the local company Conferry, which offers freight services to nearby Venezuelan islands, was raided by three men brandishing knives and guns near the port of Guanta.

Four crew members were left tied up for hours while food and electronics were stolen.

In January in Puerto La Cruz, also on the northeast coast, seven armed burglars boarded an anchored tanker. They tied up the vessel’s guard on duty, then robbed its stores. Similar incidents have been reported in the months since, according to the Commercial Crime Services division of the London-based International Chamber of Commerce.

Trinidad and Tobago, an island nation of 1.4 million people within eyeshot of the Venezuelan coast, has long worried about crime emanating from its neighbor. Since the 1990s, drug smugglers have shipped marijuana and Colombian cocaine from Venezuelan ports to Trinidad.

Trafficking and piracy, locals say, have recently been expanding and becoming more violent. Five Trinidadian fishermen in the southern port of Cedros, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing fear for their safety, said in interviews that they had witnessed a burst of Venezuelan boats arriving in recent months smuggling military-issue guns as well as drugs, women and exotic animals.

“Sometimes, those Venezuelans are willing to trade the guns and animals for food,” said one 41-year-old fisherman.

Another fisherman said he was held for hours in January by Spanish-speaking pirates while his brother was contacted to pay a $500 ransom.

A Trinidadian coast guard vessel was dispatched to patrol the waters this year after several high-profile incidents of smuggling and piracy. But locals say the criminals simply wait until the patrol passes, and then they act. n ©The Washington Post

15 SUNDAY, AUGUST 26, 2018

SUNDAY, August, 26, 2018 18

KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

Behind a frightening masterpiece N ONFICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

L ISA Z EIDNER

I THIS IS NO DREAM Making Rosemary’s Baby

By James Munn and Bob Willoughby Reel Art Press. 207 pp. $49.95

n a bit of unfortunate timing, director Roman Polanski was expelled from membership in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences this summer for violating its standards of conduct, a month before his film “Rosemary’s Baby” celebrated its 50th anniversary. Polanski, who had pleaded guilty to unlawful sex with a minor in the late 1970s, fled the United States before going to court. The #MeToo movement has generated a great deal of debate about the wisdom of conflating the artist with his art. In any case, no one debates the artistry of Polanski’s first Hollywood film, “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968), which continues to influence filmmakers half a century later.

“This Is No Dream: Making Rosemary’s Baby” is an illustrated history of the film, with text by James Munn and photos from set photographer Bob Willoughby.

The tribute provides a fascinating look at the inspired choices — and lucky breaks — that made the film iconic, starting with the fact that Alfred Hitchcock, given dibs to direct Ira Levin’s best-selling novel about a woman bearing Satan’s progeny, turned down the job.

Polanski almost declined, too, assuming that the novel was “a kind of ridiculous Doris Day comedy.” But he was hooked by what, in his version, would become the spooky-funny ambiguity at the story’s heart: Was Rosemary the victim of a satanic conspiracy or just lost in a hormonal haze?

His script was scrupulously faithful to the novel, with the major exception that, unlike in the book and the many inferior devilspawn imitators that have followed, he never reveals the progeny’s cloven hoofs or reptilian pupils. He only shows us horrified Rosemary, peering into the crib: “What have you done to his eyes, you maniacs?” Even while retaining the central dream sequence of Rosemary’s rape and impregnation as Levin detailed it, Polanski

BOB WILLOUGHBY/MPTV IMAGES/REEL ART PRESS

Mia Farrow starred in Roman Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby,” which just celebrated its 50th anniversary.

radically changes the tone, offering only fragmentary glimpses of the sex act and the devil’s scaly hands, a departure that an included page from the original manuscript of the novel makes clear.

(Levin’s version reads like soft porn.)

The set photographs reinforce how religiously Polanski cleaves to a subjective view. Waif-like, naive Mia Farrow is in every scene, reacting. Polanski would often walk an actor through the shot with himself in character, step by step, as if rehearsing a dance move.

John Cassavetes, the actor-director cast as the horrible husband and devoted to improvisation, did not take well to such detailed directives. He and Polanski hated each other.

Some of the juicy tidbits on the casting and production in “This Is No Dream” will be familiar to those who have watched the documentary that accompanies the 2013 remastered Criterion Collection DVD. Mia Farrow’s husband,

Frank Sinatra — 29 years her senior; they were the tabloid Brangelina-esque duo of the moment — was furious when the movie ran over budget and schedule, because Farrow was supposed to begin shooting “The Detective” with him. After Farrow refused to abandon her role as Rosemary, Sinatra served her with divorce papers on the set. Producer Robert Evans arranged for “The Detective” and “Rosemary’s Baby” to be released on the same day — and Farrow was delighted that her film did better at the box office.

Incidentally, her legendary short haircut in the film was not created by Vidal Sassoon, though Sassoon is credited for the movie’s hair design. Farrow had already cut her hair herself on the set of “Peyton Place.” In the first scenes of “Rosemary’s Baby,” she’s wearing a wig. Also, that is real raw liver the iron-starved Farrow wolfs down in the kitchen, although she was a longtime vegetarian — a less dangerous bit of method-acting

than Polanski making her race into oncoming Manhattan traffic.

Farrow isn’t complaining about her treatment. “I think it’s a great movie,” she has said. “I know I didn’t get another role as fine, that asked as much of me . . . . It was the happiest work experience, the most fulfilling, that I ever had.”

Willoughby’s still photographs capture the soul of the performance and the director’s vision of Rosemary. Gazing off-camera, diaphanous as a Vogue model in her hippie clothes, Farrow is the perfect film victim. She’s so easy to dismiss as a ditz in her fuzzy blue slippers. Perhaps no filmmaker has been as deeply empathetic to female isolation and vulnerability.

That Polanski’s films are essentially feminist makes his position in the crosshairs of #MeToo even more ironic. n Zeidner’s last novel was ‘Love Bomb.’

She teaches creative writing and film at Rutgers University-Camden. This was written for The Washington Post.

16

SUNDAY, August, 26, 2018

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