The Washington Post National Weekly - Sept 13, 2015

Worst Week Hillary Clinton 3

Politics Democrats keep the gloves on 4

Science Traveling into the void 17

5 Myths About the Bard 23

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2015

A love affair in reverse

For a generation hooked on smartphones, social media and Uber, car culture is fading PAGE 12

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

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WORST WEEK IN WASHINGTON

Hillary Clinton

by Chris Cillizza

‘I

’m sorry.”

It took Hillary Clinton the better part of six months to say those two little words about her decision to set up a private e­mail server after she was nominated to be secretary of state in late 2008.

After a series of “I’m sorry if people were offended” non­apologies, Clinton finally delivered the no­frills version in an interview with ABC’s David Muir this past week. “In retrospect, as I look back at it now, even though it was allowed, I should have used two accounts,” she acknowledged. “One for personal, one for work­ related e­mails. That was a mistake. I’m sorry about that.

I take responsibility.”

So, that’s a start! Except that the damage to Clinton’s campaign caused by persistent questions about why she had the server in the first place, and why she didn’t initially give it to the Justice Department, remains.

Polls this past week in Iowa and New Hampshire showed Clinton running even with or behind Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) in the Democratic presidential race; perhaps more ominous is that 3 in 10 Iowa Democrats said that the words “honest” and “trustworthy” don’t apply to her.

On top of it all is the looming figure of Vice President Biden, who continues to ponder entering the 2016 race as each day brings more bad news for Clinton.

The problem for Clinton is that this e­mail brouhaha is

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ALVIN BAEZ/REUTERS

a self­inflicted wound. She never needed to use a private server. And once it was revealed that she had, she could have come out far earlier with an apology and deflected much of the damage.

Hillary Clinton, for making “sorry” the hardest word to say, you had the worst week in Washington. Congrats, or something. n

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

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ON THE COVER At the Sterling, Va., Cruise-In, car enthusiasts can view vintage classic cars and muscle cars. But the new generation is less interested in cars than their parents were. Photograph by MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON, The Washington Post

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POLITICS

In this battle, the gloves are still on

BY P HILIP R UCKER AND J OHN W AGNER

Portsmouth, N.H.

H

illary Rodham Clinton hit on a variety of subjects at her sun-splashed campaign rally here last weekend, but not once in her 30 minutes of speaking did she utter these words: Bernie Sanders.

Campaigning 1,200 miles away in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Sanders was interrupted for applause 77 times — but not a single line in the senator’s nearly hour-long stump speech referred to Clinton or any other Democratic primary opponent.

The Republican presidential campaign is being dictated by how the 17 candidates, led by Donald Trump, attack one another — from policy disagreements to nasty personal barbs.

The Democratic race stands in stark contrast. Despite tightening polls, the two leading candidates refuse to draw sharp contrasts, let alone criticize each other, leaving voters to discern the differences in their agendas and priorities largely on their own.

Former president Ronald Reagan famously pronounced an 11th commandment for the GOP: “Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican.” In the 2016 contest, however, it’s the Democrats who are heeding Reagan’s call — at least so far.

Sanders boasts that he has never run an attack ad in his fourdecade-old career in politics and, in an interview Saturday in Iowa, explained his rationale for not going after his chief rival this time.

“You’re looking at a candidate who honestly believes that the discussion of the serious issues facing the American people is not only the right thing to do, it’s good politics,” Sanders said. “I know the media would like me to attack Hillary Clinton and say all kinds of terrible things and tell the world that I’m the greatest candidate in the history of the world and everybody else running against me is a jerk and terrible, awful people.

Nobody believes that stuff.”

Sanders and his campaign strategists have calculated that to

HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON IN PORTSMOUTH, N.H., ON SEPT. 5; CHARLES OMMANNEY/THE WASHINGTON POST

In contrast to GOP infighting, Sanders and Clinton pull their punches beat Clinton, he must expand the electorate — and that going negative will turn off too many potentially new voters.

“We have to follow the formula that brings people into the process,” said Sanders adviser Tad Devine. “Otherwise, we can’t win.”

When pressed by reporters, however, Sanders is willing to explain his policy differences with Clinton.

Recent polls show Sanders gaining on or jumping ahead of Clinton — a surge he attributes to his progressive economic and social agenda and his populist pitch to take on “the billionaire class.”

In New Hampshire, home to the nation’s first primary, an NBC/ Marist poll last Sunday shows Sanders leading with 41 percent of

Democratic voters, followed by Clinton at 32 percent. The same poll in July had Clinton ahead 42 percent to 32 percent.

In Iowa, which holds the first caucuses, the NBC/Marist survey showed Clinton leading Sanders 38 percent to 27 percent. Her lead there has narrowed since July, from 24 percentage points to 11. A couple of weeks ago, a Des Moines Register-Bloomberg Politics poll showed the Iowa race even closer, with Clinton ahead 37 percent to 30 percent.

There are some signs that the intensifying race may lead to more directengagementbetweenthetwo candidates. The first primary debate, scheduled for Oct. 13, is certain to showcase their differences.

Looking ahead to the debate,

“It certainly is clear that my campaign is focused on the Republicans.”

Hillary Rodham Clinton

Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, told reporters last week, “The ideas that she’s put out, we feel very confident, contrast with the ideas of the other Democrats, including Senator Sanders.”

When asked to specify the areas in which Clinton believes she differs from Sanders, Podesta demurred. But he highlighted several key policy proposals, including plans to combat drug and alcohol addiction, reduce student loan debt and prioritize family-friendly issues such as equal pay and early childhood education.

Clinton assiduously has avoided referencing Sanders, in part because she cannot afford to alienate his impassioned supporters; should she win the Democratic

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POLITICS

BERNIE SANDERS IN MILFORD, N.H., ON MONDAY; JIM COLE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

nomination, she will need their votes and enthusiasm in the general election.

To that end, Clinton has passed on even the easiest contrasts. She indisputably has more foreign policy experience than Sanders, yet she gives her tenure as secretary of state nary a mention on the stump.

At the Portsmouth rally, Clinton said: “Other candidates may be out there hurling insults at everyone, talking about what’s wrong with America and who’s to blame for it, but I’m going to keep doing that I’ve always done: fight for you and fight for your families.”

Some voters in the crowd said they wished Clinton would explain the differences between her and Sanders. “That’s exactly what we want to hear as voters,” said Beth Chambers, 46. “What do you think of your opponent? Why should we vote for you over him?”

“I know the media would like me to attack Hillary Clinton and say all kinds of terrible things. . . . Nobody believes that stuff.”

Bernie Sanders

In a rare sit-down interview Friday, Clinton took what was widely interpreted as a veiled jab at Sanders. “You can wave your arms and give a speech, but at the end of the day, are you connecting with and really hearing what people are either saying to you or wishing that you would say to them?” she told Andrea Mitchell of NBC News.

The next day, however, Clinton insisted to reporters that the comment was not about Sanders. “I was talking about Donald Trump,” she said, referring to the brash GOP front-runner. “It certainly is clear that my campaign is focused on the Republicans.”

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) hit on the same theme as she formally endorsed Clinton in Portsmouth on Saturday. She decried the Republican nominating contest as a “round-the-clock spectacle of scapegoating and name-

calling” but said Clinton “always chooses to lift people up rather than tear people down.”

There is little doubt, however, that Clinton will try to tear Sanders down if and when she decides she needs to. In 2008, she was stinging in her attacks on Barack Obama, including her famous “3 a.m. phone call” ad, which suggested that she, not Obama, had the national security experience and diplomatic relationships to be commander in chief.

Some of Clinton’s campaign surrogates have started doing her dirty work for her. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) said Sanders, an independent from Vermont and self-described democratic socialist, is too liberal to get elected.

Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy (D) said Sanders’s record on guns was “anathema” to many Democrats.

And Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.)

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criticized his outreach to Latinos.

Asked about those volleys on Saturday, Sanders told reporters: “Don’t tell anybody: I think they’re getting nervous.”

Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, who is trailing far behind Clinton and Sanders in the polls, has been more aggressive in directly criticizing them. He regularly calls himself a “lifelong Democrat,” in contrast with the independent Sanders. And he has referred to the State Department email controversy dogging Clinton.

“What is our message in the Democratic Party?” he asked at a recenthousepartyinHollis,N.H.“It seemsourbrandis,whatdidHillary Clintonknowabouthere-mailsand when did she know it, and did she wipe her server or did she not?”

Jim Manley, a Democratic strategist supporting Clinton, said he sees no upside for her in attacking Sanders. “That kind of contrast is just the kind of oxygen his campaign needs and it would feed his fundraising,” he said.

As for Sanders, Manley said going negative on an opponent “is not who he is. Doing so would seem forced and inauthentic. He’s always been about fighting issues — big issues. Personal attacks are not his forte.”

Yet even by talking about the issues, Sanders frames a contrast with Clinton. As he rallied about 2,000 people Friday night in Cedar Rapids, he said he was putting the nation’s ultra-wealthy — the kind of people who piled into manses from Nantucket, Mass., to Aspen, Colo., this summer to hear Clinton speak at fundraisers — on notice that “their day has come and gone.”

Without mentioning Clinton, Sanders regularly highlights policy areas where they differ. He wants to reinstitute Glass-Steagall, a Depression-era banking regulation; she has not taken a position.

He opposes the Keystone XL oil pipeline; she has no position. He voted against authorizing the Iraq war; she voted for it, though now says her vote was a mistake.

At the Cedar Rapids rally, neighbors Valerie Smith and Victoria Kircher, both 53, said they appreciated that Sanders did not talk about Clinton.

“Just tell us who you are,” said Smith, adding that she cannot stand it when Trump calls his rivals “stupid” or “low-energy.”

“Act like grown-ups,” Kircher said. “I hate bashing.” n

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POLITICS

A second shot to shine BY

K AREN T UMULTY

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he rapidly shifting dynamic of the 2016 presidential campaign will probably turn the second Republican debate into a far more contentious event than the first.

The month since the first debate in early August has seen the contest take a rougher direction, as Donald Trump continues to dominate the race and confound his rivals by skating over pitfalls that would be expected to doom any of them.

So they are no longer counting on Trump to be the architect of his own demise. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush has begun attacking Trump directly, while others, such as Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, have sought to appear much more forceful so as not to be totally overshadowed by the tough-talking real estate mogul and reality TV star.

Long shots, such as Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, have indicated that they plan to be more assertive in the second debate.

And, unlike the first go-round, this one will include former HewlettPackard chief executive Carly Fiorina, who has shown a willingness and ability to hit hard.

The newfound aggression, however, has not improved the standing of many candidates, leaving them eager for a breakout moment Wednesday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif.

“A panic has set in on a number of campaigns. I’m expecting this next debate could more resemble roller derby than a debate,” said John Weaver, an adviser to the campaign of Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, one of the few of the GOP hopefuls to experience a bit of a bump since the first debate.

Newt Gingrich, who distinguished himself as a scrappy debater during his 2012 bid for the presidency, said the imperative to stop Trump’s momentum has grown ever more urgent.

“Somebody is going to make a run at Trump,” Gingrich said. “I assume it will be Jeb Bush,” whose

JOHN MINCHILLO/ASSOCIATED PRESS

For Republican rivals, stage is set for this week’s debate to be far more contentious than the first status as a presumed favorite has been dented the most by Trump.

Going after Trump potentially comes at the cost of a candidate being thrown off his or her own messages at a high-profile moment and blowing an opportunity to emerge as the most attractive alternative to the blustery billionaire. And the one thing that anyone who attacks Trump can count upon is a gale-force response.

“As best as possible, when there is chaos all around you, you still have to focus on the things that make you unique,” Weaver said.

Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, who will be one of the questioners, predicted: “Debate #1 was touch gloves with each other.

This one will be a lot sparkier, but I don’t think it will be all pile up on Donald Trump.”

The debate is almost certain to be one of the most watched moments of the campaign so far. The first showdown drew more than 24 million viewers to sponsor Fox News, a record for a non-sports

cable telecast. CNN, which is broadcasting this one, is widely reported to be asking as much as $200,000 for a 30-second spot, which is 40 times its normal rate.

The 10-candidate GOP debate in Cleveland grappled with issues such as internal divisions and a changing American electorate.

Bush’s jabs at Trump on the campaign trail and in social media represent a shift for a candidate who had vowed to stay positive.

But it is a move that Bush has decided is necessary — not only at the next debate but continuing into the fall.

But in doing so, he could create an opening for someone else.

“You want to be like Kasich and [Florida Sen. Marco] Rubio — the nice, pleasant guys who are appealing to the country while the others are engaging in a mud fight,” Gingrich said.

Fiorina was able to capitalize on a skillful performance in the socalled “undercard” debate of lower-polling candidates that pre-

Republican presidential candidates from left, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Scott Walker, Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and John Kasich take the stage for the first Republican presidential debate in Cleveland last month.

ceded the main event in Cleveland, boosting her numbers so quickly that CNN rewrote the rules for qualifying so that she was expected to join the leading candidates at the Reagan Library event.

Fiorina and Trump, both running as outsiders from the business world, have taken a number of shots at each other.

He has branded her a failure, citing her firing from HewlettPackard and the fact that she got trounced in 2010 when she tried to unseat Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). Fiorina has criticized Trump for his intensely personal attacks on Fox News debate moderator Megyn Kelly, among other things.

In an interview with Fox Radio’s Brian Kilmeade, Fiorina said the other candidates should focus more of their fire on the likely Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, because “in the end, we need a nominee who can beat whoever the Democrats put up.”

But “if it’s important to draw contrast between myself and Donald Trump, I will. Between myself and Jeb Bush or Ben Carson or anyone else, I will,” she added.

Hewitt said that he and moderator Jake Tapper of CNN have a “shared belief” that they will have failed if the story coming out of the Simi Valley debate is about them or their fellow questioner, CNN’s Dana Bash. Instead, he said, they want to bring the candidates into sharper focus.

Hewitt has already found himself in a contretemps with Trump, after a recent interview in which the radio host asked the Republican front-runner about foreign policy. Trump bumbled a number of them, including one in which he apparently confused Iran’s elite Quds Force with the Kurds.

Hewitt, who has conducted more than 70 interviews with GOP hopefuls this year, put the same questions to Fiorina, who handled them with ease.

All of which got a typical reaction from Trump. He tweeted: “Why would a very low ratings radio talk show host like Hugh Hewitt be doing the next debate on @CNN. He is just a 3rd rate ‘gotcha’ guy!” n

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POLITICS

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Santorum tries to find that old magic D AVID A . F AHRENTHOLD Forest City, Iowa BY

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ounty No. 88. There were 25 people waiting, and a few empty chairs.

“Just to tell you a little bit about myself, uh — I’m, uh — running for president of the United States,” Rick Santorum said. People laughed at the tentative way he said it. As if Santorum knew that this huge ambition did not belong in this room. “That’s the reason I’m here. I’m running for president. We brought free pizza.”

After a brief speech, Santorum took questions. The first one was about — animal breeding.

“There are a lot of activists in Iowa that are trying to prevent animal breeding. Like dog kennels. Cattle. Hogs. Chickens. Everything,” a woman said. She clearly disapproved of this. “If you were president of the United States, could you do anything about that?”

Santorum looked deflated. But the point of this event — like the 91 others before it — was that no place and nobody in Iowa was beneath his attention.

So Santorum tried to think of a serious answer. What would President Santorum do to ensure that the farm animals of north-central Iowa could breed in peace?

“I guess the answer is that I would make sure — as president— that, uh, we allow businesses to operate in a legitimate fashion,” Santorum said, after he’d made clear that the First Amendment also protected the activists’ right to protest.

The second question was also about animal breeding.

Santorum had come to this outof-the-way place because he was searching for something — his political magic — in the same way a man looks for his lost car keys.

He is retracing his steps.

In the last election, Santorum visited all 99 counties in Iowa and later won the state’s Republican caucuses. He was transformed from a long-shot ex-senator into a conservative hero who beat eventual GOP nominee Mitt Romney in 11 states.

CHARLES OMMANNEY/THE WASHINGTON POST

The 2012 Iowa winner has looked everywhere — all 99 counties, in fact. But to little avail.

In this election, he’s a long shot again. Santorum has lost his theme song, his campaign guru, his big money and his niche in the GOP field. Even in Iowa, he was hovering around 1 percent in polls.

But Santorum had a comeback strategy: Come back to Iowa. Visit all 99 counties again.

The task took him months this year. It could be exhausting, timeconsuming and humiliating all at once. In Elkader (Clayton County, No. 74), fewer than 10 showed. In Hamlin (Audubon County, No. 25), it was four people. (“Go ahead,” he told one of them, after the man went on and on about biomass. “I’ve got plenty of time.”)

And in Carroll County, No. 26, the crowd he drew was — zero. In a moment captured on video by a Democratic “tracker,” Santorum looked around at a near-empty diner, saw no one to schmooze and sat down alone to drink a chocolate milkshake.

The 99-county tour concluded last week on a good note for Santorum: He drew 150 people to a rally in Rock Rapids, in Lyon County, according to the Des Moines Register.

One day last month, when Santorum was still in the middle of his quest, he had a plan for a long day of driving through cornfields to hit Counties 87 through 90.

The old miracle must be out there. This was exactly where he left it.

“People ask me all the time, you know: ‘How are you going to win?

How are you going to do this?’ ” Santorum said at the day’s first stop, at a Hardee’s in Estherville, in Emmet County.

“I remind people that two weeks before the Iowa caucuses last time, I was at 2 percent in the national polls,” he said. “The idea that national polls have anything to do with how people in Iowa vote — thanks be to God, the answer is it doesn’t.”

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum speaks to a sparse crowd in Garner during his 99-county tour of Iowa.

“People ask me all the time, you know: ‘How are you going to win? How are you going to do this?’”

Rick Santorum

At the Hardee’s, Santorum gave the stump speech that has defined this campaign. It is as dark as spilled ink — less a speech, really, than a list of disasters, all bearing down on us at once.

President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, he said, could give that country a nuclear bomb (“The greatest betrayal of the security of our country in our history”). An electromagnetic pulse weapon could blast the United States into helplessness and chaos (“Up to 90 percent fatalities, within a year”). Immigrants would drive down wages. Samesex marriage could erode the family. Christians could be shouted down for stating their beliefs.

Then, after all that gloom: “I’m going to ask each and every one of you for your vote. Iowa has an opportunity to do something great.”

“He’d make a good president,” said R.N. Lepird, a retired footand-ankle surgeon. But, he said, “I don’t think he’ll make it.”

The irony in this situation is that Santorum — or at least the 2012 version of Santorum — is conservatism’s patron saint of lost causes. All the long shots in this race think they have absorbed his lessons: work hard, shake hands, bash the establishment and wait for the flood of voters to lift you up. Other long shots, including Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and former Texas governor Rick Perry, have also pledged to reach all 99 counties.

But this time, even Santorum doesn’t appear able to pull a Santorum.

But Santorum still believes that he has a path, and that the path goes through little places like these. In small meetings in Iowa, he thinks, he’ll win over hard-core supporters, who will win over their neighbors. Then he wins Iowa. Then that victory boosts him into the next few states.

Back in Iowa, Santorum left Estherville for Forest City, 69 miles away. Winnebago County.

There, Santorum spoke at a nonprofit focused on people with intellectual disabilities.

That put No. 88 in the books. n

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NATION

Confused teen or terrorist in waiting?

A DAM G OLDMAN Spring, Tex. BY

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sher Abid Khan sat in Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport and considered his next move — forward to Syria and enlistment in the Islamic State, the militant group that had drawn him to the possibility of dying for Allah, or home to Texas and his bewildered family whose imploring messages were filling his voice mail.

The 19-year-old pulled out his phone and dialed.

“I want to come home,” Khan told his father, Mohammed Abid Khan, who sat huddled in his living room here with his wife and other children.

Hours later, without ever leaving the airport, Khan boarded a plane and flew home to this Houston suburb.

His family had saved him from an uncertain fate in Syria, but not legal jeopardy in the United States.

Fifteen months later, in May 2015, the FBI charged Khan with conspiracy and attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State. Instead of life inside the caliphate, Khan, now faces up to 30 years in prison.

To his family and lawyer, Khan was a misguided and naive teen.

Before flying to Turkey, in conversation with a friend on Facebook, according to court documents, Khan said: “I wana die as a Shaheed,” using the Arabic word for martyr. And he said he was “looking forward to dying in Allah’s cause and meeting Allah.”

But his defense attorney, Thomas Berg, said that Khan stepped back from an irrevocable decision and has since returned to a moderate path.

“He came home and did the right thing,” Berg said. “If the government was smart, they would exploit that. My kid could go to the mosques and talk about redemption.”

And, Berg said, if Khan is imprisoned, there is no incentive for the next young person having doubts about joining the Islamic State to turn around and come home. The

MICHAEL STRAVATO FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Young Texas man’s case shows hard line FBI takes on Islamic State government’s approach, he said, leaves no way back.

Berg would not let a reporter talk with his client.

To the FBI, Khan is an unknown risk, and one that is best mitigated through prosecution. The case is emblematic of the American approach to confronting the Islamic State. While some European countries have decided to treat young radicals returning from Syria as prodigals in need of a deradicalization program of counseling, education and employment, the United States treats Islamic State recruits, even those who make it no further than an airport, as terrorism suspects.

Since the United States designated the Islamic State, also known as

ISIS, as a terrorist organization in 2014, the FBI has made an arrest almost every week in connection with the group, many of them of young people who were radicalized online. More than 60 people have been charged with material support and other charges. Twelve of them have pleaded guilty.

FBI Director James B. Comey has called on Muslim families and religious leaders to work with the bureau to prevent young Americans from becoming radicalized, saying “our interests are aligned.”

But Khan’s case — and dozens more like it — is leaving some in the Muslim community with the impression that, for federal prosecutors and the FBI, there is no alternative to incarceration.

Asher Abid Khan faces up to 30 years in prison after he flew to Turkey, allegedly to join the Islamic State. At top, Islamic Society of Greater Houston President M.J. Khan, no relation to the accused.

Mustafa Tameez, a community leader in Houston who has worked with the Departments of State and Homeland Security on countering violent extremism, said: “You make your bones by making a big arrest.

We have to change the rewards system.”

U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation, said there are numerous cases in which agents have worked with families to prevent radicalization and criminal charges were avoided.

The officials said there were indications — worrying, although not conclusive — that Khan had not shed his radical views after returning to the United States.

Khan told a friend months after

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NATION he was back from Turkey to keep an open mind about the Islamic State, according to the FBI. The bureau also learned that concerns had surfaced at Khan’s mosque, where he was teaching seventhgrade Islamic studies on the weekend.

After Khan was arrested in May, M.J. Khan (no relation to the suspect), president of the Islamic Society of Greater Houston, received an e-mail, which was provided to The Washington Post, from one of the mosque’s religious leaders: “I was told that he has some ideological beliefs or sympathies towards certain groups that are unhealthy.”

The FBI said that mosque members told agents that Khan believed that America was the “Dajjal,” or the Great Deceiver.

But Imran Moton, the Sundayschool principal, described Khan as a “perfect young kid” who followed an approved curriculum.

He said nobody had ever said that Khan had expressed any sympathy for the Islamic State.

“Think of these charges as insurance,” said a senior U.S. law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the case is ongoing, referring to Khan. “We don’t know what he’s going to do. This guy may be on the path to deradicalization. We err on the side of caution.”

Making plans Asher Abid Khan’s parents came to the United States from Pakistan more than two decades ago, following a well-worn trail to Texas that many South Asian migrants had taken before them.

They worked three jobs — at a gas station, a Pizza Hut and a WalMart — to support their four children, all boys, who attended the local public schools. The Khan family prayed at Masjid Al Salam, a large and vibrant mosque that serves the area’s approximately 400,000 Muslims, the largest community in the state.

Among Khan’s friends at the mosque, as he neared graduation from high school, was a Mexican convert to Islam, Sixto Ramiro Garcia, who went by the name Abdullah Ali. Together, Garcia and Khan began to watch radical videos online, according to court documents. Garcia posed with a black flag, later the symbol of the Islamic State, which a friend posted on Instagram.

MICHAEL STRAVATO FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Khan felt his “brothers and sisters” were being “raped, tortured and killed,” in Syria, according to court records.

Khan began to assert that women should be covered. At home, relations with his family became strained. He objected to his parents’ decisions to work at businesses that sold alcohol.

In October 2013, a few months after graduating from high school, Khan moved to Australia to live with his uncle’s family in Sydney.

According to court records, he also joined Hizb ut-Tahrir, an international political organization that seeks to create an Islamic caliphate.

Khan began exploring the possibility of traveling to Syria. He felt his “brothers and sisters” were being “raped, tortured and killed,” in Syria, according to court records.

Traveling to Turkey On Jan. 6, 2014, Khan contacted Garcia, 20, the Mexican convert, expressing his desire to go to Syria, according to court records. In Australia, Khan managed to get in touch with an Islamic State facilitator in Turkey named Mohammad, who had promised to get them across the border.

On Feb. 23, Garcia flew to Lon-

don from Houston. Khan took a flight from Australia to Malaysia the next day, with a later connection to Turkey.

When Khan landed in Kuala Lumpur, his parents had already learned from their Australian relatives that Khan was on the move, heading to the Turkish border with Syria. “We were scared,” Afroz, Khan’s mother, said in an interview.

The family left him a message saying his mother had been hospitalized — a lie, but one they hoped would turn him around.

Once home, Khan didn’t say anything about wanting to travel to the Islamic State.

“Never, never,” his mother said.

But Khan did eventually tell his parents that he never believed the story that his mother was sick.

A change in demeanor Back in Houston, Khan had slipped into a new routine, taking classes at the University of Houston and working at Pizza Hut as a delivery driver — without having drawn the attention of the FBI for his aborted trip to Syria. He was circumspect with friends about where he had been.

The neighborhood where Asher Abid Khan lives with his parents in Spring, Tex. The Khan family prayed at Masjid Al Salam, a large and vibrant mosque that serves the area’s approximately 400,000 Muslims, the largest community in the state.

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One friend, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivities surrounding the case, said that when he returned he seemed less strident about following the tenets of Islam.

“It was a change for the better,” the friend said.

Khan continued to follow Garcia on Facebook and receive updates from his friend.

In August 2014, when Garcia had joined the Islamic State, Khan cautioned: “make sure they are doing everything according to Islam you know, not killing innocent ppl and all that.”

Garcia’s absence had not gone unnoticed. Worried family members contacted the FBI, which opened an investigation.

By October 2014, the FBI finally unearthed Khan’s connection to Garcia after obtaining a search warrant for the convert’s Facebook account, and Khan was placed under surveillance.

The FBI also suspected that Khan, who had applied for another visa for Australia, might be considering another effort to reach Syria.

On the morning of May 25, 2015, Khan was arrested at his house.

“Why are you here? What did we do wrong?” his mother asked agents as they searched the house.

Khan’s attorney, Berg — a former colonel in the Army Reserve, who has served at both Guantanamo Bay, where he helped set up the first military commissions, and in Afghanistan — dismissed the evidence against Khan as “a lot of talk and Facebook crap.”

At a detention hearing for Khan in Houston, federal prosecutors opposed bail.

“There are no conditions the government foresees that would enable the safety of the homeland,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Carolyn Ferko.

A magistrate judge disagreed, placed Khan under house arrest and ordered him to wear an ankle bracelet so that his movements could be monitored.

Khan’s trial is set for later this year.

Khan’s father said he had read the charges against his son but still didn’t understand what he did wrong. His son turned around, he said, and did the right thing.

“He doesn’t want to go to Syria,” the father said. “That’s what he told us. This is unfair. He did not do anything.” n

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2015

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WORLD

Inside Vatican, dissent grows A NTHONY F AIOLA Vatican City BY

O

n a sunny morning earlier this year, a camera crew entered a well-appointed apartment just outside the 9th-century gates of Vatican City. Pristinely dressed in the black robes and scarlet sash of the princes of the Roman Catholic Church, Wisconsin-born Cardinal Raymond Burke sat in his elaborately upholstered armchair and appeared to issue a warning to Pope Francis.

A staunch conservative and Vatican bureaucrat, Burke had been demoted by the pope a few months earlier, but it did not take the fight out of him. Francis had been backing a more inclusive era, giving space to progressive voices on divorced Catholics as well as gays and lesbians. In front of the camera, Burke said he would “resist” liberal changes — and seemed to caution Francis about the limits of his authority. “One must be very attentive regarding the power of the pope,” Burke told the French news crew.

Papal power, Burke warned, “is not absolute.” He added, “The pope does not have the power to change teaching [or] doctrine.”

Burke’s words belied a growing sense of alarm among strict conservatives, exposing what is fast emerging as a culture war over Francis’s papacy and the powerful hierarchy that governs the Roman Catholic Church.

This month, Francis makes his first trip to the United States at a time when his progressive allies are hailing him as a revolutionary, a man who only the other week broadened the power of priests to forgive women who commit what Catholic teachings call the “mortal sin” of abortion during his newly declared “year of mercy” starting in December. Last Sunday, he called for “every” Catholic parish in Europe to offer shelter to one refugee family from the thousands of asylum seekers risking all to escape war-torn Syria and other pockets of conflict and poverty.

Yet as he upends church convention, Francis also is grappling

ALESSANDRA TARANTINO/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Conservatives get more public about challenging direction of liberal pope who advocates change with a conservative backlash to the liberal momentum building inside the church. In more than a dozen interviews, including with seven senior church officials, insiders say the change has left the hierarchy more polarized over the direction of the church than at any point since the great papal reformers of the 1960s.

The conservative rebellion is taking on many guises — in public comments, yes, but also in the rising popularity of conservative Catholic Web sites promoting Francis dissenters; books and promotional materials backed by conservative clerics seeking to counter the liberal trend; and leaks to the news media, aimed at Vatican reformers.

In his recent comments, Burke was also merely stating fact. Despite the vast powers of the pope, church doctrine serves as a kind of constitution. And for liberal reformers, the bruising theological

pushback by conservatives is complicating efforts to translate the pope’s transformative style into tangible changes.

“At least we aren’t poisoning each other’s chalices anymore,” said the Rev. Timothy Radcliffe, a liberal British priest and Francis ally appointed to an influential Vatican post in May. Radcliffe said he welcomed open debate, even critical dissent within the church.

But he professed himself as being “afraid” of “some of what we’re seeing” Rather than stake out clear stances, the pope is more subtly, often implicitly, backing liberal church leaders who are pressing for radical change, while dramatically opening the parameters of the debate over how far reforms can go. For instance, during the opening of a meeting of senior bishops last year, Francis told those gathered, “Let no one say, ‘This you cannot say.’ ”

Cardinal Raymond Burke, left, and Pope Francis greet bishops this month in St. Peter’s Square.

Since then, liberals have tested the boundaries of their new freedom, with one Belgian bishop going as far as calling for the Catholic Church to formally recognize same-sex couples.

Conservatives counter that in the climate of rising liberal thought, they have been thrust unfairly into a position in which “defending the real teachings of the church makes you look like an enemy of the pope,” a senior Vatican official said on the condition of anonymity in order to speak freely.

“We have a serious issue right now, a very alarming situation where Catholic priests and bishops are saying and doing things that are against what the church teaches, talking about same-sex unions, about Communion for those who are living in adultery,” the official said. “And yet the pope does nothing to silence them. So the inference is that this is what the pope wants.”

Criticism of a sitting pope is hardly unusual — liberal bishops on occasion challenged Francis’s predecessor, Benedict XVI. But in an institution cloaked in traditional fealty to the pope, what shocks many is just how public the criticism of Francis has become.

In an open letter to his diocese, Bishop Thomas Tobin of Providence, R.I., wrote: “In trying to accommodate the needs of the age, as Pope Francis suggests, the Church risks the danger of losing its courageous, countercultural, prophetic voice, one that the world needs to hear.” For his part, Burke, the cardinal from Wisconsin, has called the church under Francis “a ship without a rudder.”

Some of the pope’s allies insist that debate is precisely what Francis wants.

“I think that people are speaking their mind because they feel very strongly and passionately in their position, and I don’t think the Holy Father sees it as a personal attack on him,” said Chicago Archbishop Blase J. Cupich, considered a close ally of the pope.

“The Holy Father has opened the possibility for these matters to be discussed openly; he has not predetermined where this is going.” n

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Striking fear into India’s super-rich R AMA L AKSHMI New Delhi BY

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mong the pledges that propelled Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to power a year ago was one to bring home millions of dollars of illicit money the super-rich had stashed abroad.

Trying to make good on his promise, his government has introduced a string of tough new measures in recent months designed to crack down on “black money,” fueling panic among India’s elite and growing numbers of millionaires.

The anxiety has deepened in recent weeks as a governmentimposed Sept. 30 tax-payment deadline for those who have stashed their cash in foreign accounts approaches.

The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India recently issued a statement denouncing the new law for creating “fear and panic” among industry leaders and trading professionals.

“People are uneasy and worried.

The penalty and term of imprisonment are disproportionately high,” said Nishith Desai, a corporate lawyer in Mumbai.

Industry experts say that the rich are frantically searching for new tax havens and other ways to skirt the law, which includes penalties of up to 10 years in jail.

A subtle new climate of fear has changed life for India’s elite.

“The super-rich are becoming much more inhibited in their behavior now. They are no longer posting pictures of their brandnew fancy watch or luxury car or expensive holiday on Facebook as readily as they did before,” said Dilip Cherian, who heads the image consultancy Perfect Relations. “They are either buying with credit cards or buying luxury products in foreign countries.”

No one knows for sure how much black money is hidden in India and overseas. Estimates range from $400 billion to more than $1 trillion.

India’s history as a socialistleaning country unfriendly to business — with endemic corrup-

MANSI THAPLIYAL/REUTERS

Top ‘black money’ tax evaders face heavy penalties for stashing millions in foreign nations tion — meant that the country’s rich routinely hid their wealth by hoarding cash, jewelry and expensive artwork or parking it in tax havens abroad. A World Bank estimate in 2010 said India’s “shadow economy” accounts for more than 20 percent of its economic output.

Only 3 percent of the country pays income taxes.

Two years ago, the investigative portal Cobrapost conducted a sting on 28 top state-owned and private banks across India in which executives were filmed on hidden camera offering to channel vast sums of customers’ unaccounted cash into the formal banking system.

Real estate is another common hiding place for untaxed money.

“Land is where Indian politicians and businessmen park the maximum amount of black money,” said Pankaj Kapoor, founder of the realty research firm Liases Foras in Mumbai. “About 30 percent of all land transactions across In-

dia is done in cash.”

Black money is also deeply embedded in India’s political system.

According to the election watchdog Association for Democratic Reforms, 80 percent of the income of five national political parties comes from unknown sources.

The government hopes to choke India’s black-money culture with measures that include mandatory tax number declarations for people shopping with large sums, linking biometric identities to every bank account, opening new payment gateways and promoting credit card use.

“The process of formalizing the informal economy is underway in India,” said Rajeev Chandrasekhar, an independent member of Parliament. “A lot of people who are used to an old model of doing business in India are uncomfortable today about the new scrutiny.”

Shortly after his election, Modi vowed he would bring black money stashed overseas back into the

The income tax office in New Delhi.

The government has imposed a Sept. 30 deadline to pay taxes on money stashed abroad, with stiff penalties for disobeying. “The big fish must not get away,” Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said in May.

country and use it for development. During his campaign, he made the wild claim that so much money was involved he could deposit nearly $23,000 into accounts of every poor person.

“The big fish must not get away,” Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said when the black-money law passed.

But interviews with accountants, tax officials and businessmen reveal that in recent months, many of India’s wealthy have found new ways around the scrutiny. A favorite tactic, accountants said, is sending family members abroad for 182 days, after which they become “non-residents” with foreign accounts and businesses where the family members can stash money.

An official in the tax department said that in the past few months, international companies have begun using a new mix of insurance products to mask and move this illegal money to locations such as Dubai and Singapore, from where it can be brought into India legally.

The official said his department has noticed a 250 percent jump in the number of shell companies being registered by what he called “Indian frontmen” in the taxfriendly city of Ras al-Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates. New safe havens such as Vanuatu near Australia and Kutunu near Nigeria are also popular, he said.

There are doubts Modi’s program will be effective. In May, Ram Jethmalani, a lawyer and blackmoney crusader, told the Supreme Court that Modi’s promise to bring back black money was “worse than an illusion” and a “fraud on the nation.”

“They must bring in a significant amount of black money into the system like they promised.

[Otherwise] people will soon begin to ask uncomfortable questions,” said T.S. Ahluwalia, director of Dharamvir Exports, an exporter of farm products.

Already there is speculation that the Sept. 30 deadline may be extended. So far, only one wealthy person has reported black-money holdings and paid the tax and penalty. n

PHOTOS BY MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

A lonely road

BY MARC FISHER

A reproduction of a famous propaganda billboard stands at the American City Diner in Washington, D.C. Versions of the billboard were erected during the Depression in the 1930s and featured a happy family traveling the roads of America by car.

C

huck Mecca plops his lawn chair down in the parking lot of the Chick­fil­A at a Sterling, Va., shopping center, smack behind his lipstick­red 1956 Ford F­100 pickup, primped and polished for its turn under the Friday night lights. ¶ Mecca, whose beard has long since gone white, is a regular at the Cruise­In, a weekly gathering of guys whose enduring love is a set of wheels that delivers them back to the time when customizing and showing off your car was the ultimate expression of self. ¶ Now 72, Mecca was 18 when he worked the biggest newspaper delivery route in his town to amass the cash to buy his first car, a ’53 Ford that didn’t have a working second gear. He pumped gas to pay for wheels to cruise over the bridge to the District or impress the girls at a local drive­in restaurant. ¶ Back then, he could name the make and model of anything that zipped by. Even now, cars speak for him: “When my wife beat ovarian cancer,” he says, “I bought her her dream car”: a ’56 Chevy Nomad station wagon. ¶ On Friday evenings at the Cruise­In, Mecca and his buddies cluster behind the ’72 Dodge Challenger and the electric­blue ’65 Corvette.

They check under the hoods and trade stories about cars and women and where the years have gone.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2015

13

COVER STORY For nearly all of the first century of automobile travel, getting your license meant liberation from parental control, a passport to the open road. Today, only half of millennials bother to get their driver’s licenses by age 18.

Car culture, the 20th-century engine of the American Dream, is an old guy’s game.

“The automobile just isn’t that important to people’s lives anymore,” says Mike Berger, a historian who studies the social effect of the car. “The automobile provided the means for teenagers to live their own lives. Social media blows any limits out of the water. You don’t need the car to go find friends.”

Much of the emotional meaning of the car, especially to young adults, has transferred to the smartphone, says Mark Lizewskie, executive director of the Antique Automobile Club of America Museum in Hershey, Pa. “Instead of Ford versus Chevy, it’s Apple versus Android.

And instead of customizing their ride, they customize their phones with covers and apps,” he says. “You express yourself through your phone, whereas lately, cars have become more like appliances, with 100,000-mile warranties.”

At the Cruise-In, 30 miles outside Washington, D.C., Mecca and a cluster of other collectors, all men past the half-century mark, trade laments — for the days when cars had more fanciful designs, for what they fear will be the loss of the Washington Redskins’ team name, for their children’s lack of interest in cars.

“The world’s changing too fast for me,” Mecca says. “I’d like to be back in the ’50s.” The old guys’ conversation turns to blemishes — not on the sparkling cars before them, but on their own, less painstakingly preserved bodies.

“It’s benign, thank the Lord,” Mecca says of the spot on his scalp.

“This is what we talk about,” says Gary Fanning, 58. He tried to give his son his ’65 pickup. Gift declined; not interested.

Across the parking lot, though, a few much younger men take a stand for their generation.

Kevin Kurdziolek, 26, and his friend Conner Walsh, 25, match their elders in passion. Their Mustangs — Kevin’s ’03 SVT Cobra and Conner’s ’04 Mach 1 — are buffed to a showroom gleam. They, too, have dewy memories of how their love of cars began. Walsh grew up collecting Hot Wheels, and Kurdziolek’s father was into drag racing. They, too, know how to rebuild the suspension. They, too, say a cool car is a fast track to a woman’s heart.

“There’s something to be said about picking up a chick in this car,” Kurdziolek says. “It’s cool and loud and aggressive. You don’t even have to hear her. You don’t even need music.”

The young guys realize they are the anomalies in their generation. Coming up behind them are people like Kurdziolek’s younger brother, who is 21. “He can’t afford most cars,” Kevin says. “He’s looking for something that has a long warranty on it, good fuel efficiency, Bluetooth, all the odds and ends for his phone.

It’s just about utility for him.”

Kurdziolek and Walsh don’t quite fit with Mecca and the old regulars, and they’re already

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nostalgic for a time when teenagers rushed to get their licenses. As car buffs, their road forward looks lonely, and the way back is crowded with another generation’s memories.

TOP: This art deco gas station and diner was built in 1935 in Shamrock, Tex., when businesses on Route 66 went all-out to attract customers traveling the highway that became emblematic of America’s car culture. MIDDLE: Chuck Mecca, 72, enjoys a smoke at the Cruise-In, a Friday night tradition in Sterling, Va. ABOVE: Ava Lowe, 9, left, and Athena Trapalis, 7, admire a 1956 Ford F-100 pickup lovingly cared for by its owner, Mecca, who laments that “the world’s changing too fast for me.”

The times are changing The number of vehicles on American roads soared every year until the recession hit in 2008. Then the number plummeted. Recently, it has crept back up. Similarly, the number of drivers has leveled off.

“In the near future, cars will control the driver instead of the other way around,” says John Heitmann, a historian at the University of Dayton who studies Americans’ relationship with automobiles. (He also is restoring a 1971 Porsche 911T Targa.) “And the way we live now, especially on the coasts, it’s a bother to own a car. For young people, and not just the urban elite, there’s not even a desire to drive.”

Americans drive fewer miles per year — down about 9 percent over the past two decades. The percentage of 19-year-olds with driver’s licenses has dropped from 87 percent two decades ago to 70 percent last year. Most teens now do not get licensed within a year of becoming eligible, according to a study by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.

“Their priorities are different — they have Mom and Dad to drive them around, and some frankly say, ‘I don’t need to drive; I can walk to Metro,’ ” says Jim Snow, a retired police officer who teaches driving in Rockville, Md. As cars have become more automated and reliable, teens have lost their connection to the mechanics of the vehicle. “I don’t see kids who know what’s under the hood anymore,” Snow says. “A lot of them don’t even know how to open the hood.”

Why this disconnection is happening is very much subject to interpretation.

It’s all about a craving for simplicity, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has said, a reluctance to jump into the trappings of adult life: marriage, children, car. Just as millennials delay buying houses, so too have they found other ways to get around — Uber, Zipcar, public transit, texting friends to see who can offer a lift.

No, it’s the economy, stupid, some car industry analysts and executives say. The recession hit this generation just as it was about to put down roots. Fewer jobs meant less money, which translated into an inability to buy, insure or maintain a car.

Now, as the economy bounces back, auto sales are up 4 percent in the first half of this year. Americans are choosing big vehicles again. Thanks in part to low gas prices, sales of SUVs and light trucks are up. Sedans, subcompacts, hybrids and electrics are down.

“This is all actually economics, not preferences,” says Sean McAlinden, chief economist at the Center for Automotive Research, a nonprofit group funded by government and industry grants. When the cost of owning a car drops below 10 percent of income, “young people will stop telling pollsters they can do continues on next page

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COVER STORY

from previous page

without cars. You say you’re not interested in owning something if you can’t afford it,” he argues.

Millennials increasingly telecommute, use public transit, connect with friends digitally without always having to meet in person, and live in big cities. About 40 percent of them say they intend to stay in cities, though previous generations said that, too, before marriage and children.

“With tuition and student loan debts, young people can’t afford a car,” says John B. Townsend II, longtime spokesman for the AAA Mid-Atlantic. Plus, there’s the cost of car insurance, an average of $1,100 nationwide.

But McAlinden is confident that young people will return to the auto fold. “It’s completely un-American not to like motor vehicles,” he says, and he is both joking and not joking.

Or maybe what it means to be American has simply changed.

“Digital enticements are displacing the pleasures of driving,” says Matt Crawford, a political philosopher at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture who also fabricates components for custom motorcycles. “So that whole sense of getting in the car and finding out what’s beyond the next town is less powerful.”

Crawford, 49, fell in love with cars back when drivers often had to deal with mechanical problems. His first few cars were “real beaters” that broke down frequently, requiring him to bang on a stranger’s door and beg for help. “You’d end up interacting with people you wouldn’t otherwise meet,” he says. And knowing your car paid dividends. Braking was a skill. Parking did not involve cameras or computers.

Now, he says, “cars have become virtual reality boxes,” infantilizing the driver. BMW even pipes phony engine noises through its cars’ sound systems to make drivers feel like they’re in charge of a machine that mostly runs itself. Driving these days, Crawford writes, “would seem to promote a kind of regression — back into the womb.”

Maybe car culture is waning, he suggests, because “parents are less authoritarian and want to be your friend.” In other words, the need to rebel isn’t what it used to be.

Gearheads gone gray Through the 30 years he spent as an Oldsmobile dealer, Steve Moskowitz saw this coming. “In my early days, I saw how romantic the idea of buying a car was,” recalls Moskowitz, 67, now executive director of the Antique Automobile Club of America. For many years, people dressed up to visit the showroom. But in later years, “people were looking for dependability and value and weren’t concerned with looks and romance.”

Unsurprisingly, the nation’s car museums and auto clubs now struggle to attract a younger audience. “We’re trying to figure out what we can present that people can’t get from a Web site,” says Terry Ernest, president of the

Active driver’s licenses since 1963 212.2 million licenses

The number of active driver’s licenses in the United States has grown in tandem with the population.

Ages 24+

95.6 million licenses

10.5 7.2

17.7

Ages 20-24

9

Younger than 19

1963

2013

Percentage with driver’s licenses since 1983

As a whole, the percentage of the population with a driver’s license has decreased slightly, but among the 20-24 age group, the drop is more pronounced.

AGES 20 TO 24

91.8%

ALL (16+)

77.5% 84.6%

1983

2013

83.2%

1983

2013

Daily auto miles traveled

Americans are driving fewer miles daily, according to data from the National Household Travel Survey.

However, that decrease is greater among young people.

Ages 19-24

40

Ages 37-42

38.5

37.1

35.6 29.9

20

0 ’95

’01

’09

’95

’01

’09

Sources: Federal Highway Administration Highway Statistics Series; “Are Millennials Really the ‘Go-Nowhere’ Generation?” by Noreen C. McDonald, Journal of the American Planning Association; National Household Travel Surveys (1995, 2001, 2009) LAZARO GAMIO/THE WASHINGTON POST

National Association of Automobile Museums and director of the Wills Sainte Claire Museum of Classic Autos in Marysville, Mich. “Certainly, some museums are going to fail.”

Cars are just one more aspect of life hit hard by the digital culture’s corrosion of local ties.

Retail shopping, the news business and politics have taken on a more national character because the Internet lets people connect along interest lines rather than by geography. In that way, car culture is losing its local structure — the clubs, museums and meets that brought people together.

The thriving platforms for younger car buffs tend to be virtual — the Jalopnik blog (slogan: “Drive Free or Die”), or Autoextremist.com.

But perhaps the most visible sign of car culture these days is on cable TV’s Velocity channel, which runs reality shows about restoring, collecting and selling cars, all aimed at “men in their mid- to high 40s and above,” says its general manager, Bob Scanlon.

There is a younger audience for shows about designing and building cars, “and there’s a direct correlation between the number of tattoos on the builder’s arms and the youth of the audience,” he says with a wink. He adds that the channel is “not in a position to develop the next generation” of car buffs.

If the audience is graying, Scanlon says, blame Detroit, which shifted from the fanciful fins and muscle cars of the ’50s and ’60s to a focus on reliability. Americans still love to tinker, and father-son bonds over mechanics can still pack an emotional wallop, but “cars don’t seem to resonate in scripted entertainment like they once did,” Scanlon says.

Scanlon, 63, grew up in a car family; his father was a mechanical engineer, and father and son tinkered together. One of Scanlon’s adult sons has followed him into car TV, as a manager on “Overhaulin’,” a car-customizing show. His other son also is a tinkerer — the new kind: He runs a video-gaming site.

A popular-culture heyday A century ago, a good way to reach the bestseller list was to publish books featuring boys and girls having adventures with cars.

From “The Motor Boys” and “The Motor Maids” through the iconic Hollywood hits of the ’50s through the ’80s, the car was every bit as important to the great American dream machine as the best-known writers and actors.

Cruising and drag racing were the real stars of “American Graffiti” (1973). Chases inspired car love among viewers of “Thunder Road” (1958), “Smokey and the Bandit” (1977) and “The Cannonball Run” (1981). On Hot Rod magazine’s list of the 40 greatest car movies of all time, only two were made in this century.

The car’s heyday in pop culture featured the Beach Boys and their little old lady from Pasadena and their little deuce coupe; James Bond’s omnipotent sportsters; Steve McQueen’s legendary chase through the streets of San Francisco in “Bullitt” (1968); Herbie the Love Bug; and on into the ’70s and ’80s with Bruce Springsteen’s “Pink Cadillac” and

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2015

15

COVER STORY Prince’s “Little Red Corvette.”

Cars had their own TV shows — “Knight Rider,” “The Dukes of Hazzard,” and for one season, in 1965, “My Mother the Car,” a sitcom in which a 1928 Porter turns out to be the reincarnation of its owner’s mother. Really.

George Barris built the Porter (a made-up make) out of an old Ford Model T. He put a stunt man on the floor of the car to drive it using mirrors so the vehicle would appear to be driven by the invisible mother. Barris, 98 and still customizing cars, also built the Batmobile, the family hearse on “The Munsters,” the rickety jalopy on “The Beverly Hillbillies,” General Lee on “The Dukes of Hazzard,” and the red Torino on “Starsky and Hutch.”

“You had to design the car to be one of the stars of the show,” Barris says. He also customized cars for celebrities such as Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and Sonny and Cher. But over the past two decades, he says: “The interest in cars seemed to slip out of the industry. The car isn’t how the stars express their personality. John Wayne told me he wanted to just slide in, not climb into his motorcar. So Pontiac sent me a wagon, I raised the roof six inches and lowered the floor four inches, and he just slid in.

“You don’t get calls like that anymore. Can you even think of a TV show now that has cars doing things or being fun characters? For most people now, it’s just transportation.”

Once magical, now mundane The argument over whether the nation is reaching Peak Car — the point after which permanent decline sets in — will continue for years, but it’s already clear that the quality of Americans’ relationship with cars has shifted.

The spirit isn’t gone — check out one of Chrysler’s elegiac ads appealing to patriotism and nostalgia to stir love of Detroit’s signature industry — but a utilitarian attitude is becoming more pervasive. Symbols of the car’s central role in American life are fading. Fast-food chains are building fewer drive-through windows. Schools are offering fewer drivers’ education classes. Automakers are studying how to make money in a time of car-sharing, driverless vehicles and a growing aversion to owning stuff.

Ford’s resident futurist, Sheryl Connelly, points to data showing that millennials often like to rent rather than buy products. Ford research finds that 74 percent of adults try to use their time in motion “to accomplish something else.” So the automaker is dreaming up vehicles that let users do something — anything! — in a state of “global gridlock,” chief executive Bill Ford’s term for a world in which more than half of people live in megacities.

The return of young people to city centers brings a permanent pivot in how people think about getting around, says Gabe Klein, a Zipcar founder who went on to run the city transportation departments in Chicago and Washington.

Klein, 44, says cars have become a burden, a symbol of a model of living gone sour. “We were

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sold a bill of goods by the government,” he says, “by real estate developers who wanted to sell tract housing far from the city, by car companies who sold us this new lifestyle of living in the suburbs and commuting in.”

That suburban model is not something to rebuild from the ravages of recession, but rather a lifestyle that technology will let Americans discard, Klein argues. “Car culture is really a brief 50- or 60-year blip in history,” he says.

Klein has become an evangelist for a future that sounds utopian to some, nightmarish to others. It’s a vision in which pods of driverless, on-demand cars roam city streets, ready to pick you up for half of what Uber charges. It’s a future with less traffic and far less parking.

And little need for car ownership.

TOP: A simulated auto assembly line is on display at the Detroit History Museum. MIDDLE: An old car in a field near Biscay, Minn., has acquired a second trunk — and a bit of symbolism for millennials’ greener habits. ABOVE: As traffic dwindled in Desert Center, Calif., the multi-pump gas station and restaurant closed.

The car culture in the United States is changing as a new generation is less interested in cars than their parents were.

For city dwellers, a hassle At 22, fresh out of college, Regina Catipon finds herself a commuter, traveling on weekdays from her parents’ place in Montgomery County, Md., to her downtown Washington office. It’s a 90-minute trek each way — a bus, a train, a walk.

She has no car, no license, no immediate intention of getting either. Her sister, who is 26, has no license either (not for lack of trying; she has failed the test five times). Her brother was 22 when he finally got his.

Living at the far reaches of a Metro line, Catipon realizes that a car would make life easier, but it’s just not a priority. If her bus is delayed or doesn’t show up, she summons Uber or Lyft, or texts friends to catch a ride.

Catipon isn’t averse to cars, though she did delay learning to drive after a good friend in high school was hit by a car at 16 and died from head injuries. Despite that trauma, “I actually love cars,” Catipon says. She’s a fan of “Top Gear,” the British TV show about car buffs, and she always wanted a motorcycle. For a time, she was into a guy who rally-raced a Subaru.

But her social life mostly takes place in the city, where parking and traffic make cars a hassle. And both Catipon and her boyfriend have big student loan debts, “so it seems almost irresponsible to take out a car loan when we’re either looking for work or getting established,” she says.

At the University of Maryland, where Catipon was a journalism major, one of her professors was appalled to learn that a majority of students in her class didn’t drive. How would they go out and cover a story without wheels?

“You’re not going to be employable,” the teacher warned.

“But I have a job,” counters Catipon, who works at a small journalism start-up, though her position doesn’t require her to leave the office.

For now, her plan is to find a way to move into the city, in part to reduce the need for a car.

Rebellion plays little role in her thinking about cars.

“People talk about the open road,” she says, “but in my experience, the road is tolls and traffic cameras.”n

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MUSIC

Female rockers crank the volumes The guys are no longer the only ones writing memoirs full of sex, drugs and rockand-roll

BY

G EOFF E DGERS

I

t’s an all-girl supergroup like no other: Pretenders leader Chrissie Hynde, Jamaicanborn singer Grace Jones, Sleater-Kinney guitarist and “Portlandia” star Carrie Brownstein, folkie Jewel, punk poet Patti Smith and 1970s icon Carly Simon.

Only these women aren’t reviving Lilith Fair. They’re part of the latest trend in book publishing.

In a genre once wholly dominated by male rockers, female musicians are now finding their voices — and their book deals.

Hynde’s “Reckless: My Life as a Pretender,” already sparking headlines for the singer’s controversial comments on rape, arrived in bookstores last week, quickly followed by memoirs from Jones, Jewel, “Brave” singer Sara Bareilles, Brownstein, Simon and Smith.

These come on the heels of books

by Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, Slits guitarist Viv Albertine, Carole King, Ann and Nancy Wilson, Cyndi Lauper and Linda Ronstadt.

The rise of the female rock memoir is rooted in several factors, some market-based, others more open to interpretation.

There is, publishers and writers say, generally a different way that female rockers tell stories — with more humility and vulnerability than their male counterparts.

There is the shift in the book business as grunge kids raised on MTV’s “120 Minutes,” not Eric Clapton solos, find themselves in a position to make publishing deals.

There are also the simple numbers, both in book sales and on the pop charts.

“This is the era of the female act, be it Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Gaga, and maybe that has caused overall a hunger for reading about female artists,” says David Rosenthal, the former Rolling Stone editor who, as president of Blue Rider Press, is publishing Jewel’s memoir as well as upcoming books by Emmylou Harris and Sinead O’Conner.

Male rock memoirs are still dominant on the bestseller lists, whether Bob Dylan’s “Chronicles,” with more than 560,000 copies sold to date, or Keith Richards’s

DAVID F. SMITH/ASSOCIATED PRESS

OWEN SWEENEY/INVISION/ASSOCIATED PRESS

JOEL RYAN/INVISION/ASSOCIATED PRESS

FROM TOP: Carly Simon, Sara Bareilles and Chrissie Hynde all have memoirs coming this year. Hynde, who says she didn’t realize her book was part of a trend, says, “A good book is a good book. A good song is a good song. . . . I’m not very gender-driven.”

“Life,” at 760,000 and counting, according to Nielsen BookScan. But Smith’s 2010 book, “Just Kids,” sold more than 430,000 copies and won the National Book Award.

“It wasn’t like Patti Smith’s success gave me the green light,” says Carrie Thornton, who published Gordon’s “Girl in a Band” earlier this year. “But publishing is a business built on comp titles. That success certainly helps this make sense to the accountants.”

In Hynde’s book, her openness is startling. She recounts being raped, in her early 20s while in a drug haze, by a group of bikers in an abandoned building in Cleveland. But she blames herself as much as the rapists, a take that has

angered rape victim advocates.

“You can’t [expletive] around with people, especially people who wear ‘I Heart Rape’ and ‘On Your Knees’ badges,” she writes.

She also downplays her own spot in music history. While Hynde’s voice and songwriting chops have generally placed her alongside such pop-punk innovators as Elvis Costello and David Byrne, she levels considerable praise on the late Pretenders guitarist James Honeyman-Scott.

“Without him,” she writes, “I’m sure I would have made only the smallest splash with my talents.”

Jewel’s “Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story” comes out Tuesday. She said her book wasn’t

really a rock memoir. It’s more about her path from an abusive childhood, through her time living in a car, struggling with agoraphobia, and, ultimately, recovery.

“I never aspired to be a great female singer songwriter or great artist,” she says. “I aspired to be a great artist competing with the boys as much as the girls.”

Then there’s Carrie Brownstein, whose “Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl,” out next month, isn’t even being pitched as a music memoir. It’s about growing up in a dysfunctional family, discovering her passion for music and the often awkward steps leading into adulthood. She even has to face being unintentionally outed by Spin magazine.

“Music isn’t a category we do,” says Geoffrey Kloske, the publisher of Riverhead Books. “Celebrity isn’t a category we do.”

To that end, Brownstein, known for her starring role on IFC’s “Portlandia,” is being pitched as a kind of renaissance riot grrrl. Her book tour will feature her in conversation with comedian Amy Poehler, Roots drummer Questlove and writer Dave Eggers.

Kloske views Brownstein’s memoir as a new start, not a oneshot deal. “She’s a writer, a storyteller,” he says. “I think it’s the beginning of her life in letters.”

Which makes practical sense.

Music sales are down, particularly for older artists. Hynde’s last album, 2014’s “Stockholm,” sold fewer than 40,000 copies, according to Nielsen Music. Taylor Swift sells that over a weekend.

“If I were someone who made my living as a singer-songwriter for a long time, I’d look at reality stars who have a zillion Twitter follows and I’d say, ‘I want to do something to make it a little easier for me,’ ” says Sheila Weller, author of “Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation.”

“I can’t sing every night of the week. Should I do this? I don’t think the Chrissie Hyndes of the world are thinking, ‘I’ve finally found my voice.’ They always had their voice. I think they realize this is a good opportunity.” n

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2015

17

SCIENCE

KLMNO WEEKLY

What’s ahead for New Horizons?

Now that Pluto is behind it, NASA’s spacecraft is peering into the void — and waiting on red tape

BY

J OEL A CHENBACH

T

he big encounter with Pluto is over. The void is dead ahead.

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is hurtling through the Kuiper Belt, a cold, dark realm of tiny, icy objects and the occasional dwarf planet such as Pluto. The spacecraft’s science instruments are detecting plasma and dust, but its cameras have been turned off. For the moment, there’s nothing to see and not much to do other than measure the loneliness of deep space.

New Horizons has a bit of an existential, or perhaps astronomical, dilemma: After you pass Pluto, there’s a whole lot of nothing.

The spacecraft can maneuver slightly, but whatever it is going to look at next has to be more or less directly straight ahead. A couple of weeks ago, the New Horizons team decided to aim the spacecraft at a small object, roughly 28 miles in diameter and known as 2014 MU69. The spacecraft will fly past it on Jan. 1, 2019.

MU69 was discovered last year by the Hubble Space Telescope, which was looking for something, anything, that might be in the path of New Horizons. The Hubble found five objects, but MU69 was the most inviting target, requiring the least amount of fuel.

New Horizons still has to surmount a bureaucratic obstacle.

NASA hasn’t yet approved an “extended mission” for the spacecraft. The New Horizons team has until spring to put together a proposal that lays out what an extended mission would cost.

NASA would consult with the broader science community before signing off on the extension.

In some respects, it seems like an easy decision: New Horizons is a healthy spacecraft. It passed through the Pluto system without any nasty collisions with damaging particles, and it has a radioactive power source that can keep it operational for a couple of decades at least. It has half a tank of propellant.

“We don’t have to buy any rocket, we don’t have to fly across

New Horizons aims for Kuiper Belt object Almost a decade after liftoff from Cape Canaveral, Fla., NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has passed Pluto and is cruising through the Kuiper Belt, a region with millions of small, icy bodies that form a ring around the solar system beyond the orbit of Neptune.

NEW HORIZONS FLIGHT HISTORY AND NEW TARGET 4 AU

0 AU*

2 AU

2 AU

2007 New Horizons rounds Jupiter

Jupiter

4 AU

New Horizons (NH)

Mars Earth 2006 Launch

2010 Passes through Uranus orbit 2014 MU69 Kuiper Belt

Pluto Neptune NH Uranus Saturn

Kuiper Belt

40 AU

0AU 0

20 AU

20 AU

40 AU

Saturn At some point this fall, the spacecraft will fire its hydrazine thrusters and make a slight course adjustment toward an object roughly 28 miles in diameter and known as 2014 MU69. If NASA approves the extended mission, New Horizons will encounter, and make observations of, MU69 on Jan. 1, 2019. After passing the object, the probe will continue to travel toward interstellar space.

2015 New Horizons passes Pluto

2019 New Horizons passes MU69

MU69

MU69 NH

Pluto NH Neptune

Neptune

Pluto

Saturn Uranus

Kuiper Belt

Source: NASA

Saturn

Uranus

Kuiper Belt

*Astronomical units (One AU is the distance from Earth to the sun).

THE WASHINGTON POST

3 billion miles of space, we don’t have to build a spacecraft,” said the team leader, planetary scientist Alan Stern.

The scientific case for closely studying MU69 is that it’s different from Pluto, much smaller, a “cold, classical” Kuiper Belt object that is likely to have formed 4.6 billion years ago, at the birth of the solar system. “It is a completely new family of object,” said project scientist Hal Weaver of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, the mission headquarters.

On the other hand: This thing isn’t Pluto. It’s small. It will be hard to obtain images as dramatic as the ones New Horizons got when it buzzed within 7,800 miles of Pluto’s surface.

Project manager Glen Fountain said his team, which he says includes the best navigators in the world, can probably get the spacecraft within 15,000 miles of the target — and maybe much closer.

New Horizons skimmed Pluto 90 seconds earlier than expected and about 50 miles closer to the surface, said Mission Operations manager Alice Bowman.

“I am still amazed and in awe of what we accomplished as a team.

In some ways, it’s hard to digest it all,” Bowman wrote recently in an e-mail. “Maybe it’s because taking all those small, continued steps over these past years became a matter of course and when those last steps were taken, it was hard to fully comprehend the magnitude of what we’d done.”

There is, however, one major feat that New Horizons has yet to accomplish, other than taking the plasma and dust measurements and steering itself toward MU69.

It still has to tell Earth exactly what it saw at Pluto.

The team leaders keep reminding everyone that New Horizons is carrying a trove of data, including high-resolution imagery, that has yet to return home. The big Pluto download won’t be finished until about the end of October 2016. Transmission rates are slow, and will get even slower, as the distant spacecraft gets more distant. n

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2015

18

KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

How broken politics led to Holocaust N ON-FICTION

T BLACK EARTH The Holocaust as History and Warning

By Timothy Snyder Tim Duggan Books.

462 pp. $30

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REVIEWED BY

M ICHAEL R OTH

he title Timothy Snyder gives to the introduction of “Black Earth” is “Hitler’s World.” That’s his signal that the dictator’s ideology is essential for grasping the history of Nazi efforts to eliminate Jews from the planet. Although this may seem like common sense, many recent historians of the Holocaust have placed their emphasis on structural elements — economic, geopolitical, bureaucratic — reluctant to hinge so much on a single individual’s obsessive, paranoid ravings. In “Bloodlands” (2010), Snyder showed the ways in which Hitler and Stalin led regimes responsible for the conflagration that consumed 14 million people, and now in “Black Earth,” he zeroes in on the German dictator’s beliefs as the spark.

In “Black Earth,” we are reminded that for Hitler, Jews were the explanation for everything that went wrong. The health of the human race was dependent, he shrieked, on protecting it from Jewish pollution. There was talk among Nazis and others of isolating the malignancy — maybe shipping Jews to Madagascar would work. But Hitler decided that there was a greater purpose to the military conflict he had launched initially just for “room to live.” And that was the ultimate extermination of the Jews. His Final Solution.

The Führer’s worldview inspired Germans to become “entrepreneurs of violence”; he needed innovative techniques for mass murder to kill not only Jews but also the many other enemies blocking Germany’s historical destiny. By destroying a variety of European states, Germany created conditions of lawlessness that legitimized unthinkable atrocities. Ordinary men (mostly men) killed people (even little children) at close range and then returned to their regular routines. Some needed more alcohol to get by, but get by they did. They rounded up men, women and children, shot them in the head or the neck, piled up the corpses, covered

AUSCHWITZ MUSEUM VIA REUTERS

Prisoners in their barracks at Auschwitz, shortly after the liberation of the camp in January 1945.

them with dirt, and then went home to their families.

“Black Earth” explains how this became possible — and it took much more than ideological fury.

Destruction of political structures and social norms was necessary.

Snyder does not focus on Auschwitz, though he does devote a gruesome chapter to how the death camp has come to stand for the Holocaust more generally. He wants readers to understand that millions were killed by tens of thousands of Germans and their collaborators before anyone was deported to a camp to be gassed.

Snyder insists that shooting people over pits was the first and most important of the Nazi techniques of mass killing. How was it possible that “people not that different from us murdered people not very different from us”? Some historians stress that anti-Semitism was the core motivating factor, noting age-old Jew hatred in the areas of Eastern Europe where most of the killings took place.

Snyder argues vehemently against this, showing there is no correla-

tion between supposed levels of anti-Semitism and the levels of killing during the war.

He finds instead that the intensity of killings correlates with the degree of political destruction a state incurred. The places where the survival rates of Jews were the lowest were those countries that had been occupied by the Soviets and then reoccupied by the Nazis.

This “double occupation” destroyed civil society and the rule of law, and in this emptiness the German forces created a “special kind of politics” through which individuals could show their allegiance to the new order by killing Jews.

Again and again he shows that depriving Jews of citizenship, making them stateless, was key to their mass murder. In countries where some state power remained (like Denmark), survival rates for Jews were much higher than in countries (like Estonia) where the double occupation destroyed local laws. “Wherever the state had been destroyed,” Snyder writes, “almost all of the Jews were murdered.”

While “Black Earth” opens with

“Hitler’s World,” its conclusion is titled “Our World.” Alas, Snyder is on much surer ground when dealing with the past than with our present.

He is right, however, to believe that his historical account has a vital contemporary lesson, the “warning” in the book’s subtitle.

He notes the “common American error . . . to believe that freedom is the absence of state authority,” and he argues effectively against both the left- and right-wing versions of this error. The failure to recognize that it is the state and the rule of law that make modern life possible, he argues, creates conditions for new cycles of horrific violence.

Of course, strong states can also initiate these cycles.

It is a testament to his intellectual and moral resources that he can so deeply contemplate this horrific past in ways that strengthen his commitment to building a future based on law, rights and citizenship. n Roth is an author and president of Wesleyan University.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2015

19

BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Feisty heroine isn’t bound by norms

The Doors’ short, turbulent life

F ICTION

N ON-FICTION

C

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REVIEWED BY

C AROL M EMMOTT

onstance Kopp, the feisty heroine of Amy Stewart’s charming novel “Girl Waits With Gun,” sounds like the creation of a master crime writer. At nearly 6 feet tall, Constance is a formidable character who can pack heat, deliver a zinger and catch a criminal without missing a beat. Based on the little-known story of the real Constance Kopp, one of America’s first female deputy sheriffs, the novel is an entertaining and enlightening story of how far one woman will go to protect her family.

Like the real figure, Stewart’s fictional counterpart is drawn into her profession literally by accident. In 1914, Kopp and her sisters, Norma and Fleurette, were riding in their horse-drawn buggy on a New Jersey road when they were hit by a car driven by Henry Kaufman, a wealthy and pugnacious factory owner. Constance demanded that Kaufman pay $50 for damages. He not only refused but threatened the sisters with bodily harm and fired shots at their house.

With the encouragement of the Hackensack, N.J., sheriff, Constance helped bring down Kaufman, a job that meant participating in a street-corner sting in which Kopp carried a revolver in her purse.

In “Girl Waits With Gun,” Stewart, author of “The Drunken Botanist” and “Wicked Bugs,” draws on little-known newspaper articles and other archival material — the title of the book is taken from a newspaper headline — embellishing the limited historical information by using her wily imagination.

The result is a tale that’s as much the story of a woman who refuses to be bested by a bully as it is a chronicle of the social restrictions placed on women at that time. (Kopp herself had no interest in marriage and had wanted to be a lawyer or nurse

but was dissuaded from these careers by her mother.)

Stewart’s descriptions of her characters, even the minor ones, are lively and delightful. The matron of a home for unwed mothers is “a short, squat woman with hair the color of a cast-iron pan and a disposition to match,” and a private detective wears “a black hat that a small child could have hidden inside.”

But it’s the usually prim Constance, suddenly unleashing her robust sensibilities, who steals the show. W hen the diminutive Kaufman threatens Fleurette, Constance throws him against a wall “hard enough that his skull cracked the plaster.” It’s a shocking moment that, as with many others in the book, Stewart imbues with humor. “If you’d like to pick a fight with a man your own size,” Kaufman says while Constance pins him to the wall, “I’ll send one over.”

A secret from Constance’s youth plays a key role in “Girl Waits With Gun,” as does a subplot surrounding a factory girl whose baby disappears. But mainly, this funny, well-plotted novel describes how one incredibly strong woman breaks the rules regarding ladylike behavior in the early 20th century.

When our statuesque heroine applies for a job as a store detective, the petite interviewer explains that the profession calls for someone unobtrusive. “You’re better suited for something more rough and tumble,” she tells Constance before showing her the door.

Stewart seems to be keeping the door open. At the novel’s end, the sheriff offers Constance a most unsuitable job for a woman.

Even readers with limited powers of deduction can surmise that we haven’t heard the last of Constance — or her gun. n Memmott frequently reviews books for The Washington Post.

I GIRL WAITS WITH GUN

By Amy Stewart Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 416 pp. $27

LOVE BECOMES A FUNERAL PYRE A Biography of the Doors

By Mick Wall Chicago Review. 416 pp. $28.95

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REVIEWED BY

D AVID K IRBY

t’s hard for a book about the Doors, even one as good as this one by Mick Wall, to be anything other than a biography of Jim Morrison. The troubled, charismatic lead singer with fashion-model good looks and a honeyed baritone propelled the band to stardom even as he seemed to do everything he could to alienate the other members of the group and ensure its failure.

Morrison burned up all the oxygen in every room. He was a nasty, nasty man. Then again, many of the greatest artists are total amateurs as human beings.

Morrison was a handful early on; he was kicked out of Cub Scouts for flouting the rules and mocking his den mother, and many high-school classmates remember him as angry and drunk.

Once out of the house, he seemed to have no relationship with his father, a Navy rear admiral, and he told people that his parents were dead when they weren’t. Arrested for a prank as a freshman at Florida State University, he ended up at UCLA, graduating from its film school in 1965.

It was at UCLA that he met Ray Manzarek, also a film student but an accomplished musician as well.

Born in Chicago to a hardworking immigrant family, Manzarek started piano lessons early. He was good at sports, but once a friend with a portable radio introduced him to “the far right-hand side of the dial,” he gave up athletics for the blues sounds of John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters and, later, the early rock music of Chuck Berry and Little Richard.

Although Morrison and Manzarek had known each other in school, they didn’t really connect until the day in July 1965 when they bumped into each other on Venice Beach and the lead-singerto-be said, “I’ve been writing some songs.” When Manzarek heard his now-sinuous, sexy friend sing hesitantly and then with growing confidence, he said, “We’re gonna make a million dollars!” Sitting

there in the sand, Manzarek could already hear himself “comping” behind Morrison’s voice, playing jazz-rock mixed with a Latin sound as the singer went where the song took him. It was in a Transcendental Meditation class — remember, this is the ’60s — that Manzarek met the two other future Doors, drummer John Densmore and guitarist Robby Krieger.

The key to managing the band, according to Elektra Records head Jac Holzman, who saw the Doors as a way to expand his label’s mainly folkie offerings, was to keep Morrison happy. The other band members couldn’t live with Morrison, but they knew they’d be nothing without his “strange druggy charisma, without his sepulchral words.”

Pop music succeeds best when it connects with its time, and if other groups did that by singing of summer romance and sunny days at the beach, Doors songs like “The End” stepped back into literature and myth to describe epic struggles and deep wounds. A young man in a Beach Boys song knows he’s going to have a great day surfing; the same young man in Jim Morrison’s world is terrified that his parents’ generation will send him to Vietnam to die.

Morrison took that jaded view a step further. He appears to have been genuinely suicidal: He’d long been known to get sloppy drunk and then take whatever drug anyone handed him. After he quit the band and moved to Paris, he added a type of heroin known as china white to his usual cocktail of whatever was available, eventually overdosing in a seedy club. It was 1971; he was 27.

The real heroes of “Love Becomes a Funeral Pyre” are Manzarek and Holzman, who found the gifts in a man who wanted to throw them away, nurtured them, and kept them alive for as long as they could. n Kirby is the author of “Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ’n’ Roll.”

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2015

20

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Birthers, ‘Trumpists’ and a crisis for the GOP DANIELLE ALLEN is a political theorist at Harvard University and a contributing columnist for The Post.

The story line around Donald Trump’s “rise” has got the narrative wrong. It mistakes the man for the movement.

While we do need to reckon with what Trump himself means for U.S. politics, we need to reckon even more urgently with what can now be called the “Trumpists,” a solidly right­wing ethno­nationalist voting bloc that has been growing since the mid­1990s.

What points to this story? The numbers capturing the ebb and flow in the belief that Barack Obama is a Muslim and the crisis over the president’s birth certificate. Those are the ones to watch.

During most of 2008, leading up to the presidential election, the number of poll respondents who identified Obama as a Muslim was stable at about 12 percent. By 2010, however, it had risen to 18 percent.

And according to Gallup, the release of Obama’s long-form birth certificate in April 2011 brought only to 47 percent, from 38 percent, the number of Americans who said that Obama was “definitely” born in the United States. Another 18 percent said only that he was “probably” born in the United States. Even after the release of the birth certificate, 23 percent of Republicans continued to believe Obama was born overseas. These, I suggest, are your Trump voters.

Recent polling has in fact confirmed that Trump, a particularly prominent “birther” in 2010 and 2011, is tapping into this constituency. According to Public Policy Polling, 66 percent of his supporters believe Obama is Muslim and 61 percent think he was not born in the United States.

The Trumpists are our equivalent of Britain’s U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) and France’s National Front, both anti-immigrant, nationalist parties. For the past five years, Trumpists have clocked in at about 20 percent of the electorate,

if one tracks numbers of committed “Obama is a Muslimists.” This makes them even more powerful than Britain’s UKIP, which won 12.6 percent of the vote in May’s parliamentary election. These numbers put the Trumpists on par with the National Front in France, which in March elections took 25 percent of the vote to the 32 percent that went to the centerright party of Nicholas Sarkozy.

The critical difference between our nationalist faction and the European ones is that their parliamentary systems register them as “parties,” whereas our two-party model makes it harder to see that what we’re confronting truly is the rise of a new party.

Provided, that is, the Republicans don’t sell their souls.

If the Republicans can hang on to the convictions that make them the party of Lincoln, we ought to see the party split. For the good of the country, we should hope for it.

Two larger shifts in our sociopolitical landscape provide the framework necessary for understanding the Trumpists.

MARK WALLHEISER/GETTY IMAGES

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump greets supporters after his rally on Aug. 21 in Mobile, Ala.

First, there is the dramatic movement of the United States toward becoming a majorityminority country, where no ethnic group is in the majority.

We have already crossed several Rubicons. In 2011, new births were majority minority for the first time, and 2014 was the first year that minority students were in the majority at U.S. public schools. Several states are already majority minority.

Predictions for when the whole country will become majority minority shift, but there is no question this will happen within the lifetimes of today’s young people. It is unsurprising that our clear movement in this direction should provoke resistance from those whose wellbeing, status and self-esteem are connected to historical privileges of “whiteness.”

Second, there is the Internet.

Digital communications technologies have enabled geographically dispersed people with niche interests to find one another and form communities.

For instance, scholars see the recent impact of the Libertarian Party on policy — beginning with successful efforts to thwart banking regulations in 1999 — as being due to the lower barriers to political influence afforded by digital tools.

Importantly, the first uses of the Internet to build political solidarity among those with

fringe political interests emerged on the right. The Drudge Report started in 1994 and Free Republic in 1996. The liberal MoveOn was created only in 1998 — to respond to online anti-Clinton efforts — but it didn’t achieve prominence until 2003. The other major leftleaning sites appeared after George W. Bush’s election: Democratic Underground in 2001, Daily Kos in 2002 and Huffington Post in 2005.

In this country, we would by now have Trumpists, libertarians and netizens in government, if we had a parliamentary system. But because we don’t, we have a very weird, historically important presidential campaign. The weirdness comes from the fact that it is unfolding inside the structure of our creaky, 19thcentury two-party framework.

The real story, then, is not about this or that candidate but about precisely how the realignment of U.S. public opinion away from the two major political parties will shake out and about who or what the major parties will sell down the river while trying to save themselves as the “big tents” they need to be to win elections. And the burning question inside this story is whether our two-party system can survive the digital era. Or, perhaps better, how to ensure that it doesn’t so that we can save our center-right party, the Republicans, for the center. n

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2015

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Obama’s shameful stance on Syria FRED HIATT is the editorial page editor of The Post.

This may be the most surprising of President Obama’s foreignpolicy legacies: not just that he presided over a humanitarian and cultural disaster of epochal proportions, but that he soothed the American people into feeling no responsibility for the tragedy.

Starvation in Biafra a generation ago sparked a movement.

Synagogues and churches a decade ago mobilized to relieve misery in Darfur. When the Taliban in 2001 destroyed ancient statues of Buddha at Bamiyan, the world was appalled at the lost heritage.

Today the Islamic State is blowing up precious cultural monuments in Palmyra, and half of all Syrians have been displaced — as if, on a proportional basis, 160 million Americans had been made homeless. More than a quartermillion have been killed. Yet the “Save Darfur” signs have not given way to “Save Syria.”

One reason is that Obama — who ran for president on the promise of restoring the United States’ moral stature — has constantly reassured Americans that doing nothing is the smart and moral policy. He has argued, at times, that there was nothing the United States could do, belittling the Syrian opposition as “former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth.”

He has argued that we would only make things worse — “I am

more mindful probably than most,” he told the New Republic in 2013, “of not only our incredible strengths and capabilities, but also our limitations.”

He has implied that because we can’t solve every problem, maybe we shouldn’t solve any. “How do I weigh tens of thousands who’ve been killed in Syria versus the tens of thousands who are currently being killed in the Congo?” he asked (though at the time thousands were not being killed in Congo).

On those rare occasions when political pressure or the horrors of Syrian suffering threatened to overwhelm any excuse for inaction, he promised action, in statements or White House leaks: training for the opposition, a safe zone on the Turkish border. Once public attention moved on, the plans

were abandoned or scaled back to meaningless proportions (training 50 soldiers per year, no action on the Turkish border).

Perversely, the worse Syria became, the more justified the president seemed for staying aloof; steps that might have helped in 2012 seemed ineffectual by 2013, and actions that could have saved lives in 2013 would not have been up to the challenge presented by 2014.

Most critically, inaction was sold not as a necessary evil but as a notable achievement: The United States at last was leading with the head, not the heart, and with modesty, not arrogance.

“Realists” pointed out that the United States gets into trouble when it lets ideals or emotions rule — when it sends soldiers to feed the hungry in Somalia, for example, only to lose them, as told in “ Black Hawk Down,” and turn tail.

The realists were right that the United States has to consider interests as well as values, must pace itself and can’t save everyone. But a values-free argument ought at least to be able to show that the ends have justified the means, whereas the strategic results of Obama’s disengagement have been nearly as disastrous as the human consequences.

When Obama pulled all U.S. troops out of Iraq, critics worried there would be instability; none envisioned the emergence of a full-blown terrorist state. When he announced in August 2011 that “the time has come for President Assad to step aside,” critics worried the words might prove empty — but few imagined the extent of the catastrophe: not just the savagery of chemical weapons and “barrel bombs,” but also the Islamic State’s recruitment of thousands of foreign fighters, its spread from Libya to Afghanistan, the danger to the U.S. homeland that has alarmed U.S. intelligence officials, the refugees destabilizing Europe.

Even had Obama’s policy succeeded in purely realist terms, though, something would have been lost in the anesthetization of U.S. opinion.

Yes, the nation’s outrage over the decades has been uneven, at times hypocritical, at times selfserving.

But there also has been something to be admired in America’s determination to help — to ask, even if we cannot save everyone in Congo, can we not save some people in Syria?

Obama’s successful turning of that question on its head is nothing to be proud of. n

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2015

22

OPINIONS

BY WALT HANDELSMAN FOR THE NEW ORLEANS ADVOCATE

Clinton can’t manufacture trust KATHLEEN PARKER writes a twice-weekly column on politics and culture. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary In 2010.

It’s no longer enough to be a happy warrior; now our candidates must be joyful!

Oh, joie.

Jeb Bush started the joy bender recently when he told a New Hampshire audience that a conservative could win the White House by “campaigning with his arms wide open, with joy in his heart, speaking about the hopes and aspirations of the people, being on the side of the people that right now don’t see their lives in the future being better than what they have today.”

Next came Hillary Clinton’s response on Sept. 5 to a reporter’s question about whether she, too, considers herself “joyful.”

“I do,” she said. “Off we go, joyfully,” she added as she stepped away from the podium.

Then, turning back to the press gaggle, she snapped her fingers and said, “Let’s get some joy going.”

This is Clinton’s renowned if scantly shared sense of humor.

And truth be known, few are better with a withering quip than she. My favorite was during a 2008 appearance with then-Sen. Barack Obama. Clinton was clearly fed up with the media fawning over her opponent. With the feigned sweetness of a Southern debutante, she inquired, “Maybe we should ask Barack if he’s comfortable and needs

another pillow.” C’mon, it’s funny.

More humor is always better, I say, and Clinton may lead the pack on this score. Think it through. Bush is a good man and probably really does feel that joy in his heart. I think it has something to do with being Catholic and the confessional.

Donald Trump is so funny at times he ought to be doing standup. But his humor is meanspirited and has all the nuance and wit of a prep school bully with a shiny, new lacrosse stick. And the rest? Bernie Sanders? Funny as a socialist. Scott Walker?

Hilarious. Marco Rubio? So earnest. Ben Carson? That giggle box.

Clinton’s humor, which can range from the self-effacing (“The hair is real, the color isn’t”) to the pinioned dart (see Obama),

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY DANZIGER

reveals not so much meanness as contempt. Her final quip to those reporters Saturday wasn’t an invitation to join the joyful fray. It was more like the verbal equivalent of her middle finger.

In a snark-eat-snark world, Hillary Clinton is a Great White.

Or, lest the Literals become fretful, a tiger. Tigress. Whatever.

Humor is near impossible when outrage, lips pursed, lies ready to pounce on every sentence.

The Clinton people (her sworn loyalists?) understand the value of humor in a candidate and especially in one so scripted and studied, which is to say, not spontaneous and, therefore, not authentic. If you ain’t got that authenticity, honey, you got nothin’. Thus, her campaign is seeking opportunities for Clinton to be funny and to reveal her more-human side.

It isn’t enough, apparently, that she’s a cooing grandmother, or a gal who chokes up when she talks to women about the travails of the trail. Or when she talks to women about being a woman, which is, if you dozed off for a second, very, very hard.

Thus, as this fall season of let’storture-the-candidates unfolds, we’ll be hearing more laughs, more joking around when appropriate (the Clinton campaign has recognized that

joking about the e-mail server isn’t funny anymore), and, yes, more spontaneity — because spontaneity really works best when it’s planned.

However joy trickles down to “everyday Americans,” it’s clear that these new strategic guidelines are mere distractions from the dreadful headlines sure to continue.

A special intelligence review of two e-mails sent to Clinton on her private server concluded that they were “Top Secret” — contrary to statements of the Clinton campaign. One of the emails concerned North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. Her poll numbers are sliding backward and she continues to suffer a trust deficit.

I concur with those who insist that Clinton can’t do anything right no matter what. Her critics are worse than the Literals. But no matter how warm, friendly, loving, smart, doting or emoting she is, you can’t manufacture trust, which is what elections ultimately come down to. Not from whom you’d rather take that 3 a.m. call, but whom you trust, rephrased by one of Clinton’s people, “to address the problems that keep you up at night.”

This is the crucial question before us — and my money’s on Ambien. n

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2015

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Shakespeare BY

A RI F RIEDLANDER

Because we so highly value our estimations of Shakespeare’s talents, we tend to make up myths about his life and work to justify them.

Yet dispelling these myths does not mean diminishing Shakespeare and our appreciation of him; it opens new ways to understand his works and their relationship to the culture that gave rise to them.

1

Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare’s plays.

Roland Emmerich’s 2011 film “Anonymous,” which dramatizes the theory that the Earl of Oxford (Edward de Vere) was the author of Shakespeare’s works, has given fresh life to this stubborn myth.

Shakespeare, however, was a well-known playwright, actor and theater co-owner. Tales of such an elaborate conspiracy — which would involve countless actors, writers, printers, publishers, servants and neighbors — surely would have surfaced in the 200 years before 1805, when James Cowell supposedly recorded his doubts in a manuscript called “Some reflections on the life of William Shakespeare.” Then-new discoveries, including records that Shakespeare hoarded grain during famine while others starved, proved unsavory to Victorians who venerated the nobility they saw in his work. So they decided to find another, more noble, author.

In fact, almost all Shakespeare denial is rooted in the belief that the greatness of the works is not reflected in what we know of the man. This idea relies on the fallacy that we can ascertain the truth of a person’s character from the fictions he or she creates.

2

Shakespeare had a uniquely huge vocabulary.

One of the most oft-repeated observations about what made Shakespeare great is that he possessed an extraordinary vocabulary and a unique facility for coining words. Estimates of Shakespeare’s vocabulary range

from 20,000 to 30,000 words, depending on how they are counted.

This may sound like a lot, but claims of “exceptionality” require context — exceptional compared to whom? Hugh Craig, a Shakespearean scholar with expertise in statistics, recently published an essay that analyzes Shakespeare’s works and those of his peers to compare how large most Renaissance playwrights’ vocabularies were and how many words they invented.

Shakespeare’s relative vocabulary size came out exactly in the middle — with John Webster at the top and Shakespeare ensconced between Robert Greene and John Lyly.

3

Shakespeare was uneducated.

The collection of his dramatic works, known as the First Folio, contains a poem by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s creative and commercial rival.

Jonson assures the dead playwright that his artistic reputation is secure, “though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek.” This comment, along with the fact that Shakespeare did not attend university, has been read as implying that Shakespeare was either a brilliant autodidact or a well-known fraud. He was neither.

To Jonson, a renowned neoclassicist, Shakespeare’s Latin may have seemed small, but that doesn’t mean he was poorly educated. If his education was like those of similar socioeconomic status, Shakespeare probably attended the king’s Free Grammar School

FOLGER SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY

at Stratford. Shakespeare’s plays, particularly “Love’s Labor’s Lost” and “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” dramatize the life and lessons of the Elizabethan grammar school classroom, and his work throughout shows an awareness of its curriculum.

4

Shakespeare was a solitary artist.

Scholars have long recognized that collaboration was the rule in the early modern theater, rather than the exception.

Jonathan Hope’s linguistic analysis of the plays suggests that Shakespeare collaborated with at least three dramatists — John Fletcher, Thomas Middleton and George Wilkins — on at least four works: “Henry VIII” (or “All Is True”); “The Two Noble Kinsmen”; “Timon of Athens”; and “Pericles, Prince of Tyre.” A 17th-century publishing archive also records Shakespeare as collaborating with Fletcher on the lost play “Cardenio,” based on the Spanish novel “Don Quixote.”

5

Shakespeare’s love poetry was written about a woman.

The Oscar-winning film

“Shakespeare in Love” portrays Shakespeare sending an aristocratic woman florid sonnets to proclaim his love and admiration. As Valerie Traub has pointed out, however, the movie overlooks the fact that the first 126 of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets were probably addressed to a male beloved, “Mr. W.H.,” whom the 1609 first edition names as “the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets.”

Interestingly, the Renaissance didn’t attach the same stigma to male-male attraction that later generations would. In an influential essay, Margreta de Grazia argued that the original “scandal” of Shakespeare’s sonnets was the 28 poems addressed to the unnamed woman traditionally called the “Dark Lady.” Her darker skin, de Grazia said, would have been a far greater barrier to a socially acceptable romance than Mr. W.H.’s gender. n Friedlander is an assistant professor of English at the University of Mississippi.

He is writing a book, “Rogue Sexuality: The Erotics of Social Status in Early Modern England,” about sex, crime and class in Shakespeare’s era.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2015

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