The Washington Post National Weekly - October 2, 2016

Share of Latinos among eligible voters in state

Politics Enabler or family defender? 4

florida

nevada

colorado

virginia

18.1

17.2

14.5

4.6

Nation Tech assist for doctor exams 9

Data crunch Power for Latino voters 17

5 Myths The Middle Ages 23 michigan

ABCDE pennsylvania

wisconsin

north carolina

4.5

3.6

3.4

3.1

NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2016

.

iowa

ohio

new hampshire

2.9

2.3

2.2

IN COLLABORATION WITH

1002 Crunched.indd 1

Guns & Soda

9/15/2016 6:36:25 PM

In Jim Cooley’s open-carry America, even a trip to Walmart can require an AR-15 PAGE12

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2016

2

Foothills Magazine presents its 5th Annual

PHOTO CONTEST

Enter your photos taken in North Central Washington for the chance to win cash prizes and see your photos published in the magazine! Photos will be judged in two categories – human subjects and landscapes.

Get all the details at photos.ncwfoothills.com Entries must be submitted by January 4, 2017

North Central Washington’s lifestyle magazine foothills.wenatcheeworld.com

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

THE FIX

Almost perfect BY

A MBER P HILLIPS

P

resident Obama was just months away from accomplishing something very few presidents have ever accomplished — the presidential equivalent of a perfect game. And now Congress is scoring a run in the ninth inning.

This past week, both the Senate and House voted to override his veto on a bill allowing 9/11 families to sue Saudi Arabia for not doing enough to prevent the terrorist attack. It was the first time during Obama’s tenure that Congress has overridden one of his vetoes.

It also means Obama will have just missed going down in history as the first president in nearly a half-century to avoid any overrides.

The last time an administration made it eight years without having Congress override one veto was the Kennedy/Johnson administration, almost 50 years ago. John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson were able to avoid veto battles with Congress in large part because Congress was controlled by their own party while they were in the White House.

Obama has had to deal with the opposite: At least one chamber of Congress has been controlled by Republicans for six out of the eight years of his presidency. Even though Congress has been historically unproductive during the past few years of Obama’s tenure, Obama has vetoed as much legislation as the last president, George W. Bush. Both have issued 12 vetoes. Congress overrode four of Bush’s.

“If Obama had made it [without a veto override], it would have been arguably the most impressive act along the lines of any president in American history,” said Brooklyn College professor Robert David Johnson, Johnson said most veto overrides happen toward the end of a president’s tenure, when his political power is weakest.

That seems to be what’s happening here.

KLMNO WEEKLY

C-SPAN 2 VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

The Senate on Wednesday voted to override President Obama’s veto of Sept. 11 legislation, setting the stage for the contentious bill to become law.

Throughout Obama’s presidency, the one group he could count on in Congress to back him up has been House Democrats. But no longer — at least, not on this politically sensitive issue.

House Democrats need to worry about their own reelection more than earning favor with a president who’s going to be out of office in a few months.

Voting against a bill that 9/11 families want is politically risky territory.

“You could imagine attack ads,” Johnson said: “Congressperson X stood with the Saudi terrorists.”

Obama was not happy about it. White House press secretary Josh Earnest called the vote “the single most embarrassing thing the United States Senate has done possibly since 1983.”

Because no presidential veto records will be

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2016 The Washington Post / Year 2, No. 51

tied or broken during Obama’s tenure, here are some of history’s veto override records, courtesy of Johnson: • There have been only 110 veto overrides in U.S. history.

• The president with the most veto overrides is Andrew Johnson, at 15.

• Among post-World War II presidents, the record for most veto overrides belongs to presidents Harry S. Truman and Gerald R. Ford, each with 12.

• Modern-day vetoes are actually relatively rare. Truman vetoed 250 bills — President George W. Bush and Obama vetoed 12 each.

• Up until the Civil War, presidents rarely vetoed legislation. The veto was considered to be used only when the president thought a bill Congress passed was unconstitutional. n

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

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Jim Cooley carries his AR-15 rifle into his house after getting it repaired in Winder, Ga. Cooley, who also owns a 9mm handgun, almost never leaves his home unarmed. Photograph by JABIN BOTSFORD, The Washington Post

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2016

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POLITICS

Walking fine line with Bill’s accusers BY

S HAWN B OBURG

H

illary Clinton has wrestled with allegations surrounding her husband’s infidelities for much of their 40-year marriage, including a sexual harassment lawsuit, a grand jury investigation and an impeachment vote centered on his untruthfulness about a relationship with a White House intern.

Now, her Republican opponent Donald Trump and his surrogates have signaled that he may bring up the subject in the next presidential debate, treacherous territory, given his own infidelities and treatment of women.

Clinton’s friends say they have seen her deal with Bill Clinton’s conduct before, bristling at threats and countering them with steely determination. Her reaction, said longtime Arkansas friend Jim Blair, is to face accusers and respond thusly: “These people are not going to run over us.”

Her detractors, though, say that Clinton has unfairly lashed out over the years at the women involved in her husband’s indiscretions. Her responses have forced her to walk a fine line during the campaign on sexual assault issues, even as she builds strong political support among female voters.

Trump and his backers have kept the subject alive with taunting social-media messages, and this past week, Trump congratulated himself for taking the high road Monday in the first debate by not saying something “extremely rough” about the Clinton family.

He added that he might not show the same restraint at the next public forum on Oct. 9.

Eric Trump said Tuesday that his father had displayed “courage” by not waging the attack, even as Trump’s surrogates began to do so on national television. Clinton’s allies say she is well-equipped to fend off the attacks.

Clinton’s Little Rock pastor, the Rev. Ed Matthews, recalled a conversation with her in 1992 after he noticed explicit drawings of Bill Clinton in the parking lot just outside the church that Hillary and Chelsea Clinton attended.

COURTESY OF PRESIDENT WILLIAM J. CLINTON LIBRARY

Democratic nominee is in a familiar place as Trump taunts her The pastor said he asked her in a phone call how she was dealing with it.

She responded bluntly, the Methodist minister said in an interview, telling him that her family had dealt with such rumors for years and would get through it.

The Trump campaign has argued that the issue facing Hillary Clinton as a candidate is not the behavior of her husband but the role she played in shaping responses to accusers. She discredited claims later revealed to be true and worked behind the scenes to help manage the allegations, according to former aides.

In November, the issue surfaced again after the Democratic candidate sent out a tweet saying that

assault victims deserve to be believed. At a public forum in December, a questioner confronted Clinton and asked whether her comment also applied to her husband’s accusers.

“I would say that everybody should be believed at first,” she said, “until they are disbelieved based on evidence.”

On Wednesday, Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said in a statement: “After his disastrous debate performance and his sexist attack on a former Miss Universe over her weight, Donald Trump is now trying to deflect by going after Hillary Clinton about her marriage.

“While Trump and lieutenants like Roger Stone and David Bossie

Hillary and Bill Clinton have their photo taken on their wedding day, Oct. 11, 1975, in Fayetteville, Ark.

may want to dredge up failed attacks from the 1990s, as many Republicans have warned, this is a mistake that is going to backfire. He can try to distract from his demeaning comments against women, but if Donald Trump thinks these attacks against Hillary Clinton are going to throw her off her game and what matters to move this country forward, he is wrong.”

Hillary Rodham moved to Arkansas in 1974, and Blair said rumors of Bill’s womanizing were not a dealbreaker for Hillary before she agreed to marry him in 1975.

“She knew he liked attention, and he liked attention from anyone,” Blair said. “From the barber, the shoeshine boy, the homeless man. It didn’t matter.”

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POLITICS Bill Clinton was elected governor of Arkansas in 1978 and served as attitudes were shifting about the relevance of politicians’ sex lives.

Presidential candidate Gary Hart’s overnight cruise with a young woman doomed his hopes in 1987.

Not long after, Bill Clinton’s thenchief of staff Betsey Wright confronted him and told him to come clean with his wife, Wright wrote in emails now archived at the University of Arkansas. Wright declined interview requests.

A marital crisis erupted while Bill Clinton was governor, and Hillary Clinton’s biographer Carl Bernstein wrote in “A Woman In Charge” that it involved his lengthy affair with a Little Rock woman.

Hillary Clinton may have become aware of her husband’s straying, “but she never accepted it,” said her longtime friend Ann Henry.

Hillary Clinton has been forthcoming about these painful early times. She told Talk magazine in 1998 that the couple confronted his cheating in the late 1980s. “I thought he understood it, but he didn’t go deep enough or work hard enough,” she said.

Blair said Hillary Clinton realized that the infidelities threatened more than their marriage.

“Her idea, I think, was, if he’s going to be politically successful they have to become more conventional people who are more in tune with values of generations other than theirs,” Blair said.

When Bill Clinton launched a presidential run in 1991, his wife and senior staff considered how to deal with what came to be known as “bimbo eruptions.”

“I think, by then, Hillary had a very good notion of Bill’s behavior,” said her longtime friend Nancy Pietrafesa. “Maybe she endured it, but I don’t think she condoned it.”

Nevertheless, Hillary Clinton dismissed an accusation made by Gennifer Flowers, the singer who sold her story to a supermarket tabloid after having previously denied an affair. In an ABC News interview, she called Flowers “some failed cabaret singer who doesn’t even have much of a résumé to fall back on.” She told Esquire magazine in 1992 that if she had the chance to cross-examine Flowers, “I mean, I would crucify her.”

Hillary Clinton’s support for her husband was crucial, and she sat by his side during a crucial “60 Minutes” interview, saying she

JON LEVY/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

“It was such a familiar scenario that I had little trouble believing the accusations were groundless.”

Hillary Clinton writing about how Bill claimed Monica Lewinsky had misinterpreted his attention

was not like the victim in Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man.” Campaign pollster Stan Greenberg said at the time that the public would disregard the allegations if they believed he had been truthful to his wife.

Six years later, Bill Clinton acknowledged a sexual encounter with Flowers.

As other women emerged, Hillary Clinton helped forge aggressive defenses.

Former White House press secretary George Stephanopoulos recalled in his memoir discussing a woman’s allegation published in Penthouse magazine. He said that after her husband dismissed it as untrue during a meeting, Hillary Clinton said, “We have to destroy her story.”

By July 1992, the campaign hired private detective Jack Palladino to investigate the accusers involved in two dozen allegations.

In 1994, former Arkansas state employee Paula Jones alleged in a lawsuit that Bill Clinton groped her in a hotel room three years earlier. Hillary Clinton wrote in her autobiography, “Living History,” that she erred in opposing an early settlement.

Eventually, Bill Clinton settled for $850,000. During discovery, Jones’s attorneys found out about White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Her husband denied the relationship, and Hillary Clinton blamed the allegations on a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”

Asked on “Good Morning America” if her husband had been truthful, she said, “I know he has.”

A former White House aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk about private discussions said Hillary Clinton blamed the scandal on political enemies and insisted that privacy was sacred.

Bill Clinton admitted his untruthfulness in August 1998.

Hillary Clinton wrote in her autobiography that her husband claimed Lewinsky had misinterpreted his attention. “It was such a familiar scenario that I had little trouble believing the accusations were groundless,” she wrote.

A chill fell over the White House as the truth about Lewinsky emerged, former staffers and friends said.

“She had to do what she had always done before: swallow her

First lady Hillary Clinton talks with “Today” show host Matt Lauer during a 1998 interview.

Clinton responded to questions about her husband's alleged affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

KLMNO WEEKLY

doubts, stand by her man and savage his enemies,” Stephanopoulos wrote, describing Hillary Clinton’s reaction.

“I think it was obvious she was more than mad, more than upset,” said Mary Mel French, a White House aide during the Clinton years. “She wasn’t speaking to him. . . . It took a long time for that to settle down.”

Hillary Clinton did not speak publicly about Lewinsky and confided in few people. Matthews, her Little Rock pastor, said he offered to listen, but she warned him that he might be subpoenaed.

“She’s not the type of person who calls friends and cries about it,” Henry said.

Hillary Clinton opened up to Blair’s wife, Diane, a few weeks later, according to a diary kept by the now-deceased friend. “She thinks she was not smart enough, not sensitive enough, not free enough of her own concerns and struggles,” Diane Blair wrote. “It was a lapse, but she says to his credit he tried to break it off, tried to pull away, tried to manage someone who was clearly a ‘narcissistic loony toon;’ but it was beyond control.”

Lewinsky wrote in Vanity Fair in 2014 that she found Hillary Clinton’s “impulse to blame the Woman — not only me, but herself — troubling.” She declined an interview request.

Accuser Juanita Broaddrick, whose claim of a 1978 sexual assault has been denied by the Clintons, thinks Hillary Clinton was too passive. “I always felt if she’d been a stronger person . . . she could have done something about his behavior,” she said.

In 2000, while running for the U.S. Senate, Hillary Clinton was asked whether she misled the public by defending her husband. “It is something that I regret deeply that anyone had to go through,” she said. “And I wish that we all could look at it from the perspective of history, but we can’t yet.”

In her treatment of the accusers, Trump has called Clinton an enabler. Her friends say it’s much more benign.

“I think she felt that she had committed her life to this guy,” Jim Blair said. “They can debate politics from breakfast until bedtime and never get tired of it. She wanted to spend the rest of her life with him. She loved him. It’s as simple as that.” n

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POLITICS

World trade stalls as attacks pick up

BY A NA S WANSON AND Y LAN Q . M UI

T

he steady march of globalization that has powered the world economy for 30 years is stalling out at a time when leading political figures have become increasingly hostile to international trade.

The World Trade Organization said this past week that growth in global trade would fall to 1.7 percent this year, the slowest pace since the 2009 financial crisis and part of a vicious cycle that has dragged down broader economic growth. Formerly highflying countries such as China and Brazil are spending less on manufacturing equipment and railroads, while stalwarts such as Europe and Japan are fighting the perilous phenomenon of falling prices known as deflation — leaving nations with little appetite for trading with one another.

Economists say the slowdown in trade could carry significant risks for American workers. Although advocates of trade barriers say they could protect more jobs from going overseas, most economists say tariffs would raise costs for American manufacturers and consumers, imperiling an already fragile economy.

The WTO report comes on the heels of the first presidential debate, in which Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton showed unusual agreement in sharply criticizing past trade deals and questioning the benefits of approving a new agreement with 11 countries along the Pacific Rim. Instead, Clinton called for “smart, fair trade deals.” Trump, who has made opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership a centerpiece of his campaign, threatened to raise tariffs and pull out of existing pacts.

But the wave of globalization that sparked political outrage is actually already waning.

China’s economy is slowing after years of driving trade growth as it gobbled up raw materials and exported goods around the world. Falling commodity prices have pushed Brazil, another major exporter, deeper into reces-

ALY SONG/REUTERS

While Trump and Clinton criticize agreements, the global economy continues to slow down sion. Advanced economies such as the United States, Europe and Japan have been slow to recover, weighing on demand for imported goods. And Britain has voted to leave the European Union and its single market.

“The dramatic slowing of trade growth is serious and should serve as a wake-up call,” said Roberto Azevêdo, the WTO’s director general. “We need to make sure that this does not translate into misguided policies that could make the situation much worse.”

But at Hofstra University in New York on Monday, skepticism of trade policy that has been building throughout the presidential campaign was on full display. It has been fueled on the left

by Bernie Sanders, who challenged Clinton for the Democratic nomination. And although Republicans have historically supported free trade, Trump has blamed increased economic engagement with China and Mexico in particular for America’s woes.

During the debate, Clinton reaffirmed her opposition to the TPP while also reminding voters that she voted against a trade agreement with Central American countries in 2005. Meanwhile, Trump derided deals such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, signed by President Bill Clinton, as sending American jobs overseas, calling it “the single worst trade deal ever approved in this country.”

Economists generally maintain that the benefits of trade remain much larger than the costs — although there is growing recognition that those costs are painful and often fall narrowly on one group. One widely cited study

by MIT economist David Autor and colleagues found that an increase in imports from China cost the United States roughly 2.4 million jobs from 1999 through 2011.

Harvard University economist Greg Mankiw said that the U.S. recovery has been sluggish and that the wealth the country is

Shipping containers are seen at the Yangshan Deep Water Port, part of the Shanghai Free Trade Zone, in Shanghai, China, last month.

producing is not being equitably distributed.

“There’s no question that there are economic trends that are disturbing, and that will make people feel concerned about the economy,” he said. “And the prosperity we do have isn’t being widely shared. . . . These are real trends that are making people feel unhappy.”

At the same time, he added, he would not put the blame for those trends on trade agreements.

Many economists say trade has been made a scapegoat for a host of economic ills — including the decline of the manufacturing sector, falling employment and growing inequality — that are probably more closely linked to the way technology is transforming low-skilled work. “At the time of weak growth and economic uncertainty, there is a desire to look for a bogeyman outside the country,” said Eswar Prasad, a professor of trade policy at Cornell University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

The slowdown in global trade has been a focus of international policymakers in recent months. A report on global competitiveness also released last week by the World Economic Forum argued that the degree to which economies are open to international trade in goods and services has been steadily declining for the past decade. It also warned that barriers to trade could hurt prosperity in the future.

Data from the International Monetary Fund reveals a similar slowdown in trade. The IMF estimates that global trade will grow a paltry 2 percent this year — just a fraction of the 7 percent pace regularly seen in the 1980s and 1990s. In a speech in Toronto this month, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde urged countries to do more to help workers left behind by globalization, but not to give up on the principles of free trade.

“History clearly tells us that closing borders or increasing protectionism is not the way to go,” Lagarde said. “We need to make globalization work for all.” n

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POLITICS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Trump can’t seem to stop weight jabs

BY K ATIE Z EZIMA AND J OSE A . D EL R EAL

D

onald Trump has a serious weight problem: He can’t seem to stop criticizing the girth of others.

For decades, Trump has commented on other peoples’ bodies, particularly women whom he believes had gained too much weight or were, in his word, “fat.” The recurring habit flared again this past week when the Republican presidential nominee attacked the size of a Miss Universe winner, claiming she had gained “a massive amount of weight” while she wore the pageant’s crown and that “it was a real problem.”

Trump called actress Rosie O’Donnell a “fat pig” and said she has a “fat, ugly face.” He said singer Jennifer Lopez has a “fat” rear end and said reality television star Kim Kardashian had “gotten a little large” during her pregnancy. He kept a “fat photo” of one employee whose weight fluctuated in a drawer and told an overweight executive, “you like your candy,” according to the employees. When a reporter complimented his wife, Melania, on her appearance shortly after giving birth, Donald Trump replied: “She’s lost almost all the baby weight.”

Trump also mocks the weight of men but usually in a more jocular way than his remarks about women. Trump reportedly told a producer on “The Apprentice” that “everybody loves a fat guy,” and has joked about New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s size on the trail.

Trump’s comments about weight, along with a long line of other incendiary comments about women, presents another serious challenge for him in attracting female voters in November. Trump needs to gain support from moderate suburban women in order to ascend to the White House but so far has found little success with female voters, many of whom find the Republican nominee offensive and unacceptable. According to an ABC News-Washington Post poll released the other week, 55 percent of women surveyed said they plan to vote for Democratic nomi-

SANTIAGO FELIPE/GETTY IMAGES

EVAN AGOSTINI/EVAN AGOSTINI/INVISION/AP

RICH FURY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

PASCAL LE SEGRETAIN/GETTY IMAGES

Incendiary comments during and after Monday night’s debate highlight a decades-old problem nee Hillary Clinton.

Trump’s obsession with weight carries some irony from a candidate who boasts about his unhealthy eating habits, dining regularly on McDonald’s hamburgers and buckets of KFC fried chicken on his private jet. By his own public accounting of his medical health, Trump is just five pounds shy of being considered obese under the Body Mass Index.

“I work out on occasion . . . as little as possible,” Trump said at a 1997 news conference where he mocked the weight of reporters.

Trump has long commented on women he believes are attractive, including his daughter, Ivanka, whom Trump said has a “very nice figure.” But he also has singled out certain celebrities for verbal abuse about their weight.

Tim Miller, a Republican strategist and a Trump opponent who worked for Jeb Bush in the GOP primary, said Trump’s insults about weight and other physical characteristics and his general lack of discipline raise serious questions about his temperament.

“He’s a middle-schooler who is filled with insecurities and insults people to try to deal with his insecurities,” Miller said.

Ana Navarro, a Republican strategist, tweeted: “I’ve struggled w/weight issues all my life. And I agree. A man who shames and bullies a woman for her weight, isn’t even fit to be a man.”

Trump’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment about his history of remarks about people’s weight.

The latest controversy erupted at the tail end of Monday night’s first presidential debate, when Clinton brought up Alicia Machado, who was crowned Miss Universe in 1996 at a time when Trump was a partner in the group that owned the pageant. During her reign, Machado was caught up in a tabloid- and Trump-fueled uproar over her weight.

In 1997, Trump publicly claimed the Venezuelan pageant queen had gained up to 60 pounds, but she said it was no more than 19.

Machado says she gained the weight when she returned to eat-

Clockwise, Alicia Machado, Rosie O’Donnell, Kim Kardashian and Jennifer Lopez.

Donald Trump’s habit of attacking the weight of women flared again last week when he criticized Machado, claiming she had gained “a massive amount of weight” while she wore the Miss Universe crown and that “it was a real problem.”

ing normally after suffering from anorexia and bulimia before the competition. Trump went so far as to ambush Machado in a New York gym, where he held a news conference criticizing her weight as she sat on a stationary bike and jumped rope in front of dozens of television cameras.

“We’ve tried diet, spa, a trainer, incentives. Forget it, the way she’s going, she’d eat the whole gymnasium,” Trump told Newsweek at the time. Machado, now a U.S. citizen, says Trump called her “Miss Piggy” in reference to her weight and “Miss Housekeeping” in reference to her ethnicity — and both were highlighted by Clinton on Monday.

In a conference call arranged by Clinton’s campaign, Machado said Trump “always treated me like a lesser thing, like garbage.”

Trump has reacted angrily, telling Fox News on Tuesday: “She was the worst we ever had, the worst, the absolute worst, she was impossible. She gained a massive amount of weight, and it was a real problem. We had a real problem.

Not only that, her attitude.”

Some Trump allies also highlighted reports about a 1988 incident in Venezuela in an attempt to undercut Machado’s credibility.

The reports said Machado was suspected of driving the getaway car after her then-boyfriend allegedly shot a man and then threatening the judge in the case; no charges were ever filed. Machado brushed off the case on CNN, calling the reports “speculation.”

At a rally this past week in Melbourne, Fla., some women who support Trump were not bothered by his comments on Machado.

“I think it’s nonsense. It’s a business. He ran beauty pageants — so what?” said Ellen Kaufman, 56.

But Andrea Franz, 54, of Boston, at a Clinton rally in Durham, N.H., on Wednesday, said Trump’s remarks are emblematic of his general views on women.

“The fact that does he honestly believe at some level, that he is a superior person and that the women he’s talking to are not — that they’re fat, or they’re whatever . . .

It just showed his colors.” n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

NATION

Police reform efforts lag across U.S.

BY K IMBERLY K INDY AND R ENAE M ERLE

T

hings would change, city officials in Charlotte vowed three years ago, after a white police officer shot and killed a black man seeking help after he was injured in a car accident. There would be new training and community outreach designed to prevent encounters from escalating into police gunfire.

But change has been slow to come to Charlotte and across the nation, since Jonathan Ferrell died in 2013. The other week, a black police officer shot and killed another black man, Keith Lamont Scott, triggering massive, sometimes violent protests. Police officials acknowledged that the officer had recently been trained on ways to de-escalate tense encounters with citizens, but he had not yet received mandatory training aimed at rooting out racial, gender and religious bias.

Protesters who thronged the streets of downtown Charlotte after Scott’s shooting said the lack of progress is palpable. Charlotte police, they say, continue to single out minorities and ignite rather than reduce tensions.

“Here we are again. This man is dead, and the police haven’t changed a bit,” said Lonnie White, 32, an accountant who joined about a hundred people demonstrating outside police headquarters late Sept. 23 for the release of police video, which was made public the next evening but does not show whether Scott was holding a gun.

“I am here because nothing has been fixed,” White said. “I am here because nothing has changed since they killed Jonathan Ferrell.”

Intense nationwide scrutiny on whether police wield fatal force too quickly and too often, particularly against black Americans, has prompted many departments to step up training, but the pace of deadly shootings has not changed. So far this year, over 700 people have been killed by police; nearly 1,000 civilians were killed

JEFF SINER/CHARLOTTE OBSERVER VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

As rate of shootings by officers remains steady, many decry slow, scattershot nature of retraining in 2015, according to a Washington Post database. In North Carolina’s largest city, five have been fatally shot this year, compared with two in 2015.

The grim toll illustrates the challenges of reforming a police force and animates the fatigue and anger of communities demanding change over the two years since protests erupted in Ferguson, Mo., when a police officer shot and killed Michael Brown.

The reforms are rolling out in a slow, scattershot fashion. There are about 18,000 police departments in the nation, many with their own training academies and unions, making it impossible for them to move in unison.

Designing new programs also takes time. Often, as it was with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, community leaders, outside training experts and police unions work for months to reach agreement. And then it can take years to get officers through

the new training, particularly in large departments such as Charlotte’s, which has about 1,800 sworn officers.

Local politics often gets in the way, said Sam Walker, who has written and consulted extensively on police accountability. Half of U.S. mayors serve for two years or fewer; police chiefs three years or fewer. When the new guard comes in, they often dismantle reform programs from the old guard when they are still in their infancy, opting for new ones they can publicly tout as their own.

“It’s like Hollywood,” Walker said. “You don’t want to be in the middle of producing a movie when the head of the studio gets fired because the new head won’t want to make it.”

Citizen or civilian police review boards — set up largely to examine instances where police officers are accused of using excessive force — have also proved to be of little help.

The boards are typically set up

Police officers in riot gear stand by as protesters gather in Charlotte on Sept. 22. The shooting of Keith Lamont Scott by an officer on Sept. 20 prompted major protests that sometimes became violent.

in communities after a controversial shooting, as was the case in Charlotte, when, in 1997, the City Council created the Citizens Review Board after the fatal shooting of three unarmed black men by white officers.

Of the more than 200 such boards, fewer than a dozen have the power to independently investigate use-of-force cases and complaints against officers. None have the power to mandate changes to police training, said Walker, who is also an expert on the boards.

Just two months after the Ferrell shooting, community activists attempted a massive overhaul of the board, hoping to give it greater powers. The panel of 11, appointed by the mayor and City Council, now receives the full department file from any investigation of an officer accused of using excessive force.

But it still has no authority to investigate, and its meetings continue to be held in private. Both factors have inhibited improvements in the relationship between police and the community, said Kyle Knight, who helped organize the reform movement.

“There has to be that trust between the officers and the people they are serving, and it’s just not there,” he said.

For some, there was hope that the fatal shooting of 24-year-old Ferrell on Sept. 14, 2013, would be a turning point.

A dash-cam video captured important details of the incident that began about 2:30 a.m., when a sober Ferrell crashed and totaled his Toyota Camry, escaped through the broken rear windshield and went looking for help.

Ferrell knocked on the door of a nearby home, which frightened the homeowner, who called 911.

When officers arrived, Ferrell ran unarmed toward them in the darkness. The only officer at the scene to draw his firearm was Randall Kerrick, who fired 10 shots into his chest.

Within hours, then-Police Chief Rodney Monroe did something unusual. There were no long delays while the department investigated. He held a news conference,

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2016

9

NATION televised nationally, saying that Kerrick “did not have the lawful right to discharge his weapon.” He said they were arresting one of their own.

Community leaders said the prompt response gave them some hope for justice and change. But when the jury deadlocked in 2015 just weeks before the second anniversary of Ferrell’s death — and a mistrial was declared — the new police chief knew something more had to happen.

“There were tears, a lot of emotion,” said Jibril Hough, who organized many of the demonstrations that followed. “There was some rage, but there was no rioting, no looting. Still, the community had enough of waiting.”

The department created programs to train officers in detecting racial and other biases, installing calm during tense encounters with citizens and taking cover and talking to mentally ill suspects rather than using fatal force.

Most were developed a year ago, said Capt. Demetria Faulkner-Welch, who runs the department’s training academy.

Hundreds still have not received some of the training.

More than 1,000 officers have gone through training to learn better techniques to properly determine when someone is in the midst of a mental-health crisis and, when it is safe, calmly talk to the person so that they can take the person into custody.

The department also has seen higher completion rates with field-training exercises since it was able to modify existing programs.

“We incorporated more situations where you don’t fire guns,” Faulkner-Welch said. “We are teaching them how and when to do this without compromising their safety.”

But after the shooting of Smith

by Brentley Vinson — who has gone through the new field-training exercises — people such as Hough say they think more reforms are needed.

“This is a new day. It’s time to take things to the next level,” Hough said. “We need to get back to the table and do some harder work on rules of engagement. We are losing time. Every week, there is another killing in another city and with social media, it feels just like it’s happening in your own city.” n

KLMNO WEEKLY

With this tech, the doctor — and others — will see you now E LIZABETH D WOSKIN Palo Alto, Calif.

BY

J

im Andrews is wearing just a hospital gown, staring at his doctor of 11 years, who is staring back at him through the sleek, metallic lens of Google Glass.

As the doctor examines Andrews, a new kind of medical scribe is watching the examination, transcribing everything he sees. The scribe, named Rahul, is thousands of miles away in India, and he is viewing the office visit live through the pint-size, WiFiconnected camera attached to the doctor’s glasses.

“When was his last physical?” the doctor, Albert Chan, asks as he listens to Andrews’s breathing and checks his reflexes. Rahul’s nearly immediate answer pops up in a text bubble display in the right corner of the doctor’s field of vision. “June 3, 2014!”

The entrepreneurs behind the technology — which could one day morph into something as tiny as a contact lens — say it is more than a transcription tool: It’s the first step to supercharging doctors with instantaneous information that transforms how medical decisions are made. Instead of human scribes taking down notes, they envision a world in which artificial intelligence software could transcribe the office visit in real time, while immediately comparing the patient’s medical issues with those of millions of others, then making predictions about what treatments would work best. Moreover, they say the technology is bringing health-care professionals back into the moment with their patients — returning a sense of humanity that has been lost as computers have become a fixture in the doctor’s office.

Yet, like much new digital technology in health care, Google Glass has the potential to create more problems than it solves.

Medical scribing is a tough job that requires a high level of accuracy — note-takers in far-off lands need to know terms such as “eo-

CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Albert Chan in San Carlos, Calif., uses Google Glass to connect with scribes in India who put information into medical records.

sinophilic esophagitis” — and getting a word wrong could have grave consequences.

Health systems are also far more vulnerable to cyberattacks than other industries, such as banking, a gap that hackers have aggressively exploited in recent years, said Avi Rubin, director of the Health and Medical Security Lab at Johns Hopkins University. Hundreds of hospitals have been victims of “ransomware” attacks, in which outsiders block the hospital from accessing its own data until the hospital pays them money.

Google Glass is in part a response to the most recent major technology introduced into the doctor’s office. The switch to electronic health records has received billions in federal funding and been hailed as a major step forward for the medical field. Doctors now say they are turning to Google Glass so they can escape the burden of spending an entire patient visit — and several hours later in the day — typing information into forms.

“I can look my patients in the eye again,” said Teresa Nauenberg, a primary care physician who works with Chan at the hospital Palo Alto Medical Foundation.

Today, roughly 500 doctors in 27 states put on Google Glass. They wear them through the day, livestreaming their office visits to the virtual scribes.

Ian Shakil, the 32-year-old chief executive of Augmedix, the San Francisco start-up that has partnered with search-engine giant Google to distribute the technology, hopes that in the near future, seeing a doctor wear Google Glass will feel as normal as seeing one with a stethoscope.

Augmedix takes extensive precautions in protecting data. The video, which is scrambled, is sent directly from Google Glass to the scribes. It doesn’t pass through hospital servers, which are often the vulnerable point that hackers exploit. The video is deleted after each medical visit.

Few patients seem concerned.

“It’s a conflict, there’s no doubt about it,” Chan’s patient, Andrews, said of the privacy issues as he got ready to head back to work from his appointment. “How I’ve rationalized it is, if this can help my doctors provide me with better medical care at this stage of my life, I’m fine with it. If someone finds out I have an artificial knee, then so be it.” n

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WORLD

Prohibition brews ‘a climate of fear’ R AMA L AKSHMI Khanpur, India BY

F

or decades, this riverside hamlet of lower-caste Indians made liquor for a living by fermenting the fruit of the mahua tree, but since a strict prohibition was imposed in Bihar state in April, police have begun raiding homes, chasing away drinkers and arresting villagers.

In response, the village vowed to give up its main source of income and poured 200 gallons of freshly made hooch into the river in a public declaration of defeat.

“Now where do we go, what do we do? Our money and food will not last long,” said Jagar Rajvanshi, 60, a balding and spectacled man in a blue sarong who had been producing alcohol for years.

Alcohol is not illegal in predominantly Hindu India, but there has long been a social stigma against it in this conservative country, and state-level bans have become a popular ploy for politicians eager to secure the women’s vote.

Drinking is on the increase in India, with rising middle-class affluence, a youth bulge and increased opportunities to dine out.

According to a report by the Parisbased Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development last year, India ranked third on a list of 40 nations in terms of rising alcohol consumption between 1992 and 2012.

At the same time, rural female voters are becoming more assertive about the depredations of alcoholic husbands, and this has become a potent election issue.

The southern state of Kerala has begun a phased ban, and neighboring Tamil Nadu is contemplating introducing such a prohibition again after a lapse of several years.

But the man who has made the issue his own is the chief minister of Bihar, Nitish Kumar, who instituted the controversial ban after an election-year promise to female voters who complained about their drunken husbands.

But prohibition has brought

RAMA LAKSHMI/THE WASHINGTON POST

Indian state’s strict ban on alcohol sparks thousands of arrests, smuggling and vigilantism unintended consequences — much as the United States found out almost a century ago — and now thousands are in jail, liquor smuggling has exploded and vigilantism is on the rise.

The anti-alcohol campaign has sent more than 14,000 people to jail since April in a state where the prisons were already overcrowded. More than 43,000 gallons of alcohol have been seized and thousands of shops shuttered.

Those caught consuming alcohol can face 10 years in prison, and bail can take weeks.

But what has set off panic among residents are the draconian provisions in the law, including a clause whereby all adults in a family are now accountable if one member drinks. Homeowners can be arrested if a tenant is drinking, and the entire village can be fined if liquor is made there.

“We are not opposing prohibi-

tion, but we are saying it is unimplementable in the 21st century,” said Sushil Modi, opposition leader from the Bharatiya Janata Party in Bihar. “There is a climate of fear everywhere.”

Over the years, Kumar has carefully constructed an image as a politician who listens keenly to female voters. His government provided free bicycles to young girls to encourage them to attend school. He set aside government job quotas for women and promoted village self-help groups.

His proposal for an alcohol ban came against a backdrop of the real suffering by some wives at the hands of their husbands.

After Kumar came to power for his third term — when he trounced Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party in the state — Kumar announced a total prohibition. He did so with the full support of local women’s groups,

Simrauka villager Munnidevi Ram had suffered domestic abuse from her husband when he drank. He left the Indian state of Bihar once the ban started.

who have since formed squads to enforce the ban, reminiscent of Carry Nation’s temperance movement before the period of prohibition in the United States.

“We now beat up men who dare to drink, with sticks and brooms.

Women have become the liquor police,” said Sunaina Prasad, 45, in Simrauka village.

In an ambitious push for national recognition, Kumar is now touring other Indian states and urging them to ban liquor, as well.

One TV channel has dubbed him a national prohibition evangelist.

Ironically, it was Kumar who once opened thousands of liquor stores in Bihar to sell government-produced alcohol. In the past decade, the state’s annual revenue from liquor increased tenfold — to more than $550 million a year.

Since the ban, bootleggers are selling liquor at three times the cost. Officials have seized liquor bottles crossing into Bihar in trucks filled with cattle feed, sacks of salt and bicycle parts. Police have found liquor hidden inside school bags, vegetable baskets, cooking-gas cylinders and even ambulances.

The state’s police department also is stretched. There are 54 police officers per 100,000 people in Bihar, the lowest such ratio in India, and there are not enough patrol vehicles and checkpoints.

Toll-free telephone numbers are still flooded with tipoffs, however.

“We have to create spies and informers among the communities — only then will prohibition be successful,” said Manu Maharaj, a senior police officer.

In a recent incident of liquor vigilantism, villagers stripped a man, tied him to a tree and beat him because he was carrying a few bottles. Police surrounded and searched the home of the chief of Patna’s postal service last month because of a tipoff; they found nothing, enraging many residents.

“Bihar is not a liquor-obsessed state. The problem was not so big here that you created this monster to deal with it,” said Shaibal Gupta, a political economist. n

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WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

Hunting for sex traffickers abroad BY

T OM J ACKMAN

T

he American men walked into the darkened brothel in Bangkok and were soon offered a variety of prostitutes, young and old, male and female. “You go in and try to look like a john as much as possible,” one of the Americans said later of his undercover role. “Try to act like them, talk like them. You don’t go in and order a glass of milk.”

The men moved from brothel to brothel, each “packed with foreigners,” the American said.

“You’re sitting next to these perverts, not only having to interact with them but become one of them. It’s common to go shop around. You sit there, get a price,” he said. “It was probably the darkest underworld playground of the devil that I’ve ever been in.”

The American was former Washington Nationals baseball player Adam LaRoche, and he described participating in a “rescue” operation last year with the Exodus Road, one of a number of American nonprofit groups that are fighting human trafficking in a new way: by luring pimps into the open, and then working with local law enforcement to arrest the traffickers and free the victims.

Members of the groups, often former U.S. service members or law enforcement officers, pose as American tourists looking to party with groups of underage sex workers. Some groups, such as the Exodus Road and Operation Underground Railroad, invite supporters or television crews to come along to spread word about the horrors and to witness the thrilling moments when sex traffickers are handcuffed and terrorized children are rescued.

“We believe the problem will never go away unless everybody knows about it and does something,” said Tim Ballard, a former investigator with the Department of Homeland Security who started Operation Underground Railroad, based in Anaheim, Calif.

But this high-profile approach is attracting skepticism from some respected workers who have fought human trafficking for decades by

OPERATION UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

Nonprofits have had men pose as johns to free sex slaves, but some question their approach working with local police and prosecutors to attack the problem and rid their ranks of corruption. They question whether the American groups spend the time and effort needed to ensure that victims aren’t returned to the same cycles of degrading violence. They also raise concerns about entrapment and safety for the civilians such as LaRoche who participate.

“The trouble is, it’s really risky to the victims,” said Anne Gallagher, founding chair of the U.N. Inter-Agency Group on Human Trafficking and Migrant Smuggling, and cited by the State Department as “the leading global expert on the international law on human trafficking.” She said that the civilian groups can cause problems for prosecutions and that they often are unprepared to help victims.

“It’s also misleading,” Gallagher said, “and deflects attention and resources and energy away from the hard stuff that needs to be done. . . . They’re in and out. No way they can follow up a victim’s case. No way they’re evaluating

the impact of what they’ve done.”

Gallagher and Cees de Rover, executive director of Equity International, wrote an article for the Huffington Post last year criticizing Operation Underground Railroad from “a law enforcement perspective.” The group’s approach, the pair said, targets low-level recruiters and pimps but doesn’t dismantle the leadership of sophisticated trafficking networks.

Gallagher said Americans entranced by the promise of quick rescues “don’t want to hear the news that it’s a hard slog. You’ve got to keep doing it for years and years.”

But groups such as Operation Underground Railroad and International Justice Mission, often mentioned as the preeminent rescue group, say that they do plan for the care of rescued victims and that their work is having a measurable effect on human trafficking and sex tourism in countries such as Cambodia, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines and Thailand. The rescue organizations are funded entirely by private donations, government and private

Tim Ballard, founder of Operation Underground Railroad, is “arrested” by police in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, as part of a sting on child sex traffickers in November 2014.

Ballard posed as a sex tourist to convince traffickers to bring sex workers to a “party” where they were arrested by local authorities.

grants, and in-kind offers of goods and services, their officials said.

Holly Burkhalter, the senior adviser for justice-system transformation at the International Justice Mission, said that her group establishes permanent staffs in the countries where it works and that it creates lasting relationships with social service providers and law enforcement.

“We stay there for the long term,” she said. “If children coming out of a criminal sexual situation are not given care and schooling and economic aid, they will almost certainly be retrafficked.

We are absolutely involved every step of the way.”

The rescue groups work closely with law enforcement in the host country to oversee their rescue missions and handle the prosecutions of the traffickers. Gallagher said that can be problematic in many countries where law enforcement is already deeply involved with the traffickers.

The most widely accepted analysis of human trafficking worldwide, by the International Labor Organization in 2012, estimated that 4.5 million people are being forced to work in the sex trade, out of 20.9 million in all manner of forced labor. The State Department’s Trafficking in Persons report for 2016 said there had been nearly 19,000 prosecutions worldwide for human trafficking last year, an 88 percent increase from the previous year.

When American rescue groups offer their help, it’s generally appreciated by the United States and host governments, even if it isn’t always comprehensive, said Ransom J. Avilla, a Department of Homeland Security Investigations attache based in Manila. Avilla said that U.S. officials in the Philippines had worked closely with the International Justice Mission and that they work with police, prosecutors and social service agencies throughout cases that can last many years.

He said it is possible that child victims sometimes fall through the cracks but that, in general, “I think any group that wants to be here combating these cases is helping the country.” n

PHOTOS BY JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

With open arms

When it comes to guns, this Georgia man never leaves home without one

BY TERRENCE MCCOY in Winder, Ga.

A

ll Jim Cooley wants to do is buy some soda.

“You want to come to Walmart?” he asks his wife.

“No,” Maria says.

“Pretty please?” Jim asks.

“I’m not going to sit there and have the police called on you. I mean, I don’t want to see that crap,” Maria says, knowing what a trip to Walmart means. She knows her 51­year­old husband has two guns inside the house, and this afternoon it won’t be the 9mm, which he straps on with a round in the chamber when grabbing lunch at his favorite fast­food restaurant or visiting a friend’s auto shop. It’ll be the AR­15 semiautomatic rifle, which he brings when going somewhere he thinks is dangerous, like the Atlanta airport, where he’s taken it loaded with a 100­bullet drum, or Walmart, where he thinks crowds could pose easy targets for terrorists.

In a country of relaxing gun laws where it’s now legal to open­carry in 45 states and there are 14.5 million people with carry permits, every day seems to bring a

new version of what open carry can mean. In Kentucky, it’s now legal to open-carry in city buildings. In downtown Cleveland, people carried military-style rifles during the Republican National Convention. In Howell, Mich., in August, a father went openly armed to his child’s middle-school orientation. In Mississippi, it’s now legal to open-carry without a permit at all. And in Georgia, which has passed a “guns everywhere” bill and has issued nearly 1 million carry permits, Jim Cooley is staking out his version of what’s acceptable as he keeps pleading with his wife.

“I got to get soda.”

Maria sighs. She worked the night before assembling air-conditioner compressors at a nearby factory, and in a few hours, she knows she’ll have to leave for another third shift.

“Yeah,” she says, giving in. “I might as well get this travesty out of the way.”

“What travesty?”

“You carrying a big ol’ rifle in the store, scaring the hell out of all the Walmart shoppers.”

“There’s no difference between carrying a

Jim Cooley tends to his bees at his home in Winder, Ga., last month. Cooley, one of 14.5 million Americans with an open-carry permit, almost never leaves his house without a weapon — either an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle or a 9mm handgun.

rifle and carrying a handgun,” he says.

“You tried that last time, remember?”

Maria says, stepping into a pair of flip-flops and running her fingers through her hair.

“And what happened? Barrow County sheriffs. Three or four of them.”

“They can’t tell me what and what not to carry,” Jim says. “You know I wouldn’t listen to them anyway.”

“Well, you go one way in the store; I’ll go the other,” Maria says. “Then when they say, ‘Ma’am, do you know this person?’ I’ll say, ‘No, I’ve never seen him before in my life.’ ” He places a lit cigarette into an ashtray, walks into his bedroom, reaches behind its door, picks up the AR-15, snaps in a magazine

with 15 rounds, and slings the rifle around his left shoulder so it rests against his torso.

“Ready?” he asks.

“Yeah,” she says, grabbing her purse and following her husband out the door for an afternoon trip to Walmart to buy soda.

T

he gun Jim Cooley carries is the ATI Omni-Hybrid Maxx AR-15 semiautomatic rifle. It cost him $579.99. It weighs 6.25 pounds, is 35 inches long, and fires bullets as fast as the trigger can be pulled, and, as Jim has learned, fits nicely between the front seats of a white minivan with peeling paint on the front and a bumper sticker on the back that says, “I ♥ Law.” Jim goes everywhere now with a gun — if not the AR-15, then his sidearm — and is so reliant on one being close by that it surprises him to think the majority of his life was lived otherwise. He was raised in a working-class family in Chicago, where he can’t imagine living now because of its strict gun laws. But they didn’t bother him then. He didn’t hunt. continues on next page

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COVER STORY

He didn’t fear for his safety. If his dad had a gun, no one knew. He grew up without a gun, went to church without a gun, married Maria without a gun, began raising two children without a gun, and settled into a life that felt as safe as it was dependable.

But then it began unraveling, starting when he was fired from a trucking job days after telling Maria, who was pregnant with their first child, to quit her job and focus on the baby, that he could support them both.

Their first bankruptcy filing wasn’t far behind, then the second, and the third, and then they were moving to Florida, where Maria had family and where Jim got a job with a grocery chain. It transferred him to Winder, and he moved the family into a middle-class neighborhood struggling with crime and drugs.

Jim now steers past the house of a neighbor who sold him his first gun — a .380 semiautomatic for $100 — so he could protect his family from that crime, then past Winder’s only gun shop where he took his dad so he could buy a gun, too. He lights a cigarette, feels the breeze from an open window because the air conditioner is broken, and takes a sip of soda from a big mug that says Athens Regional Medical Center.

It’s a memento of sorts from the day in late 2008 when he emerged from that hospital with three stents in his heart, debts worth $41,052.51 and a dawning realization he was now disabled, broke and would never work again. After the heart attack, he lost most of the circulation in his legs, received three more stents and started using an electric scooter whenever he had to walk long distances.

He told Maria he was all used up, a drag on the family. She should think about leaving him. But she wouldn’t, even after the hospital sued him for unpaid medical bills, even after he was arrested when he carried his .380 outside a school board meeting, even after he came home one day with an AR-15. He shot it at a nearby firing range and, feeling a sense of control that had gone missing in his life, told Maria he could now keep the family safe.

She now sits at his side, as always, in the passenger seat. At first, she didn’t understand the changes she saw in the man she married 24 years ago. Why did he suddenly want a gun when he never mentioned one before? Why did he want her to get one, too? Why did he put two four-inch knives inside the car’s passenger-side door? And why all the security cameras? Maria glances at a small screen beneath the rearview mirror: It shows feeds from surveillance cameras affixed inside the car that start recording when someone turns the ignition.

But Maria went along with all of it. She bought a .380 semiautomatic and has gotten used to taking it with her wherever she goes.

She got used to the cameras, too, including the seven Jim placed around the house’s perimeter. She began to understand why he was so concerned about crime, about terrorists, about the need to protect their family because they couldn’t count on the govern-

“I’m not going to sit there and have the police called on you. I mean, I don’t want to see that crap.”

Maria Cooley to her husband, Jim, about going to Walmart while armed

Jim Cooley, right, and his friend Tim Bolt work on fixing his broken AR-15 semiautomatic rifle at Bolt’s home last month in Winder, Ga.

ment to do it for them. Last year, when he showed her his new AR-15 and asked her to shoot it, she did, feeling intimidated afterward. But then she did it again. And when he started bringing the rifle not just to the range, but to Atlanta, to the airport, inside Walmart, she eventually went along with that, too.

So much of her life involves accommodating him now, including just before they left for Walmart and he asked her to send a Facebook message to a local deputy about his plans. “What do you want me to tell him?”

Maria had asked.

“Say, ‘Hey, buddy, I’m going to Walmart, and I’m going to have my AR with me, so if any call comes over the radio, you know it’s me,’ ” Jim told her.

Maria sat at a laptop in a bedroom cluttered with stacks of documents, some of

which detailed foreclosure proceedings against the house, and saw the browser had 35 tabs open. One was a YouTube video of something called “Police State 101.” Another showed the dictionary definition of the word “law.” Another was a fringe website her husband classifies as “underground,” the sort he started visiting more frequently after he joined a Georgia militia in late 2014 and decided it was up to him to protect his family from foreign and government threats.

She messaged the deputy, then looked at Jim’s Facebook page. It bore pictures of her husband carrying guns and posts about a country dissolving into chaos and videos about people stopping intruders with guns, people killing burglars with guns, people shooting big guns, small guns, all kinds of guns, that he watches late into the night.

She came back to the kitchen table, where Jim sat and smoked.

“At least I notified the sheriff ’s department ahead of time,” he said. He looked at Maria.

“Come on, come to Walmart with me,” he said.

“I got to get soda.”

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COVER STORY

“They can’t tell me what and what not to carry. You know I wouldn’t listen to them anyway.”

Jim Cooley, referring to the sheriff’s department

from previous page

So she went along with that, too, and now here she is, pulling into a parking spot outside Walmart, and her husband is reaching for an AR-15 that he tells her sometimes he would have no problem using against a thief breaking into their house, or a violent protester in the streets of Milwaukee, or a terrorist in Syria, or, if necessary, even a stray dog on their lawn.

T

he Walmart Supercenter is outside of downtown Winder, next to the Subway, the Great Clips, the GameStop, and buffered by a parking lot that can easily fit hundreds of cars, but is rarely more than half-full on weekdays. There are two entrances. One is beside the landscaping section and says “Home and Garden” above the doorway.

The other, which Jim now walks through, leads to another Subway, this one just inside the supercenter.

As Maria goes ahead, Jim veers to the right, where he climbs into a complimentary electric scooter, repositions his AR-15 so its barrel

Jim Cooley smokes after completing errands last month. He is so reliant on a gun being close by that it surprises him to think most of his life was lived otherwise.

points toward the scuffed vinyl floor, and rolls into the store.

“Hey, Maria,” he calls when catching up to her. “Do we need any lunch meat?”

“I’ll go get some salami,” she says.

“All right,” he says, now alone, and accelerates the scooter deeper into the store, crossing into the grocery section. Two middle-aged women stand beside a refrigerator, talking.

One of them looks at Jim, sees the gun around his neck and goes silent. The other woman turns, and when she sees the gun, her expression freezes, too. But it’s not the fearful looks that Jim notices as he rolls past. It’s a nearby sale. “Eighty-eight cents for a loaf,” he says and keeps moving toward the back of the store.

Not everyone sees his AR-15, which is partially obscured by the cart. One man walks

KLMNO WEEKLY

past without a second look. So does a woman, making her way into the clothing section. One couple give Jim wide berth, their eyes on his scooter and, briefly, his gun. And then Jim gets where he’s going — the soda aisle — and sees what he’s looking for.

He reaches out and, grunting, pulls free a 24-pack of Diet Dr. Thunder. Trying not to jostle the AR-15, he leans forward and, twisting awkwardly, drops the box into the scooter’s front cart, accidentally tearing it open.

“They don’t make these things like they used to,” he says quietly and grabs another 24-pack of Diet Dr. Thunder, placing this one inside the cart more gently.

In search of Maria, he continues into the dairy section, where he wheels past a father and his young daughter who stares at his rifle, into aisle 9, where he puts a large can of Great Value Classic Roast Coffee into his cart, and finally back to the front of the supercenter, where he sees Maria ordering salami.

She takes the soda and coffee out of his cart and places it in her own. She gestures at a nearby cheesecake. “They got strawberry swirl,” she says.

He is leaning forward. The muzzle of the loaded gun is pressing against his shoe. Now it’s sliding under his shoelaces.

“Give me the strawberry swirl,” he says, and as Maria heads toward the checkout line with the cheesecake, the salami, the coffee and the soda, he straightens up and the muzzle slides free of his shoe.

He steers toward the front doors, parks the scooter, slowly stands and walks outside, and that’s when a group of employees standing just outside the entrance notices the gun.

“Is that what I see?” one will later recall saying.

“What do we do if he comes in the store?”

“If someone feels uncomfortable, what can we do?”

They continue staring as Jim walks into the parking lot toward the car.

“You know my grandfather was murdered, right?” one of the employees says, and as they launch into a discussion of a robbery and shooting that happened in 1973, they are in the midst of a late summer afternoon in 2016 with its own set of shootings.

In California, by the end of this day, a 61-year-old man will have been shot to death at a carwash.

In Virginia, an intruder will have burst into a home and killed a 24-year-old man inside.

In Missouri, a woman will have shot and killed a man she said was chasing her.

And meanwhile, in Georgia, Jim is braking hard on the ride home, causing his AR-15 to topple forward.

“Can you hold onto that for me, please?” he asks Maria.

“Yeah,” she says, putting the gun back where it was, and without further incident they continue on their way home, where Jim puts away his AR-15, sits down at the kitchen table and takes a drink of Diet Dr. Thunder. n

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HUMOR

Videos take swing at zealous coaches BY

M ICHAEL S . R OSENWALD

B

efore the final game of the season, on a cool Texas night, the head coach of the Sand Gnats gathered his Little Leaguers for a pep talk.

Pointing his finger at the 9-year-olds, Scott Bergin told them, “If your dad says it doesn’t matter if you win or lose, just as long as you have fun, I hate to say it — your dad’s a loser.”

Parents took video on their phones. The players giggled. They knew Bergin, the president of a drug-testing company near Houston, was mocking crazy coaches by being someone he isn’t.

But Bergin, 46, had another motive. He posted the speech to YouTube, adding it to the scores of videos that satirize the increasingly insane $7 billion world of youth sports, where parents sometimes fight like guests on “The Jerry Springer Show” and losing coaches, as Bergin once saw in a T-ball game, hurl bats at fences.

“I’ve been so frustrated with a lot of these other coaches and parents,” he said. “I just had to do this.

I had to hammer these people.”

Bergin’s video, viewed more than 35,000 times, is the first in a series of pregame speeches he has posted to YouTube in which he instructs his team to hit dingers, disgrace the other pitcher’s family, knock the yellow from teeth, stomp butts and steal lunch money. Bergin frequently refers to opposing players as fart sniffers.

After he began posting the videos last year, Bergin was startled to discover that many viewers thought they were real. “This guy should stop coaching kids and maybe work on his attitude!” one YouTube commenter wrote. Because of the magic of algorithms, Bergin’s videos often play automatically after genuine videos of parents fighting and coaches losing their minds.

In one real-life clip, a baseball coach rants at his elementaryschool-age players, “Are you guys little boys anymore?” He reminds them that they traveled to get to their game, meaning they are travel players. “Sometimes, in travel

YOUTUBE

Satirists have been scoring a lot of fans with their takes on the crazier aspects of youth sports ball, it’s gonna feel like a job. This ain’t rec ball anymore.”

Mark Hyman, a professor of sports management at George Washington University and the author of several books on youth sports, said it was a sad commentary on the state of youth sports that viewers struggle to separate reality from satire.

“In the context of the behavior we see every day,” Hyman said, “these videos really are totally believable.”

Maniacal coaches, travel sports as a status symbol for parents, and the soaring costs of club teams (paid coaches, $300 uniforms) have decimated some recreational leagues and driven youth sports participation to the lowest level in decades, with fewer than half of children ages 6 to 12 now regularly playing team sports.

In ridiculing what youth baseball has become, Nick Hall, a stand-up comedian, invented a foul-mouthed character named Coach Kent Murphy. He wears 1980s-style coaching shorts as he mocks the thousands of instructional videos aimed at getting parents to subscribe to expensive on-

line teaching programs.

“You hear about these parents of 9-year-olds spending $20,000 a summer to travel around to tournaments,” Hall said in an interview. “When I was 9 years old, my parents made me get a paper route.”

Growing up in Indiana, Hall remembers the simpler days when dads would coach while drinking beers in the dugout, teaching the finer points of cursing and occasionally offering bits of wisdom, such as “run faster.” That’s how he styled Coach Kent Murphy.

“It’s a straight lampooning of instructional videos,” he said, “but never revealing that it’s all a joke.”

In an instructional video on bunting, Murphy appears with a shirtless, beer-drinking assistant coach named Chucky, identified as his best friend and an ex-convict.

The first priority in bunting, Murphy says, is getting out of bunting: Step out of the batter’s box, look down at the third-base coach, “throw your bat down and stare at him in his stupid eyes.”

“If you can’t get out of it,” Murphy says, “you’re just gonna have to lay down a bunt and I’m gonna

In YouTube videos, stand-up comedian Nick Hall plays the foul-mouthed Coach Kent Murphy as he mocks online training programs for youth sports. “It’s a straight lampooning of instructional videos,” he says, “but never revealing that it’s all a joke.”

teach you how to do it even though it’s [expletive] the worst thing that’s ever happened in my [expletive] life.”

The video has been viewed 3.1 million times. Hall makes nearly his entire living on ads that appear with his videos. He also makes appearances, in character, at youth baseball tournaments and batting cage complexes.

Domingo Ayala is another YouTube star. On his website and in his videos, Ayala claims he is from the Dominican Republic and was selected three times in the first round of the Major League Baseball draft.

In fact, there is no Domingo Ayala. According to U.S. trademark records, Ayala is Bryan Resnick, a former college baseball player who a few years ago, according to his Facebook page, went on his Israel birthright trip.

Ayala (and Resnick) did not respond to requests for comment.

To Bergin, the Little League coach in Texas, Coach Kent Murphy and Domingo Ayala are deities. He studies their videos, making notes on their delivery, sometimes even stealing lines to use as a sort of homage. (Will Ferrell is also an influence.) Bergin writes his speeches in the notes app of his iPhone, then rehearses them at work after everyone leaves.

In an ideal world, Bergin’s videos would be more than just entertainment. He knows firsthand they aren’t.

Last season, an opposing coach from a nearby town recognized Bergin from his videos. As they exchanged pregame lineups, the coach told Bergin that he really nailed the craziness.

“Man, you’re my idol,” the coach said.

And then Bergin’s team took an early lead. The coach started yelling at his players. A parent in the stands noticed that one of Bergin’s players was missing a mandatory Little League patch on his jersey, pointing it out to the coach, who halted the game to lodge a formal protest.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Bergin said. “He morphed into the exact same person I’m making fun of.” n

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DATA CRUNCH

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Where Latino vote might matter most A record 27.3 million Latinos will be eligible to vote on Election Day in November, according to Pew Research Center. However, Latino voters are concentrated in certain states. In 2012, Latinos voted for President Obama over Republican Mitt Romney, 71 percent to 27 percent, according to Pew Research. Here is a look at their share of eligible voters in key battleground states of the presidential race. n — Annys Shin

Share of Latinos among eligible voters in state florida

nevada

colorado

virginia

18.1

17.2

14.5

4.6

pennsylvania

wisconsin

north carolina

michigan

4.5

3.6

3.4

iowa

ohio

new hampshire

2.9

2.3

2.2

3.1

SOURCE: PEW RESEARCH CENTER, AMERICAN COMMUNITY SURVEY

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BOOKS

Compelling arguments to trash cash N ONFICTION

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ISTOCKPHOTO

THE CURSE OF CASH

By Kenneth S. Rogoff Princeton.

283 pp. $29.95

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REVIEWED BY

B ETHANY M C L EAN

here are some things that are so woven into the fabric of our existence that we never pause to think about them. Cash is one of those things. But in “The Curse of Cash,” economist Kenneth Rogoff argues that we’d be better off without it.

In fact, he writes that “the massive quantities of cash circulating today . . . are a huge public policy problem that needs to be urgently discussed, not taken as an immutable fact of life.” The great accomplishment of his book is that his arguments are convincing.

Of course, the history of cash reveals that it isn’t immutable at all.

Rogoff does a quick romp through it, from Marco Polo’s discovery of paper currency when he traveled to Asia, which “stunned Europeans as some form of alchemy,” to how new ideas about currency helped enable Alexander the Great’s empire, to the inflation that has destroyed empires when governments have debased their currencies.

And we all know that money is changing today, from the proliferation of debit cards to options such as PayPal and Google Wallet. So it might be logical to surmise that the use of cash is declining. One of the many surprising facts in Rogoff’s book is that it is not. Cash transactions account for only about 14 percent of the total by

value, and yet, Rogoff writes, “demand for most advanced-country paper currency notes has been rising steadily for more than two decades.” As of the end of 2015, there was “$4,200 floating around for every man, woman, and child in the United States.” The vast bulk of that was in $100 bills.

Here’s another strange thing about cash: No one knows where all of it is. Rogoff cites estimates that some 60 percent of U.S. dollars are held abroad. Another way of thinking about it is that on a global basis, at least half of the outstanding cash is in the underground economy. “Cash plays a starring role in a broad range of criminal activities including drug trafficking, racketeering, extortion, corruption of public officials, human trafficking, and, of course, money laundering,” as Rogoff writes. Not to mention terrorism.

Cash also enables tax evasion, which Rogoff estimates costs more than 3 percent of gross domestic product in the United States and probably much more in Europe. And if wages couldn’t be paid in cash, well, that would help address the issue of illegal immigration.

All of this helps explain why Rogoff argues that the costs of cash aren’t worth the benefits, despite the fact that the benefits are con-

siderable. Probably the biggest is “seigniorage”: the government’s ability to print money that costs nothing but can be spent at face value. In the United States, Rogoff says, seigniorage profits have averaged 0.4 percent of GDP annually in recent years. But he says that getting rid of cash still makes sense, economically speaking, because the loss of that revenue is “likely canceled out by indirect benefits due to higher tax revenues from the underground economy, not to mention all the ancillary benefits in terms of crime reduction.”

That said, in Rogoff’s view, all of this is something of a sideshow.

The real reason to end the era of cash is that it would enable central banks to cut interest rates all the way into negative territory, as some, such as the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan, are already trying to do. The existence of cash makes it difficult to take rates far into negative territory because, of course, savers would hoard cash rather than accept a negative rate. Rogoff writes that “paving the way for unfettered and fully effective negative interest rate policy ought to be thought of as a major collateral benefit of phasing out paper currency,” because “it would certainly put countries in a much better position to deal with the next fi-

nancial crisis and it would be very helpful for freeing up monetary policy in ordinary recessions in a low interest rate world.”

It’s true that some might see negative rates as “unholy,” but Rogoff argues that giving central banks the flexibility to take rates into negative territory is like giving a golfer the powerful swing required to get out of a sand trap. There are certainly risks. But he thinks a short burst of negative rates is probably less dangerous than a decade stuck at the zero bound.

One of the most appealing aspects of Rogoff’s books is that he doesn’t shy away from questions and doesn’t write with an artificial surety. He’s willing to write, “We just don’t know.” Indeed, we don’t know whether rates will remain stuck near zero, and we don’t know how bad that is for monetary policy. Nor do we know for sure what negative rates might beget.

Rogoff is an academic, and the book is not easy, breezy reading, particularly for lay people. But it’s clear and coherent, and even if you disagree with him, chances are you’ll think a little bit differently about something to which most of us give no thought whatsoever. n McLean is a financial investigative journalist and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

There’s big drama in this small space

A manager’s crazy tell-all of A-listers

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

E

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REVIEWED BY

M AUREEN C ORRIGAN

mma Donoghue is not a novelist for the claustrophobic. The type of setting that she made her signature in “Room” — her award- winning 2010 novel about a mother and son held captive together in a small room for years — is the one she returns to in her exquisite new novel, “The Wonder.” Day after day, an 11-year-old girl and her nurse are confined to a cramped bedroom, barely “three paces each way.” To make matters even more oppressive, the girl has refused food for weeks; in a real sense, she’s shrinking into nothingness.

These rooms of Donoghue’s may be tiny and sealed off, yet they teem with life-or-death drama and great moral questions.

Hesitant readers may think that they’d rather lose themselves in stories with a larger sweep, a little more air; but Donoghue does so many intricate things within these small spaces of hers that, for a time, they become the most compelling places to linger.

Unlike her characters in “Room,” the girl and woman in “The Wonder” have chosen to enter their shared cell: They’re led in, respectively, by faith and duty. The story takes place in the early 1860s, in a boggy town in central Ireland called Athlone.

An otherwise ordinary young girl named Anna O’Donnell has transformed herself into what the locals are calling “the living marvel.” It seems she’s “a magical girl who lives on air.” For the past four months, Anna apparently has swallowed nothing more than a few teaspoons of water, yet she seems unchanged. When pressed, the pious Anna eventually confesses that she’s surviving on manna from heaven.

A committee of prominent men in the village (including a doctor and the town’s Catholic priest) hires two nurses to keep a round-the-clock watch on Anna for two weeks, to document a miracle or discover a fraud. One

of the nurses is a tight-lipped nun; the other is a widowed Englishwoman named Elizabeth “Lib” Wright. Lib is “a Nightingale” — a veteran of the nursing brigade that Florence Nightingale assembled at Scutari during the Crimean War. What ensues is a tight, intense drama involving a contest of wills and a clash of worldviews within Anna’s tiny bedroom. Lib tries to alternately command and cajole her patient into eating, to no avail. Anna attempts to cozy up to this exotic English nurse and is curtly rebuffed. Throughout her eight-hour shifts, Lib, who feels as though she were “being paid just to stare,” tries to figure out exactly what she’s staring at: By turns, she regards Anna as “a false little beggar,” a victim of her parents’ and the town’s desires for fame, and a propaganda — and perhaps even a fundraising — tool for the Catholic Church.

Anna begins to weaken dramatically shortly after Lib’s arrival: Her hair falls out in clumps, her skin flakes, her swelling worsens. Lib must ask herself whether her own near-constant surveillance (relieved only when the nursing nun arrives for her shift) is somehow responsible for the girl’s decline. Lib also mulls over metaphysical questions, particularly wondering about the existence of a God who would allow the suffering she sees before her, as well as the torment she witnessed at Scutari. All these ruminations take place against the soundtrack of Anna’s nearconstant murmured prayers.

Donoghue manages to engage these larger mysteries of faith, doubt and evil without sacrificing the lyricism of her language or the suspense of her story line.

Anna may or may not be a genuine “living marvel,” but “The Wonder” certainly is. n Corrigan is the book critic for the NPR program “Fresh Air” and teaches literature at Georgetown University.

I THE WONDER

By Emma Donoghue Little, Brown. 304 pp. $27.

THEY CALL ME SUPERMENSCH A Backstage Pass to the Amazing Worlds of Film, Food, and Rock ’n’ Roll

By Shep Gordon Anthony Bourdain/ Ecco. 305 pp. $25.99

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REVIEWED BY

K EVIN C ANFIELD

f there’s one thing we can learn from “They Call Me Supermensch,” it’s that Hollywood managers have the best odd-couple stories. Shep Gordon’s memoir revels in his clients’ many successful albums, TV shows and restaurants. He’s proud to have made lots of money for a lot of brand-name stars. But the book’s defining quality is its roll call of who’d-a-thunk-it pairings, those unlikely connections that link boldface names from vastly different worlds.

Want to hear about the night that Oscar nominee Albert Finney walked naked into a club where his friend Don Ho was performing? Or the morning that the author prepared breakfast for the Dalai Lama, whom he met through Sharon Stone? And how about the times that Alice Cooper and his neighbor Groucho Marx hung out? Gordon’s happy to share: “They’d watch TV until Groucho fell asleep — both of them wearing Mickey Mouse ears. It was the cutest thing you ever saw.”

Gordon, 70, spent decades representing rockers like Cooper and acts as varied as Luther Vandross, Blondie and Kenny Loggins. All the while, he engineered numerous other deals. In the 1970s, he secured a clothing-endorsement contract for an elderly Marx. In the ’80s and ’90s, he produced small movies. Recently, he’s managed television-friendly chefs like Emeril Lagasse.

His status is such that “Austin Powers” star Mike Myers made a 2013 documentary titled “Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon.” Gordon’s memoir is an apt complement to that fawning film.

By turns funny, poignant, sexist and self-aggrandizing, “They Call Me Supermensch” is packed with anecdotes about Gordon’s A-list pals. Many of these are entertaining. But there’s also some uninspired name-dropping. Why does Gordon mention his cat? Because the kitty occasionally visited his

neighbor Cary Grant.

A self-described “little Jew from New York,” Gordon landed in California in the 1960s, and after a spell as a small-time drug dealer, shifted to the slightly less seedy business of rock-music management. His first artist, Cooper, was a prototypical shock rocker: He wore horror-movie makeup, and his concerts featured mock executions. Gordon manufactured controversies that built upon Cooper’s outrageousness: “What if we wrapped paper panties around every copy” of Cooper’s 1972 album ‘School’s Out’?” he asked? “Parents everywhere were sure to hate us.”

He could be a cad and a creep.

Before his two marriages (an annulment, then a divorce), Gordon wasn’t bashful about leveraging his influence for sexual favors. He once told a young woman that he was hiring her to be his assistant and to perform sex acts. “She said okay, and she turned out to be great at both jobs. I know how that sounds, but it worked out perfectly for both of us.” I wonder if she agrees with Gordon’s selfserving version of events.

Some of Gordon’s best chapters are about his R&B clients. He pens a warm tribute to the late Teddy Pendergrass and an amusing scene about being pelted with cold cuts during a Vandross-Anita Baker disagreement. But when he moves from musicians to chefs, “They Call Me Supermensch” turns unaccountably serious.

Suddenly, it’s all about creating “additional revenue streams” for telegenic cooks who hadn’t “monetized their value.” Very dull stuff.

Fortunately, he never runs out of stories about improbable showbiz partnerships. Heard about the time that G. Gordon Liddy and Timothy Leary visited the Cannes Film Festival together? Shep Gordon would love to tell you all about it. n Canfield has written for Bookforum, Film Comment and other publications.

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OPINIONS

Peres was Israeli patriot who believed in peace YOSSI BEILIN was a member of the Israeli cabinet under prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak.

Shimon Peres was an optimist. Not somebody who believed that everything would be okay at the end of the day, but someone who trusted that if you do the right things, you can change a situation for the better. Not a daydreamer, not a detached visionary, but a shrewd politician who knew what he wanted and how to achieve it.

When I came to know him, it seemed to me obvious that he was a politician with an agenda, but it took me a while to understand that this was unusual. Today I can testify: Most politicians come to office simply in order to be there.

When asked why, they say vague things about making their country better. But Peres was in politics for a reason: to ensure that his Israel was safe, both by creating the best means of deterrence and by promoting peaceful relations with our neighbors.

In his youth, Peres was considered a technocrat. He was a member of a generation born in the 1920s who were sick and tired of the Socialist ideology of David Ben-Gurion’s generation.

They were proud of being pragmatic. When he was much older, he was portrayed as a dreamer or even as naive. In the 1960s, he was not ready to use the label “Social Democracy” in the Israeli Labor Party platform, but in 1978, he became the vice president of Socialist International. In the 1970s, he was a staunch supporter of settlements in the occupied territories. Later, as the leader of the Labor Party and the opposition, he became very critical of these settlements and was perceived by many as a dove, and by a few as a traitor. Yigal Amir, the murderer of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, testified that his next target was to be Peres.

In the 1990s, when I told Peres — I was his deputy in the foreign ministry at that time — about my secret efforts to negotiate an

interim agreement with the Palestine Liberation Organization in Oslo, he could have easily told me that it was a rogue operation without his authorization. But instead he immediately hugged the embryonic idea and went to Rabin to get the green light to continue, because he believed that the project was in the Israeli national interest.

His attitude toward the country was different from mine.

I was born in Israel a few weeks after its establishment; he was there at its cradle. For me, the military and economic achievements of my country, as its success at absorbing Jewish immigrants in a number twice the size of its original population in 1948, were a given. For him, everything was a kind of a miracle. If my love for Israel is the love of a son, his was the love of a father, who admires every move made by his child — including those that may not deserve this admiration objectively.

We had our differences. It was

JEAN-MARC LOOS/REUTERS

Israel’s President Shimon Peres attends the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, on March 12, 2013. He died Wednesday.

difficult for me to understand why he thought that the illegal settlements in the occupied territories could contribute to our security. I was very much against the Israeli Labor Party joining a government of Ariel Sharon — the settlements’ father — and refused to serve on it. But even during that bitter collision, I knew that it was not personal for him. He believed deeply then that joining the government, after Ehud Barak’s defeat, was the only way to save Israel from the kind of ultra-rightist government that we have today.

He was wiser than most people I know. He had a wonderful sense of humor, even about himself. He had a kind of self-assurance that was never

If my love for Israel is the love of a son, Shimon Peres’s was the love of a father.

smug but enabled him to take bold decisions, such as the economic plan of 1985, which saved Israel from out-of-control inflation, or the decision to leave Lebanon once we couldn’t find a Lebanese partner for an agreement. Ben-Gurion’s grandson once told me that he thought that his grandfather was the most important Israeli leader, but that Peres was the best prime minister, because he was both a visionary and an executive who knew how to achieve his goals. He was right.

Shimon Peres led a full life of achievements, despite the many difficulties he faced, and became the most famous Israeli in the world. A short time before becoming president, he visited New York. One evening, as he entered a Broadway theater to see a show with friends, there was a standing ovation. At first, he didn’t understand what was happening, thinking the audience was applauding the actors, even though the show hadn’t started. Then he understood that the people stood for him. Shimon Peres, “Mr. Security,” the Israeli patriot who believed in peace, surely deserved it. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Iran’s future won’t be moderate RAY TAKEYH is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the coauthor of “The Pragmatic Superpower: Winning the Cold War in the Middle East.”

It is often suggested that the most consequential barrier to Iranian pragmatism is Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Once the elderly Khamenei passes from the scene, the argument goes, his successors will embrace prevailing international norms. The sunsetting restrictions of the nuclear deal need not be of concern, for a revamped Islamist regime will find global integration too tempting to discard for the sake of nuclear arms. The only problem with such expectations is that the candidate Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards are grooming to ascend to the post of supreme leader is one of the most reactionary members of Iran’s ruling elite. Ibrahim Raisi, Iran’s probable next supreme leader, could be the only person in the Islamic Republic who could cause people to miss Khamenei.

Raisi is 56 years old and, like Khamenei, hails from the city of Mashhad. After a stint in the seminary, he has spent his entire career in the Islamic Republic’s enforcement arm, serving as prosecutor general, head of the General Inspection Office and lead prosecutor of the Special Court of the Clergy, which is responsible for disciplining mullahs who stray from the official line. In one of his most notorious acts, he served as a member of the “Death Commission” that, in the summer of 1988, oversaw the massacre of thousands of political prisoners on trumped-up charges.

The position of the supreme leader was once thought to belong

to an esteemed cleric known for his theological erudition.

However, Khamenei’s lackluster religious credentials have paved the way for an even less impressive figure who has spent his professional life weaving conspiracies in the regime’s darkest corners.

Raisi’s background fits nicely with the Revolutionary Guards’ mission of crushing dissent. In a recent interview, Revolutionary Guards commander Muhammad Jaffari conceded that since 2005, the regime has come to see domestic insurrection as an even greater challenge to its existence than external pressures. The ideal successor to Khamenei would have to not only share the Guards’

perspective but also have close ties to the security organs and the judiciary. The Guards seem to have found their man. Raisi is being increasingly touted by them as a vanguard of the regime and an enforcer of its will.

Khamenei is an even more consequential backer. Iran’s supreme leader recently appointed Raisi to head one of Iran’s largest charitable foundations, Astan Quds Razavi.

The foundation manages the Imam Reza Shrine in Mashhad, which is visited by millions of pilgrims each year, operates many other enterprises and has vast land holdings. Though difficult to estimate with precision, the endowment’s value is reported to be upward of $15 billion. This appointment not only enhances Raisi’s national profile but also puts at his disposal enormous funds that he can use to nurture his own network of supporters and constituents. Khamenei, in essence, has opened the gates of the Islamic Republic’s murky financial universe to Raisi.

For Khamenei and his praetorian guards, the most important question is not just the survival of the regime but also its revolutionary values. They are determined that Iran will not become another China, which they see as having relinquished its

ideological inheritance for the sake of commerce. The 2009 uprising may be a faded memory in Washington, but it was a watershed event for the guardians of the theocracy. Under Khamenei’s watchful eye, Iran is being transformed into a police state. The logical extension of these developments is a supreme leader who comes from the heart of Iran’s repressive organs.

Iran’s formal procedures would suggest that the Assembly of Experts will choose the next leader, but in reality that decision is being made right now in the state’s backrooms. President Hassan Rouhani may be a subject of U.S. fascination and hopes of a moderate regime, but he is a bystander in this important power play. Khamenei and the Guards appreciate that the next supreme leader will assume power in a precarious time. This leader has to share their penchant for conspiracy theories, demonstrate a contempt for the West and be prepared to shed blood on behalf of the regime. The next supreme leader has to not only believe in the theocracy’s mission of repression but also have been an integral part of that machinery.

No one in the Islamic Republic embodies these attributes more than Raisi. He seems to be the right man for the right time. n

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22

OPINIONS

BY SHENEMAN

Is terror motto helping or hurting?

HANSON O’HAVER is a freelance writer based in New York.

Recently, Harry Bains became something of an American hero when he, in his words, “saw something and said something.” The New Jersey bar owner spotted Ahmad Khan Rahami, the alleged terrorist charged with littering bombs across New York and New Jersey, sleeping in the doorway of his business. He immediately called the cops.

“If you see something, say something” has become the unofficial slogan of post-9/11 America. The mantra, posted on billboards and public transportation, turns us all into amateur anti-terrorism crusaders. Any of us, it suggests, could foil the next Osama bin Laden, as long as we stay alert.

That’s not always a good thing.

The expression makes us vigilant, but it also makes us paranoid. It’s turned us into a country of people who see danger lurking inside every forgotten backpack, making an incredibly remote risk feel imminent. Americans shouldn’t be encouraged to live in unreasonable fear.

“If you see something, say something” was born on Sept. 12, 2001. New Yorker and advertising executive Allen Kay came up with the phrase without a client in mind — he wanted to create something positive in the days after the attack on the twin

towers.

He jotted the idea on an index card and kept it in his office. A few months later, when the Metropolitan Transportation Authority needed a safety slogan, he passed it on. In 2002, the phrase was one of several warnings the MTA focus-grouped for a new ad campaign on city subways and buses.

“If you see something, say something” was the favorite, and the agency adopted it that December. It got attention.

Reports of suspicious packages in New York grew from 814 in 2002 to 37,614 in 2006. Since then, the MTA has spent $2 million to $3 million a year on sloganadorned placards for trains, subway cars and buses, as well as radio and TV ads. In 2007, the agency even trademarked the slogan.

“If you see something, say something” has since been adopted by the Department of

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY CLAY BENNETT FOR THE CHATTANOOGA TIMES FREE PRESS

Homeland Security, the Transportation Security Agency, Amtrak, and cities like Chicago, San Francisco and Melbourne, Australia.

Is this really such a good thing? Today, the New York Police Department receives roughly 100 suspicious-package calls a day (that number has surged since the Chelsea bombing last month). The vast majority of those tips generate no terrorism leads. In fact, it’s not clear that the tip line has ever prevented an attack; authorities refuse to say.

According to a New York Times analysis, no terrorist has been stopped because of the tip line.

Some people even use the hotline to call in phony bomb threats.

I worry, too, about a slogan that forces people to constantly imagine the worst. Today, 75 percent of Americans see terrorism as a “critical concern,” according to a Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI)Religion News Service poll, and nearly half are worried that they or someone in their families will be a victim of terrorism. “The fear level seems terribly high given the actual likelihood of this happening to an individual. That speaks to the deep-seated feelings of anxiety that people have,” PRRI research director Dan Cox told USA Today.

This even though since Sept.

11, 2001, terrorism in the United States has been extremely limited. According to New America, just 94 people have been killed in America by violent jihadist attacks in the past 15 years; 48 have been killed in farright-wing attacks. In the same period, more than 500,000 people have died in car accidents.

Identifying a real threat becomes even harder in a place like New York, where it’s hard to look anywhere and not see “exposed wiring or other irregularities” — on the MTA’s list of things that should prompt concern.

Suggestions that we report suspicious behavior inadvertently encourage racial profiling. For example, college student Khairuldeen Makhzoomi, 26, was kicked off a Southwest Airlines flight in California after another passenger reported him for speaking Arabic. Texas ninthgrader Ahmed Mohamed was handcuffed at school after he brought in a homemade digital clock that looked, to some, like a homemade bomb.

After 9/11, America vowed to never forget. But that doesn’t mean we should obsess constantly about the next attack. n

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FIVE MYTHS

The Middle Ages BY

M ATTHEW G ABRIELE

Most Americans get their ideas about the Middle Ages from popular culture. In other words, it’s all dragons, dastardly politics and religion­ inspired violence. Yet the European Middle Ages — a period spanning more than 1,000 years — was much richer (and weirder) than even some of the best fiction or political spin.

MYTH NO. 1 Christianity and Islam were constantly in conflict.

In A.D. 638, the Caliph Umar took the city of Jerusalem and pushed the boundaries of Byzantium back toward what’s now modern Turkey. This militant expansion, some scholars and pundits say, was the beginning of a centurieslong, still-ongoing clash of civilizations between Christianity and Islam.

But there’s evidence that, at the outset of Islam’s spread, Christians and Muslims worshipped together. Then, throughout the Middle Ages, from Iberia to North Africa to the Middle East, Christians and Muslims behaved like the neighbors they were. Sometimes they feuded, sometimes they ignored one another, and sometimes they helped each other. Certainly there were episodes of horrific violence between them, such as the sack of Jerusalem in 1099, but there were plenty of other instances of Christian kings hiring Muslim mercenaries against their Christian rivals, or Islamic merchants trading freely with both Muslims and Christians, even while the Third Crusade raged. As late as the 16th century, France had no problem making an alliance with the Ottoman Empire against their common foe, the Holy Roman Empire. We should always be aware of the long, deep historical roots of religious violence, but we also have to be aware that, just like other kinds of violence, it has specific historical circumstances that create it.

MYTH NO. 2 Everyone deferred to religious authority.

Not everyone spent all their time thinking about God, and some were critical of religious authority. After all, people are people, and they naturally had many interests — including sex, which people in the Middle Ages spent plenty of time thinking, writing and joking about.

Sometimes, they worried about avoiding sin. Sometimes, they used sex to strike back against that fear, using comic set-pieces to critique the “virtue” of their clergy; the punch line of one 13th-century poem about a lascivious priest was “one hole satisfies many fools.”

Even in the midst of a Crusade, an anonymous Christian writer could strongly criticize the worldly corruption of its participants and question whether the Crusade should have ever been called.

MYTH NO. 3 Europeans in the Middle Ages were white and Christian.

Although nowhere near as diverse as any modern metropolis, medieval Europe pulsed with difference, both racial and religious. Jews and Christians lived together in most major cities. Large portions of Iberia were under Islamic control (Arabs and Berbers, primarily) for nearly 800 years, from 711 to 1492.

Recent archaeological findings (along with textual sources) in England and France have shown that people originating from North Africa and the Middle East lived in Europe from the 8th century onward; that evidence is

MATT CARDY/GETTY IMAGES

A time-lapse photo of a candlelight processional in England’s Salisbury Cathedral, built in the 13th century.

now overwhelming.

Race was something that people in the Middle Ages thought about (though in different ways than we do), and it was something that they had no problem depicting as part of their shared history — for instance, the late-11th-century statue of black Saint Maurice in Germany’s Magdeburg Cathedral or heroic Feirefiz (literally “halfwhite and half-black”) in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s early-13thcentury romance “Parzival.”

MYTH NO. 4 Everyone thought the Earth was flat.

This one’s a zombie myth. It’s been debunked so many times, it’s hard to keep track. Yet, it probably persists because of how tied we are today to misconceptions about the Middle Ages — antiscience, technologically backward, and (maybe most important) having lost Greek and Roman learning. In other words, it has everything to do with our notions about the “Dark Ages.”

To be clear, the idea that the Earth was flat was a pre-Christian Nordic one that didn’t survive much longer than the Christianization of Scandinavia in the 9th through 12th centuries.

Throughout the rest of Europe

and the Mediterranean world, throughout the entire Middle Ages, people knew exactly what the Romans and the Greeks did: that the world is a sphere. This is extraordinarily clear from the large number of surviving medieval maps, such as the wonderful map of the world in Britain’s Hereford Cathedral, and from references in various texts like those written in the early 8th century by the Venerable Bede.

MYTH NO. 5 These were the “Dark Ages.”

Many interpret the Middle Ages as a period when intellectual inquiry went dormant and the dominance of religion either stopped the progress of mankind or actively worked against those few brave souls trying to lift humanity up.

True, the Middle Ages contained violence, repression and terror. But those years also saw the creation of artistic marvels, the birth of the university, breakthroughs in the natural sciences and literature that still moves the soul.

Modernity is no different. n Gabriele is a professor of medieval studies in the department of religion and culture at Virginia Tech.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2016

24

A & Q

THE RACE:

Senate | District 12

ES T A D I D N A ASK THE C

THIS WEEK’S QUESTION: What, if anything, should the state Legislature do to address gun violence?

CANDIDATES:

BRAD HAWKINS

JON WYSS

State representative, 2013-present; currently compliance officer with Douglas County PUD, where he’s worked since 2001

Analyst and government affairs director for Brewster fruit company Gebbers Farms (2005-present)

prefers Republican Party

prefers Republican Party

ANSWER: Washington State ranks below average for gun violence, but any amount is too much. Many criminals involved in gun-related deaths are already prohibited from possessing guns, so aggressive enforcement of existing laws is important. The state Legislature should help ensure that law enforcement agencies have the resources they need to keep communities safe. Matching grants to counties for enforcement officers and mental health counselors could assist areas experiencing increased gun violence.

While homicides from firearms receive most of the attention, suicides by guns remain a major cause of death in our state. I supported House Bill 2793 during the 2016 legislative session to increase suicide prevention and education. This bill will provide opportunities for firearms dealers and shooting ranges to receive suicide awareness messages and to participate in suicide prevention training. I am supportive of efforts to address gun violence that do not infringe on people’s constitutional rights.

ANSWER: Washington State has some of the toughest gun laws on the books and additional laws added by initiative. The biggest item that would assist in reducing gun violence is to enforce current laws already on the books and take criminals off the streets by prosecuting them under these laws. Also, why do we keep letting violent criminals out just to re-offend? Since 1994, federal law has required dealers to initiate a background check before selling or otherwise transferring a firearm, whether at a gun show or anywhere else.

This is a good thing and must be continued.

If you have a question you’d like to ask the candidates in any race in North Central Washington please your suggestion to newsroom@wenatcheeworld.com.

2016

ELECTI N GUIDE

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