The Washington Post National Weekly - October 22, 2017

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2017

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How Sean Hannity learned to channel red-state rage PAGE 12

Politics Drug distributor law scrutiny 4

Health National hepatitis C outbreak 17

5 Myths Hollywood 23

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2017

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SUNDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2017

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POLITICS

Pompeo distorts report on Russia BY

G REG M ILLER

C

IA Director Mike Pompeo declared Thursday that U.S. intelligence agencies determined that Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election did not alter the outcome, a statement that distorted spy agency findings.

“The intelligence community’s assessment is that the Russian meddling that took place did not affect the outcome of the election,” Pompeo said at a security conference in Washington.

His comment suggested — falsely — that a report released by U.S. intelligence agencies in January had ruled out any impact that could be attributed to a covert Russian interference campaign that involved leaks of tens of thousands of stolen emails, the flooding of social media sites with false claims and the purchase of ads on Facebook.

A report compiled by the CIA and other agencies described that Russian operation as unprecedented in its scale and concluded that Moscow’s goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process and help elect Donald Trump. But the report reached no conclusions about whether that interference had altered the outcome — an issue that U.S. intelligence officials made clear was considered beyond the scope of their inquiry.

“We did not make an assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of the 2016 election,” the report said. U.S. spy agencies are “charged with monitoring and assessing the intentions, capabilities, and actions of foreign actors,” the report said, but do “not analyze U.S. political processes or U.S. public opinion.”

Former U.S. intelligence officials voiced

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concern over Pompeo’s statement.

“This is another example of Pompeo politicizing intelligence,” a former senior U.S. intelligence official said. “. . . This significantly undermines the intelligence community’s credibility.”

The former official and others spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the subject’s sensitivity.

A CIA spokesman denied that Pompeo intended to mislead the public with his re-

BILL O'LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST

CIA Director Mike Pompeo played down the role of Russian meddling in the U.S. election.

marks. “The intelligence assessment with regard to Russian election meddling has not changed,” said the spokesman, Ryan Trapani, “and the director did not intend to suggest that it had.”

Pompeo’s comment came in response to a question about Russian meddling at the end of a lengthy public appearance at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a conservative think tank.

Pompeo also criticized former U.S. intelligence officials for their television appearances, implying that they violated their oaths and potentially contributed to the leaks of sensitive information.

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 email weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2017 The Washington Post / Year 4, No. 2

“There are an awful lot of former CIA talking heads on TV,” Pompeo said, adding that their obligation to remain quiet about their work “far extends beyond the day you turn in your badge.”

His comment seemed to be aimed mainly at former senior intelligence officials in the Obama administration, including James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence, who said in a recent interview that Russia’s interference had “cast doubt” on Trump’s win.

He added that he worried Trump’s perceived focus on the issue “transcends, unfortunately, the real concern here, which is Russian interference in our political process.”

Clapper could not immediately be reached to comment.

Michael Morell, the former CIA deputy director who is employed by CBS News to comment on national security issues, responded to Pompeo with a post on Twitter.

Pompeo’s caution against leaking is “wise,” Morell said. “But, to be clear, critiquing policy is not leaking.”

Pompeo’s mischaracterization of the intelligence report was the latest in a series of statements from the former Republican congressman that have seemed aimed at minimizing the significance of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The intelligence report released in January noted Russia’s “longstanding desire to undermine the U.S.-led liberal democratic order” but said the 2016 effort “demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of activity and scope of effort compared to previous operations.” U.S. officials have said they have seen no evidence that Russia tampered with voting systems on Election Day. n © The Washington Post

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

4 7 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Fox News host Sean Hannity has cultivated a strong conservative following from his early days in talk radio.

Illustration by STAVROS DAMOS for The Washington Post

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2017

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POLITICS

Drug czar nominee out after report

BILL CLARK/CQ ROLL CALL

White House, Congress reviewing law that weakened DEA efforts to stop opioid distributors

BY J OHN W AGNER, L ENNY B ERNSTEIN AND S COTT H IGHAM

I

n the wake of an investigative report detailing how he helped pass legislation weakening the Drug Enforcement Administration’s ability to go after drug distributors, even as opioid-related deaths continued to rise, Rep. Tom Marino (R-Pa.), withdrew his nomination for

drug czar last week.

With Marino’s withdrawal on Wednesday, the administration’s scrutiny of the law intensified.

Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein said he was “very concerned about it” and planned to review whether the DEA needs “more tools” to carry out its mission.

But it was unclear how aggressively Congress will reassess a bill that was passed last year with no

opposition. A spokesman for Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the panel was exploring “the idea of holding an oversight hearing” to learn what had changed since President Barack Obama signed the bill.

Democratic lawmakers, meanwhile, sought to increase pressure for action and cheered Marino’s exit. They argued that his nomination demonstrated a lack of

Rep. Tom Marino (RPa.) withdrew in the wake of a report detailing how he helped pass a law weakening the DEA’s ability to go after drug distributors.

commitment from Trump to addressing the opioid crisis that has gripped the nation.

A Washington Post-“60 Minutes” investigation published last Sunday explained how a targeted lobbying effort helped bolster legislation, known as the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act, that made it harder for the DEA to act against giant drug distributors, some of which were fined for repeatedly

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2017

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POLITICS ignoring warnings from the agency to shut down suspicious sales of hundreds of millions of pills.

The law makes it virtually impossible for the DEA to freeze such questionable shipments from the companies, according to internal agency and Justice Department documents and an independent assessment by the agency’s chief administrative law judge in a soon-to-be-published law review article. That powerful tool had allowed the DEA to immediately prevent narcotic painkillers from spilling into the black market.

“As a former prosecutor who has dedicated my life to aggressive and faithful enforcement of our laws, I have reached the difficult decision that the best course of action is to remove the distraction my nomination has created to the utterly vital mission of this premier agency,” Marino said in a statement Tuesday.

But he defended his legislation, saying it was “a balanced solution for ensuring those who genuinely needed access to certain medications were able to do.”

Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.), an original co-sponsor of the bill, called Tuesday for an investigation into whether the law is harming enforcement and for hearings to examine whether she was misled about its impact.

Chu, one of only a few Democrats to put her name on the bill, said then-acting DEA administrator Chuck Rosenberg — who has declined repeated interview requests — told her in a meeting last year after the measure became law that it “did not interfere with the DEA’s ability to successfully stop bad actors.”

A letter sent by Chu on Tuesday to two House committee chairmen is the first account of Rosenberg’s position on the law.

Chu said in her letter that she had thought the law “would help independent and community pharmacists, most of whom are small business owners who provide vital services for their communities.”

In another development Tuesday, the nation’s largest drug manufacturing lobby broke ranks with the distributors and urged the law’s repeal.

“We need to ensure the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has sufficient controls and authorities in place to prevent

FREDERICK M. BROWN/ GETTY IMAGES

Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.), left, an original co-sponsor of the bill, called for an investigation into whether the law is harming enforcement.

illicit diversion of controlled substances,” Stephen J. Ubl, president and CEO of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said in a statement.

He also said Congress should consider whether existing criminal and civil penalties are sufficient to ensure reporting of suspicious orders of controlled substances in a timely fashion.

Trump declined Monday to express support for Marino, nominated in September to lead the Office of National Drug Control Policy, when asked about him during a news conference.

On Tuesday, the president took to Twitter to inform the nation of Marino’s withdrawal, while adding: “Tom is a fine man and a great Congressman!”

Trump has pledged to declare a national emergency this week to address the opioid crisis — a move he first promised in August, when he said the epidemic exceeded anything he had seen involving drugs in his lifetime.

Marino, 65, represents Pennsylvania’s 10th Congressional District, a solid-red, mostly rural area that voted overwhelmingly for Trump last year.

In his statement, Marino said he looks forward “to remaining in service to the people of Pennsylvania’s Tenth Congressional District and continuing my long record of championing solutions to better equip law enforcement to combat drugs.”

Marino’s staff called the Capitol Police when The Post and “60 Minutes” tried to interview the congressman at his office last month. In the past, Marino has said the DEA was too aggressive

and needed to work more collaboratively with drug companies.

After reports of Marino’s withdrawal Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) called Trump’s announcement “the right decision” but said the nomination “is further evidence that when it comes to the opioid crisis, the Trump administration talks the talk, but refuses to walk the walk.”

Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), whose state has been hard hit by the opioid epidemic, and who was among the first to call for Marino’s nomination to be withdrawn, said he welcomed the news.

“We need a drug czar who has seen these devastating effects and who is passionate about ending this opioid epidemic,” Manchin said in a statement. “I look forward to working with President Trump to find a drug czar that will serve West Virginians and our entire country.”

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), who plans to introduce a measure that would repeal the law weakening the DEA’s authority, said Tuesday that she is trying to find a larger piece of legislation that could serve as a vehicle for the repeal effort.

“There certainly will be a vehicle by the end of the year,” McCaskill said. “We’re going to have several must-pass things at the end of the year, if we can’t do it before.”

A senior aide to Schumer said that Democratic leaders were “still determining the best possible path” for a repeal effort.

Several Republicans who worked on the legislation have pushed back against critics of the

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (RIowa). A spokesman for Grassley said the committee was exploring “the idea of holding an oversight hearing” about the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act.

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law, arguing that it was vetted with the proper agencies and there was plenty of time for any objections to be heard.

“The Obama administration’s Justice Department and the DEA both were consulted on and approved of the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act before it was unanimously approved by Congress and signed into law by President Obama,” the Grassley spokesman said.

He added, “The committee is exploring the idea of holding an oversight hearing to determine whether the agencies’ positions have changed and whether changes are needed to the law.”

Marino spent years trying to move such legislation through Congress.

The Post and “60 Minutes” reported last week that DEA and Justice Department representatives signed off on the final wording of the bill that became law after lengthy negotiations with the staff of Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) — a point Hatch made in a speech on the Senate floor Monday.

But the DEA officials said the agency was forced to accept a compromise it did not want to avoid language that would have crippled enforcement even more.

Emails cited in the report supported that position.

“They would have passed this with us or without us,” said one DEA official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Our point was that this law was completely unnecessary.”

The DEA’s chief administrative law judge, John J. Mulrooney II, has concluded that the law makes it all but impossible for the agency to freeze the shipments of large drug distributors via an “immediate suspension order.”

“If it had been the intent of Congress to completely eliminate the DEA’s ability to ever impose an immediate suspension on distributors or manufacturers, it would be difficult to conceive of a more effective vehicle for achieving that goal,” Mulrooney wrote in an article to be published in the Marquette Law Review.

The DEA did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday.

Top Obama administration officials have declined to discuss how the bill came to pass. n © The Washington Post

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2017

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POLITICS COMMENTARY

Biden and McCain find common ground P AUL K ANE Philadelphia

BY

J

ohn McCain and Joe Biden have been on opposite sides of many crucial national security debates over the past 30 years.

From Iraq to Afghanistan to Syria, the Arizona Republican and the Delaware Democrat clashed over the scope of the American military mission and the efficacy of reaching for diplomatic resolutions for these war-torn nations. They maintained a genuine friendship through 22 years of service together in the Senate and then Biden’s eight years as vice president. Yet theirs was a fierce, principled rivalry.

On Monday night, in the cradle of liberty, those disputes disappeared as Biden presented the Liberty Medal to McCain at the National Constitution Center, a nonprofit organization that touts bipartisanship and sits across the street from Independence Hall.

Another reality has also brought them together: President Trump, whose global outlook has helped crystallize just how closely aligned these two elder statesmen really are.

“We believed in our country, and in our country’s indispensability to international peace and stability and to the progress of humanity,” McCain said, growing unusually emotional at times during the address.

McCain pivoted to a full-frontal attack on those who “refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain ‘the last, best hope of earth’ for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism.” He did not mention Trump by name, but the implication was clear, and it brought a standing ovation from a crowd that included Democratic and Republican members of Congress from the region.

The event helped illustrate the rapidly changing ideological fault lines, under Trump, on national security.

No longer was the divide between those who wanted to engage the world through brute force and those pushing for more diplomacy. Now, McCain and Biden are on the same side, battling the isolationism that Trump has avowed and that has been most clearly articulated by his onetime chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon.

In his first nine months in office, Trump has withdrawn the United States from a Pacific Rim trade deal, the Paris climate accords and a cultural organization at the United Nations, while also signaling opposition to the Iran nuclear deal and new sanctions against Moscow.

MATT ROURKE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Some of these moves have found support from Republicans, including McCain, but overall they reveal Trump’s broad intention to live up to his “America first” presidential campaign of 2016 — a repudiation of all that McCain and Biden have pressed for 40 years.

McCain spent the first half of the year crisscrossing the globe trying to reassure the country’s longtime allies, a theme he repeated last week in Philadelphia.

“We will not thrive in a world where our leadership and ideals are absent. We wouldn’t deserve to,” he said.

The speech prompted the president to issue an immediate threat: “People have to be careful because at some point, I fight back,” Trump said in an interview Tuesday with WMAL, a D.C. radio station.

But it’s a different fight now. McCain has onetime foes staunchly on his side, as Biden used the most personal terms possible to describe his respect for the ailing senator.

“I want to say, John, how much your example of service and duty, courage and loyalty, inspired my Beau,” Biden told the crowd, speaking of his son’s decision to serve in 2008 with his Army National Guard unit in Iraq. “John, when he received his cancer diagnosis, he also found strength in the courage you’ve demonstrated throughout your whole life.”

Beau Biden died in 2015 after losing his battle with glioblastoma, the same form of brain cancer that McCain was diagnosed with in July. It’s a cruel twist in their long

Former vice president Joe Biden, left, presents Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) with the Liberty Medal during a ceremony in Philadelphia.

friendship, one that they share with their mutual close friend, Edward M. Kennedy (DMass.), who died in 2009 from the same disease.

McCain wiped away tears as Biden spoke of his son’s adoration for the Arizona senator, a symbolic forging of their alliance. They will, for now, set aside their old disputes on how to engage the world and instead take up a mutual fight against those who want to withdraw from global leadership.

The bygone battle lines came from their upbringings and early decisions as senators.

The son and grandson of Navy admirals, McCain, 81, was destined for a life in the military. When he arrived in the Senate in 1987, he aimed his sights on eventually becoming the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, overseeing the Pentagon.

The son of a used-car salesman, Biden, 74, always believed that he could talk anyone into a deal. In the Senate, his highest honor came as Foreign Relations Committee chairman, overseeing the State Department.

As the Iraq War unraveled in 2006, McCain pushed for a military answer, for a “surge” in troops to beat back the insurgency and hold onto reconquered territory.

Biden pushed a diplomatic solution of partitioning the nation, trying to separate the warring clans into different regions.

At the end of 2009, McCain backed the generals who were pushing for a massive surge of more than 40,000 troops in Afghanistan, while Biden counseled thenPresident Barack Obama to go with a lighter footprint and search for a political settlement in the divided country. Obama split the difference.

In December, during a day of tribute to Biden in the Senate, McCain made light of their many disagreements.

“In the persistent triumph of hope over experience, we both still cling to the expectation that we can persuade the other that he is mistaken. I think, deep down, we probably know better,” McCain joked.

The two men set aside those disputes Monday, and perhaps for years to come, as they forged a new partnership to fight Trump’s inclination to pull back the U.S. presence on the global stage.

Biden read from an old McCain speech to sum up the new approach, saying that the United States should always be an “international beacon of liberty and a defender of the dignity of all human beings, and the right to freedom and justice.”

“That’s what it’s always been for four decades,” Biden said. n

©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2017

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NATION

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Trusted officers accused of sex crimes BY

C RAIG W HITLOCK

T

he Army is grappling with a resurgence of cases in which troops responsible for preventing sexual assault have been accused of rape and related crimes, undercutting the Pentagon’s claims that it is making progress against sexual violence in the ranks.

In the most recent case, an Army prosecutor in charge of sexual assault investigations in the Southwest was charged by the military last month with putting a knife to the throat of a lawyer he had been dating and raping her on two occasions, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

Additionally, a soldier at Fort Sill, Okla., who was certified as a sexual-assault-prevention officer was convicted at a court-martial in May of five counts of raping a preteen girl.

Army officials confirmed to The Post that eight other soldiers and civilians trained to deter sex offenses or help victims have been investigated over the past year in connection with sexual assault.

The Army would not provide details, saying that many of the investigations are pending.

Other branches of the armed forces have faced their own embarrassments. The deputy director of the Air Force’s office of sexual assault prevention at the Pentagon resigned last year after the Air Force inspector general rebuked him for making sexually inappropriate comments and creating “an intimidating and offensive working environment,” according to a confidential report obtained by The Post under the Freedom of Information Act. Air Force staff members complained that the senior executive, Jay Aanrud, made sexist remarks about tight pants and Hooters models, and said it is women’s work to shop and eat bonbons, according to the report. Despite the investigation, the Air Force rehired Aanrud last month to work at the Pentagon as a technical specialist on aviation issues.

An Air Force spokeswoman said

CHARLES DHARAPAK/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Army officials trained to prevent sexual assault have been charged with committing it he doesn’t supervise anyone in his new job. Aanrud declined to comment.

For the armed forces, the cases are a painful reminder of similar scandals that erupted in 2013.

That year, the Air Force’s chief sexual-assault-prevention officer at the Pentagon was accused of groping a woman outside a bar; he was later acquitted by a civilian jury but reprimanded by the military. An Army sergeant in charge of helping sexual assault victims at Fort Hood, Tex., was convicted of pandering for pimping female soldiers. In addition, each of the military services was tainted by reports of young women being assaulted by uniformed recruiters.

With angry lawmakers in Congress demanding a crackdown, then-Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel ordered the armed forces in May 2013 to retrain and rescreen tens of thousands of military recruiters and sexual-assault-prevention officers.

Five months after Hagel’s order, a soldier attending a sexualassault-prevention conference in Orlando was accused of getting drunk and raping a woman he met

at his hotel. The Army investigated but did not file charges because the woman declined to cooperate.

Since then, the military has invested millions of additional dollars in sexual-assault-awareness programs. Training is mandatory for everyone in uniform.

Top brass have promised to redouble their efforts to punish offenders and protect victims.

“We’ve been putting extraordinary resources into this area,” said Rep. Mike Coffman (R-Colo.), chairman of the House Armed Services subcommittee for military personnel.

Last year, the Defense Department received 6,172 reports of sexual assault in the ranks — a new high and almost twice as many as were reported in 2010.

Pentagon officials have called the increase an encouraging sign that more victims are willing to come forward and trust the military to help them. To tackle the problem, the Army employs 650 full-time sexual assault response coordinators and victim advocates, plus 2,200 others who work part-time.

In the past year, eight of them have been accused of sexual assault, triggering criminal investi-

“We’ve been putting extraordinary resources into this area.”

Rep. Mike Coffman (RColo.), chairman of the House Armed Services subcommittee for military personnel, about measures taken to deter sexual assualt

gations by a combination of military and civilian authorities, said William J. Sharp, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon.

The program was thrown into turmoil in 2014 when its supervisor was placed under investigation for allegedly groping a female lawyer — at a sexual-assault-prevention conference. The Army has since been rattled by another case involving a special-victim prosecutor. In August 2016, a lawyer who worked for the Army walked into the Comanche County Courthouse in Lawton, Okla., to seek a protective order against a man she had been dating: Capt. Scott Hockenberry, who handled cases at Fort Sill and other posts in the region.

The woman alleged in court papers that their relationship had turned violent and that Hockenberry had raped her three times over the previous month. She also alleged that he had placed a knife against her throat during one of the assaults and injured her jaw on another occasion, according to her protective-order application.

Hockenberry disputed the allegations and has filed a defamation claim against the woman in state court in Oklahoma, documents show. Last month, the Army charged Hockenberry with sexually assaulting the woman on two occasions, placing a knife against her throat and striking her in the face, according to military charging documents obtained by The Post. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for later this month.

(The Post’s policy is not to identify victims of sexual assault or abuse in most cases.)

Another recent case that has received high-level attention surfaced in August at Fort Benning, Ga., a boot-camp hub for the Army. The Army suspended several drill instructors after female recruits reported being sexually assaulted. A criminal investigation is pending.

The Army has released few details, although it has since relieved a Fort Benning battalion commander for “a loss of confidence in his ability” to lead. n © The Washington Post

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2017

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NATION

A countryside transformed by fire S COTT W ILSON Calistoga, Calif.

BY

T

here’s a peach tree still heavy with fruit behind the boxwood hedge of Hideaway Cottages, which promise “a unique place for rest and relaxation.” Nearby, in fluorescent police paint, the words “All Units” and a zero have been sprayed onto the hotel’s driveway.

No one is here, not in the cottages nor in the surrounding neighborhood. Evacuation orders have left this high-valley village pristine and empty as fire burns on two sides.

The town stands at one end of a 10-mile stretch of road that runs southwest to Santa Rosa through some of California’s loveliest countryside, transformed now into stands of torched pines and oaks, abandoned vineyards and the unrecognizable remains of a lifetime’s possessions, piled in ashes atop cement foundation after foundation.

A dawn drive along the route, winding alongside the petrified forest, an exotic wildlife attraction and horse ranches, reveals a certain California truth that some enduring the wildfires north of San Francisco hoped did not hold here. Living in this state’s most beautiful spots has always required a sacrifice in safety, even in the unique places for rest and relaxation.

“Life is a trade-off,” said David Frame, who has lived here for 30 years and patrols on his bike each morning to check his neighbors’ empty houses in defiance of the evacuation order. “We will all change; the character will change.

But I think it will make us stronger.”

Californians have long accepted a measure of danger in exchange for the beauty of where they live — whether on the muddy cliffsides of Malibu and Topanga Canyon, in the dust-dry fire zones of Southern California or along the fault lines around San Francisco.

That devil’s bargain did not appear to apply to a collection of

ELIJAH NOUVELAGE/GETTY IMAGES

Californians have long accepted a measure of danger in exchange for the beautiful landscapes counties north of the Bay Area, commonly known as California wine country, until a hot overnight wind whipped up a week ago. Since then, fires have killed at least 42 people, displaced nearly 100,000 more and destroyed thousands of homes, from multimillion-dollar to mobile.

Most of those killed have been elderly, evidence of the area’s attraction as a beautiful and safe place to retire.

No one here was blind to the risk of living in near-constant drought conditions, and of the steady push of development from city centers into the eucalyptus and scrub brush in the dry hills outside. But some say it was easy to forget given the region’s history of being mostly fire-free, even as similar areas in the state’s south burn every year.

“It’s always been obvious to even the casual observer,” said Chip Sandborn, who was born and raised in the city of Sebastopol in neighboring Sonoma Coun-

ty. Sandborn is a 66-year-old tree expert, who during a recent dawn parked along Mark West Springs Road to watch the valleys fill with purple smoke from a fire burning in the next canyon.

The last major fire in the area, he said, was in 1964, when the area was far more sparsely populated. But it was not nearly as damaging as this one, and so it was easily forgotten over the decades.

“People get complacent; they do a little clearing of their land, but the embers don’t care,” said Sandborn, who has been hired by the state to study the fire’s effects on the region’s diverse range of trees. “Perhaps for a moment after this, the complacency will end.

But it will kick in again, it’s human nature, and we’ll have this conversation again in 50 years.”

This region is known for its picturesque places and sophisticated farm-to-table ethic by those who have made it one of the state’s prime tourist destinations. The

Ed Curzon and his daughter Margaret use sifting trays to search through the remains of their home in Santa Rosa, Calif. Fire destroyed thousands of homes, from multimilliondollar to mobile.

wine industry will suffer, and so will the empty tasting rooms along Washington and Lincoln streets here.

But the damage is most acute in the beautifully ordinary places people lived — the charred houses with the hurriedly abandoned jogging stroller still out front, the driveways lined with melted recycling bins, the front yards prepped for Halloween with faux spider webs and plastic tombstones.

The road rises and dips out through vineyards as it runs from Calistoga west toward Santa Rosa, the Sonoma County seat. After a few miles the valley narrows, creating what became a wind tunnel for the fire as it roared toward the city. The route goes from those custom-home addresses to tract housing as it hits the edge of Santa Rosa. The comfortably middleclass Mark West Estates is the gateway there.

A few blocks from the estates, Peter Farber and Stevie Lazo, masked against the smoke, visited a friend’s home on a recent morning despite the evacuation orders in place. They were tending chickens, house by neighbor’s empty house. Farber, a clinical engineer, said he has felt safe from fire since he moved into the area nine years ago.

“I was wrong; this was a whirlwind,” he said. “It will undoubtedly change here with all the personal loss, the shock. For us, it’s survivor’s guilt. How were we spared when so many others close by were not?”

A few miles away is the Journey’s End Mobile Home Park where, a week ago, Linda Tunis was overwhelmed by the fastmoving fire. She was 69 years old.

The park is framed by a Kaiser Permanente hospital, evacuated and largely undamaged, and the stretch of Highway 101 that the flames jumped that night. It is the urban end to the quaint Calistoga start of the route, a fenced-off corner lot of twisted mobile home frames and ruined cars.

No one has returned to sort through what is left, only the police in search of human remains. n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2017

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NATION

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Puerto Rico faces slow-moving tragedy BY

P ETER W HORISKEY

out-migration, lower home prices and raise poverty rates.

Like many on the island, Sergio M. Marxuach, policy director for the Center for a New Economy, a San Juan-based think tank, said a massive federal investment is necessary.

“We’re going to need some significant government intervention — essentially a big rescue package, not only to rebuild the economy but get it growing,” he said. “People are saying, ‘I don’t want my children to grow up in place where the economy is going to be devastated for the next 10 years.’ If enough people think that way, it’s going to be a self-reinforcing downward spiral.”

D

uring the decade before Hurrican Maria, economic decline and depopulation, a slower-moving catastrophe, had been taking a staggering toll on Puerto Rico: The number of residents had plunged by 11 percent, the economy had shrunk by 15 percent, and the government had become unable to pay its bills.

It already ranked among the worst cycles of economic decline and depopulation in postwar U.S. history, and projections indicated that the island’s slide could continue for years.

Then came Maria.

Now, even as officials in Washington and Puerto Rico undertake the recovery, residents are expected to leave en masse, fueling more economic decline and potentially accelerating a vicious cycle.

“We are watching a real live demographic and population collapse on a monumental scale,” according to Lyman Stone, an independent migration researcher and an economist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Whatever happens with Puerto Rico, moreover, will have farreaching effects, because while the disaster is felt most keenly on the island, the accelerated exodus is already being felt on the mainland.

Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló warned that without significant help, “millions” could leave for the U.S. mainland. Puerto Rico Treasury Secretary Raul Maldonado has warned, meanwhile, that without more aid, the government could suffer a shutdown by the end of the month.

Prolonged bouts of economic decline and depopulation have afflicted parts of the United States before. But in depth, the cycle of economic decline and depopulation on the island of 3.4 million people may prove the most punishing.

Compounding problems For years before the economic slide, companies such as PepsiCo had saved tens of millions or more

MARIO TAMA/GETTY IMAGES

Even before Maria, the island’s population and economy had suffered a decade of decline annually under a key tax break that gave U.S. companies an incentive to set up operations on the island. But in 2006, the tax break was eliminated, taking away a key incentive for firms to operate there. It was one of many factors blamed for the island’s decline.

Among the others: The island’s electrical power system is outdated and saddles islanders with bills roughly double what they are on the mainland; an exodus of doctors has opened holes in the health-care system; and the economy’s most critical sector, manufacturing, has been shrinking even more rapidly the rest of the economy, affected not just by the lost tax break but by global competition.

Only about 40 percent of people in Puerto Rico are employed or seeking work. By contrast, the U.S. figure for what economists call “labor force participation” is about 63 percent.

Finally, the government’s inability to pay off more than $70 billion in debt has provoked a congressionally mandated oversight board and a new fiscal plan that calls for significant cuts to the government and efforts to raise more taxes. Even with some optimistic assumptions, that plan predicted continuing shrinkage of the economy.

As a result, for Washington and Puerto Rican officials planning a recovery, the ongoing exodus poses a multifaceted dilemma.

In the short term, at least, the island is likely to see an economic boost; the rebuilding after a hurricane often injects a jolt of spending into local economies. But according to recent research of 90 years of natural disasters in the United States, published as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, major natural disasters also have a range of unfavorable effects: They increase

Residents gather and receive food and water provided by the Federal Emergency Mangement Agency in a neighborhood without grid electricity or running water in San Isidro, Puerto Rico.

‘A lethal blow’ In addressing complaints about ongoing struggles on the island, President Trump noted last week that Puerto Rico “was in very poor shape before the hurricanes ever hit. Their electrical grid was destroyed before the hurricanes got there. It was in very bad shape . . . ” Indeed, interviews with Puerto Rican business people indicated that even if the obstacles left by Maria can be overcome — most notably the widespread lack of electricity — a return to economic life as it was before the storm is untenable.

Take Frank Joseph Sugden, 51, the owner of an established family tuxedo and gown business in Bayamo. His company, Top Hat, once had three stores but now has just one. Now, after Maria, weddings and other formal parties have been largely canceled through December, so his store is closed. Two of his remaining eight employees are considering leaving for good. His wife wants him to leave, too. To make up for the lost business, he’s started to do insurance work on the side.

He worries whether Puerto Rico is in a death spiral.

“I think so, yes, and I’m not too sure we’re going to come out of it,” Sugden said. “We’ve just been kind of shrinking, shrinking, shrinking, and this is kind of a lethal blow.” n ©The Washington Post

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‘All Lebanon is against them’ L IZ S LY Miziara, Lebanon BY

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hen Syrians began streaming into Lebanon six years ago to escape their country’s war, around 1,000 of them found a welcome in the small Christian village of Miziara, in the pine-clad mountains of the north.

That was until the discovery in her home last month of the body of Raya Chidiac, 26, a daughter of one of the village’s wealthiest businessmen. She had been bound, raped and suffocated with a plastic bag. The Syrian caretaker at the family’s home confessed to the killing and was arrested and charged with murder.

The ensuing backlash against Syrians has rippled across Lebanon, exposing razor-sharp tensions between the country’s 1 million Syrian refugees and their hosts that increasingly threaten to open up Lebanon’s own fragile sectarian divisions.

As the war in Syria drags into an eighth year with no sign either of an end to the fighting or a peace settlement that will guarantee safe returns, concerns are growing that the refugees will not be going home. Including the 450,000 Palestinian refugees also living in Lebanon, refugees now account for nearly a quarter of the population, the highest concentration in the world.

Chidiac’s killing touched a nerve among Lebanese who feel they are shouldering a disproportionate share of the refugee crisis.

Calls are mounting for the refugees to be sent back regardless of conditions inside Syria. The United Nations has appealed to the Lebanese to refrain from “collective reprisals as a result of one tragic incident,” said Mireille Girard, who heads the U.N. refugee agency in Lebanon.

But for the Syrians living in Miziara, it was already too late. All of them, refugees or not, were ordered to leave the town after Chidiac was killed. Tensions had been building between the Lebanese and the Syrian refugees for months before Chidiac’s death.

DIEGO IBARRA SANCHEZ/MEMO FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Tensions had been rising, but a killing incited nationwide backlash against Syrian refugees Syrians have spilled into the country, taking up residence in unfinished buildings, parking garages, abandoned shopping malls, warehouses and in thousands of makeshift camps that have sprung up in rural areas. All of them, including those in camps, pay rent to private landlords.

Syrians have contributed to the economy as well as subsisted on it.

Some Syrians have found work, mostly the kind of menial, lowpaid jobs that Lebanese do not like to do, such as picking fruit and laboring on construction sites.

Lebanon’s economy has been hit by the war. Resentment has steadily grown against refugees perceived to be stealing Lebanese jobs and driving down wages.

Syrians were hired to build homes, including the man accused of murdering Chidiac. Identified in Lebanese police reports only by his initials, B.H., he was employed a year before the war began to work on one of the Chidiac family’s houses. After the house was fin-

ished, he was kept on as a caretaker, family members said, and he was at the house when Chidiac was there, alone, in the early hours of Sept. 22. He told police that he held her at knifepoint, asked for money and when she said there wasn’t any, tied her up, raped her and suffocated her, according to the police report.

The shock of the alleged betrayal ricocheted across Miziara and beyond. “The family trusted him for years, and he did this,” said Father Yusuf Fadoul, after conducting a Mass for Chidiac’s soul at Miziara’s Maronite Christian church.

Although the accused was not officially a refugee but a migrant worker, the village turned its anger on all the Syrians living there.

“We’re not angry at the Syrian people, we’re angry at the number of people they have thrown onto us,” Fadoul said. “Those who have come here have not been living in a civilized society. They don’t have our social manners, our civilized

The family of Raya Chidiac, who was raped and killed in September, leaves a church in Meziara, a village in northern Lebanon. Her slaying exposed sharp tensions between the country’s Syrian refugees and their hosts.

behavior.”

After funeral services for Chidiac, residents marched through the village, some holding placards calling on the Syrians to leave.

Many of the Syrians fled overnight after realizing the mood had soured against them.

“To be honest, if they didn’t leave we would have killed them,” said Boulos Dib, who runs a local grocery store. “The whole town is against them. All Lebanon is against them.”

Yasmina, 26, arrived in Miziara with her family in 2012 after her brother was killed in the Syrian war. She got a job at the local hairdressing salon. After her employer called to say she should leave Miziara for her own safety, she and her family left to stay with relatives about 40 miles away.

One of her customers was Chidiac, the murdered woman. “She had a lovely personality, and she didn’t discriminate against people,” Yasmina recalled. “I am so sad about everything. I loved my job. I loved Miziara. The people there are so nice. But after what happened, they had had enough of us.”

As the Syrians scattered, fear spread among refugees across Lebanon. At least one other local municipality has ordered its Syrian residents to leave. Fears that the Syrians’ presence will trigger civil strife in a country eternally hostage to sectarian rivalries underpin concerns among Lebanese that the recent arrivals are here to stay. No one has forgotten that it was another influx of refugees, the Palestinians who fled Israel in 1948, that helped fuel Lebanon’s civil war between Christians and Muslims over 30 years ago.

At a coffee shop in the center of Miziara, three men who sat playing cards said they would prefer not to discuss the recent tensions in the town.

“It’s better that we don’t say anything about the situation now,” said one man who was forced to flee his home in Tripoli nearly four decades ago and has since lived in Miziara. “There are many different factions, and we don’t know what will happen next.” n ©The Washington Post

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he United States is not the only country wrestling with a controversy about free speech and respect for the national anthem. But in China, it’s the fans, not players, who are causing controversy.

Hong Kong’s soccer fans have been booing the Chinese national anthem for at least two years, an expression of popular discontent with Beijing’s interference in the affairs of the former British colony, and also of a desire to maintain a separate identity as Hongkongers.

The protests have irked China’s Communist Party, soccer’s world governing body FIFA, netizens on the mainland and even some locals.

In Beijing, China’s government responded by passing a new law in September that threatens anyone disrespecting or mocking the national anthem with 15 days’ detention, with the possibility of further criminal charges.

Hong Kong enjoys significant autonomy under the terms of the 1997 handover from British rule, but its government says it is also working on a similar law. On Monday, the city’s top official for constitutional and mainland affairs, Patrick Nip Tak-kuen, said the local version of the law would keep in mind Hong Kong’s own legal and constitutional traditions, the South China Morning Post reported.

In the United States, the National Football League is expected to decide soon whether to force players to stand for the national anthem.

President Trump tweeted recently that tax breaks should be revoked for a league that disrespects “our Anthem, Flag and Country.”

Many NFL players have knelt during the national anthem in recent weeks, joining a protest against police brutality and discrimination against African Americans begun by former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick last year.

FIFA has twice fined Hong Kong’s soccer authorities over the booing, which dates back to June 2015, when the team played Bhu-

KIN CHEUNG/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Hong Kong residents mocking national anthem face jail time tan in a World Cup qualifying game. That followed the 2014 prodemocracy protests in Hong Kong, known as the Umbrella Movement, several of the ringleaders of which were recently jailed.

Fans have since booed and jeered the “March of the Volunteers,” the anthem, at almost every opportunity, sometimes turning their backs as it plays or holding up signs saying “Boo” and “Hong Kong is not China.”

The protests continued at a game against Malaysia on Oct. 10, despite the passage of the law in mainland China, the South China Morning Post reported, listing it as the 14th home match in a row where a section of fans have registered their feelings in this way.

The following day, Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, called

it a “very serious issue.”

“Some people said: ‘Don’t boo, otherwise the next game is going to be played behind closed doors,’ ” she was quoted as saying, in response to a question at a news conference. “But I think that shows the wrong focus. I must make it clear that this is an issue of respect for the nation and whether you recognize that you are Chinese.”

Hong Kong’s soccer authorities have repeatedly appealed in vain for fans to desist, with Football Association official Pui Kwan-kay describing the catcalls as “stupid” and “meaningless.”

“I cannot rule out more jeers in the next game as, honestly, there are no measures we can take to stop fans booing,” Pui was reported as saying before the Malaysia game.

Polls show a rising majority of

Soccer fans turn their back during the Chinese national anthem at the AFC Asian Cup 2019 qualification match against Malaysia in Hong Kong.

residents of the territory see themselves as Hongkongers first and Chinese citizens afterward.

Opinion about the protests is split in Hong Kong, with some defending the fans’ rights to make their feelings heard and others castigating them as “uncivilized losers.”

China’s law, which went into effect Oct. 1, bans the use of its national anthem in commercial advertisements or at funerals, and stipulates that attendees at events where the anthem is played must stand up straight and remain solemn. It also says the anthem should be included in school textbooks.

Under Hong’s Kong’s existing laws, anyone who desecrates the national flag can be fined up to HK$50,000 ($6,400) and jailed for up to three years. n ©The Washington Post

THE MAKING OF SEAN HANNITY

BY MARC FISHER

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he president and his favorite prime-time pundit are both New Yorkers of significant means who talk like they grew up in the tough part of town. One drenches his well-done steaks in ketchup and the other favors Coors on ice. Both have long traveled by private jet, yet both feel somehow spurned by the elites.

Donald Trump and Sean Hannity champion the little guy, the forgotten men and women, the audience that has cheered Hannity on as he emerged in the past nine months as perhaps the most dependable pro-Trump voice in the mainstream media, as well as a friend and adviser to the president.

In the process, Fox News’s top-rated host has regained ratings supremacy, pushed back against an organized boycott of his advertisers and quieted rumors of his impending departure from the network.

Hannity, long a movement conservative, nonetheless embraced Trump, who is largely allergic to ideology. Like the president, who has been a Republican, a Democrat and an

independent through the years, Hannity isn’t necessarily what he appears to be.

He denies being a journalist, but has said, “I think a lot of the reporting we do is better than the mainstream media.” He covets being in a position of authority, leading a movement, yet he repeatedly embraces story lines that prove to be inaccurate. He’s not a politician, but he takes positions, which have, as he puts it, a way of “evolving.” He was, for example, against amnesty for illegal immigrants, and then he was for creating “a pathway to citizenship,” and then he was against that idea.

What Hannity has stood for — at least for the past couple of years — is Trump. Rival TV host Joe Scarborough calls him Trump’s lap dog.

Hannity, a still-rambunctious 55, insists he’s not; he’s pushed back against the president on tax reform and health care, for example.

But the president instinctively understands that his people are Hannity’s people and vice versa. At an August rally, when Trump bashed the media as “the source of division” in the nation, he made a single exception: “How good is Hannity?” he said to rising cheers. “How good is Hannity? And he’s a great guy and an honest guy.”

When the president was still opening casinos in Atlantic City, Hannity was systematically building a following, identifying the issues that could stir up listeners (homosexuality, he declared in his first radio gig, is “disgusting”) and portraying himself as a brash truth-teller whose plain talk was too blunt for the entrenched and the powerful.

April 1989: The voice on the answering machine at the Santa Barbara chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union had a distinctive New York sound. The young man seeking help had just been thrown off his show on the radio station at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He was being discriminated against because he’s a conservative, the voice said. Could the ACLU help Sean Hannity get his show back?

Stewart Holden, a local lawyer who volunteered for the ACLU, was intrigued. He asked his local board to take the case, even if Hannity’s show, “The Pursuit of Happiness,” had already achieved some notoriety. People had heard about the rookie host’s inflammatory style, how he railed against “liberal fascists” and hung up on callers he didn’t like.

Every Tuesday at 9 a.m., Hannity, then 27, spent an hour figuring out how to build an audience, how to connect with the bedrock conservative Americans he knew were out there, even in a solidly liberal college town like Santa Barbara.

“It’s my hope to make radio a career at some point,” Hannity wrote in his application for a no-pay position at KCSB in 1989. He wrote that he had “developed alot of dicipline and goodworking habits.”

Hannity had come to Santa Barbara in part because his sister lived there. He supported himself as a house painter, wallpaper hanger and contractor, all the time listening to talk

Before he became a Fox News personality, he proved adept at pushing the envelope on radio shows

radio. He told people that he was “a serious intellectual” who was studying political science. In fact, Hannity attended three colleges — Adelphi, New York University and UCSB — but never graduated.

In his first months on the air, Hannity developed themes that would sustain him for decades — blasting the news media, lending credence to fringy theories, speaking up for the little guys who felt overrun by the elites.

“America’s lost its virtue,” he said.

That April, Hannity shared his theories about AIDS, as a tape of the show reveals: “What is the coverup all about that the media is hiding from the general public? Contrary to what we hear in the general media, you can get AIDS from saliva, from tears. . . . They won’t let you say it’s a gay disease.”

More listeners called to complain about Hannity than about all of KCSB’s other shows combined, according to former managers. But the calls really spiked after Hannity’s show about AIDS. He said he wouldn’t want a gay teacher telling his child that homosexuality “is an alternative lifestyle.” He egged on a guest who claimed that AIDS was spreading among gay men because they consumed each other’s feces.

Jody May-Chang, who also had a show, “Gay and Lesbian Perspectives,” on KCSB, heard Hannity’s AIDS episode and felt compelled to call.

“I have a son, okay?” she said on the show. “I just gave birth to him about eight weeks ago and I certainly hope he doesn’t grow up to be like you.”

“Artificial insemination,” Hannity replied.

“Aren’t you married to a woman, by the way?”

When May-Chang confirmed that she was, Hannity and his guest, Gene Antonio, an anti-gay activist, bantered about how her son came to be.

“Turkey baster babies,” Antonio said.

“Yeah, isn’t that beautiful?” Hannity said. “I feel sorry for your child.”

Later in the hour, Hannity added that “any-

In 1989, after Sean Hannity was kicked off his show on the radio station at the University of California at Santa Barbara, he found an unlikely ally in the American Civil Liberties Union.

Photograph by CHRISTOPHER GARDNER

one listening to this show that believes homosexuality is just a normal lifestyle has been brainwashed. . . . These disgusting people.”

May-Chang asked the station to silence Hannity. “For me, the goal was ‘Get this guy off the air, he’s fomenting hatred,’ ” she said. “In retrospect, the higher thing was the First Amendment, but at the time, what he was saying was just abhorrent.”

The station’s student manager told Hannity he was being taken off the air. The young host did not take the news well. “He was extremely upset,” recalled the manager, who spoke on the condition that his name not be published. “I thought he was going to hit me.”

Even though some of its leaders found Hannity’s message reprehensible, the ACLU took his case and informed the university it would sue, alleging discrimination against Hannity’s conservative views. Hannity was called before a university board that governed the station.

“The station did not like my opinions,” Hannity argued, according to a transcript of the board hearing. “I stood for conservative, traditional, loving family values.”

Under pressure from the ACLU, the university counsel “just wanted us to do whatever Sean wanted,” said Elizabeth Robinson, the KCSB manager. “They didn’t want to be on the wrong side of a First Amendment case.” The board concluded that Hannity had been improperly removed and offered to put him back on the air. But Hannity demanded a public apology and double his old airtime. The station stuck with its initial offer, which Hannity rejected.

“We were gleeful,” May-Chang said. “We thought that was the end of him.”

Finished with Santa Barbara, Hannity put an ad in the trade magazine Radio & Records, promoting himself as “the most talked-about college radio host in America.”

From then on, Hannity, who declined to be interviewed for this article, would portray the KCSB chapter as a symbol of liberal intolerance. The ACLU’s role was written out of the story, unmentioned in his own account.

Years later, Hannity accused his liberal foil on their Fox News show, Alan Colmes, of being “a card-carrying member of the ACLU.” Colmes said he was proud to be a member, “because they defend all free speech.”

“No, they don’t, actually,” Hannity replied.

Robinson lost track of Hannity. Seven years later, when she saw him for the first time on Fox News, she said she saw “nothing surprising. The older we get, the more we become who we were.”

In 1990, Bill Dunnavent was trying to bring a relatively new concept to northern Alabama — highly opinionated political talk radio. Three years earlier, the Federal Communications Commission had repealed the Fairness Doctrine, which for nearly four decades had required broadcasters to provide equal time to people who disagreed with views continues on next page

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expressed on the air. The rules kept political talk on the airwaves within civil bounds, some people said. Others said it unfairly limited debate, keeping it dull and centrist.

Dunnavent advertised for show hosts, got more than 50 tapes from eager young talkers, and narrowed the field to two candidates. One had a distinctive New York accent, a Joe Sixpack affect, and a collection of headlines from California that proved he could win attention.

“I hired Sean because he had enough guts to stand up for his convictions and because he sounded different from everybody else in our area,” said Dunnavent, who put Hannity on WVNN in the afternoons and paid him $19,000 a year.

The station owner told his new hire he had only two rules: “We don’t talk about religion, and we don’t talk about abortion.”

One day soon after Hannity had started work in Huntsville, Dunnavent flipped on his car radio to hear the kid interviewing a madam from the Mustang Ranch brothel in Nevada.

“I found a pay phone and told him, ‘Don’t ever do that again!’ ” the owner recalled. “He was doing what he does, pushing the envelope.

Sean understood that the job is to say something that evokes someone’s emotions.”

Hannity started out “very raw,” Dunnavent said, but improved dramatically over a couple of years, becoming the area’s top-rated host.

His official station biography said that he “made a proud name for himself by insulting lesbians.” (“Over the years, I have evolved into more of a libertarian when it comes to people’s personal lives,” Hannity said in 2013.)

Hannity met his future wife, Jill Rhodes, in Huntsville, where she was a newspaper columnist. At a prenuptial meeting, Hannity lit into their minister, arguing that the church had become too liberal. The pastor suggested that Jill was “crazy to be marrying this guy” and she left the session in tears, Hannity later said.

In 1992, a salesman who had been driving through northern Alabama called up Eric Seidel, the station manager at WGST in Atlanta, and told him about a great guy on the radio in Huntsville.

Seidel happened to have a cassette Hannity had sent him. The manager popped it into his tape deck and heard an eager talent with strong conservative views and a knack for landing big-name guests, including the voluble local congressman, Newt Gingrich. Seidel hired the kid just as right-wing radio voices were becoming an alternative to traditional news media, a battalion arrayed against Bill Clinton, his wife, and their liberal, multicultural vision.

Hannity’s show had a lot of rough edges at first. He would get angry at callers and hang up on them. His righteousness, blue-collar Long Island diction, and plain-spoken rhetoric struck his Georgia audience as refreshingly authentic, Seidel said: “Sean’s not somebody who’s going to make you laugh a lot. He’s not like Rush. There was a blue-collar nature to his family.”

Hannity was also extremely competitive. In Atlanta, he’d listen to promos for his main

DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES

competitor, Neal Boortz at WSB, and counterprogram his own show. When Boortz booked Robert Shapiro, O.J. Simpson’s lawyer, for a 10 a.m. interview, Hannity called the lawyer’s PR rep and begged for a 9 a.m. slot with Shapiro.

He not only beat the competition by an hour, but Hannity kept extending the interview, making Shapiro late to the Boortz show.

Boortz and Hannity competed for the same audience — conservative men — but their approaches were radically different. “I would tell Sean, ‘I am here to attract a large audience so the station can play commercials for them,’ ” Boortz said. “Sean is truly, truly there to save the country. . . . His whole appeal is two words: Earnest and honest. I have never heard Sean say anything off the air that was different from what he’s said on air.”

Few listeners feel a connection to the personal lives of Rush Limbaugh, with his stories about his Palm Beach, Fla. estate and private jets, or Glenn Beck, with his armored cars and guard dogs. But when Hannity talks about his martial arts practice or his beer drinking or his afternoons spent hauling his kids to sports practice, he makes a regular-guy connection that sticks.

“He’s easy to listen to,” said Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, a liberal media watchdog group that has tracked Hannity for decades. “There aren’t a lot of complicated narratives like Beck or Limbaugh. He doesn’t claim to be the expert on anything. He’s just kind of a guy.”

Hannity proudly says he never backs away from a battle, but he leavens his aggressive side

with the occasional you-got-me shrug. In September, Hannity asked a guest, a radio psychologist, to diagnose Hillary Clinton’s mental health.

“You can’t do that,” interrupted another guest. “You don’t like it when people say Trump is insane.”

“Okay,” Hannity said — flashing his impish smile — and dropped the topic.

Though he’s fixed in the public mind as a TV talker, Hannity is the nation’s second-highest-

Fox News personality Sean Hannity, left, with White House press secretary Sean Spicer in January, has been called “a great guy and an honest guy”

by President Trump.

rated radio host, behind only Limbaugh. He’s No. 1 in the key 25-54 audience among cable news shows. He makes $36 million a year, according to Forbes, which ranked him No. 77 among the world’s top-paid celebrities. (Two other radio hosts, Howard Stern and Limbaugh, made the top 100, both way above Hannity’s pay grade.)

But like the president, Hannity retains enough blue-collar cred to position himself as a scrappy fighter for the regular guy. “My overpaid friends in the media, well, they have their chauffeur-driven limousines, they like their fine steakhouses and expensive-wine lifestyles,” he told viewers last fall. “The people you’re watching on TV” do not feel your pain.

“And therein lies the contempt.”

Hannity grew up on Long Island, son of a probation officer and a homemaker. Something of a troublemaker as a kid, he and his pals would go “skitching,” grabbing onto the bumpers of passing cars to hitch a ride.

He was a news junkie, delivering the New York Daily News and Long Island Press, listening deep into the night to the pioneers of

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COVER STORY raucous talk radio. His heroes were rabblerousers such as Bob Grant, famous for shouting “Get off my phone!” and dumping callers who annoyed him. As a teenager, Hannity would call in to the shows, testing his conservative arguments.

Gingrich, who got to know Hannity in 1990 and has remained a frequent guest, said the connection Hannity forged with Trump “is the New York thing. They talk the same language. I can’t possibly interact with the president in that same way that Sean can.”

Hannity’s big move up came courtesy of a fellow talk-radio fan, Roger Ailes, who created Fox News for owner Rupert Murdoch in 1996 and essentially translated conservative radio to a TV format. Ailes hired Hannity to host a debate show that the new network initially referred to internally as “Hannity and LTBD” — “liberal to be determined.” That turned out to be Alan Colmes, who shared the 9 p.m. hour with Hannity until 2009, when Hannity went solo.

Hannity has done one hour of TV and three of radio every day for 21 years. Through the George W. Bush years, he loyally supported the president’s policies. Then, during the Obama presidency, Hannity’s tone shifted. He leaned more heavily on stories he believed were being given short shrift by the “liberal media” — stories about where Obama was born, and who deserved blame for the attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya.

It wasn’t winning over a new audience. By 2013, Hannity’s audience was shrinking; it was the year after a presidential election, when cable news numbers typically droop, but Fox News, still under Ailes’s iron leadership, was talking about changing the channel’s approach.

“We are beginning to dramatically change the way news is presented to the public,” Ailes wrote in a memo announcing that Hannity would move from 9 p.m., the heart of prime time, to 10 p.m., losing the cherished time slot to Megyn Kelly, who, Fox hoped, might lure a younger audience. Kelly’s numbers soared. Hannity’s fell by a quarter between 2009 and 2014.

Four years later, Kelly is gone, moved to NBC; Ailes is dead, having spent his final months denying sexual harassment allegations, which also felled former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly.

Hannity is the only remaining original primetime talk show host from Fox’s launch.

Last month, he returned to his 9 p.m. home, making way for Laura Ingraham to take over the 10 p.m. slot. His numbers are back, and a drive last spring to get his advertisers to dump him seems now to have been a bump in the road.

Hannity’s comeback coincided with his early, eager embrace of his fellow New Yorker. As early as the fall of 2015, Hannity wore a Trumpbrand necktie to interview the upstart candidate at the CPAC convention in Maryland. As some conservative talk hosts pronounced themselves Never Trumpers or came to his side late and halfheartedly, Hannity went all in.

Hannity had come to see conservatives as not just a political movement, but a cultural tribe.

In 2008, he launched Hannidate, an online dating service “where people of like conserva-

tive minds can come together to meet.” It didn’t last long, but Hannity’s sense of his audience as vanguard of a crusade to restore a fading culture only strengthened. Hannity made his name as a movement conservative, but he was loyal to the first rule of talk shows: As radio host Mark Levin put it, “In this business, you don’t get out ahead of your audience.”

When Hannity “hitched his wagon to Trump,” Carusone said, “he got access and access brought ratings.” Trump insiders used Hannity’s show as their safe space. When things got hot, Donald Trump Jr., Sebastian Gorka and the candidate himself went on Hannity.

Trump attacked the Gold Star father, and Hannity stood by him. Trump went after a federal judge of Mexican descent, and Hannity backed him. Even after the “Access Hollywood” tape emerged of Trump boasting about grabbing women, Hannity defended his guy: “King David had 500 concubines, for crying out loud.”

After the inauguration, the first interview the new president gave to a cable news channel went to Hannity.

Hannity’s “advocacy journalism” sometimes entails passing along stories that never quite check out. He used his TV show last year to promote the false rumor that Hillary Clinton was hiding a severe health crisis. He let Trump push the baseless idea that Ted Cruz’s father was somehow involved in the John F. Kennedy assassination. “I saw that somewhere on the Internet,” Hannity said.

After the election, Hannity doubled down on his loyalty. He defended the administration’s false contention that Trump’s inauguration crowd was the biggest ever.

And Hannity spent many hours hawking a discredited theory whereby a murdered Democratic National Committee employee, Seth Rich, was said to have been killed by Democratic operatives because he supposedly had leaked emails that were embarrassing to Hillary Clinton. Fox News retracted its report that had lent credence to the theory, and police affirmed that the scenario had no validity; the murder was the result of a robbery gone bad.

Through much of the spring, Hannity kept at the story, backing off only after Media Matters urged his advertisers to pull their ads.

Several did, though one, USAA insurance, returned to his show because “we heard from our members, and . . . the lines between news and commentary are increasingly blurred,” a company statement said.

In late May, Hannity, facing pressure from Rich’s parents, dropped the story. “Out of respect for the family’s wishes for now, I am not discussing this matter at this time,” Hannity said on TV. Fox News and Hannity declined to comment on the Rich coverage.

The Rich debacle led some people who know Hannity to believe that his time at Fox was nearing an end, that the next generation of the Murdoch family was looking to tone down the sensationalism. But Hannity has told friends he would never cave to those who want to take him down.

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“I’ve told you for years what’s going on here,” Hannity said on the radio in May. “I’ve told you that every single conservative host on radio that you like and you listen to is being recorded every second of every day by these losers in their bathrobes or in their underwear . . . being paid to do it in the hope that we conservatives say one word, one sentence, one phrase that they don’t like and that they can then use to attack our advertisers in the hopes that our advertisers will bail out, the show becomes financially unfeasible and that the host gets fired.

“This is a kill shot. . . . This is to silence me.”

When Ted Koppel interviewed him in March, Hannity asked the CBS newsman, “You think I’m bad for America?”

“Yeah,” Koppel replied, “because you have attracted people who are determined that ideology is more important than facts.”

Like Hannity, Chip Franklin, a radio host at KGO in San Francisco, started out in the business as a conservative, but Franklin switched sides and now runs a liberal show. “I know Hannity knows that Koppel was right,” Franklin said.

“I’ve seen what happens to people like Hannity because I was seduced in the ’80s and ’90s when I was yelling about what Clinton did to Monica Lewinsky and things like that. I know Hannity knew that Obama was born in the United States. I know Hannity has the same facts we all do about the crowd size at the inauguration or the Russian connection. I know that because I knew him in New York and he was always a conservative, but not like this.

“And then he got in this boat and didn’t realize how strong the current was, and he couldn’t get off. Because people adore him now.

Nobody around him wants him to change. So he doubles down. He can’t go against his audience because he’ll lose millions of dollars.”

“They talk the same language.

I can’t possibly interact with the president in that same way that Sean can.”

“Donald Trump and Sean Hannity are both disrupters of the status quo,” said Kellyanne Conway, counsel to the president and an architect of the administration’s communications approach. “Disrupters project a strength and moxie that fascinates some people and causes envy in others.”

Trump watches and values Hannity’s show, she said: “Hannity’s monologues have caught our attention. There’s a deeper, investigative component, and in this predictably vanilla and mediocre media environment, somebody like Hannity can break through with a steady stream of undercovered stories.”

The administration uses Hannity’s show because that’s where Trump’s base is. “Sean gets programming and the president gets a platform for his message,” said a senior White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid. “But between the two men, it’s not a transactional relationship.

They’re genuinely friends.”

Last spring, Fox News’s Howard Kurtz asked Hannity if there was “anything so far in the Trump presidency that’s disappointed you?”

“Not yet,” Hannity replied. n

Newt Gingrich

© The Washington Post

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HISTORY

A long-awaited homecoming Killed in a World War II battle in the Pacific, scores of Marines were never recovered — until now

MARINE PHOTOS FROM U.S. SERVICE RECORDS

FROM TOP: Marines Cpl. Walter G. Critchley, Pvt. Archie W. Newell and Cpl. Anthony G. Guerriero.

BY

M ICHAEL E . R UANE

O

n the first day of the World War II Battle of Tarawa in the central Pacific, Marine Corps 2nd Lt. George S. Bussa was assigned to take his platoon and assault a huge Japanese bunker on Red Beach 3.

Bussa, a battle-tested veteran, had earned the Silver Star for gallantry a year earlier at Guadalcanal as a platoon sergeant. He had a wife — and a baby girl he had never met — back in California and several brothers in the service.

As the platoon attacked, it was assailed by enemy soldiers inside the bunker. Bussa, who was 29, was killed, and his men were driven back. After the battle, his body was buried in a trench, but after the war, it could not be found and he was declared lost.

Earlier this month, 73 years after his death, Bussa’s body, recently recovered and identified, was buried in Arlington National Cemetery as his daughter, Jerilyn Heise, 75, his grandchildren and great-grandchildren looked on beneath a stand of towering willow oaks.

Another Marine killed at Tarawa, Cpl. Walter G. Critchley, 24, of New Rochelle, N.Y., was recently buried in Arlington.

On Nov. 14, a third Marine killed and lost in the battle, Cpl. Anthony G. Guerriero, 21, of Boston, is to be buried there.

And on Dec. 8, a fourth killed and lost at Tarawa, Archie W. Newell, 22, of Faith, S.D., is scheduled for burial there.

The funerals are the result of work by the Defense Department and the nonprofit Florida research group History Flight, which have recovered scores of lost or unknown remains from the battlefield and a cemetery in Hawaii in the past two years.

More than 1,000 Marines were killed in the multiday battle in late November 1943 in the amphibious landing on Betio Island in the Tarawa Atoll, 2,400 miles southwest of Hawaii.

Most were buried on the island in dozens of scattered plots. But after the war, some of the plots

SARAH L. VOISIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

MOLLY MOSER/NEVADA APPEAL/ ASSOCIATED PRESS

LEFT: The remains of Marine Corps 2nd Lt. George S. Bussa are placed at Arlington National Cemetery.

RIGHT: In a photo taken July 25, Jerilyn Heise holds a picture of Bussa, her father.

could not be found, and the bodies of hundreds of Marines were never located and brought home, according to History Flight.

The bodies of other Marines were found after the battle but could not be identified. They were eventually reburied in a cemetery in Hawaii, known as the Punchbowl, according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA).

Last year and earlier this year, the Pentagon, spurred by scientific advances in identification processes, exhumed all 94 Tarawa caskets from the Punchbowl to try to identify those within.

In 2015, History Fight said it had recovered and subsequently turned over to the Pentagon 35 sets of remains found in a lost burial plot on Betio.

In 2016, it found at least a dozen more — Bussa’s included, it turned out, the organization said. His remains were found under a building that had to be jacked up to gain access to his grave.

In July, History Flight announced that it had found and turned over an additional 24.

The DPAA’s website indicates that 57 servicemen killed at Tarawa, most of them Marines, have been identified since 2014.

Hundreds more may still be on

the island, said Mark Noah, executive director of History Flight.

Some of them may never be found on the now-densely populated island, he said.

“We’ve recovered Marines underneath houses . . . underneath roads, underneath pigpens,” he said.

Bussa, who hailed from Chicago but was living in Van Nuys, Calif., had suffered multiple fractures of the skull, limbs and ribs from “blast injuries,” according to a Pentagon report on his case last April.

His flashlight, canteen and toothbrushes, among other items, were reportedly found with him, the report said.

His body was identified using DNA comparison with his family as well as dental and anthropological examination and material evidence, the Pentagon said.

In January 1944, Bussa’s wife, Ellen, 28, who had grown up on a farm in Kansas, wrote the Marine Corps commandant, asking for more details.

“I have a little daughter 15months-old whom he never saw,” she wrote. “I would like to tell her where and the date her daddy lost his life. . . . It’s hard enough to lose them, then not to know where and how they were buried make it

much worse.”

That May, on a parade ground in Los Angeles, a military officer presented Ellen Bussa with the Silver Star her husband earned at Guadalcanal in 1942. The Los Angeles Times reported that daughter Jerilyn, not yet 2, “looked on in wonderment.”

Under heavy fire The heavily fortified enemy outpost and airstrip at Tarawa was targeted for elimination as the United States began to roll back the Japanese tide of conquest in 1943.

But when the attack was launched by the Marines on Nov. 20, the massive American naval and air bombardment had failed to knock out many of the enemy positions.

In addition, to their consternation, the assault forces found that their landing boats couldn’t get over Betio’s outlying reef. Many men had to leave their boats and wade hundreds of yards in neckdeep water to the beach under heavy enemy fire, according to historians Eric Hammel, John E. Lane and news accounts.

Casualties were enormous, and the water was soon littered with dead Marines. Once ashore, the Americans encountered two days of fierce fighting as they assaulted

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2017

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HEALTH Japanese bunkers with flamethrowers, grenades and machine guns. In the end, the enemy garrison of several thousand was wiped out, and the burials began.

“Initial burials . . . were made by Marines with no graves registration training and resulted in poor [location] records . . . and in trench burial methods,” DPAA historian Heather Harris wrote in 2006 memo.

And after the battle, military construction projects on Betio moved many grave markers without moving remains, she wrote, making rediscovery all but impossible. Many of the Marines were buried with their gear, helmets and boots on.

“There was no time for the modern conveniences,” Noah, of History Flight, said in a recent telephone interview.

War correspondent Robert Sherrod, who covered the battle, remembered of the burials: “The bulldozer scoops a long trench, three feet deep.”

“The bodies, not even covered by a blanket or poncho, are brought over and placed in the trench, side by side,” he wrote. “A man’s last ceremony should be dignified, but this isn’t. The bulldozer pushes some more dirt in the Marines’ faces and that is all there is to it.”

‘A very special place’ Jerilyn Heise was 14 months old when her father was killed. Her mother remarried when Jerilyn was about 5, and she learned only “bits and pieces” of her father’s life over the years, but “not a lot.”

“I went to visit my grandparents that lived in Chicago,” she said in a telephone interview from her home in Minden, Nev. “I definitely should have asked more questions as I got older, but didn’t.”

Her mother died in 2012. And last May, she got a call from the Defense Department saying that her father had been identified.

“It was a surprise, and it’s still a surprise to me,” she said. “After 74 years, how would I even expect that I would be able to have his remains brought back to the United States.”

She said it was important that he be buried at Arlington.

“I just felt that that was a very special place,” she said.

As for the Silver Star, she still has a copy provided by the government, but the original, given to her mother in 1944, has been lost. n © The Washington Post

KLMNO WEEKLY

Another outbreak related to U.S. opioid crisis: Hepatitis C K ATIE Z EZIMA Charleston, W.Va.

in 2015, the majority of them over the age of 55.

Now, new carriers tend to be young people who use intravenous he nation’s opioid epidemdrugs. Health providers in an aric has unleashed a secondray of locations, from rural Tenary outbreak: the rampant nessee to suburban Boston to Balspread of hepatitis C. timore, are reporting increases in New cases of the liver disease hepatitis C diagnoses. have nearly tripled nationwide in In West Virginia, the number of just a few years, driven largely by new hepatitis C cases is nine times the use of needles among drug the national average, and Medicusers in their 20s and 30s, spawnaid costs for treating the disease ing a new generation of hepatitis C amounted to more than patients. Because a treat$27 million from 2014 to ment that cures the disease 2016. West Virginia has agcosts tens of thousands of gressively tried to track dollars, is limited by insurhepatitis B and C cases, exance and Medicaid, and is panding testing at the mostly unavailable to peostate’s syringe exchanges, ple who are still using illicit jails and prisons. drugs, there probably will Hepatitis C is particularbe financial and public ly worrisome because it is health ramifications for 10 times more contagious decades to come. than HIV. While HIV can In West Virginia, which be spread by sharing neehas the nation’s highest dles, hepatitis C can be conrates of overdose deaths PHILIP SCOTT ANDREWS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST tracted at any point during and new hepatitis C and the injection process, inhepatitis B infections, Christine Teague takes a blood sample to cluding by using a drug public-health officials are screen for hepatitis C in West Virginia. cooker or tourniquet that attempting to identify as has another person’s blood on it, many new hepatitis carriers as beyond the significant rise of oversaid Shruti Mehta, deputy chair of possible — and are girding for doses: increases in hepatitis B; the department of epidemiology decades of repercussions. sexually transmitted diseases inat the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg “If we don’t cure a significant cluding syphilis and gonorrhea; School of Public Health. The disnumber of the people who are inelevated rates of endocarditis, an ease also is spread through sexual jecting, in 20 years from now, the infection of the heart seen in peocontact, though the rate of transhospitals in this part of the world ple who inject drugs; higher rates mission is not as high as blood-towill be flooded with these people of emergency room visits for abblood contact. with end-stage liver disease, which scesses; and hospitalizations for Soon after finding out she was has no cure,” said Judith Feinberg, soft-tissue infections — some that pregnant, Sarah Farrugia went to a professor of behavioral medicine become so severe they require amthe doctor, who drew blood and and psychiatry at the West Virginia putations. diagnosed her with the disease.

University School of Medicine. “I Part of the solution, public Farrugia, 27, of Maine, had injectcan see it coming at me like the health officials believe, is opening ed heroin for about five years. She headlights of a train. Just coming, syringe exchanges so users can stopped using drugs after meeting coming, coming, and I’m thinking, access clean needles. Long controthe man who is now her husband ‘Doesn’t anybody want to jump out versial, syringe exchanges are beand got pregnant a few months of the way?’” coming more broadly accepted in later. Farrugia believes that drug The number of new confirmed the wake of the opioid epidemic. use needs to be less stigmatized hepatitis C cases nationwide rose Hepatitis C was once associated and that people need to start talkfrom 853 in 2010 to 2,436 in 2015, with baby boomers — who coning more about hepatitis. according to the Centers for Distracted the disease before the na“When I would be worried ease Control — a 15-year high. But tion’s blood supply was screened about using someone else’s neetens of thousands more are befor it starting in the early 1990s — dles, it was because I didn’t want lieved to have contracted the disand with urban drug users. About to contract HIV or AIDS,” she said. ease without knowing it.

3.5 million people nationwide “I didn’t think about other Testing for the disease is not have hepatitis C, three-quarters of things.” n widespread, and because it’s possithem baby boomers. Nearly ble not to display any symptoms, 20,000 people died of the disease ©The Washington Post

BY

T

hepatitis C often goes undetected for decades.

“It’s the unidentified that scare me,” said Rahul Gupta, West Virginia’s health commissioner.

“What I’m afraid of is that there are people out there not in the medical health-care system and they’re spreading the disease.”

Across the nation, health providers are seeing a cascade of public-health consequences unleashed by the opioid epidemic

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2017

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BOOKS

The glory and gloom of Joni Mitchell N ONFICTION

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RECKLESS DAUGHTER: A PORTRAIT OF JONI MITCHELL

By David Yaffe Sarah Crichton. 420 pp. $28

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REVIEWED BY

S IBBIE O ’ S ULLIVAN

ith her regal beauty, imperious nature and nifty clothes, Joni Mitchell could fit right into “Game of Thrones.” Her kingdom would be a mix of Canada and California, where handsome male musicians are as available as cigarettes and artistry, not business, prevails; where songs, instead of swords, serve up revenge but also seduce and enlighten. This kingdom is heavily defended, yet the queenly voice that rules it invites us in. Who could decline her invitation? Certainly not David Yaffe, whose “Reckless Daughter” is one more reminder of how difficult it is to refuse greatness.

Yaffe, a professor of humanities at Syracuse University who’s written books about jazz and Bob Dylan, wants to “understand the mind” that wrote Mitchell’s songs.

He creates his portrait using biographical information and extensive quotations from interviews that Mitchell has given to him and others. He tracks her early years in Canada, her rise to fame in 1970s Los Angeles, her expansion into jazz and the decline of her audience and her health.

Though this format allows us to see multiple sides of Mitchell, it also tests our opinion of her as an artist and as a person. Regardless of whether one likes or dislikes her, no one can dispute that courage and vulnerability have been the motivating forces in both her life and art.

Born Roberta Joan Anderson in 1943, the only child of rather distant parents, Mitchell was 10 when she developed polio. Confined for months to a “polio colony” outside Saskatoon, Canada, and haunted at night by the sound of iron lungs, Mitchell surprised her doctors by learning to walk again, what Yaffe calls the first of her many “acts of defiance.” Soon Mitchell would be dancing to rockand-roll, and soon after that singing and playing guitar in Toronto folk clubs. In 1965, she gave birth to a daughter whom she ultimate-

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Joni Mitchell, above, in 1972, the year her album “For the Roses” was released, one year after the seminal “Blue.”

ly gave up for adoption. After this, she married folk singer Chuck Mitchell, and they began performing in Detroit and New York City, but she quickly divorced him, telling Yaffe that her husband was her “first major exploiter.” In the remaining pages, Yaffe examines Mitchell’s music along with those who inspired and helped shape it: the men who were both muse and nemesis.

Mitchell’s list of lovers boggles not because of its quantity but its quality: Leonard Cohen, David Crosby, Graham Nash, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, John Guerin, Sam Shepard, Jaco Pastorius, Don Alias and Larry Klein, among others. Many of her songs reference those lovers — “A Case of You” is about Cohen; “Coyote” about Shepard — and seldom in flattering ways. In many of her interviews in “Reckless,” Mitchell is

crass and vindictive. She calls Larry Klein, her second husband, a “puffed up . . . dwarf.” Another producer is “a slimy little bugger.”

Peter Asher, briefly her manager in the 1980s, counters such criticisms as an “alternate version of reality.” Yaffe seldom comments on Mitchell’s abrasiveness, but he’s quick to point out the rampant sexism in the music industry that may have prompted it, most notably when Rolling Stone named Mitchell the “Queen of El Lay.” Where Yaffe should intervene is when Mitchell makes outlandish and self-serving statements about music. “It’s the same with sus chords,” she tells Yaffe. “Only a woman could have discovered harmony that was never used before in the history of harmonic movement.” Sus chords are suspended chords, and they have been around for a long, long time.

Also, why does it take Yaffe more than 150 pages to tell us that Mitchell’s mysterious guitar tuning originated to accommodate her left hand, which was weakened by polio? She’s not the only guitar stylist whose hands determined how they play their instrument. Putting Mitchell in a wider musical context would be helpful.

And so, her music! Here Yaffe does not hold back. Beginning with early examples before she became Joni Mitchell to her last album, “Shine” (2007), Yaffe solidly traces the glory and gloom of a musical career that expanded our ears and hearts. Mitchell influenced everyone who heard her music, from Jimi Hendrix to Prince to Taylor Swift. She adapted jazz, funk, classical, folk and rock to her own hybrid compositions and stunning lyrics. To his credit, Yaffe treats every album, even the nonsellers of the 1980s — what Mitchell called “The Lost Years” — with respect and equanimity. Nor does he shy away from detailing her miscalculations, such as her performative expressions of what she considered her “inner black person.” His book ends in 2015, when Mitchell had a brain aneurysm that left her disabled but not defeated.

As with Mitchell’s hero Picasso, we must take the good with the bad, the unforgettable voice done in by its daily four packs of cigarettes. It’s fitting, then, that Yaffe closes by praising Mitchell’s wise, world-weary reprise of “Both Sides Now” on her 2000 album of the same name. Her version reminds us of “how many new meanings had been accumulated from the many lives Joni had been living since she wrote that song” in 1967. The lonely girl ill with polio had survived to become a great artist. Yaffe’s books tells us how she got there. n O’Sullivan writes frequently about music, culture and the arts. This was written for The Washington Post.

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BOOKS

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Small-town satire as murder mystery

Into the mind of a criminal cousin

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

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REVIEWED BY

P ATRICK A NDERSON

mong the leading crime novelists, John Sandford is notable for his sense of humor. You find it in his novels — particularly his Virgil Flowers series — and, if you happen to meet him, in casual conversation. When I met Sandford at the National Book Festival a decade ago, he professed uncertainty about the wife he had bestowed upon Lucas Davenport, the star of his hugely popular “Prey” series.

The detective had run through numerous women in the early novels, Sandford said, and fearful that his promiscuity might offend some readers, he married off his hero to the beautiful and brilliant doctor Weather Karkinnen.

I thought the early Davenport novels suffered from too many diversions — the detective’s favorite jokes, his favorite rock songs — but Sandford and his readers clearly enjoyed them. Then, 10 years ago, Sandford started his second, avowedly humorous series about Davenport’s sidekick, Virgil Flowers, who came to embody the author’s sense of the absurd. “Deep Freeze” is the 10th novel in the Flowers series, and as always, Sandford devises a bizarre plot for his hero to untangle.

Set in the winter chill of the northern Minnesota town of Trippton, the novel is both a murder mystery and a satire of smalltown life. We meet a local dummy known as “Bug Boy” because he owns the local pest-control business. Bug Boy, recently divorced, has a chance to visit a high school classmate, the richest, if not the nicest, woman in town, who is also divorced. He has a fantasy of wooing her, so he brings along a bottle of champagne. Alas, they argue and she slaps him, whereupon he tries to slap her back, but forgets the bottle in his hand. It bangs into her head and she falls dead on her living-room floor, whereupon he flees, consoling himself that he’s not a murderer, just accident-prone.

Launching his investigation,

Flowers questions people who knew the dead woman. He soon discovers that the town’s leading citizens are busily hopping in and out of bed with one another. One woman tells Flowers, “Keeping two men happy is the only way I can stay happy myself.”

“This place . . . ” Flowers sighs.

“Is exactly like every other place,” she says.

Another crime emerges. A dozen local women are marketing sexed-up Barbie dolls. These Xrated Barbies, called Barbie-Os, are selling by the thousands. Barbie’s corporate masters have sent a private detective to stop this outrage, but no one in Trippton will talk to her because Barbie-O sales have become the town’s major source of income. When Flowers tries to investigate, four members of the Barbie brigade beat him senseless outside a bar.

Sandford doesn’t always bother to make his humor plot-related. For no urgent reason, he has someone tell the venerable old joke, not printable here, about why Mickey Mouse wants to divorce Minnie. He even tosses in a bit of red-state bumper-sticker humor: “Honk If You’ve Never Seen a Gun Fired From a Vehicle.”

Flowers’s adventures are a riot, in part because of the author’s belief — which he shared with me — that most criminals are remarkably stupid.

Amazingly, this is the 11th consecutive year that Sandford has published both a Davenport novel and a Flowers novel. This punishing, two-a-year pace arises at least in part from idealism. Sandford, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter before he turned to fiction, earns millions of dollars from his two best-selling series and has for years donated substantial amounts to support the homeless, animal rights and other causes.

And that’s no joke. n Anderson writes regularly about thrillers and mysteries for The Washington Post.

A

DEEP FREEZE A Virgil Flowers novel

By John Sandford Putnam. 391 pp. $29

RANGER GAMES A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime

By Ben Blum Doubleday.

412 pp. $28.95

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REVIEWED BY

K AREN A BBOTT

t the heart of every truecrime story is one inevitable fact: Someone is lying. But seldom does the alternative scenario arise: when doubt hovers not over guilt but over motivation — and, even more confounding, when there appears to be no motivation at all. This is the captivating question at the center of “Ranger Games,” Ben Blum’s singular true-crime tale about his cousin, Alex Blum, that at once upends and expands the genre. The book is a riveting exploration of the malleability of memory and the stories we choose to tell — to others and to ourselves.

The facts of the crime are clear: Late on the afternoon of Aug. 7, 2006, a silver Audi A4 pulled up to a Bank of America branch in an industrial section of Tacoma, Wash. Four men, wearing ski masks and body armor, entered the bank and overtook it with terrifying efficiency, wielding an arsenal of AK-47 assault rifles, pistols and duffel bags to hold their loot. The gang’s leader — distinguished by striking blue eyes peering through the slit of his mask — launched himself ninja-style over a glass partition and made specific demands: fifties and hundreds, no dye packs, no bait money, no serialized bills. Obey or be killed. He would later be identified as Spec.

Luke Elliott Sommer, a highly respected and battle-tested U.S. Army Ranger.

Two minutes later, hauling a bounty of $54,000, the men retreated and met up with their getaway driver, Alex Blum, a cocky, goofy 19-year-old wearing flipflops and board shorts. After his arrest, everyone who knew Alex was seized by one question: How had he allowed such a reckless, futile scheme to ruin his carefully plotted life?

As Alex awaited his fate in a federal detention center, he proposed an explanation about his detour into criminality. His indoctrination into the Rangers was disturbingly akin to that of a cult,

during which his mind was systematically emptied of everything he’d ever known about himself and the world around him.

Alex’s first cousin Ben Blum, meanwhile, was experiencing a crisis of his own. A math prodigy — by age 13, he was studying physics and calculus at the University of Colorado — he had grown disillusioned with analyzing algorithms and abstractions, fearing that his prodigious talents ran “perpendicular or worse to the real meaning of life.”

Blum instinctively applies scientific principles in an attempt to garner clues. As Blum delves deeper into the mystery, math and logic remain his secret weapons. Despite his growing affection for his cousin, he is able to acknowledge that some of Alex’s statements do not add up. To get closer to the truth he needs distance, and Blum acquires it in the most expedient way possible — striking up a correspondence, and something approaching a friendship, with Sommer, the alleged mastermind of the operation.

Blum is as gifted with language as he is with numbers, and “Ranger Games” is an extraordinary book, a thrilling, bumpy journey into the complexities of the mind, with its capacity to protect and betray — often within the very same moment. His investigation into his cousin’s downfall spurs his own tumultuous but ultimately triumphant resuscitation, a shedding of his dangerous habits and destructive thoughts. In the book’s surprisingly poignant conclusion, the cousins are wholly liberated from old restraints, both internal and external. All of the lies have been identified and filed away, on their way to becoming history.

Neither man, finally, has anything left to prove. n Abbott is the author, most recently, of “Liar Temptress Solider Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War.” This was written for The Washington Post.

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OPINIONS

The global rise — and fall — of U.S. men’s soccer AFSHIN MOLAVI is co-director of the emerge85 Lab and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. This was written for The Washington Post.

You may have never heard of Paul Caligiuri — unless, of course, you know a bit of U.S. soccer history. Caligiuri scored the soccer equivalent of the “shot heard ’round the world” in November 1989 with an improbable goal against Trinidad and Tobago that catapulted the U.S. national team to its first World Cup since 1950. The 1­0 U.S. victory by a team of scrappy professional journeymen with little international experience in Port­of­Spain on that November day changed U.S. soccer forever.

The world was changing, too, at that time. In November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, as did two Communist leaders in Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria.

Brazil held its first free election in 29 years. Douglas Wilder won the governor’s race in Virginia, becoming the nation’s first elected African American governor.

Over the next two and a half decades, the world moved inexorably toward an interconnected web of commerce, culture, consumerism fueled by dizzying technological advances.

The U.S. government and its multinational firms rode and drove this early wave of globalization, writing the rules, setting the agenda and benefiting from the opening of markets.

Globalization seemed to be a part of our destiny, whether we liked it or not.

It was fitting, therefore, that the United States became a part of the globe’s most popular sport just as globalization was gaining steam. In that 1990 World Cup, Caligiuri and his teammates faced off against perennial powerhouse, Italy, after being thrashed by Czechoslovakia. It did not look promising, but the United States lost respectably 1-0, prompting Italians to cheer the U.S. squad, almost saying: Welcome to the big leagues.

The big leagues, thereafter, became commonplace for U.S.

men’s soccer. The team had qualified for the past seven World Cups — until disaster struck on Oct. 10. Trinidad and Tobago was once again the venue and World Cup qualification was on the line.

This time, all the U.S. team needed was a tie, and this time it was the clear favorite, and worlds apart from 1989. In quick succession, Trinidad and Tobago scored two first-half goals. The U.S. team looked listless at first and furiously fought back, but ultimately buckled in a 2-1 loss.

The U.S. soccer world was aghast. Grant Wahl of Sports Illustrated called it “the most embarrassing failure in U.S. soccer history.” After all, a great deal has happened to U.S. soccer since these two Trinidad bookend matches. Qualifying for the World Cup had become expected.

The next step, U.S. soccer boosters said, was competing for top honors. Today, many of the team’s best players play in Europe or compete in a respectable U.S. league.

When I was growing up in the 1980s, global soccer was a niche sport. But today’s American kids sport European soccer league jerseys emblazoned with “Fly Emirates” or “Yokohama Tyres” logos, idolize stars such as Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi or support their local teams with names fashioned after British clubs: D.C. United, Sporting Kansas City or New

REBECCA BLACKWELL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The United States’ Christian Pulisic fights for control of the ball with Trinidad and Tobago’s Joevin Jones during the loss this month.

York City FC. A soccer infrastructure of youth academies and travel teams has also sprouted. This is not 1989.

So, if the U.S. team today has more experience, more money, more fans and better-quality players than back in 1989, what went wrong? Soccer aficionados point to a combination of poor coaching and poor leadership at the federation level, coupled with simply poor play on the field, creating a perfect storm of disaster. Bruce Arena, the U.S. coach, has resigned. Calls are also swirling for U.S. Soccer Federation head Sunil Gulati, who called for a “deep dive” into what went wrong, to step down.

There are other issues at play.

Another common lament is that youth soccer development is still too closely tied to the socioeconomic position of parents: It takes parents’ time and money to join a travel team. If you have neither, you are out of luck. Then, there’s always this one: The United States has great athletes, but they are choosing a different sport — basketball maybe, or football.

On a broader level, it is tempting, of course, in this season of “America first” and talk of walls, and with an antiglobalization mood capturing large swaths of the American public, to add this soccer loss to a perceived American retreat from the world. This month, the

Trump administration announced it is pulling the United States out of UNESCO, a benign U.N. organization that seeks to preserve culture and heritage around the world.

Forget architecture and old ruins and, while we’re at it, forget soccer, too? Isn’t that a sport played by “cosmopolitans” and immigrants?

Of course, none of this is really salient. The U.S. men’s soccer debacle has nothing to do with politics or grand theories of globalization — and American business, by the way, is not retreating from the world nor are American travelers. The beauty of sports is that all scores are settled on the field. Iceland, a country of 330,000 people, qualified, the smallest country to ever do so.

The men’s soccer team came up short for a variety of reasons as noted above (American women, on the other hand, remain perennial favorites to win it all).

The United States is bidding to host the World Cup again in 2026. It’s a joint bid with Mexico and Canada — a NAFTA World Cup, if you will. Insert the ironic joke here about walls and NAFTA. As world leaders are grappling with how to handle a retreating United States on the world stage, the soccer world that will gather in Russia in 2018 will do so without the U.S. men’s squad — and the world will go on. n

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2017

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Weinstein needs help, punishment RUTH MARCUS is a Washignton Post opinion editor and columnist.

One of the most repulsive aspects of the Harvey Weinstein scandal — and oh, so many to choose from — is the attempted medicalization of evil.

In this convenient, entitled telling, Weinstein’s alleged use of his industry power and physical force to coerce women into sexual activity is not to be understood as inappropriate and very likely illegal workplace behavior. It is not to be prosecuted and punished as criminal sexual attacks. It is to be therapized and counseled away.

From the moment the stories about his predatory behavior broke, Weinstein and his coterie of enablers have used the gauzy language of therapy to explain and excuse his conduct.

“My journey now will be to learn about myself and conquer my demons,” Weinstein said in his initial statement to the New York Times. Weinstein, his spokesman said, “has begun counseling, has listened to the community, and is pursuing a better path.”

The producer’s brother and business partner, Bob Weinstein, called him “obviously a very sick man,” adding: “I’ve urged him to seek immediate professional help because he is in dire need of it.”

And when Harvey Weinstein’s wife, Georgina Chapman, announced she was leaving him, Weinstein said, “I am in counseling and perhaps, when I

am better, we can rebuild.”

At which point he jetted off to rehab.

Look, I believe in therapy as much as the next neurotic columnist. And grant Weinstein this — he is a troubled man. But let’s be clear: This is not about journeys or community or demons or rebuilding. It is about a man who was happy, over the course of decades, to use his power to solicit and, allegedly, coerce sex. I initially typed “sexual favors” instead of “sex,” but that prissy formulation whitewashes the ugly reported reality.

Ronan Farrow, writing in the New Yorker, did not hold back.

“Three of the women . . . told me that Weinstein had raped them, forcibly performing or receiving oral sex or forcing vaginal sex,” Farrow wrote. “Four women said that they had experienced

unwanted touching that could be classified as an assault.”

A pattern of assaulting and harassing women is not something you recover from, like battling cancer, or struggle to get under control, like alcoholism. It is something that you are, or should be, punished for in civil lawsuits or criminal charges.

Weinstein’s behavior was widely known and, it seems, studiously ignored; the New York Times reported that Weinstein reached at least eight settlements with women alleging harassment and misconduct.

Indeed, Weinstein’s employment contract, as detailed

by TMZ, seems to have been crafted with future instances in mind. It provides that if Weinstein “treated someone improperly in violation of the company’s Code of Conduct,” he would have to reimburse the company for settlements or judgments and pay escalating fines — $250,000 for the first instance, up to $1 million for the fourth episode and beyond. You could look at this as an effort to deter misbehavior — or simply to put a price on it.

Under the contract, as long as Weinstein writes the requisite check, that is deemed to “cure” his misconduct and he is immune from further punishment.

Somehow the Weinstein Co. board’s expressions of “utter surprise” and being “shocked” and “dismayed” ring rather hollow in the face of these reported provisions. This was not a company committed to keeping women safe.

“I got to get help. You know what, we all make mistakes,” Weinstein said recently, repeating his hope for “a second chance.”

Help? Mistakes? Second chance?

No. No. No. This man may need help, but he deserves consequences, criminal consequences if possible. His casual invocation of “mistakes” only reveals the insincerity of his remorse.

Weinstein is sorry only that he was, finally, exposed. He hopes to buy his way out of the problem, this time not with a settlement and nondisclosure agreement, but with pricey rehab. As James Hamblin wrote in the Atlantic, “The ability to even attempt to sell this narrative is a luxury disproportionately afforded to powerful men — the ones who are not thugs or violent criminals but simply can’t help themselves . . . .

If there is diagnosable compulsion on display in this case, it seems to be an inability to hold oneself accountable.”

For that malady, there are not enough rehab beds in the world. n

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2017

22

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

BY MORIN FOR THE MIAMI HERALD

The Boy Scouts’ troubling message MOLLY E. REYNOLDS who wrote this for The Washington Post, is a fellow in the Governance Studies program at the Brookings Institution. She is a lifetime member of the Girl Scouts of the USA and a recipient of the Girl Scout Gold Award.

In the latest of high-profile moves to open up its membership, the Boy Scouts of America has announced that it will soon allow girls and young women to participate in more of its programming. Many see this as a big step forward for girls; another wall keeping young women from certain opportunities has fallen. And for some young women, the chance to participate in Boy Scouting programs will give them a chance to pursue their goals in exciting ways. But the new policy isn’t a straightforward win for girls.

Initial reports on the Boy Scouts’ policy indicate that small groups for young members (known in the Boy Scouts as Cub Scout dens) will continue to be single gender, so girls will still have access to leadership opportunities in a single-gender environment. But there’s a difference between being in a girlled group within a larger entity whose entire history and mission has been about serving boys and being part of an organization like the Girl Scouts whose central focus has always been on building “girls of courage, confidence, and character, who make the world a better place.”

Even with careful research and preparation, Boy Scouts’ efforts to serve girls in single-gender groups will still be built on a long legacy of focusing on boys’ needs.

Everything meant to serve girls

specifically will be an adjustment, not the default, central focus. Will a Boy Scouts’ program meant to introduce girls to public service, for example, take the same careful steps to make sure young women meet female elected officials, like one in which I participated as a Girl Scout in high school?

It’s not just that opening up the Boy Scouts to girls has the potential to move girls out of a girl-led, girl-centered organization. Even for girls who aren’t participating in Girl Scouts, the move sends a troubling message: You can do more as a girl in a boys’ organization than you can as a girl in a girls’ organization. We already use what boys achieve in Boy Scouts as our point of reference for what girls accomplish in Girl Scouts because the former is more familiar to the broader public

BY WALT HANDELSMAN FOR THE NEW ORLEANS ADVOCATE

than the latter. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of the Girl Scouts’ highest honor, the Gold Award. Proponents of the Boy Scouts’ policy change have emphasized girls’ newfound ability to earn Eagle Scout rank as one of the most exciting things about opening up aspects of Boy Scouting to girls. Colleges and prospective employers, they argue, understand the work it takes to become an Eagle Scout and see young men who have earned the Eagle Scout rank as attractive candidates.

They’re not wrong. Achieving Eagle Scout status is a significant accomplishment, and the young men who earn it deserve the respect they get. And yes, the Eagle Scout rank is far more familiar to many Americans than the Gold Award. Indeed, I’ve spent the past 15 years explaining my Girl Scout Gold Award to friends, colleagues and prospective employers as the “Girl Scout version” of the Eagle Scout rank. But the solution to that imbalance shouldn’t be telling girls to abandon their Girl Scout troops to go after the boys’ honor. It should be giving the girls’ achievement — which requires working hard to build the same skills we celebrate so publicly in Eagle Scouts — the respect it deserves.

By telling young women that they need to earn Eagle Scout rank to get the recognition and benefits it conveys, we are sending a crystal-clear message: To get the respect you deserve for your achievements, you have to join a historically male-oriented organization and meet that group’s definition of success.

There are girls and families for whom the Girl Scouting programs in their communities don’t meet their needs. For older girls, existing coed Boy Scout programs can and do help address those shortfalls. I know, because I also participated in one of those programs, Venturing, as a high school student in part to pursue activities beyond what my Girl Scout troop was offering. I applaud the activism of the young women who have been pushing for the policy change. Even if they find that Girl Scouts don’t meet their needs, identifying what you see as a problem in the world and working to change it is exactly what Girl Scouting teaches. But the Boy Scouts’ policy change isn’t just about the opportunities it creates for individual girls. It’s about what we convey to young women about their achievements and the context in which they pursue them — that they are less valuable, simply because they weren’t designed by men. n

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2017

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Hollywood BY

A MY N ICHOLSON

If Hollywood made a movie about Hollywood, this year would be the crisis point when the bruised hero wonders whether she can really save the day. Summer 2017’s box office was the worst in more than 10 years, and the Harvey Weinstein sexual assault accusations are just the latest embarrassment as the industry comes to terms with its treatment of women. But the reasons that Hollywood reached this nadir are shrouded in errors and myths.

MYTH NO. 1 Hollywood has always been a boys’ club.

In 1916, the highest-paid director in Hollywood was a woman: The passionately political Lois Weber shot 18 films that year. During the silent era, women wrote the majority of films. (Two-time Oscar winner Frances Marion penned a staggering 325.) Editing department jobs were “held almost entirely by women,” according to a 1926 article in the Los Angeles Times. And the first wave of female stars invested in their success by founding production companies, often helming their own films without credit.

It didn’t last. As movies transitioned to sound, the major studios coalesced into a maledominated structure that slashed female jobs in every branch.

“Women entering the industry now find it practically closed,” Weber said in 1928 — words that have echoed for nine decades.

MYTH NO. 2 The studio system was terrible for actors.

An actor’s first Hollywood goal used to be to score a studio contract — and their second was to get out of it. Studio bosses were paternalistic and punitive. Louis B. Mayer propelled teenage Judy Garland toward an addiction to cigarettes and diet pills. As Kim Novak told her biographer: “You are no longer a person. You are a property.”

Actors understandably railed against this system for controlling their lives, but when studio contracts became scarce in the early ’60s, many found that their careers suffered without shepherding. The alternatives, even today, could be worse. As the studios’ personal investment and security evaporated, young actors took their talents to TV. Box office revenues plummeted. Hollywood spent the 1960s in financial free fall. Eventually, Hollywood made itself over into corporate conglomerates that favor big opening weekends over lasting star power. Few actors have been able to build themselves into a brand.

MYTH NO. 3 Hollywood used to be more original.

The 10 biggest hits of 2017 sound wearily familiar. There are four sequels , three franchise spinoffs, one reboot of a TV miniseries of a best-selling novel and one live-action remake of a cartoon. The war movie “Dunkirk” rounds out the list.

But Hollywood has always been obsessed with established properties. The technically innovative D.W. Griffith wasn’t even the first director to adapt “The Clansman,” the novel rejiggered into “The Birth of a Nation.” By 1915, “Alice in Wonderland” had been remade three times. L. Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” inspired seven films before the Judy Garland classic. Tarzan fans were

FRED PROUSER/REUTERS

fed 41 jungle flicks in 52 years.

Think seven superhero movies in 2017 is overkill? Imagine living in 1957, when studios released a staggering 61 westerns.

MYTH NO. 4 Huge hits make huge money.

This year, “Spider-Man: Homecoming” made $333.1 million domestically on a $175 million budget. But the truth is that a movie needs to make at least twice its production budget just to break even. Marketing added $140 million to the cost of “Homecoming,” thanks to TV ads.

What’s more, domestic theaters siphon off about 40 percent of the take. “Homecoming” earned $546 million abroad, but U.S. studios see an even smaller percentage of that money. These hurdles, plus creative accounting, are why “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” could sell close to $1 billion in tickets and yet claim to have lost $167 million.

MYTH NO. 5 Rotten Tomatoes is ruining Hollywood.

The film critic aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes has been online since 1998, but it’s the villain du jour in part because the ticketing site Fandango bought it in 2016 and began to post its scores on

the same page where people can buy their seats. Click online to nab a pair of tickets for the “Flatliners” remake, and behold its 4 percent “fresh” rating.

Would potential audiences still spend money on tickets? (They didn’t.)

Still, Fandango is in the business of selling tickets. This year, high Rotten Tomatoes score helped turn $5 million darlings such as Jordan Peele’s daring, race-confronting horror flick “Get Out” (99 percent) and Kumail Nanjiani’s interracial, hospital-set romantic comedy “The Big Sick” (98 percent) into wildly profitable hits. In fact, every film in 2017’s top 10 has a thumbs-up score on Rotten Tomatoes. Forget critic-proof hits — these are critic-protected.

Instead of destroying Hollywood, Rotten Tomatoes could prod it to make better blockbusters and take risks on more low-budget, original films from newcomers such as Peele and Nanjiani.

What objections to Rotten Tomatoes actually mean, New York Times critic A.O. Scott told the Ringer, is: “We’re startled to see that people aren’t as stupid as we thought they were.” n Nicholson is the author of “Tom Cruise: Anatomy of an Actor” and host of the film criticism podcast “The Canon.” This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2017

24

2017

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