The Washington Post National Weekly - November 5, 2017

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2017

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

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a communist success New Delhi

INDIA

Kerala

In a small Indian state, the party of Marx may have done too well for its own good PAGE 12

Politics Trump’s Mueller dilemma 4 Nation Terrorists’ default tactic 9 Food Why we’re wasting food 23

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2017

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KLMNO WEEKLY

THE FIX

What’s at stake on Election Day BY

A MBER P HILLIPS

an unpopular president from the other party.

T

ISTOCK

uesday is Election Day again in a number of states, and Democrats, on the first anniversary of President Trump’s election, have a lot to prove.

More than a dozen elections across four states will give Democrats a chance to show how strong their party is (or isn’t) in the era of Trump. If they win just two races, they could effectively control state government in New Jersey and Washington state. But if they lose a high-profile governor’s race in Virginia, it could throw the whole party off its axis. Meanwhile, Republicans are mostly looking to hold the line because they effectively control 68 out of 99 state legislative bodies.

Everything that happens will set the stage for the 2018 midterm elections, where control of Congress could be on the line.

Here are four major races and what both parties have on the line in each of them.

1. Gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey What’s on the line for Democrats: In New Jersey, Democrats have a chance to flip termlimited Gov. Chris Christie’s seat. Christie (R) is extremely unpopular, which is one reason Democrats say they’re feeling good about their candidate, Phil Murphy. A Murphy win could make New Jersey just the seventh state to be entirely controlled by Democrats, because the state legislature is strongly Democratic.

In Virginia, Democrats are trying to hold on to the governor’s seat by their fingertips. A recent Washington Post-Schar School poll showed Republican Ed Gillespie closing in on Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam’s once-double-digit lead. For Democrats, winning here is everything. They need to show they can win a contested race in a state that’s leaning blue with

KLMNO WEEKLY

What’s on the line for Republicans:

Gillespie has run a race that has echoed Trump, from getting tough on majority-Latino gangs to keeping Confederate statues. If Gillespie wins, Republican operatives will see it as a sign that they’ve figured out how Republican candidates can embrace Trump’s policies without turning off swing voters.

3. Washington state special elections What’s on the line for Democrats: Like New Jersey, Democrats are trying to get a governing trifecta — control of both state legislative chambers and the governor’s mansion — for the first time here since 2012. Democrats need to net just one state Senate seat out of a handful of special elections, and they will effectively control the chamber. Democrats have zeroed in on a suburban Seattle race that has been in Republican hands for seven years. A jaw-dropping $10 million has been spent there to elect either Democrat Manka Dhingra or Republican Jinyoung Lee Englund.

What’s on the line for Republicans:

2. Virginia House of Delegates races What’s on the line for Democrats: Democrats are trying to put a dent in Republicans’ 2-to-1 control of the 100-seat House of Delegates. They hope to build off momentum that comes from flipping eight state legislative seats across the nation this year. In Virginia, Democrats think they can make some gains in 17 Republican-held seats that Hillary Clinton won thanks to compelling first-time candidates such as the potential first Latina, Asian American female and transgender state legislators, who were motivated by Trump’s election to run.

What’s on the line for Republicans: Barring a massive Democratic wave, they will keep control of the state legislature. (Republicans also control the state Senate.) That means Republicans will control redrawing the congressional and state legislative electoral maps in 2021.

If they have a Republican governor to sign off on those maps, they can cement their control of the state for a long time.

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2017 The Washington Post / Year 4, No. 4

They’re excited about possibly electing Englund, who would be the first Korean American woman elected to a state senate, and they would be thrilled to keep a blue-ish state out of entirely Democratic hands. Republicans say the fact that Democrats could lose a close race there is a sign of Democrats’ weakness.

4. Georgia state Senate special election No, Democrats don’t have a chance to control any branch of government in deep-red Georgia. But they can play defense by flipping an open state legislative seat. If Democrat Jen Jordan can win outright or make it to the December runoff and win, they’ll block a GOP supermajority there.

A win in a Republican-held Senate could set up Democrats to seriously play for Georgia’s governorship next year for the first time in two decades. Liberal Daily Kos blogger Carolyn Fiddler said, “Next Tuesday is full of electoral opportunity for Democrats all across the country.”

And that’s true. Democrats have a lot to gain Tuesday. They also have a lot to prove. n

©The Washington Post

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY SCIENCE BOOKS OPINION FOOD

4 8 10 12 17 18 20 23

ON THE COVER In southern India, the communists in the state of Kerala have embraced electoral politics and since 1957 have been routinely voted into power. This modern incarnation of communism has also produced an odd paradox.

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POLITICS

Mueller’s moves frustrate president

ANDREW HARNIK/ASSOCIATED PRESS

In wake of charges, Trump resists calls by Bannon, others for more combative response

BY P HILIP R UCKER AND R OBERT C OSTA

D

ebate has intensified in President Trump’s political circle over how aggressively to confront special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, dividing some of the president’s advisers and loyalists as the Russia investigation enters a new phase following charges against three former Trump campaign officials.

Despite his growing frustration with a federal probe he has roundly dismissed, Trump has

been cooperating with Mueller and lately has resisted attacking him directly, at the urging of his attorneys inside and outside the White House.

But several prominent Trump allies, including former White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, have said they think the president’s posture is too timid.

Seeing the investigation as a political threat, they are clamoring for a more combative approach to Mueller that would damage his credibility and effectively kneecap his operation by cutting its funding.

Still, Bannon and others are not advising Trump to fire Mueller, a rash move that the president’s lawyers and political advisers oppose and insist is not under consideration.

Bannon in recent days has spoken with Trump by phone to relay his concerns about the president’s position and to counsel a shift in strategy, according to three people with knowledge of the conversation. The president — so far — has not accepted Bannon’s advice, these people said.

Bannon’s view has been ampli-

Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel probing Russian interference in the 2016 election, departs Capitol Hill after a closed-door meeting in June.

Three former Trump campaign officials have been charged so far.

fied elsewhere on the right, with talk radio and cable news commentators speaking out more forcefully against Mueller and his expanding probe. The Wall Street Journal editorial board has called on Mueller to resign. The Journal is part of News Corp., which is led

by Rupert Murdoch, a friend of Trump who speaks privately with the president.

But many people in Trump’s orbit recommend that he stay the course with cooperation — encouraging him to harshly criticize media coverage of the investigation but avoid engaging Mueller.

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POLITICS “I like Steve, but his advice is not always the most helpful,” said Christopher Ruddy, a Trump friend and the chief executive of Newsmax, a conservative media outlet. “In this case, whatever Steve says, the president should do the opposite.”

The tensions extend to Capitol Hill, where Republican lawmakers have mostly split into two camps: those who are wary of weighing in on Mueller’s investigation and those who see it as a prime political target.

Bannon is demanding that GOP leaders move swiftly to end congressional probes into Russian interference, undermine Mueller’s investigation and increase scrutiny on Democratic controversies.

“The Republicans are like church mice,” Bannon said Tuesday. “No support of the president.

Totally gutless. The Hill needs to step up.”

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (RIowa) said he believes that Republicans should proceed carefully, and he called Mueller a “very ethical person.”

“I don’t know how you could improve things by interfering,” Grassley said. “The process just ought to go.”

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), a trusted Trump ally, has launched an investigation into an Obama-era uranium deal and wants to have witnesses testify about the FBI’s handling of Russia investigations. Nunes intends to issue subpoenas if people decline to appear, according to people briefed on his plans.

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich, an informal Trump adviser who praised Mueller earlier this year after his appointment as special counsel, said he has slowly “soured” on the former FBI director and agrees that Congress should put a harsher national spotlight on him.

“Mueller ought to be held accountable,” Gingrich said.

He ticked through a series of what he considers questionable moves by Mueller and his team, including their handling of former Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, whom the government described in an indictment unsealed Monday as a “proactive cooperator.”

“Congress should look serious-

MARY F. CALVERT/REUTERS

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon is pushing GOP leaders to end congressional inquiries into Russian meddling, undermine Mueller’s probe and increase scrutiny on Democrats.

ly at whether Mueller put a wire on this guy and sent him around to entrap people,” Gingrich said.

“If that happened, Congress better see the full transcripts, not just the FBI’s edited versions.

Congress should also ask why they’re raiding [former campaign chairman Paul] Manafort’s home at 5 a.m. for a white-collar crime from a few years ago.”

This sentiment is not heard at the White House, however, where officials have been careful not to antagonize the special counsel.

“Our approach has been to be cooperative and responsive and to see this come to a quick conclusion,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. “Have we been aggressive in our comments and our feelings towards the Clinton campaign and the DNC? Yes. But that’s where our aggression is seen and nowhere else.”

Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer overseeing Russia matters, said after Monday’s indictments of Manafort and his longtime deputy, Rick Gates, “Nothing about today’s events alters anything related to our engagement with the special counsel, with whom we continue to cooperate.”

Cobb added, “There are no discussions and there is no consideration being given to terminating Mueller.”

Republicans in Congress said Trump is wise to avoid messing with Mueller.

“There would be an uprising at the Capitol like never seen before if any kind of interference looked like it was taking place,” said Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.). “Regardless of which side of the aisle.

That’s just beyond the pale.”

Among Republicans, there is broad agreement to bring attention to past controversies involving Hillary Clinton, Trump’s Democratic opponent in the 2016 election, that have animated hourly discussions on Fox News Channel and conservative talk radio programs.

The White House and allies have waged a public relations battle over the Clinton campaign’s and the Democratic National Committee’s funding of research that resulted in the famous dossier that details Trump’s alleged connections to Russia.

The dossier has become a lightning rod, with congressional Republican leaders trying to discredit Fusion GPS, the firm that

commissioned the dossier, and the document’s author, Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with ties to the U.S. intelligence community.

Republicans also are trying to bring scrutiny to a 2010 uranium deal approved by the Obama administration, while Clinton was secretary of state. The deal — which Trump used as a political cudgel against Clinton during the campaign — allowed a Russian nuclear energy agency to acquire a controlling stake in a Canadianbased company that had mining licenses for about 20 percent of U.S. uranium extraction capacity, although the company cannot export uranium.

Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity, a Trump confidant, decried the lack of investigative attention on Clinton, a point the president and his top aides have made in recent days.

“This is not hyperbole,” Hannity said Monday night in his on-air monologue, which the president is known to watch regularly. “I am not overstating the case. We are at a major crisis point in America tonight. Do we have equal justice under the law in this country today?”

Some Republican lawmakers have heeded these calls. House and Senate GOP leaders have announced two investigations into the uranium deal, while at least three congressional committees are continuing to look into how the FBI handled Clinton’s email scandal.

But there appears to be little appetite for legislation that would cut Mueller’s funding or otherwise limit the scope of his investigation, something various Trump allies have suggested is necessary.

“My basic philosophy is, once you have an independent counsel, you ought to give him a chance to follow the facts,” said Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee and the chairman of the subcommittee that handles the Justice Department’s funding. “If somebody’s doing a job, you don’t want to cut it off.”

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said: “The idea that Bob Mueller is going to have the scope of his inquiry constrained, or be otherwise restricted, is really out there. I think that’s extremely unlikely.” n ©The Washington Post

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“My basic philosophy is, once you have an independent counsel, you ought to give him a chance to follow the facts. If somebody’s doing a job, you don’t want to cut it off.”

— Sen. Richard C. Shelby, chairman of the subcommittee that handles the Justice Department’s funding

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POLITICS ANALYSIS

Silicon Valley made it easy for trolls BY

G EOFFREY A . F OWLER

A

mericans are getting our first glimpse of how we got played.

On Wednesday, Congress released some of the 3,000 Facebook ads and Twitter accounts created by Russian operatives to sway U.S. voters.

These disturbing messages, seen by up to 126 million Americans, raise thorny questions about Silicon Valley’s responsibility for vetting the information it publishes. Beyond Washington, it leaves Americans who use social media to keep up with friends, share photos and follow news wondering: How’d the Russians get to me?

The short answer is that Silicon Valley made it very easy.

Facebook’s top lawyer told Congress on Wednesday that the Russian effort was “fairly rudimentary.” Here’s what he meant: Ever notice a Facebook ad that’s eerily relevant to something you’ve been talking about? Has an ad for a pair of sneakers followed you around the Internet for a week? Or have you seen an ad that says your friend “liked” it?

That’s the occasionally creepy handiwork of advertising tech, which covertly tracks much of what you do online — and then sells access to you to the highest bidder. We’re just now waking up to the fact that not only traditional marketers and legitimate political campaigns are buying in — it’s also Russian trolls hoping to manipulate you.

You were in Russia’s crosshairs if you liked the Facebook page of Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.

Same goes for people who said they were fans of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Russians even targeted people who shared enough stuff about the South that Facebook tagged them as being interested in “Dixie.”

There’s no way to tell if you personally saw a Russian post or tweet. I’d certainly like to know, but Facebook so far hasn’t disclosed to individuals whether they were exposed to posts from a troll farm called the Internet Research Agency. (Ads paid for by

MANUEL BALCE CENETA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

that group made up the bulk of a trove published Wednesday.)

Facebook lawyer Colin Stretch on Wednesday told Congress that the social network had notified Facebook members broadly about the issue but that it would be “much more challenging” to identify and notify specific people.

Facebook’s advertising systems are largely automated, so no human had to check before these ads went online. Often they originated from groups with legitimate-sounding names, such as “Donald Trump America.” Facebook and Twitter have taken down posts they suspect had “inauthentic” Russian roots and instituted new review systems. Legislators are threatening new laws that could further rein them in.

Of course, you didn’t have to click on these posts or believe what they were pitching. But social media tech is particularly good at making messages irresistible. The Russian trolls didn’t have to spend much money on these marketing techniques to have an impact thanks to preci-

sion targeting — and free promotion for buzzy content.

The most basic tool they used is called targeted advertising. By watching what you and your friends share and do on — and off — the social network, Facebook slots you into categories. Some are demographic (age, state, gender) and others are based on things you’ve “liked” and the assumptions Facebook draws about your interests. Facebook will actually show you what it thinks of you if you view your ad preferences settings. (It also lets you edit the categories; doing so could make its ad targeting even more effective.)

The Internet Research Agency bought ads targeted to people with diverse criteria, including gay and lesbian groups and the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Russian agents also used an ad technique based on tracking and following certain people around the Web. For example, if you at some point clicked on a troll website masquerading as legitimate, the site’s tech could identify your Web browser and allow the trolls to “re-target” ads to

Russians exploited Facebook to sway voters Facebook ads linked to a Russian effort to influence U.S. voters during the 2016 election are displayed during a House Intelligence Committee hearing.

Targeted advertising made it easy for Russian operatives to show social media users content that was tailored to their interests.

you elsewhere online. On Facebook, Russian operatives used a tool called “custom audiences” to target people in such ways.

Most effective of all: Russian trolls used celebrities — and our own friends — to get to us. For free. For example, in April 2016, rapper Nicki Minaj retweeted a message about an upsetting shooting from the twitter handle @Ten_GOP. That account looked like it was the Tennessee Republican Party, but it was actually a Russian troll. Minaj’s post was retweeted and “liked” more than 24,600 times. (For the record, the actual Tennessee Republican Party told The Washington Post that it had contacted Twitter three times about its impersonator problem.)

You or your friends might have shared one of these posts on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest or beyond, which the industry calls “organic” promotion. These posts reached way more than the 10 million people who saw paid ads. On Facebook alone, they found their way in front of the eyes of 126 million Americans. n

© The Washington Post

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POLITICS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Tax plan controversy centers on debt Experts say GOP proposal does include ideas with bipartisan support

BY

H EATHER L ONG

M

any of the ideas in the Republican tax proposal unveiled Thursday have found bipartisan support in the past and endorsements from economists who see a way to improve the U.S. economy.

That includes plans to make the corporate rate more competitive, simplify personal taxes, curb several tax breaks of dubious value and provide more assistance to working families.

The controversy is over who will gain the most: the rich and corporations. The GOP bill would cut the corporate rate well below previous attempts, eliminate a tax on inheritance that affects only people with many millions of dollars, and take other actions that do not provide direct benefits to most Americans.

And the proposal represents a significant break with previous tax-rewrite discussions.

Republicans have in the past focused on the importance of not adding to the nation’s debt through tax reform. Democrats have favored overhauling the tax code to raise revenue to pay for needed improvements in America’s infrastructure or to provide services for the middle class and poor.

But in this case, Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation estimated Thursday that the tax plan would be paid for by $1.5 trillion in additional borrowing over the next decade. Much of that reflects tax reductions benefiting the wealthy and companies.

Budget experts say the GOP’s decision jeopardizes what could otherwise be one of the great legacies of Republican-controlled government: fixing the U.S. tax code and improving the economy.

“I do think this is a sensible framework. It emphasizes the need for corporate reforms and how our tax system works,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “But this is still a deficit-exploding tax cut at a time when the deficit is at

The GOP bill would cut tax rates ...

Tax rates for married couples filing jointly

Current tax brackets $19,050 $156,150 $237,950

$424,950 $480,050

Taxable income

$77,400

15% $0 25% 28%

33%

35%

39.6%

10%

Tax rate

GOP bill’s tax brackets $24,000 $90,000 $260,000

12%

$1 million

25%

35%

0%

39.6% 39.6%

How does it change your rate?

Cut

Same

Increase

$90,000 $156,150 $260,000 $424,950 $480,050

$1 million

... but also cut popular deductions Eliminates the $4,050per-householdmember personal exemption but extends the child tax credit.

Caps the mortgage interest deduction for newly purchased homes — up to $500,000 in loan debt.

Source: IRS, ‘Tax Cuts and Jobs Act’ proposal

near-record levels.”

At heart, the GOP plan cuts taxes on large businesses and pays for those reductions by raising taxes on individuals, the exact opposite of what was done in the 1986 Tax Reform Act under President Ronald Reagan. Republicans have long held up the 1986 effort — which did not add to the deficit — as a model.

The cut in corporate taxes will deplete the Treasury by nearly $847 billion over the next decade, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation. The elimination of the estate tax — which is paid only by the small portion of Americans with estates worth more than $5.49 million — and related measures will cost $172 billion. The creation of a 25 percent rate for people who pay corporate taxes through the individual code — a popular way for the wealthy to reduce their tax obligation — will cost $448 billion.

The GOP offsets some of those costs by raising taxes on individu-

Eliminates the deduction on state and local taxes (except for property taxes up to $10,000).

THE WASHINGTON POST

al earners who use tax breaks such as the mortgage interest deduction and the state and local tax deduction. But critics say the GOP could have chosen to overhaul the tax code in a way that concentrated benefits on middle- and working-class Americans — and chose not to.

“You can very much achieve tax reform without giving higherincome earners a tax cut,” said Chye-Ching Huang, deputy director of federal tax policy at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

President Trump and top Republican leaders argue that the middle class and working poor will benefit from lower taxes of big businesses because corporations will use the money they save on taxes to hire more workers and pay existing employees higher wages.

“We will be creating jobs like you have rarely seen,” Trump said in the Oval Office, as he kissed a postcard of the House GOP tax plan, hailing it as a “great Christ-

mas present.”

Invariably, overhauling the tax code creates winners and losers, and the writers of the legislation argued that they were making progress toward a top policy goal.

The plan contains several policies that have attracted bipartisan support before. The current corporate tax rate of 35 percent is far higher than those of most other wealthy countries, leading many companies to say they are at a disadvantage and must spend a disproportionate amount of time and resources on complying with tax rules. In his last year in office, President Barack Obama proposed lowering it to 28 percent.

The GOP has pursued a much lower rate, proposing on Thursday a 20 percent rate.

Likewise, many experts agree the tax code contains numerous tax breaks that don’t provide much benefit to the economy. For example, while many existing homeowners may appreciate the mortgage interest deduction, research suggests that it disproportionately benefits higher-income earners and does little to spur home-buying. Democrats have proposed limiting its value before — just as the GOP tax bill on Thursday proposed allowing new home buyers to deduct interest on only $500,000 of mortgage debt rather than the current $1 million threshold. Only 5 percent of mortgages in the United States are worth more than $500,000, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

The mortgage interest change, among other limits to tax breaks benefiting individual earners, would raise more than $1.25 trillion over the next decade, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.

Alan Auerbach, professor of economics and law at the University of California at Berkeley and one of the country’s top tax scholars, said some provisions in the plan make a lot of sense. But he lamented how much the plan adds to the deficit, among other provisions. n © The Washington Post

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NATION

In Calif., a developing-world virus S COTT W ILSON San Diego BY

C

alifornia’s exorbitant housing costs are driving a public-health crisis here, as a developing-world disease is racing through homeless encampments in cities along the coast.

The hepatitis A outbreak in Los Angeles, Santa Cruz and San Diego, long considered a model of savvy urban redevelopment, is the extreme result of a booming state economy, now driving up home prices after years of government decisions that made low-cost housing more difficult to build.

Unlike in some other large U.S. cities, the homeless population in San Diego has been rising sharply, outstripping the local government’s ability to manage its scope.

State lawmakers passed more than a dozen measures in the recent legislative session to address the state’s lack of affordable housing, none of which will help resolve the crisis in the short term.

Nowhere is the need more urgent than in this prospering city, where the number of people living on the streets rose 14 percent in the past year, tracing a hepatitis A outbreak that thrives in unsanitary conditions. Health officials believe an epidemic that has infected more than 500 people statewide since March began in San Diego County, where 19 people have died as a result of the disease, nearly all of them homeless.

Extremely rare in the United States, and rarely fatal when it does occur, hepatitis A attacks the liver and causes symptoms such as fever, nausea and jaundice. It is spread when a person ingests food or water tainted by the feces of someone who is infected — that is, it is a virus that stalks the unclean places where the poor are often consigned to live. California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) declared a state of emergency as the result of the outbreak this month.

“An epidemic like this in California — are you serious?” said Timothy Berry, 48, who lives amid the mattresses and tarps lined up along 16th and Island streets out-

SANDY HUFFAKER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Lack of affordable housing exacerbates growing homelessness — and the spread of hepatitis A side God’s Extended Hand mission.

Berry lives below the brushedsteel apartment buildings that in recent years have remade this city’s downtown, on streets that crews now power scrub with bleach. Portable toilets and handwashing stations mark downtown corners in the shadows of buildings where sea kayaks are visible through the glass balconies of $2,000-a-month studios.

The first of three large, citysanctioned tents opened last month to bring some of the more than 9,000 homeless people into sanitary conditions, at least temporarily. A vaccination program that already has protected more than 65,000 residents continues with guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has called this outbreak the deadliest since it began tracking the disease in the United States two decades ago.

But the long-term solution is simple and elusive: constructing

more housing that would be affordable to those on the streets and the estimated 500,000 San Diego County residents living a missed paycheck away from homelessness.

“At the heart of this homeless crisis is a housing crisis,” said Jim Vargas, a Roman Catholic deacon who runs Father Joe’s Villages, one of California’s largest providers of services to the homeless. “Low vacancy rates and high rents is a very toxic combination for our population. Our clients don’t stand a chance against that dynamic.”

California has often limited development in its most desirable areas, either through heavy regulation or popular referendum. The practice has boosted property values, but those without a foothold in the market have found it increasingly hard to find a path in.

The state’s poverty rate has become the highest in the nation, a direct result of housing costs that statewide exceed twice the national average.

Paulina Bobenrieth, a nurse with the public health department, gives a hepatitis A vaccine to a homeless man in San Diego.

A long policy debate over how to address homelessness has coalesced around “housing first,” an approach that emphasizes getting the homeless into permanent housing as quickly as possible and then treating the mental illness, addiction and other issues that often surround those living outside.

It is one of the few policy areas where California’s political leadership agrees with the Trump administration. Secretary Ben Carson’s Department of Housing and Urban Development prioritizes funding for permanent housing projects. While this has proved more effective than treating the homeless in shelters or temporary housing, the approach places an even higher premium on available housing stock that many California cities do not have.

Amid a state budget crisis six years ago, Brown decided to steer money once available to cities for low-income housing construction toward debt servicing and schools.

San Diego has lost an estimated $200 million in affordable housing funds.

The result has been that little, if any, affordable housing has been built since then in cities that at the same time have approved highend redevelopments, typified by the apartment buildings with names such as Urbana and Fahrenheit that line the streets around Petco Park — home of the San Diego Padres — a baseball stadium the city subsidized when it was built 13 years ago.

State officials — and concerned voters — are scrambling to make up for lost time. Brown signed legislation in September that will place a $4 billion bond measure on the ballot next year to finance the construction of low-income housing.

“I look at this situation here as the growing gap between the haves and have-nots,” said Gordon Walker, chief executive of the nonprofit Regional Task Force on the Homeless in San Diego. “. . . It’s political will that is needed to solve these social problems, and the decisions are not easy.” n ©The Washington Post

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2017

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NATION

KLMNO WEEKLY

Terrorism by truck is hard to thwart BY

J OBY W ARRICK

I

n Stockholm, the perpetrator was an Uzbek immigrant who careened down a busy shopping street in a hijacked beer truck, hitting 19 pedestrians before crashing his vehicle into a department store. Five of his victims died, including an 11-year-old girl.

In London, British national Khalid Masood plowed into a throng of tourists on Westminster Bridge in a rented SUV, then jumped out and stabbed a police officer before he was fatally shot. In Barcelona, the driver was a radicalized 22-yearold who left a quarter-mile trail of carnage along the city’s famed La Rambla boulevard.

Over the past year, the same scene has played out at least seven times in Western cities, from Berlin’s crowded Breitscheidplatz Christmas market to a hockey arena parking lot in Edmonton, Alberta. In the wake of Tuesday’s truck rampage in Lower Manhattan, investigators were piecing together a basic narrative that has now become distressingly familiar — rented vehicle, soft target, homegrown perpetrator armed with a crude weapon and the simplest of plans.

With the Islamic State all but finished as a military force in Iraq and Syria, terrorism by vehicle is now firmly entrenched as the preferred choice for the group’s scattered followers and sympathizers outside the war zones of the Middle East. The results of the Halloween attack underscore the reasons for its popularity, terrorism experts say: The tactic requires no special skill or instruction or formal membership in a terrorist group. And it is nearly impossible to prevent or stop.

“Cities are filled with pedestrians and streets are filled with automobiles, and you can’t realistically separate them,” said Brian Michael Jenkins, a terrorism expert and senior analyst at Rand Corp. “Look at it from the perspective of the perpetrator: You don’t have to take on the risk of enlisting confederates or entering a conspiracy. You don’t have to apply for

MARK LENNIHAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The cheap, simple method of attack has become the default choice for Islamic State followers a firearm permit or learn to make a bomb. All you have to do is get behind the wheel.”

A day after the New York attack, investigators concluded that suspect Sayfullo Saipov spent weeks preparing for the assault, choosing a route sure to be crowded with bicyclists and joggers and arranging the rental of a small Home Depot truck. But like the suspects in other similar attacks, he appears to have little, if any, training or direct contact with foreign terrorists. Instead, he is believed to have followed a detailed template distributed broadly over multiple Islamic State social media accounts in recent months.

Those instructions have typically included advice on how and where to obtain a vehicle, as well as tips on choosing the right location for an attack. One such article posted in Rumiyah — the Islamic State’s online magazine — said the ideal vehicle should have a raised chassis for clearing curbs and barriers and should be “fast in speed, or rate of acceleration,” to ensure maximum

momentum before striking.

The truck allegedly driven by Saipov traveled “at a high rate of speed” on a Lower Manhattan bike path and appeared to specifically target bike riders and pedestrians, John Miller, the New York Police Department’s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism, told reporters Wednesday. The rampage ended when the truck collided with a school bus, injuring still more people. Saipov was shot and wounded shortly after he emerged from the vehicle brandishing what turned out to be a pellet gun and a paintball pistol, police said.

The rising popularity of the truck tactic in recent months prompted the federal Transportation Security Administration this spring to issue guidance to rental companies nationwide, urging managers to report any suspicious behavior by clients, such as “unusual or unexplained modifications” to reinforce a vehicle’s front bumper and frame, according to the official memo released in May.

This Home Depot truck was used to mow down people on a bike path before the driver crashed it into a school bus Tuesday in New York.

Eight people were killed and a dozen others wounded.

The NYPD has passed along similar warnings to local rental companies and dispatched officers to scores of them over the past two years to talk about the growing potential for using trucks as terrorist weapons.

“We did extensive outreach to the truck rental business,” Miller said at a news conference.

In practice, the chances of disrupting a plot at a rental counter have always been small, U.S. officials and terrorism experts acknowledge. Despite his reported preparations for Tuesday’s attack, Saipov had no history of serious crime or known association with terrorist groups. He had made a living as an Uber driver and had passed the company’s background checks, an Uber spokesman said.

Privately, some longtime terrorism analysts express surprise that the number of such attacks has not been higher, given the simplicity of the plots and the difficulty of gaining prior warning about them. Indeed, the shift to simpler tactics and cruder weapons in recent months has meant far fewer opportunities in general to detect and thwart a terrorist operation in advance, Matthew Levitt, a former Treasury Department counterterrorism official, said in testimony in September to the House Financial Services Committee.

While the personal circumstances that motivated Tuesday’s attack are not fully understood, nearly all the recent instances of terrorism by vehicle involved troubled men who had never belonged to the Islamic State but sought membership posthumously, in an act of what Jenkins called “prestige suicide.”

“ISIS today is signaling that you can become a member just by taking action,” he said. “ISIS has no investment in this person other than in sending out the appeal: ‘If you carry out the attack and claim it is ISIS, then you become a member, ex post facto.’ In the mind of the perpetrator, it means your action has status, rather than just being some loser taking out his frustrations on the world.” n ©The Washington Post

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As Syrians starve, hope withers away

BY L OUISA L OVELUCK AND Z AKARIA Z AKARIA

Beirut

I

n the final days of Sahar Devdeh’s life, her parents feared their hugs might break her.

She barely moved. She was too weak to cry. At times, her doctor thought, she looked more like a skeleton than a month-old baby.

When she died recently at 34 days old, Sahar became a stark casualty of a growing food crisis in a pocket of the Syrian capital. Aid groups warn more deaths will follow.

The story of how a child dies of hunger is not a simple one. In the besieged suburb of Eastern Ghouta, food supplies did not dry up overnight. Even after years of violence, families still managed to cope, spending savings on food sold at inflated prices and finding creative solutions when the fuel ran out.

Slowly, after years of a government blockade, warlord profiteering and international paralysis over the appropriate humanitarian response, residents of this suburb once known as the bread basket of Damascus have reached a breaking point.

“What we saw with baby Sahar was just the start of a tragedy,” said Hamza Hasan, a representative of the Syrian American Medical Society in Eastern Ghouta. “If things continue as they are, there will be many, many more.”

Forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have long besieged rebel-held areas to push them to surrender. Six years into the war, government forces have recaptured most opposition areas, with only a handful of areas still dominated by fighting.

Just east of Damascus, Eastern Ghouta is one of the most strategically significant of these areas.

About 385,000 residents still live in the area, once home to fertile farmlands that supplied the capital with food.

When the blockade of Eastern Ghouta began in mid-2013, business executives on both sides of the political divide smuggled food, fuel and clothing through a lucra-

ABDULMONAM EASSA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Children are dying amid the siege, and aid groups warn more will follow, especially as winter nears tive network of tunnels.

Late last year, the Syrian government recaptured nearby districts and sealed those routes for good. Then on Oct. 3, it closed the only entry point accessible to commercial and humanitarian convoys.

Figures provided by UNICEF, the U.N. children’s agency, suggest about 1,100 children in Eastern Ghouta are suffering from some form of malnutrition. Chronic shortages of medicine have compounded the problem. Doctors working on Sahar’s case said she died from intestinal complications. At least two other young children died from hunger-related issues in October.

The Washington Post interviewed nine residents of Eastern Ghouta by phone, each of whom described the toll of the siege on their lives.

For Umm Sayyah, 28, the siege’s strangling grip has meant worrying as her 2-year-old daughter, Hala, wastes into a bundle of bones.

When Hala fell ill at 7 months old, the family paid smugglers to take them through the tunnels and out to the children’s hospital in Damascus. “She put on weight, she was eating. She recovered there,” Sayyah said. “We could give her pieces of apple, pieces of banana, all of the things she couldn’t get back in Ghouta.”

When she became sick a second time, there was no way out.

A series of photos show Hala’s decline from a round-faced smiling infant to one so thin she’s unrecognizable. Ribs protrude through shrunken skin. Doctors said the toddler now weighed just over nine pounds.

“We can only give her water, and it goes right through her,” Sayyah said. “She sleeps for 15 minutes, and then she starts screaming again. I’m so tired.”

Under the terms of a cease-fire agreement brokered by Turkey, Russia and Iran, Eastern Ghouta was supposed to receive aid from the United Nations. On Oct. 30, the first humanitarian convoy in more

Hala, a 2-year-old Syrian girl suffering from a lack of medical care and adequate nourishment, is seen Oct. 25 at her home in the rebel-held town of Saqba, in Eastern Ghouta.

than a month arrived in the suburb, delivering supplies to tens of thousands of residents but leaving most empty-handed.

Government bombing has resumed, targeting militant groups, but also the marketplaces in which goods are sold. Dozens of civilians have been killed.

Speaking recently in New York, the U.N. special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, described the trend as “re-escalation rather than de-escalation.”

Mistura said violence could intensify in coming months as Syrian government forces shift their attention from the country’s remaining pockets of Islamic Stateheld territory and toward the final rebel holdouts.

“The desired improvement on humanitarian access therefore continues to elude us,” he said.

In Eastern Ghouta, women no longer come to the community center Layla Bikri runs.

Many are too frail to travel far.

Bikri, 26, who works with the Syrian nonprofit Women Now for Development, described watching children walk past the shops selling sweets that are far too expensive for their parents to afford.

“When you see them, they look so sad. Back in the days that we had dessert, I used to promise my daughter a piece at the end if she was good. Now when she asks, I give her pieces of corn. A piece of corn each time,” she said.

According to UNICEF, some 80 percent of Syria’s children have been affected by war, either living with violence at home or as refugees abroad.

With winter fast approaching, chronic shortages of fuel in Eastern Ghouta are expected to make the situation worse. Aid officials and local humanitarian workers said that substitutes — wooden benches, plastic bags — have mostly been used up.

Bikri said her job was getting harder. “I’m trying to give women and children hope that I just do not have,” she said. “I’m describing to you how we live here, but you just can’t imagine it. It feels hopeless here.” n © The Washington Post

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For Muggles, the magic continues K ARLA A DAM London BY

D

o you know which Harry Potter characters share their names with ancient constellations? What’s the incantation for the levitating charm? Do you know your Bowtruckles from your Basilisks?

Because there will be a trivia test.

It has been 20 years since J.K. Rowling charmed readers of all ages with the publication of the first Harry Potter book, and it seems many of us are still spellbound.

To mark the anniversary, the British Library has swung open its doors for “Harry Potter: A History of Magic,” a new exhibition that explores the history behind the wizarding world and sold a record 30,000 tickets even before its Oct. 20 opening.

The show delves into the historical links with the fantastical world dreamed up by Rowling — who studied classics and French at university — by exploring the wider cultural context in which the books are set. For those able to harness their inner Hermione, the library is hosting “quiz nights” to test visitors on their wizarding knowledge.

Perhaps the most exciting aspect for fans is the scores of items donated by Rowling, including original handwritten extracts from various Potter books with lines crossed out and annotations from the author.

There are also a number of intricate drawings (yes, she can draw).

For instance, one is of Professor Sprout sketched on Dec. 30, 1990.

In the BBC documentary, Rowling said she can recall the exact date because it was the night her mother died 250 miles away. She also revealed that the film she was watching at the same time may have inspired the Deathly Hallows symbol.

“The Potter series is hugely about loss,” Rowling said. “I’ve said this before — if my mother hadn’t died, I think the stories would be utterly different.”

Another drawing on display is a

JOHN PHILLIPS/GETTY IMAGES

map of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, complete with a Quidditch field and a lake with a giant squid.

Many of her items are dated from before she found a publisher — she was turned down eight times before Bloomsbury took a chance on her — and they illustrate just how vivid and richly imagined the Harry Potter-verse was from a very early stage, complete with its own consistent logic and rules.

The “first review” of her work is also on display. Alice Newton, the 8-year-old daughter of the founder of Bloomsbury, wrote on a piece of paper: “The excitement in this book made me feel warm inside. I think it is possibly one of the best books an 8/9 year old could read.”

The day after she penned the note, Bloomsbury agreed to publish “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.”

The exhibit is lined with book wallpaper and is dimly lit. Cauldrons and tea cups “float” from the ceiling, and an invisibility cloak is, apparently, hanging from a hook.

It’s organized by the school curriculum at Hogwarts, so visitors explore rooms dedicated to subjects including potions, herbology, divination, astronomy and defense

The British Library provides a historical look into Harry Potter’s world — 20 years after the first book The British Library’s “Harry Potter: A History of Magic” exhibition in London runs through February and will transfer to New York’s Historical Society next October.

against the dark arts.

The potions room, for instance, features the Ripley Scroll, a 20foot-long manuscript from the 1500s that is a kind of instruction guide on how to create a philosopher’s stone, a substance that reputedly could turn base metals into gold and grant eternal life.

“It helps bring stories to life to see the real concepts behind them,” said Alexander Lock, a historian and one of the curators of the exhibit.

Leaning over the glass case containing the scroll, Lock pointed to an image depicting a black stone, a white stone and a red stone. He noted that Sirius’s last name is Black, and that Albus [Dumbledore] is Latin for white and Rubeus [Hagrid] is Latin for red.

The scroll is displayed alongside the tombstone of Nicholas Flamel, a name shared by a character in the first Harry Potter book.

On loan from the Musée de Cluny in Paris, the headstone was reportedly found in the 19th century at a Parisian grocery store where it was being used as a chopping board.

The real-life Flamel was a Parisian landlord and bookdealer who died in 1418. After his death, rumors surfaced that he was an al-

chemist — his work was referenced by Isaac Newton — who had unlocked the secret to creating a philosopher’s stone.

In addition to borrowing artifacts from other museums, the library draws on its own rich collection to display ancient books like “Liber Medicinalis,” which features the earliest recorded use of “abracadabra,” a charm thought to have healing powers.

In the herbology section, there are ancient manuscripts on mandrakes, plants with roots that look humanlike. In “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” Professor Sprout asks her students to wear earmuffs when replanting baby mandrakes because of their insanely loud cries.

Indeed, it was long believed that when the root of the plant was yanked from the ground, it would scream and kill anyone who heard it. According to a 15th century book on display, the recommended way of harvesting mandrakes included the use of a horn to drown out the shrieking.

In the astronomy room, which is dominated by a 400-year-old celestial globe, visitors discover the constellations that share names with characters in the book, including Bellatrix Lestrange and Sirius Black.

Keen stargazers will know that the brightest star in the night sky is called Sirius, also known as the Dog Star.

The reviews so far have been generally strong, with many critics noting the breadth of material on display. Some have said that it doesn’t “hang together ” as a whole or that younger children may become “fidgety ” near the end — but most agree that Potter fans will gobble it up.

All of this is fair game for the Harry Potter quiz nights. If you do portkey over to London and find yourself participating in one, facts that may come in handy: Draco Malfoy and Remus Lupin also share their names with the constellations; Wing-gar-dium Levio-sa is the spell for levitation; and a Bowtruckle and a Basilisk are very different creatures. n ©The Washington Post

COVER STORY

where the party of Marx can still dream

BY GREG JAFFE AND VIDHI DOSHI in Alappuzha, India

O

n a recent morning in southern India, one of the world’s last truebelieving communists rose to speak in a place where communists can still whip up the masses and win elections.

Thomas Isaac, the finance minister for the state of Kerala, gazed out at a crowd of hundreds gathered to honor the founding father of Kerala’s communist party, a man killed by a snakebite while organizing farmworkers whose dying words were reputed to have been: “Comrades, forward!”

A row of hammer-and-sickle flags fluttered in the wind. People raised clenched fists in a “red salute” and chanted “Long live the revolution!”

“We are trying to build our dream state in this fascist India!” Isaac began, and in so many ways it was still true.

/

A century after Bolsheviks swarmed the Winter Palace in Petrograd, Russia (now St. Petersburg), the Indian state of Kerala, home to 35 million people, remains one of the few places on Earth where a communist can still dream.

The Bolsheviks, inspired by Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto,” had set out to build a new kind of society, a workers’ paradise in which property and wealth would be owned in common. That revolution began in the fall of 1917 and gave rise to the Soviet Union and a movement that would sweep across one-third of the world, inspiring new followers, erasing borders and filling gulags. Eventually, it would be undone by stagnant economies, pressure from the West and the alienation of its own people.

What remains today are five nominally communist nations. In Cuba, the revolution survives mostly as a decrepit museum piece. The communist parties of China, Vietnam and Laos preside over largely autocratic forms of runaway capitalism. In North Korea, communism

has become a nuclear-armed cult of personality and police state.

But in Kerala — far from the high-stakes maneuvers of the Cold War and nearly 2,000 miles from the Indian capital of New Delhi — history has taken a most unexpected detour.

Instead of ossifying into an autocratic force, Kerala’s communists embraced electoral politics and since 1957 have been routinely voted into power. Instead of being associated with repression or failure, the party of Marx is widely associated with huge investments in education that have produced a 95 percent literacy rate, the highest in India, and a health-care system where citizens earning only a few dollars a day still qualify for free heart surgery.

This modern incarnation of communism also has produced one of the stranger paradoxes of the global economy: millions of healthy, educated workers setting off to the supercharged, capitalist economies of the Persian Gulf dreaming of riches and increasingly find-

ing them.

And that has raised an existential question for Isaac and Kerala’s other 21st-century communists: Can they survive their own success?

India’s integration The story of communism in Kerala did not begin with a revolution, the storming of the capital or even Marx. Instead, its beginnings in 1939 were far more idiosyncratic, rooted in resistance to British rule, a commitment to land reform and opposition to India’s caste system.

It was also intimately tied to a traveling musical, “You Made Me a Communist,” about peasants who banded together to fight an evil feudal landlord. The play premiered in 1952, drew big crowds and helped the party win its first election five years later. Another decade passed before the “Communist Manifesto,” Marx’s account of the contradictions of capitalism, was even translated into Malayalam, the continues on next page

The symbols of communism are everywhere in the village of Pinarayi, India, the party’s stronghold in southern Kerala state, where a portrait of Russian communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin is seen reflected in a mirror.

Photograph by VIVEK SINGH For The Washington Post

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PHOTOS BY VIVEK SINGH FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

from previous page

local language.

And while Kerala’s communists borrowed the symbols of the Soviet Union — they read Sovietland magazine, followed the march of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and sent rice to the Cubans — they also embraced their own local heroes and followed their own distinct path.

Unlike communists in China, Latin America or Eastern Europe, party leaders in Kerala never seized factories — the “means of production,” in the words of Marx — or banned private property.

Instead, they competed in elections with the center-left Indian National Congress party, winning some years and losing others.

Communism became for many a piece of their identity. In the 1970s and 1980s, it wasn’t uncommon for parents to name their children “Lenin,” “Stalin” or, in the case of one girl, “Soviet Breeze.” Pictures of early Soviet leaders, such as Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, were hung on the walls in party offices alongside Indian heroes such as the party’s founder,

Krishna Pillai.

In the Soviet Union, the Communist Party had been something remote — “a mysterious and implacable external power,” as one scholar put it. In Kerala, the communist party is made up of people like Isaac, the finance minister, whose iPhone was now ringing.

“Yes, comrade,” he answered.

‘A better life for people’ He had finished his speech honoring the party’s founder and was now in his government van heading off on yet another 14-hour day in the life of a local politician tending his base. His driver pumped the horn in a nonstop staccato to clear a narrow path through streets clogged with smoke-belching motorbikes, dented cars and puttering rickshaws.

Isaac often describes his decision to join the party in the early 1970s as an act of rebellion.

His parents were devout Christians who owned a modest textile factory, and before joining the party, Isaac had been a seminary student.

Soviet-era symbolism abounds in Pinarayi. A big reason for the communist party’s survival in Kerala has been its ability to adapt to the demands of electoral politics and accommodate different and even contradictory views.

As a result, the very meaning of communism has become a subject of debate. Above right, communist party members work at their headquarters in Pinarayi.

Among his first acts as a communist was to organize a strike at his father’s mill.

“If you don’t negotiate with these workers, I will be with them on the picket line,” he recalled telling his father.

Now 64, he is still very much an idealist. He owns no land, having given away a small parcel of property inherited from his parents. His two daughters, who moved to the United States 20 years ago, after Isaac and his wife divorced, worry sometimes about their father’s lack of savings. He was unable to contribute to either daughter’s college education, and his visits to the United States to see them have been rare.

Only in the past few years has Isaac allowed himself a handful of luxuries, such as a car, the iPhone and an iPad that he uses to check the day’s cricket highlights and update his Facebook page.

His first stop was a ribbon-cutting at a family-owned driving school. Then he made a two-hour drive to Kollam, where a party leader had asked him to stop by his son’s wedding.

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COVER STORY Isaac, who became an atheist when he joined the party, posed with the newlyweds under a statue of Christ on the cross, because in Kerala the communists had never sought to stamp out religion. Soon he was back in the van rushing down a narrow, potholed road past makeshift tea stands, coconut sellers and clusters of simple, concrete homes, each one with electricity and indoor toilets. Kerala is one of the few states in India where that is the case.

“This is what it means to make a better life for people,” Isaac said, pulling on a neck pillow for a quick nap.

As he approached his home town of Alappuzha, the road widened and Isaac’s minivan sped past a mural of Che Guevara, the ageless hero of the Cuban revolution, and a billboard of Colonel Sanders, the ageless hawker of capitalist fried chicken.

Near the city’s edge, Isaac’s van stopped at a state-supported cooperative that manufactures coir, a bristly fabric used to make welcome mats sold in hardware stores across the United States. There he greeted the 100 or so older women who had gathered in a mosquitoinfested palm grove and assured them that they would not lose their jobs as the industry mechanized.

“Make whatever quantity of coir you want, and the government will buy it,” he said as the women in orange, green and gold saris applauded. Then, he promised to double their daily pay to about 300 rupees, or $5.

Isaac estimated that the government would have to subsidize the workers’ salaries for about 10 years, until they retire and their jobs most likely disappear.

He knew such subsidies were possible only because of the decidedly un-communist lives that the younger generations are pursuing.

Increasingly, young workers are fleeing Kerala’s low wages for the booming states of the Persian Gulf region, leaving Isaac to oversee an economy unlike anything Marx ever imagined — one fueled by global demand for Kerala’s healthy, educated workforce. But even with the gulf money, Isaac is running the largest deficit of any Indian state.

As finance minister, Isaac dreams of building new highways, bridges and industrial parks that might make it easier to attract high-paying jobs to Kerala — “the best physical and social infrastructure in all of India!” he often says.

But for now, his government has more pressing priorities: expanding Kerala’s four international airports — each of which offers nonstop flights to the gulf — and adding a fifth.

Persian Gulf prosperity In the 1980s and 1990s, Kerala’s migrant workers found employment building highways and skyscrapers in the gulf. These days, their better-educated successors fill jobs overseas as accountants, nurses, lawyers, doctors and midlevel civil servants. More than a third of Kerala’s gross domestic product last year came from remittances.

These migrants are remaking Kerala’s culture. One of the most popular programs on

local television is “World of Expats,” a reality show that helps family members find relatives who have gone missing in the gulf region.

They are also remaking the state’s humble landscape. Kerala is a place where big, gated homes — “gulf houses” in the local lingo — sit next to simple ones. Many of the big homes are empty for much of the year, while their owners are abroad working. One government study from 2011 estimated that there were nearly 1 million empty or partially occupied homes.

Meanwhile, Isaac worries about a shortage of housing for the poor.

Less than a mile from the spot in the village of Pinarayi where the party held its first clandestine meeting, Prasanth Cherambeth, 40, and his wife, Saniga, 36, had just arrived from Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, and were celebrating the opening of their six-bedroom home.

Friends, family and a few curious villagers were walking up a red-carpeted driveway and entering a home festooned with marigolds.

They took in the indoor fountain under the stairs, the marble floors, the glass-tiled swimming pool and the kitchen full of stainless-steel appliances that Cherambeth’s aunt was saying were “all from Dubai.” On the second floor, porch chandeliers flashed red and blue.

In a few weeks, Cherambeth and his wife would drain the pool, lock up their new home and return with their three young children to Abu Dhabi, where they had spent much of the past 15 years. Someday, when their work visas expire, they plan to return to Kerala permanently. For now, Cherambeth, a mid-level administrator at a nuclear power company, was going to enjoy his new home.

“It’s a dream,” he said, as guests swirled around him.

Indian communism’s future Despite all the changes, the party’s loyalists kept the faith. At a recent party-sponsored class for the public in the city of Kannur, a professor named K.N. Harilal was insisting that true communism would come only with the catastrophic collapse of the global economy.

“The deterioration of capitalism is an inevitability, and it’s happening fast,” he said. “Humans cannot be so narrow-minded and profitoriented forever.”

Ceiling fans circulated humid air, and a few dozen mostly middle-aged students scribbled notes in party-supplied workbooks.

“How will we know when the permanent crash finally comes?” a student asked as the class stretched into its fifth hour. “What will the signs be?”

“Nobody can predict it,” Harilal replied.

A big reason for the communist party’s survival in Kerala has been its ability to adapt to the demands of electoral politics and accommodate different and even contradictory views. As a result, the very meaning of communism in Kerala has become a subject of debate.

For many, especially the young, communism today is more about the ideal of equal opportunity than the ideology of Marx or Lenin.

“We believe all people are the same class and should have the same chance in life.

I am not a selfish person.

That’s why I am a communist.”

Shigin Pradeesh, 20, a university student and son of a low-wage coconut picker in India’s Kerala state

KLMNO WEEKLY

“We believe all people are the same class and should have the same chance in life,” said Shigin Pradeesh, 20, a university student and son of a low-wage coconut picker, who was waiting by the front desk of the party headquarters in the village of Pinarayi.

“I am not a selfish person,” he said. “That’s why I am a communist.”

Ultimately, communism in Kerala has remained Indian. At a time of rising Hindu nationalism, the party’s classes for young children — a communist version of Sunday school — emphasize a secular Indian identity.

“We are not Christians or Muslims or Hindus,” sang a group of barefoot boys and girls in Kerala’s capital of Thiruvananthapuram, near the southern tip of India. “Hunger is the same for us all; pain is the same for us all. Our blood has the same color; our tears the same taste.”

Nearly 70 years after the play “You Made Me a Communist,” introduced communism to Kerala, a popular movie offered a new account of the movement.

Director Amal Neerad’s “Comrade in America” opened at theaters in Kerala, Abu Dhabi and Dubai on May 5, which happened to be Marx’s birthday. In the film, Neerad’s communist hero fights for the poor and falls in love with an American woman visiting family in Kerala. When she returns to the United States, he risks his life sneaking across the U.S.Mexican border to win her back.

The film gently pokes fun at self-important communists and their long-winded speeches about revolution. In one of its many whimsical moments, the lovesick hero drinks too much and hallucinates a conversation with Guevara, who tells him that the “best lovers among us are communist comrades. Those who don’t have anything to hide can create revolutions and love deeply.”

In the end, the hero’s love chooses capitalist America over him. One film critic described Neerad’s lead comrade as a “losing man.” To Neerad, a former party activist, this was too bleak. “He’s a losing believer,” the filmmaker said.

This was perhaps one more way to think of communism in Kerala at a time of growing inequality and religious division in India and around the world.

“It’s a failed dream,” Neerad said. “But it’s our only hope.”

Isaac had been reluctant to see a movie that makes fun of his party, but one of his daughters, visiting from New York, pressed him to go.

“She found it to be a hilarious take on us,” he said.

Isaac’s views were more complicated.

“We should be able to joke about ourselves,” he said.

He paused and thought some more. The aging communist had never been prouder of the party’s achievements or more worried about its future. One hundred years after the birth of the first communist state, the movie’s heroes — its “losing believers” — seemed “very familiar,” Isaac said. “They feel true.” n © The Washington Post

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SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2017

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WEEKLY

Study says corals don’t eat plastic by accident; it’s tasty BY

B EN G UARINO

O Accountants and auditors Oct. 13

KLMNO

cean plastic is an indiscriminate hazard. It harms fish and kills seabirds, which wash up with bellies full of trash. Turtles swallow it because, the thinking goes, they mistake the floating waste for jellyfish. Less well known are the ways plastic damages the ocean’s smaller inhabitants, plankton and corals, which sometimes are found with particles wedged in their teeny guts.

For years, biologists and conservationists assumed that most sea creatures ate plastic by accident, said Alexander Seymour, a geographic information systems analyst and marine researcher at Duke University. Marine life, it seemed, was too confused or too hungry to avoid the junk.

A small but growing number of studies suggest another, more disturbing reason: Humans may have invented plastic that is appetizing.

“Plastics may be inherently tasty,” said Austin Allen, a Duke marine science doctoral student.

Allen and Seymour are the lead authors of a study just published in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin. Along with Duke marine ecologist Daniel Rittschof, they demonstrated that corals respond to microplastic fragments as though they were food.

The two-part laboratory study consisted of hand-feeding coral as well as growing it in seawater tanks contaminated with plastic particles less than a millimeter in diameter.

During the feeding trials, the scientists picked up a plastic or sand particle with forceps and dropped it near a coral polyp. If the sand came near their mouths, the animals used tiny hairs covering their body to brush themselves clean.

But if a piece of plastic tumbled by, the corals snapped into action.

They fired cellular harpoon guns, called cnidoblasts, to launch toxic barbs into the plastic particle. The corals scooped the plastic toward their mouths with their tentacles,

ALEX SEYMOUR/DUKE UNIVERSITY

A coral polyp consumes a white fleck of plastic during a lab trial to test plastic’s dangers to the animals.

then gobbled up the trash.

The researchers offered up polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride and six other types of plastic. More than 80 percent of the plastic particles were eaten. But a coral polyp tried to eat sand only once in 10 trials. “What happens when you drop a particle of sand on a coral polyp is absolutely nothing at all,” Seymour said.

Most of the time, the corals spat out ingested plastic within six hours. But in approximately 8 percent of the dozens of trials, the plastic became stuck inside the coral polyps for the duration of the 24-hour tests.

Corals do not hunt by sight — they have no eyes — and so must figure out what is good to eat by using chemosensors, their version of a tongue. This is a different strategy from using smell, which draws animals toward or away from an object.

“When an animal tastes something, that’s when they make a decision whether or not to eat it,” said Matthew Savoca, a postdoctoral researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center who was not involved with the study.

The Duke scientists tried to alter the chemical profile of plastic by coating it in a microbial film.

They hypothesized that corals

might prefer such “candy,” with the microorganisms hiding the taste of plastic and providing at least a few nutrients.

But they were surprised to find that corals preferred raw plastic.

In the aquarium tests, the corals ingested the clean stuff at a rate of up to five times how often they ate the bio-fouled version. This preference, the researchers said, suggests that factory plastic has an appealing ingredient.

“At least some of the hundreds of additives are acting as phagostimulant — a fancy word for compounds that are tasty,” Seymour said.

Few studies examine interactions between microplastics and corals, said Carlie Herring, a research analyst for NOAA’s Marine Debris Program. The latest research “provides new insight into their relationship,” she said.

The Duke authors cautioned that the relationship between plastic and coral may be different at sea. Though earlier research demonstrated that wild corals eat plastic, their study does not provide evidence that corals prefer plastic bits to food items, for instance.

And plastic is unlikely to be as severe a threat as coral bleaching, acidic oceans and dynamite fishing.

“This is just another drop in the bucket among the very large challenges faced by these species,” Seymour said.

Yet there is no question that plastic has penetrated the ocean, and that even its most remote corner is not beyond human influence. Robot submersibles have spotted plastic bags on slopes leading to the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the Pacific.

Seymour and his colleagues say they hope their study will be an ecological call to arms to discover what plastic ingredient appeals to coral. Savoca has the same question: “If in fact there are phagostimulants in clean plastic,” he said, “let’s find out what those are and remove them.” n © The Washington Post

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2017

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KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

Decoding da Vinci’s odd genius N ONFICTION

W

LEONARDO DA VINCI

By Walter Isaacson Simon & Schuster. 624 pp. $35

l

REVIEWED BY

A LEXANDER C . K AFKA

ould you hire this guy?

The candidate is hopeless with deadlines and alternates between undisciplined meandering and grandiose hyperactivity.

When he isn’t sketching birds, he’s making fruitless plans to reroute rivers, build cities or create absurd flying machines. When he does focus on a project, it’s with a febrile intensity, drawing, say, page after page of triangles or sadistic war machines. More disturbing, he habitually dissects corpses — humans, pigs, whatever’s at hand.

He’s restless, moving with proteges and hangers-on from one town to another, leaving contractual agreements unfulfilled.

A risky prospect at best, this mercurial Leonardo from Vinci.

Then again, he did create arguably the two most iconic works of art in Western history: the “Last Supper” and the “Mona Lisa.” His drawing of “Vitruvian Man” is the classic representation of the Renaissance spirit. And if it weren’t for those thousands of pages of forward-thinking sketches on geology, geometry, light, anatomy, astronomy, biblical history, military strategy, hydrodynamics, flight, neuropsychology, ophthalmology and countless other topics, his few surviving paintings wouldn’t be the masterworks that they are.

Nor would we know so much about this peculiar, haunted, wonderful man who was, in so many ways, centuries ahead of his time.

He comes to life in all his remarkable brilliance and oddity in Walter Isaacson’s ambitious new biography, “Leonardo da Vinci.”

Isaacson’s previous biographical subjects include Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs — restless, driven men who, like Leonardo, had bisected personalities: one half solitary pioneer, the other half inspirational team leader. For all of them, the unifying element was an insatiable, lifelong appetite for knowledge.

Tinkering and touching up his work for years upon years, Leonar-

PRINT COLLECTOR/GETTY IMAGES

Study for the head of Judas in Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper,” one of the most iconic works of art in Western history.

do took quality over quantity to an extreme. He hauled the “Mona Lisa” around with him, sometimes strapped to a mule, for 14 years, adding a minute speck of new paint here or there until the 30some layers of brushstrokes over a special lead white undercoat on wood vanished into that spookily three-dimensional visage with eyes that follow and a suppressed smile that teases and taunts. Leonardo’s obsessive dissections of lip muscles were key, as were his studies of the eye, to his virtuoso sfumato, a technique of working shades and colors into one another to form indistinct boundaries that feel psychologically subtle and alive.

In “Leonardo da Vinci,” Isaacson’s approach, true to his back-

ground, is fundamentally journalistic. No intellectual peacocking for him, and though his writing is certainly graceful, it is never needlessly ornate. But make no mistake: He knows his stuff, crowdsourcing, with extreme diligence, an array of art, historical, medical and other experts to arrive at a vigorous, insightful portrait of the world’s most famous portraitist. Leonardo groupies won’t find startling revelations here. Isaacson’s purpose is a thorough synthesis, which he achieves with flair.

He seems drawn to Leonardo’s own reportorial instincts. The artist often carried a notebook tied to his belt for his observational sketches as well as his questions, lists, fantasies and jokes. He moved easily among not just art-

ists and musicians (he played the lyre and the flute) but scientists, doctors and engineers, peppering them with questions and sometimes collaborating with them.

Isaacson, ever seeking the human aspects of the icons he studies, sieves off as much gelatinous mystique as he can from the obscuring label of “genius.” Charmingly, he ends his book with worthy lessons to be learned from Leonardo. Among these are “be curious, relentlessly curious,” “seek knowledge for its own sake,” “start with the details,” “go down the rabbit holes.” Not listed, but surely helpful, would be “possess a one-in-a-billion innate visual talent” that early on astonished Verrocchio, the Florentine artist with whom Leonardo apprenticed.

Isaacson’s confidence in the rest of us is uplifting all the same.

It’s fun when Isaacson occasionally discovers that despite or because of his research, he’s got some opinions of his own. The esteemed art historian Kenneth Clark, for instance, although finding the “Last Supper” “the keystone of European art,” considered the movement of its characters snapshotty, or “frozen.” “I think not,” pipes up Isaacson in an endearingly rebellious turn.

“Look longer at the picture. It vibrates with Leonardo’s understanding that no moment is discrete, self-contained, frozen, delineated, just as no boundary in nature is sharply delineated.”

Where the historical record is a little scant, the imagination kicks in. Enjoying his own reportorial sfumato, Isaacson writes: “As always with Leonardo, in his art and in his life, in his birthplace and now even in his death, there is a veil of mystery. . . . As he knew, the outlines of reality are inevitably blurry, leaving a hint of uncertainty that we should embrace.” n Kafka has written about books and the arts for The Washington Post, the Boston Globe and the Chicago Tribune.

This was written for The Post.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2017

19

BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

A real spy makes this thriller hum

Giving context to Brits’ ‘finest hour’

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

I

l

REVIEWED BY

B ENEDICT C OSGROVE

t’s a rare writer who can turn the inevitable into gripping drama. This is a special challenge for spy novelists whose work centers on World War II or the Cold War. After all, we know how World War II ended. We know (or we think we know) who won the Cold War. The greatest espionage novelists — John le Carré, Eric Ambler, Alan Furst and a handful of others — find new drama in the shadowy, private battles that rage in the hearts and minds of spies themselves.

John Lawton’s Frederick Troy novels fit somewhat uneasily into this category. Troy, of Scotland Yard, is not a spy so much as a cop who finds himself enmeshed in espionage plots with alarming frequency. That Troy’s father is an émigré from a prominent Russian family adds a convenient — and utterly convincing — personal connection to many of the Cold War-related plots of the Troy novels.

“Friends and Traitors” is Lawton’s latest entry in the series, and one of the best. Part murder mystery, part spy tale, the book has a streak of wonderfully dark humor throughout. The winding, cleverly constructed plot focuses, in large part, on Troy’s relationship (strained, but cordial) with Guy Burgess, the real-life British spy who fled England for the Soviet Union in the 1950s. In Troy’s capable hands, Burgess comes across as a charismatic, booze-soaked wastrel, something of a privileged brat, and a man openly and even defiantly gay at a time when homosexual acts were illegal in England.

Many of the photos that survive of Burgess, taken when he was in England and later when he was living in Russia, depict a smug creep with a cigarette forever stuck in the corner of his mouth. Among Lawton’s many accomplishments is to bring that creep to life — and make the reader (reluctantly) like him, even if we never quite admire

him.

In fact, the Burgess of “Friends and Traitors” is compelling enough that he threatens to eclipse Troy — no small feat, as Lawton’s cynical, tenacious chief superintendent of Scotland Yard is one of crime fiction’s superlative creations.

What makes Troy so appealing as a character is that he’s forever challenging that internal compass. He screws up. He breaks his own rules. He’s not so much larger than life as he is fully, believably alive, with flaws to match his formidable strengths as a detective.

The story line of “Friends and Traitors” is rather convoluted, which will come as no surprise to readers of previous books in the series. It boils down to this: Years after Burgess fled England for Moscow, he confronts Troy at a concert in Vienna. Burgess tells the superintendent that he wants to come home. Troy alerts his intelligence counterparts in MI5, who dutifully send an agent to gauge Burgess’s sincerity and look into the prospect of repatriating such a high-profile traitor.

When the MI5 agent is murdered, Troy emerges as a suspect.

The search for the real killer ensues — as many of Troy’s old flames, old mistakes and old family schisms flood back into his life.

For those who have not read Lawton’s previous books, there is a bit of a learning curve. Expect to meet characters who obviously belong in Troy’s world — even if it’s not clear, at first, why they belong, or where they fit in.

Still, in the end, “Friends and Traitors” is more than a genre novel. It is a wickedly seductive entertainment and more proof, if anyone needed it, that Lawton is creating some of our finest, and some of our most enjoyably ambiguous historical fiction. n Cosgrove is a writer and editor in Brooklyn. This was written for The Washington Post.

L FRIENDS AND TRAITORS An Inspector Troy Novel

By John Lawton Atlantic Monthly. 337 pp. $26

ALONE Britain, Churchill, and Dunkirk: Defeat Into Victory

By Michael Korda Norton.

525 pp. $29.95

l

REVIEWED BY

M ARIANNE S ZEGEDY-MASZAK

ike Waterloo and Stalingrad, Gettysburg and the Somme, Dunkirk is a place that has become shorthand for a blood-drenched turning point in a greater war. But Dunkirk has a particular distinction, one that Michael Korda captures in the subtitle to his fascinating and occasionally exasperating book “Alone: Britain, Churchill, and Dunkirk: Defeat Into Victory.”

The story, even by World War II standards, is dramatic. Hundreds of thousands of British Expeditionary Force and French troops, having been defeated by the Germans as they tried to defend Belgium, the Netherlands and France, were stranded on a French beach from May 26 until June 4, 1940. Christopher Nolan’s film “Dunkirk” focuses on the sheer vulnerability, terror and discipline of the 400,000 BEF soldiers when they faced, seemingly out of nowhere, the Luftwaffe, which left them cowering and praying to be spared a fatal bullet — until the next assault. Or until the lucky ones were evacuated, provided, of course, they weren’t aboard a vessel that fell prey to a mine or another German attack.

For Nolan, despite the carnage, the myth of the British victory involves the humble, plucky armada of private sailors and captains of all ages who commandeered fishing boats, sailboats, tugboats, ferries and nearly anything that could float to bring the boys back home. By the time they were through, 198,000 British BEF soldiers — half the force sent over — and about 140,000 French soldiers were evacuated. Korda offers a broader context to this great story by pointing out that while this fleet “captured the minds of most people, with yachtsmen and Sea Scouts performing miracles,” the reality “was that good planning by the Royal Navy was responsible for taking the lion’s share of those who were evacuated.”

With riveting detail and often pitch-perfect pacing of the dra-

matic tension of this early part of the war, Korda interweaves history, politics, geopolitical intrigue, backroom bargaining, generals, admirals, prime ministers and a führer, military strategy, and autobiography to tell the story surrounding those nine days.

Korda was also a witness — albeit a pint-size one from a formidable family. “How we arrived there, on the brink of disaster is the subject of this book,” he writes, “at once the modest account of my family’s dispersal and a history of the greater events that led to Dunkirk, and to Britain’s ‘finest hour’ as Winston Churchill called it.”

“Over the years, ‘the Spirit of Dunkirk’ has largely erased the reality of it,” Korda observes. The paradox was how a catastrophic military defeat was transformed into a mythic victory, in almost the amount of time it took to cross the channel from Dunkirk to Dover.

There are times when Korda’s re-creation is superb and panoramic — the movements of troops, the despair of politicians, the memories of soldiers, the engagement of the British public feel almost novelistic in pacing and dramatic tension. What is less satisfying is the parallel story of his family, whose occasionally unexpected appearances have the quality of a Dickensian non sequitur.

In the end, however, these shortcomings might be yet another example of Dunkirk’s role not just in history but in the country’s psychology. When Korda says he seeks to explain “how we arrived there,” he may not be writing only about how Dunkirk embodied and foretold Britain’s solitary status in the world, but also how alone one 6-year-old boy felt when the world was at war. n Szegedy-Maszak is a senior editor in the Washington bureau of Mother Jones and the author of “I Kiss Your Hands Many Times: Hearts, Souls, and Wars in Hungary.” This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2017

20

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Making parks pricier will also make them whiter DAN WHITE is the author of “Under The Stars: How America Fell In Love With Camping” and “The Cactus Eaters: How I Lost My Mind And Almost Found Myself on the Pacific Crest Trail.” This was written for The Washington Post.

As someone who has camped in national parks since the third grade, I can’t help but notice the blinding whiteness of the great outdoors. Everywhere I go, I see lots of other people who remind me of myself: aging and white.

My experience reflects a long­standing ethnicity gap: White visitors make up roughly 80 percent of all national park travelers, according to National Park Service visitation figures. Now, a proposed entrance­fee increase to $70 per car at 17 popular national parks — including such crown jewels as Yosemite, Yellowstone, Zion and the Grand Canyon, where entrance costs will jump from $30 for a weekly pass — could make these places even whiter.

If the price increases go into effect, all lower-income Americans stand to be priced out.

Still, advocates say fee increases could have an oversize impact on communities of color by creating a new disincentive for groups that have stayed away from, or felt discouraged from, visiting national parks, for reasons including fearful historical associations with wilderness areas and a perceived lack of cultural relevancy.

The most recent Park Servicecommissioned demographic survey, from 2008 to 2009, showed stark differences among ethnic groups in terms of national park visitation: 78 percent white, 9 percent Hispanic, 7 percent black and 1 percent American Indian or Alaskan. Members of underrepresented groups pointed to the high cost of national parks.

Forty-seven percent of Hispanic respondents, 54 percent of African American respondents and 59 percent of American Indian respondents said that hotel and food costs were too high in national parks, compared with just 33 percent of white respondents. And 32 percent of Hispanics, 25 percent of African Americans and 37 percent of

American Indians said entrance fees were too high, compared with 20 percent of whites.

Finances are hardly the only factors in the low minority representation at national parks.

In that same survey, a much larger proportion of black and Hispanic respondents said that the parks were too far away for them to visit more often. And there are cultural factors.

Those worries reflect a history of racially motivated violence in the outdoors. In his book “Heading Out,” a history of camping, Terence Young noted that park administrators in the early 20th century followed a policy of “discouraging visits by African Americans, [who were], in the opinion of administration, ‘conspicuous . . . objected to by other visitors . . . [and] impossible to serve.” Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park, in the early 1940s, was up front about such exclusionary policies, with “separate but equal” camping, cottages and coffee shop.

Affordability can make the difference between heading out and staying home. I saw plenty of evidence of this in 2014, when tagging along on an organized camping trip to the Everglades that upended the usual

FELICIA FONSECA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The National Park Service plans to impose steep increases in entrance fees at 17 of its most popular parks, including the Grand Canyon.

demographics of my trips to national parks. Except for a couple of white adult chaperons, the campers were African American and Latina teenage girls from low-income households in Miami. For most of the girls, this was their first campout and their first visit to a national park. Several of the girls had to persuade skeptical parents to let them attend.

“My father just doesn’t get that I would want to do this,” one girl told me. “He told me: ‘Black people don’t camp. You can go in the back yard or watch the nature channel.’ ” But the primary barrier to entry was financial; several campers told me they simply could not afford the expense of such an excursion when they factored in tents, sleeping bags and travel costs — not to mention park admission fees. The trip knocked aside such barriers, at least temporarily, because it was sponsored and co-organized by Inspiring Connections Outdoors, a Sierra Club affiliate that takes more than 14,000 youths, most of them from low-income families, from 52 U.S. cities on nature excursions, including national park camp-outs.

The potential fee increase comes at a time when a number of groups, including Outdoor Afro, Hike Every Available Trail and Latino Outdoors, are working toward greater inclusiveness. Several have seen surges in membership in recent years. One reason is greater

exposure, including the publicity of President Barack Obama’s barnstorming tour of western national parks in summer 2016.

When Teresa Baker founded the African American Nature and Parks Experience in 2013, 500 group members visited national parks as part of an event held in the summer. This year, 2,000 members took part.

Some have celebrated the idea of increasing park fees, given the record-high attendance at national parks last year and the need for a cash infusion to repair park infrastructure.

Understandably, many park visitors crave more room to spread out in the best-loved parks and worry about aging roads, bridges, bathrooms and camping areas. But it’s important to remember that this popularity surge followed a long period of stasis, with Park Service administrators expressing concerns about a steep decline in per-capita visitation over the past two decades. Part of that stasis has been linked to “limited participation of minorities” traced to the 19th century, according to a study in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, as well as pressing economic concerns.

“Thinning out the crowds” might sound good, but the people forced to stay home could be the very ones the parks most need to attract — and with such steep increases, there might not be much of a crowd remaining at all. n

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2017

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

China’s bold totalitarian ambitions JACKSON DIEHL is deputy editorial page editor for The Washington Post.

While the Trump White House wallowed in its usual trifling controversies, China’s communist leadership recently staged what will be remembered as the most important political event of the year, and maybe of the century so far. As the party Congress concluded the other week, Xi Jinping was confirmed as most powerful leader in Beijing since Mao Zedong — and he proclaimed the regime’s intention not just to become the world’s leading power but to establish a new model of totalitarianism.

Xi’s “new era of socialism with Chinese characteristics” was written into the party constitution, making anyone who opposes it an enemy of the state.

Its aim is to make China “a leading global power” by 2050, with a “world-class military” built to fight and win wars. These aims will be achieved by reinforcing Xi’s dictatorial powers, and those of the party, over every area of life, using cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence. It’s a Stalinism for the 21st century.

Perhaps most ominously, Xi envisions his updated police state as a model for the rest of the world.

“It offers a new option for other countries and nations,” he said during a three-hour, 25-minute speech that was its own statement of grandiosity. “It offers Chinese wisdom and a Chinese approach to solving the problems facing

mankind.”

Plenty of strongmen and would-be strongmen around the world were probably applauding, from Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Hungary’s Viktor Orban and, it seems, Stephen K. Bannon. The oracle of the altright called Xi’s 30,000-word text “an adult speech to adults,” in contrast to the “pablum” of John McCain and George W. Bush, who delivered contemporaneous speeches defending democratic values and U.S. global leadership.

It’s worth considering what the world might look like 30 years from now if Xi’s ambitions are realized. A few broad themes stand out: Concentration of power. Xi is returning China to the era when a single, emperor-like figure ruled without the constraints of legal checks or term limits. In a break with the practice of the past two

decades, no potential successor was named at the congress to the party’s standing committee, meaning that Xi aims to remain in power after his second fiveyear term as president ends in 2023. At 64, he could conceivably dominate China until 2035, the year he set for achieving many of his goals.

State control of all behavior.

In the past five years, Xi’s regime has wiped out the modest avenues for dissent his predecessors allowed, from human rights lawyers to nongovernment groups and cautiously critical journalists. Now it is developing a far more ambitious system of social control driven by new technologies. Every citizen will be given a “social credit” rating based on data collected through the Internet, the financial system and public surveillance, which will be stored along with facial images. Those with bad ratings will have good reason to fear being recognized by the regime’s ubiquitous cameras. At last, the overused term “Orwellian” will be accurate.

A global imperial system. Xi’s “belt and road ” initiative, which will invest hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure projects across Eurasia, is meant to create a Beijing-dominated geopolitical bloc that overshadows the

transatlantic alliance.

Meanwhile, the regime is seeking to control how it is portrayed even in the West. It has kidnapped dissenters in other countries and sought to suppress critical discussion of China on university campuses. Western journalists who probe corruption are denied visas. If Xi has his way, even countries that remain democratic won’t practice free speech where China is concerned.

Of course, it is possible that Xi is overreaching. As it watches the United States and much of the rest of the West struggle with populist and nationalist movements, the political consequence of the last crisis of capitalism, the Chinese elite may overestimate the attraction of their totalitarian alternative.

Centralized control of society and the stifling of individual freedom led China and other communist nations to catastrophe in the late 20th century; Xi’s bet that a modified, technologically updated system can work in the 21st century could easily fail.

It would nevertheless be dangerous not to take China’s strongman seriously. He is imagining a world where human freedom would be drastically curtailed and global order dominated by a clique of dictators. n

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2017

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

BY WASSERMAN FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE

Nuance in speech is not oppression LUCÍA MARTÍNEZ VALDIVIA is an assistant professor of English and humanities at Reed College in Portland, Ore. This was written for The Washington Post.

At Reed College in Oregon, where I work, a group of students began protesting the required first-year humanities course a year ago. Three times a week, students sat in the lecture space holding signs — many too obscene to be printed here — condemning the course and its faculty as white supremacists, as anti-black, as not open to dialogue and criticism, on the grounds that we continue to teach, among many other things, Aristotle and Plato.

In the interest of supporting dissent and the free exchange of ideas, the faculty and administration allowed this.

Those who felt able to do so lectured surrounded by those signs for the better part of a year. I lectured, but dealt with physical anxiety — lack of sleep, nausea, loss of appetite, inability to focus — in the weeks leading up to my lecture. Instead of walking around or standing at the lectern, as I typically do, I sat as I tried to teach students. Inadvertently, I spoke more quietly, more timidly.

Some colleagues, including people of color, immigrants and those without tenure, found it impossible to work under these conditions. The signs intimidated faculty into silence, just as intended, and these silenced professors’ lectures were quietly replaced by talks from people willing and able to carry on

teaching in the face of these demonstrations.

I think obscuring these acts of silencing was a mistake that resulted in an escalation of the protesters’ tactics. This academic year, the first lecture was to be a panel introduction of the course: Along with two colleagues, I was going to offer my thoughts on the study of the humanities and the importance of knowing the history of the education that students were beginning.

But as we were about to begin, the protesters seized our microphones, stood in front of us and shut down the lecture.

The right to speak freely is not the same as the right to rob others of their voices.

Understanding this argument requires an ability to detect and follow nuance, but nuance has largely been dismissed from the debates about speech raging on

BY SHENEMAN

college campuses. Absolutist postures and the binary reign supreme. You are pro- or anti-, radical or fascist, angel or demon.

Even small differences of opinion are seized on and characterized as moral and intellectual failures, unacceptable thought crimes that cancel out anything else you say.

No one should have to pass someone else’s ideological purity test to be allowed to speak.

University life — along with civic life — dies without the free exchange of ideas.

In the face of intimidation, educators must speak up, not shut down. Ours is a position of unique responsibility: We teach people not what to think, but how to think.

Realizing and accepting this has made me — an untenured, gay, mixed-race woman with PTSD — realize that no matter the precariousness of my situation, I have a responsibility to model the appreciation of difference and care of thought I try to foster in my students.

If I, like so many colleagues, am afraid to say what I think, am I not complicit in the problem?

At Reed and nationwide, we have largely stayed silent, probably hoping that this extremist moment in campus politics eventually peters out. But it is wishful thinking to imagine

that the conversation will change on its own.

Nuance and careful reasoning are not the tools of the oppressor, meant to deceive and gaslight and undermine and distract. On the contrary: These tools can help prove what those who use them think — or even feel — to be true.

They make arguments more, not less, convincing, using objective evidence to make a point rather than relying on the persuasive power of a subjective feeling.

I ask one thing of all my firstyear students: that they say yes to the text. This doesn’t mean they have to agree with or endorse anything and everything they read. It means students should read in good faith and try to understand the texts’ distance from our historical moment.

Ultimately, this is a call for empathy, for stretching our imaginations to try to inhabit and understand positions that aren’t ours and the points of view of people who aren’t us.

A grounding in the study of the humanities can help students encounter ideas with care and learn that everything is open to critical interrogation. The trick is realizing — and accepting — that no person, no text, no class, is without flaws. The things we study are, after all, products of human hands. n

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2017

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FOOD

Americans aren’t eating leftovers BY

C AITLIN D EWEY

A

merican consumers throw away 27 million tons of food each year, according to the food waste coalition ReFED, clogging landfills, generating greenhouse gasses, and costing the economy an estimated $144 billion.

The solution, however, could be simple: get people to eat leftovers again.

Once the mainstay of weekday lunchboxes and thrifty home cooks, leftovers today constitute the single largest source of edible food waste in U.S. homes, according to a new study by the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group.

The finding defies conventional wisdom about the sorts of foods consumers waste — and represents a major obstacle for environmentalists and anti-food-waste campaigns. While past efforts have focused on improving consumers’ food literacy and kitchen skills, converting them to leftovers will involve changing deep-seated food preferences.

“I don’t think this is just about education,” said Dana Gunders, a senior scientist in the NRDC’s Food and Agriculture Program. “It’s a cultural shift that needs to happen.”

In the report, published recently, the NRDC sought to measure

how much food Americans waste and what types of foods they tend to waste most. The study analyzed the food-waste habits of more than 1,151 households in Nashville, Denver and New York, which agreed to keep diaries of the items they tossed and allow researchers to check their trash cans afterward.

What researchers found was staggering: The average person wasted 3.5 pounds of food per week. Of that, only a third consisted of inedible parts, such as chicken bones or banana peels. And of the remaining, edible trashed food, bin digs found that 23 percent consisted of prepared leftovers, from any source — followed by fruits and vegetables, baked goods, and liquids and oils.

Gunders said that many consumers appear to stash Tupperware containers in their fridge and then forget to excavate them before the food goes bad. Other times, consumers grow bored of eating the same food on multiple occasions.

“There were two big reasons people threw out edible food,” Gunders said. “They thought it had spoiled, or they just didn’t like leftovers.”

This is not a new feeling in the American psyche, although it has come under scrutiny with increased attention to food waste.

The food historian Helen Veit has observed that regard for leftovers plummeted in the 1960s, when refrigeration and cheap food became plentiful. Although saving food had been patriotic during the World Wars, and economically necessary in the century before them, rising incomes and agricultural productivity pushed thrift out of favor.

“I’m not saying all Americans did this recklessly, but by the 1960s, people were able to say, ‘I’d rather not eat that leftover pot roast,’ ” Veit said. “They could say,

When researchers dug through trash cans in three U.S. cities, these are the types of food waste they encountered Inedible parts 35% Prepared foods & leftovers 23% Fruits & vegetables 20% Baked goods 6% Liquids, oil & grease 5% Snacks & condiments 4% Meat & fish 3% Dry food 2% Dairy & eggs 1%

‘Let’s drive to a restaurant or go to the grocery store or get something out of the freezer.’ ” Shifting Americans back to that old way of thinking could be tricky.

Gunders said the effort could include public-service campaigns, aimed at getting people to “love their leftovers.” The NRDC is also emphasizing education around portion size and meal-planning to encourage home cooks to make only what they’ll consume.

Apart from that, environmentalists and anti-food-waste campaigners are holding out for a shift in American eating culture. Gunders is hopeful that cultural influencers, led by the food media, can help convince people that it’s cool to eat leftovers. Some have already tried: Ted Allen, the host of the popular Food Network show “Chopped,” declared that leftovers were not “a dirty word” during one of the show’s three episodes on the subject.

But if Americans are truly to embrace the doggy bag, they may need a stronger push, Veit said.

After all, it has never been so cheap, from a purely monetary perspective, to ditch yesterday’s takeout for lunch elsewhere. Veit sees one possible model in the government propaganda campaigns that got Americans to embrace leftovers during World War I and World War II. n © The Washington Post

Source: Natural Resources Defense Council

ISTOCK

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2017

24

Foothills Magazine presents its 6th Annual

PHOTO CONTEST

Enter your photos taken in North Central Washington for the chance to win cash prizes and see your photos published in the magazine. Photos must have been shot during the 2017 calendar year. Entries will be judged in two categories — human subjects and landscapes.

Get all the details at photos.ncwfoothills.com Entries must be submitted by January 4, 2018

North Central Washington’s lifestyle magazine ncwfoothills.com